Judith Nangala Crispin, Off the South Coast, where Christmas tourist traffic threads the Kings Highway, and stops for no reason, not for bird or fallen roo—the ocean gathers up Brendan, at the edge of water, remakes his shattered hind leg and broken tail, his heart..., 120 x 91cm Photo: Grainger Gallery.
In Greek and Roman mythology, harpies were half-bird, half-human creatures that personified destructive storm spirits. They were also known as the hounds of Zeus. They were human vultures that in art frequently possessed beautiful, seductive female faces.
Judith Nangala Crispin is a First Nations artist, poet and environmentalist living near Braidwood, who for many years has worked with roadkill and innovative cameraless photographic techniques.
Stephen Harrison is another local, multifaceted artist who, for decades, has pursued the dark side of the landscape, with roaming thylacines, deserted lighthouses and the gothic architecture of Prague.
Crispin and Harrison together create a world of darkness in which harpies roam, reason gives way to surreal invention, and we are constantly reminded that our last hope for saving the world has passed and that we are now confronting inevitable global destruction and despair.
It is a world that the great Dante once described as the place where “the repellent harpies make their nests” from where they make their “dire announcements of the coming woe”.
Dante describes the harpies: “They have broad wings, with razor-sharp talons and a human neck and face, clawed feet and swollen, feathered bellies; they caw their lamentations in the eerie trees.”
Judith Nangala Crispin, The insects are leaving us, 100 x 61cm. Photo: Grainger Gallery.
Of the many exhibitions that Crispin has held in recent years, this one has a strong, deliberately religious character.
In some instances, her pieces have appropriated the forms of the painted altarpieces of Renaissance and Baroque masters, including Peter Paul Rubens, except the imagery is not devoted to the Godhead, the Virgin or the saints of the church, but to nature. It is to the sacrificed animals and insects who are now perishing in the landscape around us.
Take, for example, her metre-high panel, The Insects Are Leaving Us. If you pause and enter the work, there is a testimony to a great exodus of insects disappearing as a stream of tiny ghost-like beings into a heavenly direction.
Although the piece has an immediate impact, when you pause to examine it for a few minutes, the full richness of the tapestry of vision gradually reveals itself to us. In many of the pieces, collaged elements add glitter and texture to the surface.
Judith Nangala Crispin, I dreamed of spiders—a great hierarchy of limbs and fangs, stretching from the earth into the sky, and thousands of tiny insects climbed them, skittering over those huge arachnid forms, up and up, until they too were lost in blinding light, 150 x 59cm. Photo: Grainger Gallery.
In another piece, my favourite at the exhibition and shaped like a Baroque dissolving ceiling about one-and-a-half metres across, the poetic title leads us into the work, I dreamed of spiders—a great hierarchy of limbs and fangs, stretching from the earth into the sky, and thousands of tiny insects climbed them, skittering over those huge arachnid forms, up and up, until they too were lost in blinding light. The denuding of our environment of insects and spiders is a prelude to the denuding of our planet of humans.
There are also a number of her more traditional roadkill images. One of the most powerful is titled Off the South Coast, where Christmas tourist traffic threads the Kings Highway, and stops for no reason, not for bird or fallen roo—the ocean gathers up Brendan, at the edge of water, remakes his shattered hind leg and broken tail, his heart…. It is a powerful manifestation as a monument to our sacrificed wildlife.
Stephen Harrison, Death Hugging a Tower, 54 x 20 x 12cm, clay and paint. Photo: Grainger Gallery.
Stephen Harrison’s contribution to the exhibition consists mainly of three-dimensional pieces in bronze, lead, clay and glass, largely professionally cast by Nick Stranks.
If Crispin’s images resemble altarpieces, Harrison’s are more like holy relics with symbolic and allegorical forms. His pieces have a haunting simplicity, such as Death hugging a tower or the wonderfully expressive, The harpy poet, made out of bronze and glass.
Stephen Harrison, The Poet Harpy, 41 x 32 x 32 cm, bronze and glass. Photo: Grainger Gallery.
They are essentially table-sized sculptures that tackle the theme of our lost ecology, as in his wonderful bronze-and-lead piece, The thylacine dreamt of hunting.
All of his pieces bear the expressive mark of being made by the human hand, and no matter how absurd they initially appear, they bear testimony to a vanishing past and the prophecy that the future is something dark and inevitable.
Stephen Harrison, The Thylacine Dreamt of Hunting, 28 x 29 x 20cm, bronze and lead. Photo: Grainger Gallery.
Judith Nangala Crispin and Stephen Harrison: Afternoon of harpies is now open at the Grainger Gallery, 1/34 Geelong St, Fyshwick, until 30 August. It’s open Thursday to Sunday, 11 am to 4 pm.
