RSJ Barker

Why Timelessness?
When Andrew Purvis first saw my work for the show he asked me what I was going to title the exhibition. Not
being the sort of artist who is inclined to attempt to reproduce or represent my immediate surroundings in either a realistic, impressionistic, abstract or a surrealistic manner, I inevitably struggle with the concept of naming paintings let alone coming up with “titles” for my exhibitions. However, the nature of the paintings and drawings on display do raise the obvious questions, such as what exactly is it that I’m trying to say…or do?

It’s a good question, and worthy of a response. Well it’s a slender connection really but which can be justified by my method of art practice. I don’t like to classify my work along formal lines and I try not to contrive or force imagery. I prefer to let things occur on my canvases and boards naturally or intuitively or with just a little bit of prompting from my own hand. So it’s strange that I actually came up with the idea of the exhibition title well before Andrew even mentioned it. Perhaps it was my fear of knowing that it was going to have to be dealt with at some point anyway that I subconsciously sorted it out well in advance of the starting date. I’d recently acquired a box of 30 faceless wristwatches that I found on the street during a Bondi rubbish throw out. The transient nature of the Eastern Suburbs means there is always people’s detritus out on the streets whenever someone moves house. This discarded box of faceless wristwatches seemed rather odd and sort of precious in a reverse kind of way and immediately suggested the word ‘timelessness’ to me. I took them back to the studio with a view to using them in an artwork somehow.

For a long time I was looking for something to do with them but hadn’t really resolved how to incorporate them into a work. So, in the end I just left them alone and went back to working with my paintings, collages, drawings and assemblages.

I’d been doing some representational work, landscapes, still life, narrative paintings, but became bored with the
idea of painting “things”. It seemed like just pure exercise to me after a while, and analogous to doing push ups
with the view that it’s going to turn you into an elite athlete. In the meantime I’d become fascinated with all these piles of trash and junk that I’d regularly see around the streets where I live. I’d go out looking for little treasures or odds and ends that I may or may not use in an artwork. I loved the way some of them were stacked up in the street or the nature strip. They looked really quite thoughtful and beautiful in the way they had been arranged. They brought to mind installations by artists like Joseph Beuys, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg or Adrian Hall, to name a few. The problem however, was that recently I’ve been more into painting in oils or acrylics or working on paper, but I wanted to work out how to bring these elements together, discarded junk and traditional materials. I couldn’t find a way to reconcile the two. I wasn’t going to sit down in front of the piles of junk and try to draw or paint them or drag it all back into my 8 x 4 by two-bit* studio. I could have photographed them but for some reason I kept losing cameras or the camera would just break down at the crucial moment.

Anyway, around the middle of last year (2007) I was out in my backyard at dusk where I found myself gazing at a different kind of throw out, this time a compost of discarded dead leaves and bracken in my own backyard. I placed my hands over my eyes and cropped my vision to form a makeshift viewing frame - like a photographer might do when setting up a shot - I realised how perfect this simple heap of leaves and twigs really was. When I went back into my 8 x 4 x two bit studio later I approached my works-in-progress with an entirely different attitude which I believe evokes what I’d seen in the backyard earlier.

Much much later, back in the studio again and staring at yet another batch of newly incomplete paintings for about four hours or so, as you do, with my unresolved wristwatch objects laid out on my workbench, I began to wonder how something so common and plain as a pile of dead leaves and debris could offer so much, and provoke such a complex range of thoughts and questions about life, death, art, artlessness, time and…….timelessness.

Voila!
Thankyou.

RSJ Barker