Suzanne Bellamy
The landscape, colour, intense air and high altitude of New Mexico are unique. It has inspired great visionary art, mystical abstraction and magical forms, and drawn to it, artists, writers, poets from all over the earth, pilgrims, returning again and again, some moving there. Back in 1978, I first saw the work of artist Georgia O’Keeffe in a book. It was transformational for me. The name Abiquiu jumped out of the title of one of her paintings, a little pueblo north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Within a year, I went there. I found an old adobe house looking out over a wild landscape, O'Keeffe’s house. She was still living there. Her dogs barked at me as I walked around the wall and decided not to knock. She was then in her 90’s and died a few years later. I loved it all -Ghost Ranch, Santa Fe, Canyon Road, Bandalier National Archaeological Monument, San Ildefonso Pueblo and the great potter Maria Martinez, Taos. Over the next 30 years I have returned six times, for Taos and Questa workshops and sweat lodges, conferences, explorations, encounters with the Kachinas and Corn Mother, with the black pots of Maria Martinez, the storyteller ceramic traditions of the Pueblo peoples, Navaho weaving traditions, the mad insane contradictions of Los Alamos and the bomb, the cool abstractions of Agnes Martin, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge and the Bloomsbury exiles, visioning and making art, wandering in the high country and the thrilling mountains. Two recent trips in 2007 and 2008 completed the current cycle, including finally being able to visit inside O’Keeffe’s studio and house, see her pigments and colour strips and collections, her window views, black door in the wall, her shells and rocks and bones. A magical stay in Mabel Dodge’s house at Taos as part of a Bloomsbury South West research trip linked all the paths of early Modernism, and my personal muses. Life can be truly marvellous.
Sometimes you have to go away from your own land to come home with signs and gateways to what it is that is your own work. The combination of the astronomical, archaeological and mystical, grounded in mud and earth and the creative is a rare thrill. Through my encounter with O’Keeffe and New Mexico, I found something of a model of how to live on land suffused with ancient cultures, living thriving indigenous traditions and eccentric individual artists. It is a border country between cultures in time, and a space in the sky. This was a perfect counter-point for an Australian woman artist living in troubled times.
The work for this exhibition is really a long meditation on my own work and some of its wellsprings, a way of naming and acknowledging some of my many inspirations. Undoubtedly, Georgia O’Keeffe opened a new form language for 20th C women especially as her work became known outside the USA in the late 1970’s. It was a time when women artists were inventing a new language for our visions and stories, something writer Lucy Lippard called “central core imagery.” There was a moment when new risky paths opened and a new generation of creative women could take the jump. We entered wild places following the breakthroughs of earlier artists, including the women surrealists of early modernist 20th C art whose work was brought to us by the pioneering research of the brilliant art historian Gloria Orenstein. Painters such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Frida Kahlo as well as O’Keeffe thrilled me. It is a sustaining women’s world, women’s visions, and an art imagery which is non-prescriptive and open ended. It is a great tradition.
O’Keeffe’s story in particular really spoke to me, as it embodied the courage to make a leap into the work, leave academic safety and a career path and move into a place where the work and place drives everything. Place matters, what we make where we live, how we find our tradition, the responsibility to be serious, respectful and committed to finding new language, to entering the liminal world where the work comes from.
This exhibition uses clay forms in a mixed Media format on board with oils, to move across 30 years of my own art practice. I have always seen my clay work as storytelling, and found that first in the Hopi Storytellers and the old Anasazi pots. Some of the clay forms I have put through the etching press, as with ‘The Mother of Us All’, old skin and the shell of desire and the lips and bird forms of a lover. There is a lot of imagery here that is about essence, sexual openness, love of being a woman and loving women. There is the dream world and the bones, shells, clouds and flowers of O’Keeffe made into my own, mud and structure, weaving, combining the unlikely, listening to the voices.
As an Australian woman artist, I love having been able in my lifetime to have encountered and absorbed the tradition of great women artists who emerged from the shadows of European modernism and made great lives in the New World, and who then embraced places utterly unknown to me, filled with magic and ideas.
This then is homage to some of the great artists and places I love, a self-discovery that opens the way to new work in the future.
Suzanne Bellamy
Mongarlowe, February 2009
