debbie pryor

RELATIONAL RESPONSES

ARTISTS: DEBBIE PRYOR AND CHRISTINE CHOLEWA

venue: SAUERBIER HOUSE

DATES: 3 APRIL - 12 MAY 2024 (RESIDENCY) 29 JUNE - 3 AUGUST 2024 (EXHIBITION)

EXHIBITION: RELATIONAL RESPONSES CHRISTINE & DEBBIE PRYOR

29 June – 3 August
Sauerbier House
Ngankiparinga Country / Port Noarlunga, South Australia
photography: James Pryor, Callum Docherty

In Relational Responses, Christine and Debbie present works in various stages of the making process, showing the material's transformation through making speaks to the ever-evolving nature of the landscape around Sauerbier House and the impact of the residency experience.

Their residency was approached with a desire to explore the sandy, rocky surrounds 

by foot, kayak, or swim. Their shared experiences in the Onkaparinga environment were marked by the discovery of unique patterns, textures and lines. Those observations were brought back to the house studio for transferring and responding to in new materials.

Sometimes, the process of making is in itself the artwork; informed by the process of talking and walking while witnessing their surroundings—tide lines, wildlife, gliding past a pelican by kayak, layers of wet black and beige sand, old rock faces, old disintegrating mortar—all of these considerations display like an 80s movie montage in the mind's eye while shaping the material. 

Almost exclusively, the artists have carved and polished their materials: stone, clay, and plaster. Their mediums are monolithic tablet-like, as though they are creating samples or pieces of communication based on their sightings. In a way they are, these works are explorations into the process of carving, not mimicking their surroundings but responding to elements such as texture and scale, while noticing the similarities between the material they are using and the element they are responding to. 

The rhythm of carving and polishing is simultaneously unsettling and soothing. While some carving strikes are simple, others take away more of the material than intended or in the wrong direction - as is part of the gamble when familiarising yourself with a craft. Once settled, the rhythm of both carving and polishing can be hypnotic and allow you to once again be in the sandy terrain you are navigating.

Stones also revealed themselves to be part of the hypnotic state; in seeking them on long beach walks, replicating them in burnished ceramics, sorting them and incorporating them into the work. Symbolically within the works the stones represent many things, from our own smallness within the natural and built worlds to the aesthetic balance they bring. 

The opportunity of a residency allowed the artists to dedicate time and intention to their practices without distraction. While their works don’t directly collaborate they show the similarities in their visual language, the elements they seek and respond to crossover. The rare occasion to witness a like-minded maker in the studio, discussing technique and inspiration provided an impetus for both to push the material and create a new body of work; the effects of which will impact works ongoing.

This 6 week residency and exhibition was provided by the The City of Onkaparinga.

OPENING ADDRESS BY DR SERA WATERS, June 29 2024

Acknowledgement – I would like to join in recognising the traditional custodians of this special Country, the Kaurna people, and pay my respects to elders past and present.

I would also like to thank the artists we are celebrating today for asking me to speak and spend time thinking about their practices and processes (one of the great joys of my practice). A special thank you to Lesa and Jaynie for their hospitality and care in creating and sustaining this centre for attentive creativity and bringing us all together.  

So while I want to draw your attention today to the exhibitions being opened; which are

·      Relational Responses – Debbie Pryor and Christine Cholewa – Hallway Gallery and Foyer

·      Subtidal Assemblages – Lauren Downton – Lounge Gallery

·      Catchment – Adele Sliuzas – Wash house

29 June – 3 August

I mostly want to speak around collaboration, repetitive processes, and what it means to make when given the gift of attentive concentrated time that residencies offer – such is the model offered here at Sauerbier house.  Thinking in oceanic or watery ways suitable to this ecology, these exhibitions and their artwork outcomes, are the glistening rocks, coral, or worn smooth pebbles, that peek out and catch our attention, yet are mere indicators of the teeming richness that has gone on below and before.  

Spending time with these artists and hearing of their 6 or 12 week residency experiences, has been a reminder - or an antidote - to any lingering myths that art is ideally made by individual artists toiling away in studios. There has been a lot of toiling and noisy toiling at that– hammering, chiselling, weaving, whacking, rubbing, polishing, chattering, diving, paddling, walking, collecting – reconnoitring then being pulled into Sauerbier house’s orbit and atmosphere, to labour side by side or within earshot. Collaboration doesn’t always mean working on the same artworks, but is the push and pull of dialogue, responsiveness, taking in, a generosity of sharing proximity and insights and knowledge we as practitioners have gained from living creative lives. This collaboration occurs from artist to artist, but as much with this site and its layered history, with wider community, with shifting ecologies and observing, documenting and sometimes collecting its clay, stone, reeds, coral, being swept along by its weather.  

When Debbie and Christine told me that to set the tone for their focussed time here they would begin their day with a debriefing walk or kayak, amidst pelicans, following paths, foraging and letting go of the week before in order to focus in; or Lauren who recounted how she submersed herself into the nearby coral reef, and was astounded by the varied pink tactile underwater lives, or Adele who has worked with local wool and ceramics while forging new connections to their Lithuanian heritage, seeking out overshot technique woven patterns in attempts to reforge or grasp at intergenerational fraying, I thought anew of the gift that are residencies. In a busy life – a crisis of pace as I heard it described – residencies sift slow and close attentiveness and creativity to the top in our hours/days/weeks, to purposefully BE in place, with like-minded investigators and open collaborators, and with this Country. Each of the artists recounted they have been led down unplanned for pathways in their residency experiences; rediscovering and testing their own creative expectations, sometimes being frustrated and blocked, but taking new routes. Being gifted the time to stray from paths is to be treasured.

Each of these artists also draw from lineages of making – of ceramics, or stone, or textiles and weaving. Such processes, reenacted by our fellow humans for generations, have embedded within them an ethics of craft based upon labouring; an ethics taken up by these artists, and one that values what is learned from doing with the hands. Different to artisanal trades, in art practice this is perhaps less about mastery (though skills still become honed ) but about tendrils of making that grow from experimenting, testing, following one step to the next in unexpected ways, and being open to take these untrodden paths. My thinking is that to craft is to be human; it is our responsiveness to the stuff around us; by making we are asking, what can we do with that? How can we make it work for us (tell a story, convey an idea, serve a purpose), what can be salvaged, transformed, or co-opted, re-appreciated. This kind of craftiness responds to place, or sometimes, when coming from a country of many migrants, of the displaced, or making do with skills that grew elsewhere but can offer us sustenance here too. All of these lineages are impressed with repetitive processes – of often excessive amounts of time – where incremental actions grow into accumulated meaning.

As we look across the processes, experiments, revelations shown here today, we not only see contemporary expressions, but materials and forms which reach back to our many forebears. I am reminded of clay tablets (that carried messages and held memories), the passed along patterns in domestic textiles which have carried along family tales, of great grandparents deft hands, or the richness of clustered ornaments that tell of the often unseen wonders of this world. Mostly they carry along processes which continue lineages into our generation, continuing our shared legacies of working with the world.