Life and death and smiling clouds: Nell

There are few artists for whom a simple mononym, such as Madonna, will suffice. Sydney-based artist Nell, however, needs no surname. Nell is just Nell. This is not precocity on the artist’s part. Rather, it demonstrates the artist’s whimsical personality, which intimately infuses her practice. For those close to her she has always been an extension of Nell; she is Nell Bunny, and her email sign-off always includes the exhortation, “Forever joy.” Again, this is not an affectation; it is just further evidence that the artist’s life and work are inseparable. It would not be too much to suggest her life is her artwork. Nell wants to touch you.

feature by Alison Kubler FEB 2019

 

Image credit: Nell, History is Now, 2014-15. Stoneware, glaze, enamel paint, wooden stool, 57.2 x 20.2 x 33.4 cm, (3 parts)
Photo: Jenni Carter. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and STATION, Melbourne.

 

Nell’s practice is highly autobiographical and its content is richly personal. Her willingness to lay bare the truths of herself is her artistic driving force and, it would seem, inescapable. She explains her motivations to VAULT: “What else is there? I can only make artwork that springs from my own experience. Like all kids I wanted to make sense of my little world. And somehow making art became the perfect container for me to explore anything and everything, and I just never stopped making things! I learnt early on from looking at art and from making art that the personal and the universal are wholly interchangeable. And that’s precisely where I find all the good stuff – meaning and understanding for myself and empathy and connections with others.”

This commitment to being empathetic is deeply embedded in Nell’s practice, which oscillates across media and form. As a whole, it is difficult to condense into a tidy package, and is perhaps best described thematically. Her work tackles the big stories of life – birth, death and the ugliness and beauty in between – with humour and a kind of naive wit, articulated in what might be described as ‘Nell’s lexicon’ – a series of aesthetic tropes including smiley faces, poos, lightning bolts and the juxtaposition of text. It should be noted that Nell was employing these graphics before emoji even were a thing. Her favourite, by the way, is the ghost – another repeating motif. This visual language is recognisably Nell’s.

She tells VAULT, “I’m envious of artists who have a neat sound bite about their practice, because I don’t! Things change, I change, so my work changes. Most of my work probes the thresholds of binary opposites – life/death, happiness/sadness, light/dark, day/night, black/white, masculine/feminine, et cetera. I’m interested in amplifying the tensions between those opposites or reconciling their differences until they are inseparable.”

Happy Ending, a sculpture that resembles a gravestone, is installed outside University of Queensland Art Museum (where it was first included in the 2007 exhibition Neo Goth: Back in Black). The work stayed on due to popular demand and has now become integral to the graduating process at the university, where students have themselves photographed with the tombstone. Nell’s seminal work for the Adelaide Biennial, The Wake (2014–16) – subsequently purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia – is based around the Japanese ritual funerary haniwa objects (designed to drive away evil). It was a deeply personal meditation on the loss of her baby Lucky in 2012. The artist came face to face with her own mortality; this life-and-death-defining moment has informed her practice since, so that we might read subsequent work as a meditation on her greatest loss, which was also her greatest love. The Wake consisted of 41 objects marking the artist’s 41 years – ghosts, poos, eggs and nests – all collected as a tableau to represent the artist’s life to date. The Wake might be seen as an emotional and professional turning point of sorts: we see the artist shift from mourning to acceptance, to sheer joy. For her December 2018 exhibition Blessings at Roslyn Oxley9, she made 43 objects. This consideration and marking of time passed suggests a kind of personal reckoning on the artist’s part; with age comes wisdom.

When VAULT spoke to Nell she was in the process of realising her first major public artwork for South Eveleigh (previously known as Australian Technology Park), Sydney: a collaboration between Carriageworks and Mirvac, together with design collective Cave Urban. Eveleigh Tree House will consist of a series of interconnected pods created from hundreds of individually forged steel gum leaves. The tree-house pods will be nestled among the existing gum trees at Eveleigh Green. Nell describes the work “as a kind of secular gum-leaf temple.”

The artwork is an extrapolation of smaller works on a decidedly grander architectural scale. Inspired by the history and character of the Eveleigh locomotive precinct, and recognising the history of the traditional Gadigal site, the tree house also embodies a personal connection to the site for the artist, whose great-uncle and grandfather worked in the 1930s at Carriageworks and Eveleigh, respectively. She explains, “I took this personal connection to that site as a starting point – thinking about the relative insignificance of individual labour compared to the productivity of collective labour, the insignificance of one brick in a massive Victorian industrial complex and of the beauty of one gum-leaf in a gum tree. I borrowed the personality and face of the tree house from the façade of the individual work bays at Eveleigh and Carriageworks. The tree houses are on legs, so it looks like one of the individual work bays got up and walked over to Eveleigh Green and slowly became entangled with the gum trees over time – or like the industrial architecture and the gum trees made love, and the Eveleigh Tree Houses are their love children! There’s also a beautiful Australiana feel to it.”

The final work will be installed in April 2019 alongside another commission on the site. Happy Rain takes the form of a large-scale smiling LED lighting cloud on the exterior wall of a building that contains a childcare centre and houses an Indigenous rooftop garden. Happy Rain is designed to invite viewers to reflect on the relationship between weather, environment and mood, illustrating the artist’s maturation in her practice, too. With its economy of means and distillation of concept, it exemplifies a new ‘less is more’ approach. “I am really passionate about communicating directly and clearly and I feel like my works with faces on them do this. I especially like putting smiley faces on things that you wouldn’t at first associate with happiness, like a storm cloud, a gravestone or a poo, because you can no longer read the object as negative or sad – the smile is always stronger. It doesn’t matter what your cultural background is or how old you are; you know what a smile or a tear coming out of an eye means.”

Nell acknowledges the developments in her work: “I’d like to think the first whispering of maturity in my practice was evident in the works I made for The National (2017) at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Both the installation With things being as they are… and the painting Mother of the Dry Tree used negative space as a major ingredient. It took a lot of restraint not to fill in those negative spaces and to let the absence speak of presence.”

This paring-back of expression, moving from trauma and sadness to joy and hope, is the key to the work. It’s a journey the artist is taking us all on. She adds, “More generally, I have lost the fear of making or saying anything I need to, and there is such a wonderful freedom in that. No matter how difficult the subject matter, I feel safe making art. I don’t know what art is for. And I love the unknown. It’s in the unknowable that we connect to the mystery of all things throughout space and time! Art – and music – just make more sense to me than anything else.”

Nell is represented by STATION, Melbourne.
stationgallery.com