Stuart, in the furnace of all her agitation and fury at the past few years, has managed to forge a utopia. These are atmospheric works, with moody skies, cresting waves, oceanic mists, and verdant, sun-lit waterholes. They are familiar, but they are also untouched. I think of the Night’s Plutonian shores that Edgar Allen Poe dreamed of. I think of Jupiter and her ninety-five moons, and also another poem, but I forget the author, who wrote that the sky above is an aerial ocean. In the thick throng of the crowd I bump into people trying to get closer. Someone sits down to get a better view. Someone else stands on their tip toes. I smell breath and perfume and the wool of the person’s coat beside me. We are clustered lemmings about to fall.
Let’s talk about place. Let’s talk about the artists role as navigator, as tour guide, as developer. Stuart is well versed in traversing inner landscapes before translating them two dimensionally. In this exhibition, she has sliced tiny slivers of intergalactic, otherworldly planes and pressed them between two pieces of borosilicate glass for us to contemplate. Stuart says this work came from an inner craving to understand the minutiae and magnitude of the world around her and to envision a pre-colonised land. Orison was made with urgency during the pandemic, growing alongside her search for home, while she uprooted herself from the city and attempted to resettle up North. But Neptune could never. Stuart has created a counterpart to earth. She has unpicked the fabric of time and space and pushed us through to another side, and we can only thank her.
She has unpicked the fabric of time and space and pushed us through to another side, and we can only thank her.
Marina Abramović says that in a city, the people are the nature. Three dancers including Stuart, walk into the space and stand in front of the window facing the crater. Clad in pale things, floaty garments, loose hair and barefoot, they are wide-eyed and lucid as if just born in the next room. Aliens. Creatures. They begin to move in and around each other. It is a dance, but it is also a reassembling. It is a dance, but it is also a hatching. Stuart leads the dancers deeper into the space to stand in front of her beautiful portals. The creatures become gargoyles, sentients to the landscapes they now block. They are trolls that dare us to cross. The crowd transforms again from moths to water, and the tide of bodies retreat to allow the three to move. And how do you write about movement and art? What do three beings look like in a dystopian coin cage in the guts of the city? Can dancers turn from guard dogs to oceans to sediment, churning? I would have to say yes. Washed out. Panting. Weathered. Barking. Sliding around on the fucking wood floor. Collapsed. They are together as one and then they are spread apart. Legs as arms and arms as heads. This is not the first time Stuart has done this.
There is something a little alchemical in what good artists do. They don’t just reference the past or future but rather bend everything that has ever existed sideways, until it all cracks open. They eat whatever flows from that space, chew it, and then spit it into the mouth of the viewer. Mother bird, baby bird. Initiated by the performance, we are ready to leave our mortal plane and transport into the worlds of Orison. Words leave me for dead, and only another borrowed line from a poem comes to mind, this one by Robert Macfarlane in which he has the forest talking to time. Year, year fledge me a jay, and the year (Stuart in this case) responds, I will fledge you a jay that will plant you a thousand acorns that will each grow a thousand oaks that will each live a thousand years that will each fledge a bright-backed, blue-winged, forest-making Jay.
In her artist statement, Stuart says Orison is born from discomfort, displacement and inner agitation. She mined herself for sadness and anger, pulled each thread of feeling until she made art that functions as a memory of home. Stuart has distilled the peace of being in the natural world in this unnatural environment. In a closed space, filled with people desperate to see, she has cut windows for us all.
Ella Baxter, a writer and artist, has released her debut novel, New Animal, in Australia, the UK, US, and France. Her second book, "Woo Woo," is scheduled for release next year: Website
30 May – 10 June 2023
fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders lane, Melbourne, 3000, Australia
