TOUCHING ARCHIVES OF SUNLIGHT

Amelia Wallin (2022)

Immersion, entanglement, visual hapticity, ciliated sense, the synesthetic force of perceiving-feeling, contact, affective ecology, involution, sensory attunement, arousal, response, interspecies signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance, and remembering.[1]

So reads Material Feminist Karen Barad’s list of “sensuous practices and figurations at play in feminist science studies”. Following Donna Harraway, Barad and others are forging new materialist topographies based on embodied perception and entangled positionality, united by a commitment to helping make “a more just world”.[2] Artist Kylie Banyard’s new body of work, Becoming Sessile, engages with the sensuosity of vegetal life towards this same pursuit, attune to the alterity of plants while speculating on their subjectivities.

Across a series of paintings small hands hold, touch, caress the leaves and flowers of native Australian plants. Neither picked nor plucked, the touch is nevertheless precise; thumb and forefinger enclose around a stem, press against a leaf, cradle a gumnut. Stalks heavy with wattle flowers rest in open palms. This tender, deliberate touch is enacted by the artist’s young son, on daily walks through bush and suburban streets; what originated as an incidental moment became an intentional ritual between mother and son. These moments are tenderly photographed by Banyard and inform the basis of her new body of work and a new direction in her practice.

The relationship between painting and photography has long been of interest to Banyard, whose previous works have reconstructed historical photographic archives and investigated obsolete cameraless photographic techniques such as the cyanotype. Earlier bodies of work have reanimated the activities of the radical Black Mountain College (1933–56), foregrounding the contribution of the school’s female participants. Driving this impulse to engage in historic materials is a desire and belief in alternative possibilities of living and working. In Banyard’s practice, pedagogy of imagination and utopian thinking is key to the speculation and potential creation of a more just and ethical world. This new body of work maintains this commitment, whilst turning from the historic photographic archive to what curator Martin Clark termed “archives of sunlight”: the vegetal world.[3]

In Becoming Sessile visual hapticity — the visual perception of touch — is threaded through each work. From the intermingling of pigments and fibres on the surface of the canvas, to the transferal of matter, to the inter-species encounters between plant and person. For these paintings, the process of creation begins with the assembly of natural pigments and plant matter which are then used to dye the canvas. After this has dried and fixed, the canvas is again stained with watery swirls of colour, reminiscent of the fluid shapes and "soak stains” of Helen Frankenthaler’s large-format floor paintings. Then begins the methodical transferal of the photographic image onto the canvas using oil paints.

Becoming Sessile presents eight variations of the ritualised “touching” encounter between mother, son and plant. The word “touching” is echoed across the title of eight paintings, followed by the awkward anglicised and anthropomorphic names for the native plants: “Dollar Gum”, “Silver Princess”, “Drumstick”. These common plant names, with their capitalist and feudal associations, are an attempt to embed plants within colonial Western logic, to make them familiar rather than revel in their unknowability. However, the reverence of touch between child and plant depicted in the paintings returns the plants to their true state of otherness, respecting their “strange alterity” and the “uniqueness of their existence.”[4]

In biology, the state of sessility refers to sitting or resting on the surface. More broadly, it is the state of being fixed or immobile, such is the case with vegetal matter. Clark suggests that sessility necessitates a level of adaptation to survive. Whereas animals have the ability to avoid danger — through speed, motion — the sessile plant must adapt in order to face it. Plants therefore operate from a position of embeddedness. “They hold a deep, slow ancient knowledge of what it is to be in the world, and what it is to make a world”.[5] What can we learn from remaining in one place?

Banyard and I live a few minutes’ walk from each other, on Djaara. Most weekends, our sons play together, and we delight in their made-up games, full of imaginative characters, magic, karate moves and alchemic potions. Their brews are improvised from garden plant matter, with the odd household product thrown-in, carefully assembled and left to stew in jars. In Becoming Sessile, a more distilled version of this game is on view, created by the artist’s six-year-old son in an act of reciprocal collaboration. Bark and leaves are soaked until the colours run, the plant matter is drained out and only the colour and perfume remain. Displayed in the gallery in glass jars, atop an improvised platform of found bricks, Bubble Fume is a shrine to play and imagination, qualities sorely needed in the pursuit of a more just world.

When I visited Kylie at her studio, our region, indeed much of the east coast of so-called Australia, was experiencing severe weather warnings with most of the state on flood watch. The local creek that we regularly walk alongside swelled with rainwater and swallowed its banks. Walking through this watery landscape, I was reminded of the surface of Banyard’s canvases, they depict a sense of immersion, of seepage and swirling of colours, the feeling of everything washing together, background and foreground blending until there is only one surface. In the dry warmth of the studio, Banyard describes her use of oil paint as akin to using watercolours; in the instance of these paintings, there is little to no use of white paint. We talk about a lightness of touch, so the paintings are “just enough”. It is this restraint that allows the viscosity of the oils to give way to the natural and synthetic dyes underneath, drawing the dyed background of the canvases into the imagery.

“Plants are capable”, advises Philosopher Michael Marder, “of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modes of dwelling on and in the earth”.[6] Vegetal thinking, as proposed by Marder, reminds us that human-animals are not the fulcrum of our world. While the depth of plant knowledge is still being determined, for Banyard, their networked and non-hierarchical thinking, their sessility, offers contemplative possibilities for other ways of being in the world. Becoming Sessile operates within this affective ecology, with respect for the agency and unknowability of pants as speculative models for more gentle ways of being.

[1] Karen Barad, On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1), diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin: 2014

[2] Ibid.

[3] Martin Clarke, ‘On Being Sessile’, The Botanical Mind, eds. Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clarke, Camden Arts Centre, Camden: 2021, 187

[4] Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Columbia University Press, New York: 2013, 8

[5] Op Cit., Martin, 187

[6] Op cit., Marder, 8