Penny Burnett

Charting Colour in The Gray Zone

Schoolhouse Gallery, Rosny Farm Arts Centre

11th January - 4th February, 2024

Charting Colour in the Gray Zone is a window into a painter’s quest to understand colour. The focal point of this exhibition is a unique, bespoke colour-chart book started during the first COVID-19 lockdown. This ongoing labour of love – painting sequential tonal colour charts, is an exercise commonly loathed and misunderstood by art students, a task seldom revisited post-art school.

Little did I know, this rhythm of methodically charting colour would not only shift the way I paint and perceive landscape but also open another door of understanding – a nuanced conversation about those pigments that are often considered non-colour: black and white. Borrowing the loaded term, The Gray Zone, this exhibition is an invitation to visually re-consider the contested binary of black and white by celebrating the innumerable possibilities of charting colour

Poimena Gallery

Opening Thursday 13 May @ 5.30pm

Mon – Fri 9am – 4pm

14 May - 3 June.

This exhibition showcases the transition and consolidation of my art practice over the last 12 months with the impact of the pandemic. From studio isolation in March 2020 to an enriching residency with the students and staff of Launceston Church Grammar School @ Poimena early 2021. On the surface it is obvious that my focus has been on colour, finding the nuances and tonal shifts within a limited palette, but on a deeper level I have been thinking about the impact and strength of being still. The embedded wisdom of being grounded in one place (not longing for the future when restrictions are hopefully lifted but being present in the moment), hence my fascination with older trees. Outside Poimena is a magnificent stately Magnolia tree, I tree that is very present. This tree has not only become the subject matter of several paintings in this show, but a catalyst for future reflection.

Huge thank you to Louise Middleton these amazing photographs and exhibition documentation …. kudos xx

Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery, 5 October, 2019 – 27 January, 2020

When does an environment shift from being a vista, something we look at, to something visceral, something that moves us within? How do you paint the howling wind with needle sharp snow pelting your face? Or the song of a currawong as it serenades the suns arrival and departure? Or the foreboding sensation that the trees are watching you, whispering mysteries of survival way-to selfless to understand?

Wild – Outside and Within is a dance between painterly figuration and abstraction within landscape painting. Through the application of paint, I have endeavoured to suspend the vulnerability and wonder of those sensations by bringing resonance to the imagery that is raw, basic, and instinctual.

In some works, the materiality and chemical elements of the medium, in particular the pigment of the paint, is exposed in order to resonate with the minerals of the earth: ochre, copper, oxides and cadmium, this linkage is visceral rather than cognitive. In this exhibition the works oscillate between the two, some are Wild - Outside, the vista and some more abstract, Within.

Botanica 2019, Despard Gallery

26 June – 21 July 2019

Lorraine Biggs, Penny Burnett, Maggie Jeffries and Ochre Lawson

Botanica, a group exhibition that brings together a diverse group of women artists, each exploring the magic and intrigue of the botanical world.

Botanica is a striking name for a show, at first glance we tend to think of all things plants or leafy, hence we safely assume there will be garden and landscape artworks. Researching the term Botanica I was surprised to find a world of references beyond the green sward: restaurants, bars, apartment blocks, even river tours... The Oxford Dictionary defines Botanica as a “small shop that sells herbal and other traditional remedies, together with charms, incense, candles, and other items used for religious or spiritual purposes”. I see Botanica as more of a desire than an object, something deeply related to the alchemy of plants with a desire to glimpse the hidden power of nature.

This body of work is a personal collection some these Botanica moments. Moments that happened on the tiny island of Jeju, South Korea, and other moments that occur closer to home, like my daily headland walk at Dodges Ferry. These Botanica moments are not limited by site, some are cultivated gardens yet others are wild and indigenous gardens. Common to each moment is they were all unexpected, all captured my curiosity to see beyond to nature’s hidden powers.

All works displayed on this page are

Oil on Japanese maple

36.5 x 30 cm

—

Jeju Artist Exchange facilitated by Arts Tasmania, The Jeju Foundation for the Arts,

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Australia Korea Foundation.

Perceptions - IAa studio residency Sep-Oct, 2018, - Jeju, South Korea

When do we shift from being a spectator to being emotionally engaged with a place? My focus during this residency on Jeju was to explore how we perceive a site, and ask when do we go beyond looking to experiencing?

I arrived in Jeju as a cultural outsider viewing the location from essentially a ‘tourist’s perspective’: the language, culture and landscape was a new experience. With the ever-increasing tourism market on this island paradise my focus was improve the phenomena of the photo opportunity, rather than simply a being a visitor. I wished to creatively enrich my experience of a place.

Initially I noticed the profound similarities between Jeju and Tasmania. For example, both are islands, where both are renowned for their pristine beauty, cultural and historical uniqueness, and both are marketed as ultimate holiday experiences.

Being limited to only six weeks on Jeju most of my time was spent exploring, learning, meeting the locals, and then using this new knowledge to come to a greater understanding of the island’s history and significance. I also had the opportunity to be part of everyday activities like grocery shopping, catching public transport, and putting out the rubbish…. Trying to live like a local rather than a tourist. This gave me the time to experience the rhythm of everyday life on Jeju.

This suite of works I produced whilst on the island all resulted from deeply significant moments for me. Each of these paintings have a personal backstory. At first glance they could be read as a snapshot in time, yet they represent a larger narrative and a combination of several perspectives and moments. Even the titles are clues to the backstory. None of these paintings are simple copies of photograph taken on site, rather they are a chance to see the creative process and how those backstories come together to create a painting. The iPad drawing videos reveal some of the process of searching the site, where the high-speed video of my digital drawings shows my artistic experience on site in just a few minutes. Does the concentration of observation, history, perspective and painting in both the forms of video and painting offer a better form of interpretation and experience to the viewer?

7 March – 1 April 2018

Despard presents their first solo show of Tasmanian artist Penny Burnett. Her paintings focus on our relationship with space and nature. Penny uses the motif of the garden to expose tensions between nature and culture, authority and agency, she brings the viewer’s attention to the act of observing. With a recently completed PhD under her belt, The Evolving Garden, represents Penny as a distinctive contemporary painter.

“The Evolving Garden celebrates the highlights, discoveries and interrogations of four years research into the agency of garden imagery. Within that process I have been privileged to experience, observe and listen to many gardens ranging from Kew Gardens in the UK, to Tasmania’s own beautiful Botanical Gardens in Hobart. I have sat quietly beside the hidden quarry pond in Government house, had high tea on the well-manicured lawns of a Nairobi tea planation and enjoyed the rambling, unexpected surprises of my own quirky garden, but nothing draws me deeper into the heart of the garden than the screaming silence of the ancient Pandani groves at Mt Field. As diverse as all these spaces are, the thing that strikes me most is the threshold between form and wildness, which creates a primal urge to break free from containment whilst acknowledging its support. Universal to all of these gardens is an oscillation that sets up a perpetual state of flux, where one moment the garden is controlled and serene and the next it is a wilderness straining to break out, it is this ‘in-between’ space I am trying to capture with paint.

My aim is to shift the view of the garden from the vista to the experiential and immersive in order to offer an alternative reading of garden imagery. Thus, the deliberate elimination of the narrative elements that appeared in the conservatory works – such as garden borders and pot holders – to the more abstract works which offer familiarity, via the materiality and application of the paint but not through motif.

The particular consistencies of the paint invite a visceral sense of engagement through viscosity. That is, the manner in which the substance has congealed in some passages suggests a suspension of time and weathered endurance. Conversely, in other passages where there are quick gestural marks the paint is slippery, moist, and pulsating. This instinctual lexicon of painterly gesture aims not only to register with our eyes, but also to provoke an evocation of our own garden experience. I am particularly excited about the 3D work done in collaboration Sara Lindsay. This piece offers a disruption, a punctuated equilibrium in the evolving garden. “ Penny Burnett, March 2018

20 October – 30 October, 2017, PhD Examination Submission, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania

ABSTRACT

This studio-based investigation explores traditional representations of gardens in order to create an alternative way of perceiving cultivated space. This thesis presents a way of perceiving “otherness” in garden imagery through the materiality, colour and agency of paint. The works offer an alternative visual conception of tensions between gender, identity, power, agency and authority.

The studio practice examines pictorial devices of the imperial vista, diagrammatical mapping, encompassing narrative, framing portals, surfaces tension and compositional axis. These devices are utilised to engage with the notion of boundary and threshold, where they disintegrate and become suggestive of something other. This framework is examined through political, cultural and gendered power relationships, and contextualised through the writings of W.T.J. Mitchell, Martin Jay and Martin Warnke. The garden construct is argued as a form of cultivated landscape; Mitchell argues landscape as an instrument of cultural power and Warnke argues all landscape is political, identifying structures and boundaries as symbols of power. Jay aligns the act of gardening with violence, as a site of conflict between natural force and human control. The concept of the threshold of otherness is drawn from the ideas of Emma Cocker, Marc Treib and David Batchelor. Cocker discusses otherness in the context of the threshold of the untameable and unexpected in creative practice. Treib identifies the delicate agreement which arises between seemingly conflicting landscape modes as a form of otherness, whereas Batchelor sees the potency of colour with its cultural bias as a form of otherness.

Underpinning this research is the Foucauldian convention of power, where the convention of painting is examined as an operation of power over (authority) and power to (agency) and this is argued both pictorially and relationally, that being the experience of the painting as object in a gallery space. Typically, vistas, control, vantage points, colonialism and the politics of assigning otherness all resonate with the operation of power over, whilst a more immersive, visceral, un-prescribed engagement aligns with power to. In the project, the tension between agency and authority is represented through wildness. Wildness in garden constructs is the ever-resourceful life force of nature, which aligns with the alchemy of paint, through viscosity, fluidity, pigmentation and flexibility. Wildness is contextualised within the writings of Emma Marris, who discusses wildness within national parks and gardens; Rebecca Solnit, who discusses wildness in the context of resistance to control; and Richard Mabey, who looks at wildness in the context of weeds and cultivation.

The utopian ideal of the Garden of Eden has been a pivotal influence in understanding garden imagery, in both aesthetics and attitudes. This utopian ideal led to the identification of authority and agency as key forces, traditionally seen as two divisions or binaries within garden structures, but in this project reconciled as a state of productive tension. This tension is seemingly opposite but not independent or isolated from each other; in their most dynamic form they operate in dualism, in a complementary state, creating a visual charge by simultaneously attracting and repelling.

Four visual themes are carried through the final suite of work: otherness, control, agency and oscillations. These themes have been defined and contextualised through a number of key artistic works. Marc Quinn’s macro psychedelic flower painting is used as an example of otherness. Fiona Lowry’s muted, pattern-like landscape pulsates with restraint and is therefore argued within a framework of control, and Cecily Brown’s suspended gestural energy in a suite of works that denotes garden motifs is discussed in relationship to the agency of paint. Additionally, Bahar Behbahani presents a complex work of the Persian garden which is examined as an exemplar of oscillation, with layers of poetic narrative and veiling abstraction. Embedded in the strategies of narrative and veiling are the issues of identity and gender.

The contribution of this research project to the field is the offer of another way of seeing and engaging with garden imagery. This vision is presented as one that comes from standing within. Rather than a scene or picture, this vision is embedded and grounded, elemental and basic. It acknowledges the historical, cultural, gendered and political ways of seeing a vista and the power positions in garden imagery. This thesis steps outside these traditional notions and presents a way of looking that embodies a relationship to potency and potentiality, a threshold position that is never fixed or static but one that evokes a poetic sense of renewal and regeneration.

Dark Pandani was an exhibition that showcased me early experiments within my PhD research. My starting point was individual Pandani I encountered in Mt Field national park. The sense of otherness entwined with this timeless anthropological presence haunted me.

Strongly influenced by the video installation of Richard Mosse the Enclave (2012) I limited the palette at the beginning of this project to an infra-red range. Implicit to the work of Mosse is the colour palette which is derived from discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film invented by the US military for enemy surveillance during the Cold War. Mosses is interested in exposing the invisible.

The Enclave is essentially a war documentary, filmed in infra-red. Within the actual scenery there is a post-apocalyptic presence. The otherness of colour implicit in this work is suggestive of landscape made mutant, that can not come to terms with what has happened, it is in a state of posttraumatic stress and in essence crying after genocide. However beautiful and seductive, it is also uncomfortable. I somehow felt implicated just by looking, and the voyeur becomes the subject. The work was haunting and still effects me years later.

I was curious to test how a painting of an infra-red garden could affect the reading of garden imagery. Discovering that rather than exposing the invisible, the medium of paint disassociated with the authoritative documentary mode and transformed the image into an imagined fanciful place.

It’s all in the genes: a painterly exploration of traditional female archetypes through a re-interpretation of historical narrative painting and symbolic characters to explore in-vitro-fertilisation (IVF)

My investigation is concerned with the anxiety, confusion and complexity of negotiating expectations of feminine identity through the uncanny world of in-vitro-fertilisation (IVF). Through paint I have created a fairy-tale world to facilitate access to a deep, multilayered experience that transverses medical intervention, individual hopes and desires, as well as ethical implications.

Specifically, I am locating this project within the assisted reproductive technologies (ART). I am particularly interested in how the cultural significance of a woman’s identity is intrinsically linked to her ability to procreate. With the onset of ART women supposedly have new freedoms, however assisted reproduction is not a liberating process.

Throughout the western painting tradition there a two reoccurring depictions of women - the Madonna (the virgin) and the Magdalene (the whore). In re-focusing and reinterpreting these historical representations, I aim, through the use of characterisation and dark humour, to broaden the debate around the social and ethical implications of ART and female identity, highlighting the conflicting and puzzling nature of these issues.

Within this paper I will be discussing the arguments Greta Gaard presents in Reproductive Technology, or Reproductive Justice? (2010), in addition to Catherine Mills, assessment in Futures of Reproduction, Bioethics and Biopolitics (2011) and Ann Summers’, seminal work Dammed Whores and God’s Police (1975). All of which suggest there is a myopic view around these complicated issues. They advocate the need to broaden the parameters of consultation and the contributors in the influential position of forming social policy.

Unnatural – place and being: connections under stress, 2011

7th October – 4th November 2011, Plimsoll Gallery Hunter Street

Curated By Dr Megan Keating

Artists

Penny Burnett

Joel Crosswell

Amanda Davies

Claudia Damichi

Matthew Newton

Lucienne Rickard

Mike Singe

Yvette Watt

“Penny Burnett’s world hovers between enchanting fairytale and psychological triller. Through constructed narratives, Burnett conjurers a curious vision of the characters and personalities in a theatrical re-telling of her personal journey with IVF. This is her version of a modern day creation story, punctuated with art historical references and inside jokes. Strange potato faced creatures hide amongst the succulents in a claustrophobic Gondwanaland or Garden of Eden in Earthly Delights 2011, a galah looms ominously over a miniature hospitable bed that is more spectacle than menace in another work.

The viewer looks down onto these scenes, like peering into a Petri dish, and spies upon the unfolding narrative. This vantage point presents a scrutinising view. The viewer is able to ogle and pry into every corner and crevice of the scene. Within Burnett’s world the roles of the characters are fluid. The galah is both annunciating archangel and hysterical female flapping about in delirium in Gabriel 2011 and Mr Potato-head men portray the coveted progeny as well as the choose-your-own attributes of sperm donation in Mashed 2011. In Bang Bang 2011, medical staff and legal teams are represented as cardboard cut outs of currawongs who perch in corners overseeing the convoluted drama. Burnett’s vision of the mythical wild place at the end of the earth is populated with the desires and dreams of personal experience but her vision of a fabled Garden of Eden within the Tasmanian landscape id flawed with the taint of hospital disinfectant and endless doctor’s waiting rooms.”

– excerpt from Dr Megan Keating’s catalog essay Unnatural – place and being: connections under stress 2011

http://www.utas.edu.au/creative-arts/events/art-hobart/2011/october/un-natural2