Solitude 2019

photo credit: Christian Capurro, install: William Mallat, solo show at Wagner Contemporary 26 Oct - 13 Nov

‘In a forest, solitude would be life; in a city it is death.’ (Brother Jonathon, 1843)

Earlier this year, Schawel and her family were amongst a group of 40 who hiked the remote 53 km Milford Track in the South Island of New Zealand - a magical, tactile place draped in moss and lichen, flax and ferns, where in the space of an hour, heavy rains turn trickling creeks into raging rivers and waterfalls. Whether traversing waterfalls or meandering slightly off track to admire hidden worlds, the landscape demanded her undivided attention.

There is an accompanying shift in Schawel’s palette and technique in this series, which conjures the verdant lushness and textures of the Fiordland’s ancient rainforests. Greens, umbers and deep reds make their debut. There is a weightiness to some of these new works but also a sense of lightness and fragility. Multi-layered background washes and highly pigmented pools of ink are poured and allowed to spread and dry under plastic. Sections of paper are torn off the surface with a scalpel and an engraving tool is used to drilled into and through the paper, creating spatterings of holes that define negative spaces. The push-pull tension typically present in Schawel’s clustered compositions remains but the volume appears to be turned up a few levels, successfully encapsulating the intensity of her experience on the Milford Track.