“Lottie Consalvo’s exhibition No entry but through the sky continues her exploration of formlessness and the unknown. Shortly before starting this body of work, the artist began a practice of walking through dense bushland. The walks were taken without goal or intention, in an area where there were no tracks to follow, and each path was different from the last. When she couldn’t be in the bush, the walks were continued in her mind. These were not recollections of what she had already seen but rather what she imagined lay beyond where she last stopped – the internal landscape of memory and imagination holding equal significance to physical experience. These experiments with shifts in perception, and practices of ‘intentional non-intentionality’, form the current basis for her work.
I am in the bush, and I imagine no way out, and I’m calling but there’s no sound, and there is no determined thing I am calling for, or place I am trying to arrive at, and the only entry or exit is through the sky, and even then, it doesn’t take you anywhere in particular.
Consalvo says ‘The bush has taught me the importance of unpredictability, of not-knowing, and of letting go to make room for something else to happen’. In the studio she now paints in small intense bursts for a few hours at a time. Spontaneity and directness are embraced by focusing on the immediate action rather than the image as a whole, mirroring her walking process. Consalvo exits the studio before rational afterthought stifles this process of indeterminacy and the paintings are put away out of sight for some weeks, suspended, until in Consalvo’s words, ‘the hand has had enough time to forget’. At this point she returns to the work and the process begins again. It is a point of discipline to accept this passive role – the disciplined use of chance for discovery. The paintings become momentary combinations of unmediated gestural mark making and internal choice.
The legacy of American avant-garde composer John Cage’s musical compositions can be seen in Consalvo’s process of indeterminacy and chance. Cage famously stated that “the highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation”. This is not about a lack of productivity, but rather a manner of being alert to the world. Consalvo shares this aspiration. Her paintings are an expression of an esoteric feeling that there is a deep sentience in the natural world which is mysterious and hidden echoing our own obscure and impenetrable inner worlds. With the world at the tipping point of environmental disaster, standing in front of Consalvo’s works, and understanding her unique dialogue with nature, offers a sense of possibility. The paintings ask us to pay attention and to leave room for moments where we move beyond the limitations of conditioned logical thinking. Ultimately this may renew our capacity for fresh sensation and make room for a richer and more compelling understanding of the world to take hold.”Kim Fasher, Artist and Curator, 2022
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Working across painting, performance, video and sculpture, Lottie Consalvo connects deep internal states of being with finely attuned sensory perception and expression. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally, including New Zealand, Mexico and Germany. Exhibitions include: Millerntor Gallery #5, Hamburg, curated by Fabian Jentschin, 2015; ‘In The Remembering’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2018; and in the fourth Clayton Utz Partnership exhibition, Melbourne 2019. Consalvo has worked with Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, including a performance-based residency with Marina Abramovic in 2015. Her work is held in a number of collections including Artbank, Macquarie University, Allens law firm, The Stevenson Collection and Warner Music Australia.
