How to Swim borrows its title from a chapter in Emily Ogden’s recent book, written while her children were small: On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays, a suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing and the significance of embracing uncertainty. Other chapters are titled things like ‘how to turn a corner’, ‘how to hold it together’, ‘how to milk’ and ‘how to stay’. I was introduced to this text by a friend based in the UK who mentioned reading it on the train home from Scotland or Wales. This premise of ‘unknowingness’ resonated with me and reminded me of the way I approach painting (and parenting). Through processes of unlearning (or unknowing), we’re able to relinquish total control and dodge conditioning to make way for new processes, perspectives, and notions.
How to Swim comprises 18 Australian artists spanning various career stages and working predominantly in the field of painting. Their work draws on diverse references: the land, fishing, art historical imagery and objects, domesticity, overheard conversations, and intimate personal narratives. Their work somewhat defies traditional painting categorisation and inhabits multiple genres at one time, thus existing in a kind of liminal or ‘non-space’ – swimming in and between abstraction and representation, landscape, figuration, and still life. I suspect a fundamental part of the exhibiting artists’ practices is surrendering to process and embracing this premise of ‘unknowingness’, a state that Ogden suggests precedes knowledge or shifts in articulating it.
Sally Anderson 2023
Image: SIMONE GRIFFIN, Bunya Milk2024, acrylic on linen, 140 x 110 cm
