Rhizoming: a piece of Tasmania in Canberra

Posted on 20 June, 2019

Jan Hogan’s exhibition, Rhizoming, is a piece of the Tasmanian coast transported to inner-city Canberra.

I visited the south coast of New South Wales in late autumn this year, a rare treat that means empty beaches and quiet observation of the sea, as dark skies threaten to open over the beach in the chilly afternoon.

Exploring the beach at length in this way always gives me a sense of having had a private connection with the landscape, through the pulse of the waves and the rushing in my ears.

It is this quiet connection with nature that can be seen in Jan Hogan’s exhibition, Rhizoming: Language of Print and Place, at the Craft ACT Gallery.

Just as the rhizome root structure stretches its slow, fertile fingers to connect all things in the natural world, we can map our own web of connections by spending quiet time in our environment and contemplating our place within it.

Jan Hogan has been doing this important work in her new home at Hinsby Beach, at the mouth of the Derwent River.

Jan Hogan. Credit: 5foot Photography.

Hogan’s work is ambiguous – her expansive laser-cut wood-blocks and the prints that they create could equally be the crisscrossing of roots or the graphic outline of a rock.

The installation of these large works is accompanied by a series of small sculptures, that Hogan thinks of as books for their sequential display, which mimics the slow rhythm of reading and page-turning.

The exhibition shares the gallery space with Take Time, a group show by renowned Australian textiles artists that explores the laborious process of tapestry weaving.

Yellow Painting by Suzanne Knight. Credit: Brenton McGeachie.

The pairing of these two shows is apt. It is by spending time that Jan Hogan captures the landscape with such sensitive beauty: time passed in contemplating a particular landscape through the mesmeric work of recording and mark-making.

Her process mirrors the marks of natural forces etching their own language into the coastal landscape over millennia.

Rhizoming. Credit: 5foot Photography.

The motif of the rhizome in Hogan’s work refers to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical system of meaning.

Deleuze suggests that the interactions between all things form invisible connections that together create an all-encompassing web. Deleuze offers symbiotic relationships in nature as an example of this rhizoming at work.

Hogan lives out a symbiosis of sorts with her coastal landscape as she acts upon it and allows it to act upon her and her materials. She embeds the marks of natural forces into her work by immersing her materials directly into her landscape, letting the sand and water take effect upon the paper itself, imbuing its fibres with the identity of Hinsby beach.

It is clear that this record of the environment is central to Hogan’s practice.

“I start with sketches and drawings, immersing paper into the water to see how this environment changes the patterns and marks, allowing the matter of the world to reveal the meaning of place,” she explains. Hogan’s work gives voice to her landscape and adds her own voice in chorus.

Ladies and My Little Unicorn by Rachel Hine.

Jan Hogan’s work speaks specifically about her own space: the landscape that she inhabits. To see it is to read a map of her intense engagement with that site.

Though I have never visited Hinsby beach, Hogan’s work evokes to me a familiar feeling.

It is a nourishing feeling that we all need more of – the feeling of being in nature and sinking into it, of finding our place and putting down roots.

the essentials 

What: Rhizoming: Language of Print and Place
When: Until 6 July 2019
Where: Craft ACT Gallery, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, City
More information: craftact.org.au/blogs/current-exhibitions/rhizoming-language-of-print-and-place-jan-hogan

What: Take Time
When: Until 6 July 2019
Where: Craft ACT Gallery, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, City
More information: craftact.org.au/blogs/current-exhibitions/take-time

Feature image: 5foot Photography