The term ‘provisional’ refers to something existing in the present but subject to change. For Becky Gibson and Nina Juniper, their subject is change – particularly as it pertains to the built environment. Our urban environment is in a perpetual state of transition, its facade undergoing constant redevelopment and reconstruction. Through painting and printmaking, Gibson and Juniper contemplate our constructed environment. Juniper takes a meticulous approach to her subject and process, while Gibson aims for “submission to the material”.(1) Both artists use unusual media – most commonly seen on the construction site – to hypothesise about building and how we construct the world around us. “A Provisional Landscape”, a group show at ANCA Gallery exhibited from 5 to 23 February 2020 and featuring the work of both Gibson and Juniper, speaks to the urban environment and the unexpected ephemerality of seemingly steadfast constructions.
The artists came to work together through a mutual interest in the urban landscape. Juniper’s practice arises from an interest in the compositional qualities of public spaces, sites of construction and deconstruction and their associated support structures such as scaffolding and temporary struts. These structures, though ephemeral in nature, have become aubiquitous visual feature of the contemporary cityscapes of Canberra and Sydney where the artists’ practice and seek inspiration. Juniper screenprints onto materials that have historically existed outside of the fine art context: construction timber, 15mm compressed fibre concrete, plywood and sheet aluminium. “(Not yet) self supporting #22019” depicts the construction of a new building, screen-printed onto a crumbling and pocked block of cast concrete, characteristic of the cycle of transience as constructions are erected and demolished.
Gibson’s paintings are more intimate than the expansive public spaces in Juniper’s works. Gibson depicts unassuming corners of construction sites. “Timber” (2018) portrays a pile of wooden beams; “Untitled 2” (2020) the cropped composition of a building frame. The stereotypical masculinity of the building site, at odds with feminine connotations of domesticity and the home, is juxtaposed with floral still life elements. “Site” (2019) depicts a suburban backyard in a period of reconstruction. A slab of bricks occupies the composition, framed on either side by rubble and arose bush, alluding to two very oppositional, gendered conceptions of ‘home-making’. Like women’s labour in the home, the temporary sites and constructions illustrated in “A Provisional Landscape” are often overlooked.
The artists utilise non-traditional materials in order to realise their subject through material means. Juniper’s “Building fragments #2” (2019) depicts an abstracted support structure of termi-blu. The material forms not only the support in the image but of the image – the frame is made of the distinctively blue anti-termite material. Like Juniper, Gibson uses building materials, such as plaster, timber, clay and steel, realising her subject not only in concept but inform. The artists’ use of these materials is both a process of discovery and away to bring the subject into the work. Building materials form the very matter, or support, of the works rather than just the subject matter, extending traditional processes and referencing the industrial sites from which they came.
Gibson and Juniper explore transitions between new and old, construction and demolition, occupied and empty. There are other dichotomies at play here too: masculine and feminine, domestic and public, organic and manufactured. This fluctuating spectrum resembles the ebb and flow of civilisation and the timelessness of the cycle of renewal. “The way we do it might look different (with more high-vis) but it seems very human to want to build and tear down what others built before us in an eternal pursuit of the new,” (2) Gibson says. “A Provisional Landscape” examines our constructed environment, the external worlds we create and what they can tell us about the worlds within.
1&2. Becky Gibson, in conversation with Sophia Halloway, 21 February 2019.
Title image: Becky Gibson, Site (detail). Oil on board. 64 x 84cm. Image courtesy the artist.
Article by 2020 CiR Sophia Halloway as part of the Critic in Residence (CiR) program. The CiR is a partnership program between Art Monthly Australasia and ANCA.