Catalogue Essay | A Physical Reader | CAVES Gallery

Nathan Beard, Devi Seetharam, Sophie G. Nixon, 22 July - 13 August, 2022.

In A Physical Reader I have drawn together Nathan Beard, Sophie G. Nixon and Devi Seetharam, artists who turn to adornment, gesture and dress to explore cultural attitudes towards gender, sexuality, labour and ecology. The artists chart how these attitudes converge, are sustained, shift and made manifest by drawing on the embedded lineages that pervade the Keralan mundu, Thai gestures, such as the wai, and material histories of organic textiles.

Through attentive material engagements, painterly approaches and compilations of wayward archives, they have developed aesthetic languages that ground the dialectic interplays embedded within their chosen, seemingly innocuous motifs, allowing contradictions and hypocrisies to arise, settle and at times proliferate. Starting from certain points of unease and anxiety, the artists’ compositional and material approaches subtly, albeit pointedly, create critical frameworks for reading these gestures and dress. In their explorations there is a reparative quality that both forms around and is embedded within their working processes, as art becomes a recuperative strategy to better orient the self and intervene in social and cultural idioms.

Devi Seetharam was born in Kerala and begun the series “Brothers, Fathers, Uncles” in Narrm/Melbourne in 2016 soon after getting married. The work arose as Seetharam began to question the conflict between the traditional attitudes that accompany the ritual and her own feminist values. From this point of unease and confusion Seetharam found a focus and orientation to work through not only the questions she had about traditional gender roles, but also how they manifest in the Indian state where she was from. Seetharam’s focus settled on the white mundu, a form of dress worn by men on formal occasions such as weddings and political protests throughout Kerala. Seetharam articulates that despite Kerala having a matrilineal culture there are stark, persistent discrepancies in the power relations between men and women, as gatherings of men in the white mundu exclude women and frequently reduce them to symbolic figures of beauty and desire. In Kerala, men predominantly occupy public space and hold court wearing the mundu to signify their dignity, purity and respect, a quality that Seetharam does not deface in her tender paintings. Instead, it is in her compositional framing and painterly techniques that Seetharam forms a critical lens onto the mundu, allowing its broader cultural implications to come to the fore. Men wearing the mundu can often be seen in public gathered in groups and in Seetharam’s paintings we see such gatherings pictured as legs atop a grey background stand amidst strewn objects. Men in these groups are frequently referred to as vayinokki, a Malayalam term that describes roadside oglers of women. In Seetharam’s compositions she critically frames the bottom half of the men, cutting off their gaze, limiting the capacity of the men to objectify women, while acknowledging the conversations occurring outside of the frame that she would not typically have access to. Seetharam’s mundu and silhouetted legs with dark, Dravidian skin sit amidst storm grey and mottled backgrounds.

Whilst the dominant cliché in Keralan art is to represent the state as lush and green, Seetharam turns to a weathered urbanity of dull, concrete public spaces the likes of which are seen in Cochin and Thiruvananthapuram. In the process of painting the mundu, Seetharam repeatedly applies and removes paint in layers to generate form, the figure and ground interplay through tonal variation, embedding the attire and the figures wearing them within the public spaces they occupy. The planar ground is given depth by the depiction of objects scattered on the ground, in the two paintings included in A Physical Reader we see yellow Kanikonna flowers amidst the figures feet. The floral motif, not to be misconstrued as some reference to the feminine, points to a seasonal process of blooming and wilting, coming to rest on the ground. The Kanikonna flowers presence draws temporality into the work, evoking the sustained presence of the mundu and the gendered power relations it describes.

Similarly working with time and the inferences of flowers and plant material, Sophie G. Nixon engages with pre-existing fabrics, discarded garments, disused and damaged bedsheets and flora gleaned from Boorloo/Perth and its surrounds. Their work exists within a material ecology and carries broader ecological concerns, which course through the textiles they employ. Working with fabrics made of organic materials, cotton and silk primarily, Nixon repurposes and mends the fabric with flowers, weeds, plants and wool; they also frequently dye material on rusted corrugated steel sheeting. It is an experimental approach to textiles, working with what is at hand, and carries poetic possibilities as an embodied, environmental response to art making. Furthering the ecological underpinnings of this process of repurposing materials is a weaving into the laboured histories of organic fabrics that are made invisible in the formation of garments. In this instance the three works exhibited in A Physical Reader are from fragments of a 1950s silk dress. By sewing into the fabric with grains, blossoms and weeds Nixon evokes the laborious processes of harvesting organic material that was subsequently woven to produce the silk fabric, reasserting the garments plant-based origins. This turn to the disused garment carries an emotional weight as Nixon tends to histories both hidden and embedded, enacting a process of healing by engaging with the garments through attentive mending and adornment. Like the ecology that Nixon’s work is drawn from, the plant matter woven through Shell, Weeds and Grain has subsequently dried and wilted, as the work returns to the ecological matrices from which they are derived.

Whilst Nixon works within a material ecology Nathan Beard works through an archival network of image and gesture. White Gilt 4.0 presented in A Physical Reader is the fourth iteration of an image-based exploration into the wai, a twelfth century Thai gesture, alongside hand movements from Thai dance. The original iteration of White Gilt was shown at Cool Change Contemporary in 2019, White Gilt 4.0 continues the deployment of an accumulated archive of found images, family photographs, material gleaned from the internet and Beard’s own imagery. Beard’s work is a personal navigation of his own ‘Thainess’ from within a Western context, particularly Western Australia, where he grew up. Beard inserts himself into the work aiming to chart and reconcile aspects of heritage, cultural performativity and the morphology of Thai gestures. As Beard articulates,

Conceptually this work is trying to suggest that how I perform an understanding of ‘Thainess’ is inextricably tied to my perspective of whiteness, so it was important that I insert myself into this work... [1]

Nathan’s hands can be seen glammed-up—adorned with long acrylic nails painted with Tom Ford holding orchids. The images reference his childhood recollection of his mother remarking that he would have been a great Thai dancer if he was a girl. In the ‘dragging up’ of his hands for the imagery with Fenty Beauty, Beard also points to a ‘failure’ in his attempt to replicate the gestures as the arch of his finger in one image has slackened into a formation that’s more reminiscent of the ‘OK’ gesture, rather than the traditionally desired narrow peak formed with an index finger and thumb that represents a flower in Thai dance vernacular. In his research Beard has looked to his own anxiety and “gilt” around reconciling the gestures of his heritage and their performative use in a Western context. In the accumulation of imagery pertaining to the wai and Thai dance Beard has drawn out touristic imagery from family photographs at a Crocodile Farm, images of Shawn Mendes doing the wai, and Michael Jackson with a group of Thai dancers. Through this cultural wandering, ‘dragging-up’ and reperformance of a series of gestures on his own terms, Beard humorously assuages some of the guilt that can stem from enacting cultural gestures outside of their original context, discerning that, ‘Thai culture is historically hybrid and constantly shifting; and I’ve come to embrace the fluidity of this for its creative potential.’ [2]

In A Physical Reader we are presented with a range of partial views, fragments and performative photographs. Through the framing and shaping of their given motifs the artists raise pertinent questions about the social and material ecology of gesture and adornment. Their enquiries tease out complex questions about artmaking, hybridised cultural idioms and sustained cultural attitudes that persist despite apparent shifts in a broader social consciousness. Their inquiries are material, active, physical and probing, looking to re-read and interrogate what we have inherited, culturally and socially, and to challenge the perception that these cultural idioms infer. The three artists shown here find wayward ways of making space for contradictions, looking at what is sustained present and what has changed, in the process mending with plants, Fenty nails and strewn Kanikonna flowers.

1. Interview with Nathan Beard, Cool Change Contemporary, 2019. https://coolchange.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cool-Change-Contemporary-July-2019.pdf

2. Ibid.