A meeting of talents and vision

By KIERAN FINNANE

Two of Alice Springs’ leading artists, Pip McManus and Rod Moss, are sharing gallery space for two outstanding separate shows at the Araluen Arts Centre until August 17. The following is an edited version of my opening night speech.

Beyond their interesting differences, Pip McManus and Rod Moss share many points in common: their longevity here in Mparntwe Alice Springs and their maturity as artists, to start with.

Pip, raised by the Swan River in Perth, came in 1981, after a few years spent in Europe. Her return to Australia wasn’t necessarily going to bring her here but when it did, this place answered her strong desire to live where she could feel the earth beneath her feet.

Rod, raised in the foothills of the Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, arrived in 1984, again after time away – elsewhere in Australia and overseas. He knew by then that he was keenly interested in the strong Aboriginal presence here.

Both were in their thirties and already trained and practising artists.

Rod, after art studies, had been on a highly focussed search for meaning, exploring eclectic philosophies and spiritual practices. This period lay the foundation of a lifelong-openness to non-Western cultures, particularly to the ways in which they integrated mind and body, without him repudiating the best of what his Western heritage has to offer. By the time he arrived in Mparntwe, though, it was clear to Rod that it was art, rather than spiritual practice, that would be his path to making meaning.

Pip, then as now, was more attuned to the immediacy of her experiences in the material world, by which I mean the full manifestation of its natural wonders and what human cultures have made of them. She had travelled and has continued to travel, widely; she has an ear for languages, for word play and music, and a keen eye for visual expression at every level. All this passing through an often-playful filter, which is not to say trivial.

She loves animals, cats especially, but dogs, birds, marine life, all have sparked her imagination. In a persistent strand of her art, beautifully represented in this show, she continues to remind herself and others of the capacity for pleasure in the moment that animals can teach us.

Alongside this strand, taking its time to emerge, was another, in which her eye was trained on the follies of humankind.

So, something else in common for Rod and Pip: clearly reflected in the work of each and meaningfully transmitted to viewers is a consciousness and conscience, both well-nourished and honed by travel, in the world and of the mind. This is as true of Rod’s work, as hyper-local as it may appear to be, as it is of Pip’s which spans hemispheres.

It was not a matter of course that both would stay here, but thankfully they did. For another thing that is true of both is the significant contributions they have made, in their quite different modes of expression, to the local culture.

• • •

Pip was a ceramist of refined skill. I say ‘was’ because this strand of her work has all but ceased. I’ll come back to that. But before it did, it made a number of graceful entries into the public space, in the grounds of Araluen, as well as elsewhere around the town and the Territory.

Her public art work would continue, turning to cast bronze and laser cut steel as her preferred materials.

All the while, Pip lobbied governments for greater attention to the public space, in terms of design and the commissioning of public art, playing a significant part in putting it on the horizon for our administrators.

She had also begun to exhibit more complex ceramic work than previously, in the form of installations with strong conceptual underpinnings. As a foundation artist of Watch This Space, she was stimulated by the shared interest among this group in installation work as a way of getting into thorny terrains.

She revisits two examples in the current show at Araluen: one, History, about the blighting of the present by past wrongs, is an edited form of The Poisoned Well, first shown in the Alice Prize of 1999; the other, Lamentations, reconfigures – with the addition of a striking new element – parts of an earlier installation called The Green Line. First shown at Watch This Space in 2001, it looked specifically at the long, self-devouring bloody history of Jerusalem. How devastating that it remains so pertinent now, almost a quarter of a century later.

These works demonstrate Pip’s ability to make potent political art that stimulates emotional responses as well as reflection, without being stridently polemical.

This strength remained as she began to turn her back on ceramics. In part this was for environmental reasons: the firing of ceramic objects is energy intensive and they last forever. Before firing, however, they are vulnerable. In a breakthrough work, taking clay into an encounter with video, a new medium for her, Pip made Ichor, which won the Alice Prize in 2008. It managed to conjure – with the magic that is art at its most felicitous – the heartbreaking losses across cultures caused by the complex violence of our prolonged present moment.

Pip McManus: Place of sleep, 2024, still from video work

Pip continues to work with video and there are two recent works in this show. Neither involve clay. Both reflect her increasing fluency in the video medium, with the most recent, titled Place to sleep – on its first outing – achieving the same kind of subtle complexity as Ichor.

She also continues to make objects, small and large, now with found materials, coaxing from them unsuspected expressive qualities, which she underlines with her clever, playful titles.

The largest gives this exhibition its name, Saw Points. It exhorts us to look – as in s-a-w – and reflect on the s-o-r-e that we hear alongside ‘points.’ Its focus is on the contemporary Northern Territory and the environmental crises we are engendering here. And so, it puts on a continuum, from the local to the global, the scope of concerns of this intellectually and morally courageous, wryly humorous and energetically inventive, skilful artist.

• • •

As with Pip’s turn away from ceramics, there has been a radical turn in Rod’s work. Away from paint, away from colour, away from people – those narrative paintings made with his Arrernte friends at Whitegate that we came to know so well.

Now he has set aside this work of decades to explore a rich seam of landscapes in graphite.

The transition was not abrupt. Rod had always made paintings and drawings of the land, and continued – until just a few years ago – to make occasional narrative paintings. These he’d rendered in a signature mix of graphite for the Aboriginal figures, for their skin, and paint for the rest.

He associated that stylistic device with “describing disruptions to Arrernte lives wrought through colonisation.” Some of the narrative works, though, were about the continuity and vitality of Arrernte ways amongst his friends. Indeed, it was the range that fully expressed his insights and achievement.

That body of work is unique not only in Mparntwe but in Australia more broadly. Combined with his books – particularly The Hard Light of Day which won the Prime Minister’s award for non-fiction in 2011 – it continues to make an important contribution in understanding this community and its intercultural relations.

But the course of this work is largely run, as if bleeding out on the hard ground of Whitegate and our divided town. Now, Rod invites us to walk alongside him alone, on his forays into the country around Mparntwe, his eye drawn particularly to its rock formations and ephemeral waters.

We are in similar terrain to that of his last solo show at Araluen – All My Fat Country in 2021 – but now the rocky outcrops and ridgetops are right up close. They seem to push forward, looming, his gaze ever more penetrating, away (mostly) from the drama of whole sites under big skies, away (mostly) from the many places of past memory, insistently towards a different kind of encounter. It’s hard not to think that it anticipates a ‘return to dust.’

This was present previously as a minor note, but has intensified since the sudden death in January 2022 of his much-loved younger brother, Colin. The drawing titled Ridgeway is the only one in the current show that predates Colin’s death.

Drawing is Rod’s way into the “magnitude” of experience, of life and now death, of the land, its beauty and damage.

Poetry is too. It is inscribed in many of the drawings – and if not in them, in their titles. Its potent imagery is fully resonant with the intensity of the forms that emerge from Rod’s vision and touch.

Rod Moss: They Come Dishevelled and Unloved, Voices Clinging to Cliffs and Crannies, 2023.

In this show, Moon Havoc, his subjects are mostly not landmarks or named sites; they are not views, but encounters, human to rock. Like faces standing out in a crowd, the rocks become familiar with repeated sightings and then cherished for what that familiarity reveals. In 2020 he thought about it as “the tender fellowship of rocks,” the title he gave to a drawing back then, of a seeming inconspicuous cluster, beautiful under his gaze.

In these later drawings, though, tenderness is not the dominant note. There is something more resistant and implacable about these rocks.

His writing – in the artist’s book that he is publishing to coincide with this show – makes clear his deepening concern about the ways the warming global climate is manifesting here in central Australia – the longer hotter summers, the fire threat, the buffel grass, the whole infernal cycle. His beloved rocks will endure but imagine this kind of ‘return to dust’ – imagine living in that world.

The title poem of his most recent drawing says it all: “Great silence returns to fill the endless numbered days.”

Rod has never resiled from tough subjects. Disciplined, prolific, generous, visionary, he offers us a hard beauty that we can’t afford to look away from. At the same time, in that beauty survive the kernels of hope.

Note: Kieran Finnane was the arts writer for the Alice Springs News for close to three decades. She has also published essays and reviews in national journals, such Artlink, Art Monthly Australasia and Griffith Review.