Landscape Portrait Prelude / Departure
Clare Noonan’s practice has long sought to consider and question an array of modernity’s received truths. Imperial fascinations with exploration, measurement and the prospects made tangible by technological and literal advances are recalibrated to a more personal scale within Noonan’s contemporary evocations of place and orientation.
Drawn to the instruments of science and culture that allow the world to be framed, measured and understood, Noonan often presents reconditioned componentry which pair the appeal of natural history exhibits with the heirloom intrigue of unusual devices and constructs.
In Landscape Portrait Prelude two distinct European art-making traditions collide as the picturesque tradition of the landscape faces up to the similarly self-aggrandising discernment of the portrait genre. Curiously absent from this scene, the outline of the artist’s body marks out a withdrawal and an inversion not dissimilar to the effect of that most Victorian of touristic contrivances, the Claude Glass. This was a small black convex mirror used by spectators of a landscape to reflect a given view whilst rendering tonal values and areas of light and shade more easily discernible.
Designed to contain the natural world at the surface level of the picturesque, while distancing the user from the scene reflected within, the Claude Glass allowed viewers to literally turn their back on the complexities of a scene and instead focus on a condensed section of the world. As ecologist and writer Geoff Park has explained, the Claude Glass transformed nature into scenery, and real experience into theatrical representation.1
Set just outside of Christchurch where the artist grew up, Landscape Portrait Prelude sees Noonan addressing the living interface between the place she calls home and her own body, suggesting that the imprint of one resides firmly and permanently in the other.
As in a number of Noonan’s earlier works, the compass point embedded within the outstretched palm of Departure orientates itself to magnetic north, and in doing so emphasises the flexible truth of shifting certainties and mobile relations over more static social norms. Noonan’s componentry might initially suggest itself as a memorial to the original narratives and methodologies of European exploration, but the instability and general implausibility of her devices’ construction means that they manage to deflect attention elsewhere. As a result, Noonan’s offerings are more tentative, personal and softer than they may first appear. They are both oddly nostalgic and also shifting and chimerical.
Employing a variety of techniques, Noonan bravely confronts the nature of our settler culture’s rhetorical crutches while clouding the efficiencies of those models with a more personal and experiential response. By questioning the assumption of memory’s transparent relation to the past, Noonan’s work recognises a more complex relationship to location and place. By tracing manifold manipulations of scale and duration, she employs a variety of sculptural and temporal investigations to recalibrate her readings of home.
Text by
1 See Geoff Park, ‘Theatre Country’ in ‘The Idea of Place: New Zealand Issue’ of Australian-Canadian Studies, Vol. 18, Nos 1 & 2, 2000, pp. 7–21.
