Arthouse Gallery at Sydney Contemporary

In a world full of unique artists, Joshua Yeldham still feels singular. The borders of life and the studio seem to continually blur together in the artist’s work. This September, Yeldham’s new paintings, sculptures, and photographs will be premiered across Sydney Contemporary, and Arthouse, Sydney.

The title of Joshua Yeldham’s exhibition, Broken Head, comes from a moment of tragedy. After labouring for months on a large ceramic head, a moment of inattention saw Yeldham’s work fall and break into pieces on his studio floor. It is the kind of accident which would usually signal the end to an artwork. “I was crying on the floor, on the phone to my daughter, who really knew how long I spent on it,” Yeldham recalls. “There definitely was a thought that ‘this is all going to go in the bin. I’m fucked, and I have to start again.’” Yet the broken shards never found their way to the trash. Something in the artwork pulled at Yeldham refusing to let the remains of his work fall into their assumed fate. “I was so upset, but I just found myself piecing the work back together on the floor,” Yeldham tells me. “I left them for a day and then I came back to it—I just couldn’t help myself.”

The artwork that emerged on the other side of this ordeal is Broken Head, Pittwater, 2024, —a remarkable painting with the broken pieces of ceramic incorporated into not only its title but also its form. Yeldham’s act of piecing the ceramic back together with gold, immediately recalls the Japanese art of Kintsugi, wherein broken pottery will be mended with precious metal. This process of repair is, of course, as much a philosophical act as it is a physical one—as it powerfully suggests our ability to confront the sudden catastrophes in our lives and slowly, painstakingly, repair them. This is certainly true for Yeldham. “I think that it sums up a lot of my mental health about, you know, trying to use my art as a way of joining me together,” he says. “I struggle sometimes with how to integrate into community, because I have such a beautiful family, and I have close friends, but I go so deep into these works that I struggle to know how to come back out.” With Broken Head, Pittwater, Yeldham believes the work provided him with a path which not only led him into the work but also returned him out of it.

Yeldham’s emotional entanglement with his artwork is registered in his intense experimentation with materials. While his works often carry the simple description of “painting” or “photograph,” their physicality moves beyond these reductive designations. We see this immediately in Butterfly Girl, 2024,—a painting which stretches the very definitional boundaries of “a painting.” Here, Yeldham has transformed a portrait of his daughter into a musical instrument, by arranging tuned strings, a fret, and a bodhrán on the surface of the painting, which can be played by a viewer’s hand. He has, in other words, taken the visual medium of paint and unlocked its sonic potential, bringing together the melodies of sight and sound.

Fertility Tree, Morning Bay, 2023, began its life as a simple photograph of a tree that Yeldham has been painting for sixteen years. The original image was low-res and taken with an iPhone—a beautiful photograph, yet one that would not usually grace a gallery wall. That was before Yeldham’s hand touched it. First, the artist printed the image on robust Italian watercolour paper, which allowed him to carve into the photograph, creating his own marks and striations on the surface of the tree’s bark. Yeldham then worked back into the tree’s leaves with white impasto paint, building up texture and a sense of dimensionality on the otherwise flat surface. Here, the photograph and the tree are both transformed. As one’s eyes move around the artwork, it slides between different photographic, painted, and carved states, as the everyday gets wrapped in an almost cosmic abstraction.

However, my favourite material intervention are the lines of white string and cane that run throughout Fertility Tree, Morning Bay, joining the branches of the tree to the ground. As Yeldham explains to me, in real life, the tree to the left of Fertility Tree blew over in a storm. In response, he added the web of string to the image to secure and support the remaining 150 year old tree. If I think logically about this addition, it makes no sense—no change has been made to the real tree, only Yeldham’s image. Yet on another, deeper, level, I completely understand the impulse—the raw urge—to protect something that you love, even if only symbolically—from the perils of the world.

There is something deeply obsessive and beautifully vulnerable in the way that Yeldham discusses the work in his exhibition. His words, like his artworks, are more than passive descriptions. When he talks about his artworks, he speaks as if they are alive—and I catch him referring to his work as “she” on several occasions. The internal animation—the personhood— of his work is evident when I ask him how he knows when one of his pieces is finished. “The key is that they stop asking me to come back to them—when a work no longer calls me in with charm,” he explains. “I don’t clock labour because I’m not interested in it. You don’t clock the labour when you’re raising a kid.” Here the art object isn’t inert. The artwork almost feels like it has an agency and voice, which calls to both the artist and the viewer. Whether Yeldham is gesturing towards one of his clay effigies, or his meticulously carved photographs, or his trompe l’oeil gigantic room paintings—like his Self Portrait, Studio Interior, 2024, which literally feels inhabitable—the artist pulls you into his world.

This article was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
Joshua Yeldham: Broken Head
5 – 8 September, 2024
Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Sydney

29 August – 14 September, 2024
Arthouse Gallery, Sydney