Joshua Yeldham | Endurance: Two Rivers
Joshua Yeldham’s new series of paintings, ‘Endurance: Two Rivers’, explore the shared threads that weave cultural ideologies, philosophies and religions across East and West. The works form part two of his ‘Endurance’ series, which has been staged at Arthouse Gallery since the end of 2017 and marks five years since the artist’s last major Sydney presentation.
In these large format works on paper, Yeldham takes viewers on a poetic odyssey of cultural, historical and personal significance, responding directly to recent travels throughout Japan, Arizona and India as well as his ongoing interactions with Australia’s Ku-ring-gai and Hawkesbury regions. Delicate calligraphic lines and indigos recalling Edo Period ceramics summon traditional Japanese visuals, yet their subject is decidedly Australian – anthropomorphised mangroves stretch out their limbs while Hawkesbury waterholes beckon us into their serene wilderness.
Yeldham’s emphasis on materiality dislodges the conventional connotations of works on paper by pushing the possibilities of paper to a greater level of tactility. Ritualistic swathes of paint and ink rove through sculptural webs of cartographic carvings, the thick linen paper sharing the sturdy properties of board with the malleable medium of ceramic while maintaining the soft surface of paper. He sculpts and engraves the paper like an archaeologist excavating an historical site, yet Yeldham’s artefact is allegorical – a distant sense of history, of memory and of truth. For the artist, this kind of higher awareness can be distilled from the various cultural ideologies observed during his travels, including Hopi cosmology, Hindu mythology the philosophical tenets of Kyudo (the Japanese art of archery) – each belief system orbiting ideas about surpassing oneself and becoming, in the artist’s own words, ‘transient’.
EXHBITION
Joshua Yeldham | Endurance: Two Rivers
19 January – 17 February 2018
Arthouse Gallery, Sydney
The exhibition opens with paintings that place Done in conversation with some of the great names of art history. He has always been something of...
The art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) asserted that “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.” He continued, “The...
Museums and galleries often attempt to decolonise their collections and embrace diversity, equity and accessibility by ditching the elevated status of the artist. Yet artist...
Kaldor Public Art Project 38 is in the Naala Badu building (the term for “seeing waters” in the Gadigal language). Demand, as it happens, has...
Australia’s addiction to art prizes is difficult to comprehend. To the best of my knowledge, Australia has more art prizes per head of population than...
The measure of how much I enjoyed this book is that as I was reading it I was also compiling my list of Top Ten Books...
Australian art history still holds many gaps. The life and work of John Joseph Wardell Power (1881–1943) is one of them. Curated by Ann Stephen,...
Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs was commissioned for the Contemporary Projects series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, where it was first...
Pulse, the title of his current exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney, alludes to the rhythmic equilibrium of parts that has long characterised his work. As...