Lisa Sammut: How the earth will approach you

The exhibition title, How the earth will approach you, proffers a shift from our usual position as active, effectual individuals impacting upon a more passive earth. This is not the only shift away from dominant paradigms that Lisa Sammut’s exhibition suggests.

Entering the darkened exhibition space at the University of NSW (UNSW) Galleries forms a literal shift from the other two exhibitions on view—also mid-career solo presentations, by artists Lillian O’Neil and Paul Knight—both with brightly lit, white cube layouts. The darkness of How the earth will approach you requires a slowing of my pace and viewing, not least to allow my eyes to adjust, but also for the many discrete elements that make up the larger whole of the works to reveal themselves in diminished lighting conditions. The light that is present bounces from moving mirrored, white painted, and glass surfaces, calling my attention in different directions.

The first room feels like an antechamber and contains only one work, A circular logic, 2023. Arranged in a semi-circle, it is composed of multiple hanging circular and elliptical sculptural elements with two large, clear glass orbs positioned on the floor. I periodically catch myself in the slowly rotating ellipse-shaped mirror placed toward the centre of the work. The light then reflects off a glass sphere that sits, tucked into the curves of one of the many hanging white wooden shapes. The work includes various kinetic components whose movements interloop with the movement of the prominent shadows thrown on the polished concrete floor—the lighting seemingly optimised for creating shadows.

Sammut, in researching towards her exhibition, has drawn on historic astronomical and celestial diagrams, that, while perhaps skewed or not immediately obvious in the verticality of the hanging sculptures, unexpectedly become clearer in the shadows they cast on the floor and walls of the gallery (perhaps we are more familiar with encountering these diagrams horizontally, on a page for example). Sammut’s sculpture is an experiment in drawing in space and becomes a shadow drawing on the floor of the gallery. There is an aesthetic to parts of the work that I can’t quite place, perhaps it’s very slightly reminiscent of the curves and curls of art nouveau, alongside the more clearly geometric diagrammatical style that many of the lines take.

Sammut is based in Kamberri / Canberra where she also undertook a residency at Canberra Glassworks. The glass elements, or “cosmic eggs” as she calls them, in A circular logic (there are a dozen or so, each measuring no more than ten centimetres in height) were made during this residency. This was the artist’s first attempt at working with glass, and in the wall text, she talks about the realisation that “hot glass instinctively curves and pools around itself,” which brought about the creation of the egg shapes, and the title of this work.

From the first room the second, larger room is visible. The main room holds two works, a two-channel moving image work Full Circle (ii), and another sculptural installation How the earth will approach you, sharing its title with that of the exhibition. But there is so much cohesion and cross-over between all three works (they were made at a similar time in 2023), it feels as if they are part of one larger whole. While the curation by Catherine Woolley emphasises and facilitates this connection, it is the sound of cicadas in a suburban backyard on a warm Australian summer night, emanating from Full Circle (ii) and audible throughout the entire space, that draws these three connected works together more tightly. This sound also situates the work geographically in Australia, in a way that would have otherwise been absent.

Movement and its connection to time features across all three works in slightly different ways: there is the more obvious movement and passage of time present in the video format of the work Full Circle (ii). This work couples fragments of text written by Sammut with the low-fi aesthetic and stilted movement of GIF [graphics interchange format] animation. GIF is used in astronomical footage to simplify information and condense expanses of time into a simple animated action or movement, which is then looped. Bright circles, representing Halley’s Comet, appear across the screens, moving and rearranging themselves while casting an opalescent glow. Full Circle (ii) also suggests a temporality on a personal scale in the artist’s initial inspiration to plot her lifespan in relation to Halley’s Comet, a comet that is visible from earth every seventy-two to eighty years. For Sammut the comet came into view near the beginning of her life and will again near the end, suggesting a circularity—a return path—rather than a straight line to life’s continuum. This conceptualisation of a biological or cosmological temporality makes me wonder about the artist’s desire to measure her life in a way that sits outside the dominant format. Through this alternate temporality she suggests that other ways of thinking about and being in time are possible, a shift away from our current paradigm where the strictures of the capitalist modality and its link to the ticking clock shape our lives: for me, the clock is currently making its way through my seven hour and twenty-one minute working day. Or is the shift to a cosmological temporality more an attempt to capture a sense of the infinite, unfathomable depth of cosmic time and space, placing the brief human lifespan on this seemingly endless trajectory.

The accompanying work How the earth will approach you forms a more physical, sculptural exploration of these concepts, it takes a form similar to A circular logic, but its hanging sculptural elements are much larger, reaching floor to ceiling. Another drawing in space.

I’m reminded of the Scottish artist Katie Paterson and her work Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight, 2008. Paterson also sought to wrest a more biological or cosmological temporality back from our current measures of time. Working with a lighting company, she created a light globe that simulated the moon’s glow. Two hundred and eighty-nine bulbs were installed in a grid pattern, representing the average human lifespan of sixty-six years (in 2008)—imagining a human life measured in the light of the moon’s glow.

Later, across the courtyard at the UNSW Art and Design Library, I leaf through the Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art: Time edition, edited by Amelia Groom in 2013. Its introduction suggests that artists have been exploring time as a complex web since well before this book’s publication, and that a linear concept of time is in many ways “outmoded.” While this may be true in the context of contemporary art—and importantly within Indigenous and non-Western cultures that seek to resist the dominance of colonial systems and Western constructs, instead looking to their own measures and concepts of time—the chronological past-present-future, and the cause and effect measures, are still deeply engrained in my everyday life, especially as it is tracked in finer and finer detail across various applications. Either way, it was uplifting to catch a glimpse of another temporality—one with a sense of being swept along with time, rather than one where time is something controlled entirely by social forces.

This review was originally published Artist Profile, issue 68 

EXHIBITION 
Lisa Sammut: How the earth will approach you
28 June – 24 November 2024
University of NSW Galleries, Sydney