Julian Meagher
There is hope to the last flower

Julian Meagher found the title of his new show in a documentary about the threatened ecology of bees. Balance, in the natural and man- made world, pivots upon a delicate tipping point between redemption and extinction. Survival for the bee is down to the last flower. ?Optimism? Meagher believes ?is needed, because in some regards it is also a mechanism of survival.? Although he has been painting gathered objects for some years, conceptually these are not straight still lives but conduits for a more subtle allegory. Flannel flowers, metallic plastic wine flasks, ancient bottles and a silver emergency blanket ?contain? his ideas, mixing tragedy with elegy and the aesthetic with the arbitrary. A portrait of his wife wrapped in a silver ?safety blanket? mixes the formal tenets of a classical sitting with a media image from a calamity. Using loaded materials, he personal becomes the political. How could it not? These new work are concentrated but anti-passive. A burst of petals splintering inside a cut glass vase, the flowers are not just standing there.

They are exploding.

In these works the palette has paled into monochrome. The drama and vacuum created by a static matte black bottle creates a magnetic center and the gleam of metallic reflection lends the lowliest objet a certain glamour. The artist seems to arrived at the end of the gathering and he tends to fallen and broken things with detailed tenderness. In the planet?s eleventh hour he is scavenging for beauty and bruised truths, symbols and salvage:

?We need that shard of light. The idea of redemption is an answer to nihilism. Perhaps my use of bottles isolates the object away from a myriad of negative contexts: a bottle empty of alcohol is also drained of so many darker connotations. Perhaps the work itself is in a constant process of emptying out. I like the space between objects. The silent intervals.?

Catalogue essay by Anna Johnson, 2017