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New Work - Joanna Logue
Art World Oct/Nov 2008
Sarah Hetherington
What’s the origin of the name Logue?
I don’t know much about my family history, but I know that my surname is Irish. My Mum is English and came to Australia as a small girl. My Dad is true-blue Australian. I grew up in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. We moved to Sydney when I was 10 years old.
When did you realise you wanted to be an artist?
When I was young I didn’t think that making things was unusual or extraordinary; it was compulsive and just seemed natural. From an early age I was making marks in the sand and creating patterns with found objects. I thought it was what everyone did. I’ve always had a fascination with the natural world, with assembling objects and the tension created by the space around them.
You seem to have a deep connection to the Australian Landscape. What meaning does landscape convey in your work?
I have a very close and intimate connection with the landscape, which is probably a result of having grown up in the bush. It’s there that I find solace and where I’m truly myself and able to grapple with the nature and concept of being. I feel both powerful and small in the landscape – it’s humbling. A kind of sadness comes over me, but also a sense of rapture and wonder. The balance between these emotions is what I try to speak of in my work.
Your surroundings in Oberon play a strong part in shaping your work – from the weather to the time of day and even the windowpanes of your house that you look out of each day. Can you describe what it is you’re responding to?
Basically I’m responding to my local environment in Oberon, where I’ve been now for more than 12 years. It’s not a particularly beautiful place; in fact it’s quite bleak and sombre. I’ve since “learned” it – it has become part of me, part of my personal narrative. I’m not just speaking about my place in the world in my work, I’m also speaking about myself, because the landscape I explore is so personal and particular. In this way the paintings are a kind of self-portrait. But sometimes the level of exposure feels too raw so I spend a lot of time painting myself out: erasing, masking or censoring my initial emotional and intuitive mark-making in an attempt to introduce order or restraint. I do this by bringing structure back into the composition and by paring down the marks and shapes so that the works speak on a universal level. I hope that by cancelling myself out viewers might find the paintings easier to access.
Do you spend a long time mixing and contemplating colour? Or are the colours you use quite literal?
I don’t spend a long time mixing my palette. A lot of the mixing happens while I’m painting. My palette is quite literal – I don’t make anything up. How I see the landscape at any given point is how I want to articulate it. I can’t lie; I want to convey the truth of what I see and experience.
Tell me about the title of your paintings. They’re also quite literal.
The titles generally come from the specific place the paintings are based on, or the actual thing that I’m painting. For example, if I’m painting a track dissecting the landscape I’ll call the work Track. I don’t want to impose a poetic title on the work because it suggests that viewers have to feel what the title implies.
In 2007you made a video for an exhibition in Bathurst. Will you continue to explore video as a way of conveying your experience of the landscape?
Yes. In fact, at the moment I’m more interested in moving images than I am in painting. I’m finding the two-dimensionality of painting quite limiting. I love the immediacy of film, where I’m not inhibited by certain technical hindrances of the painting process. I’d like to continue experimenting with the moving image, but – of course – I’ll always be a painter.
Is your new work a departure from or an extension of your practice?
It’s a departure but also as a part of the process in that it has come out of the work that has gone before – it couldn’t evolve any other way. I’m constantly borrowing from past compositions and subject matter and distilling it to arrive at the essence of a place or a feeling. Some of my new paintings comprise only three or four shapes. They’re about how colour fields meet and the tension between forms. Some works are based on broad sweeps or vistas where I use traditional one-point perspective, while others are bold views of the conifers around my property with positive and negative shapes dancing across the picture plane.
Which artists do you admire?
I’m drawn to the use of geometry and positive and negative space in the work of Sean Scully, Richard Diebenkorn, Giorgio Morandi and Kevin Lincoln. I also like Bill Viola’s videos and Willima Kentridge’s work.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m revisiting John Updike’s novel Seek My Face (2002). I’m also reading Ted Hughes’s letters and Andrew Motion’s poems.
Finally, if you could live with any work of art ever made, what would it be?
I don’t think I could pick one artwork to live with forever… My perception shifts so readily that what pleases me today might repel me tomorrow. I could only live with a natural object, like a stone, a feather or a bone.