Vera Moller: Hybrids
Australian Art Review February - April 2009
Jo Bertini
The battered and inconspicuous door off the main street in Melbourne's inner city opens to a dark, narrow flight of steps that leads to Vera Moller's world. Climbing the stairs there has a sense of extraordinariness, an anticipation of gaining access into an Aladdin's cave of secrecy and sorcery. The doorway opens into a large, light-filled space partly reminicent of a scientist's labratory, partly of an artistic workshop. It is crammed with ephemera: perspex specimen boxes of quietly multiplying striped organisim, half-hidden prototypes of creatures and paintings of pseudo-organic life forms in the development. There are tables and shelves too, teeming with books and jpournals, encyclopaedis, documented experimentations and discoveries, the flotsam and jetsam of ideas cought among a general morphing creativity.
Studying biology and microbiology in Germany with the intention of perhaps later becomming a biological illustrator, Moller worked within the field of imnology (freshwater ecology), assisting with the research and documentation of microscopic plankton in barvarian Lakes. During her investigations Moller came across hydras. These minute freshwater polyps had greatly fascinated 17th century scientists who were able to see them for the first time assisted with newly developed lenses, the percursors of the modern microscope. Hydra viridis has been affectionately referred to as a "carnivorous palm-tree", and Rotifers have been described as "micro-animals that eat with a ventilating fan".
Throughout the history of biological discoveries, the use of analogy in the attempt to understand, describe and name unfamilliar phenomena was common. This has always fascinated Moller and sparked her own creative speculations regarding plant or animal hybrids. Since 2000, Moller has been working on a series of prototypes in response to concepts and possibilities of horticultuaral hybridisation and genetic engineering. Her recent completion of a PhD "helped to clarify my artistic interests and ideas in this respect".
In the construction of her objects and images, Moller explores surrealist strategies of juxtaposition and recombination to construct new 'pseudo-organic' forms that are entirely fictional, yet still appear familiar. Using her experiences with traditional grafting experiments as a starting point and method for working with modelling material, Moller keeps the conceptual premise for her work initally consciously simple. "What kind of combination plant or new constructed hybrid would surprise me? I think of my constructions as hypothetical life forms, or as species that have not yet been discovered or identified.....or altertnatively, as designs for mutations that are currently in a state of becoming a type of science fiction."
To Moller, her paintings and their current direction have presented a challange. Her earlier allusions to the conventions of traditional biological illustration formats had meant that no further consideration needed to be given to the pictorialisation of the environment that a fictional specimen might inhabit.
In such illustrations the space that surrounds a plant of animal has been of little interest, usually the figure is placed on an insignifigant bit of turf. To embrace some aspects of illusionism in her painting emerged for Moller as one possibility to add a degree of believability to an imagined 'specimen' or growth. An emphasis on the creation of the illusion of a three-dimensional, by the addition of shaddows and other details, are part of this approach. Moller looked at the hallucinatory quality of underwater spaces as a reference for the development of her painting backgrounds. The immersion in relatively opaque fluids can create a visual environment where there is no detectable horizon line. This creates a sense of infinity. In recent years, Moller has turned her attention to the fauna and flora of the Graet Barrier Reef "for its extraordinary life forms, their intricate structures and monumental formations, the complexity of their spaces and scintillating colours and their 'otherworldliness', which is in a state of flux". Scientists now fear that masny species living in reef zones are likely to be extinct before that have been discovered or studied.
Of great interest to Moller is the distinction between the biologist's role, which is to analyze and measure the natural world, and the possibility for the artist to reflect on such research practices and relationships , viewd within the wider cultural context in which these occur. Within biology research the primary interest is focused on aspects the 'perfect specimen' and on functionality, add, to a lesser degree, for instance, on notions of imperfection, malformation or dysfunction. "Artists' contemplations are much less restricted; our undertaking is to look on a speculate."
Her most recent solo exhibition titled Vera Moller: Neomorphics (Neugemuse) at La Trobe University Art Museum, Bundoora, in September 2008, included a series sculptures, sequences of works on paper, as well as collages and paintings; a body of work exhibited with clear reference to natural history museum display formats.
Walking through Vera Moller's studio, it is difficult not to assume that the specimens are in some way real life forms or potentiallyreal creatures, captured and preserved. There is a sense of breath to the artworks, an expectation that the perspex boxes will soon have condensation trapped and building within.They require a quiet, considered observation and their graphically descriptive nature servesonly to amplify the fact that they are obviously not deptictions of dead specimens, but in some way living, regenerating, growing and multiplying. There is also a sense of movement that is not kinaesthetic, motorised or technologically driven, but rather a natural imperceptable energy, created by the hand of the artist, a novel type of life form, gifted with a novel type of life force.