Realms of Possibility - Robert Hollingworth with Juz Kitson + Wade Marynowsky

Realms of Possibility
Robert Hollingworth
with
Juz Kitson + Wade Marynowsky
12 Berry Street Nowra | shoalhavenregionalgallery.com.au
Robert Hollingworth, Lyrebird 2023 (detail) acrylic on canvas, 222 x 444cm
Robert Hollingworth
has held more than thirty exhibitions in
Australia as well as solo shows in USA,
Singapore and Hong Kong. His work is
included in more than a dozen public
collections and he has won many awards
including the Sulman Prize, AGNSW, and
Mt Buller Art Prize. For many years he was
a teacher of fine art at RMIT University,
Melbourne. He is also an essayist and
established author with seven works of
fiction published. Hollingworth now lives at
Kings Point, South Coast NSW.
Juz Kitson
has held solo shows in Sydney,
Melbourne, Brisbane, London and Beijing.
Her work continues to gain critical
acclaim as a prize finalist including the
Wynne Prize (Highly Commended 2022)
(2017), the Sidney Myer Fund Australian
Ceramic Award (2019) and The Alice Prize
(2018). Her work is held in many public
collections, including the NGA, AGSA,
Artbank, RMIT University, as well as private
collections in Australia, Germany and the
UK. Kitson is currently based in Milton,
South Coast, NSW.
Dr. Wade Marynowsky
creates interdisciplary works including
robotics, performance, installation, music
and video, addressing important issues
relevant to our computer-controlled
society. He has exhibited in Beijing,
South Korea, Poland, Taiwan, Germany,
Amsterdam, Japan, as well as in capitals
around Australia. His work is held in
collections at the NGV, Artbank Australia,
UTS, Bundanon Trust Collection. He is a
lecturer at the Unversity of Technology,
Sydney and lives in Nowra, South Coast,
NSW.
Robert Hollingworth, Pink-spotted Hawkmoth 2023
(detail). Acrylic on canvas, 122cm x 168cm
Juz Kitson, The mother tongue; a delicate and fragrant
being. No II. 2023 (detail). Stoneware, raku clay,
various glazes, 80 x 50 x 38cm
Wade Marynowsky, Liminal Lyrebirds, 2023 (detail). HD
video, audio, 3 minutes (edition of 3 + 1 artist proof)

Hanging in Space
When the impossible becomes possible,
worlds change. Or specifically, our
individual worldview. Disruption, discovery,
evolution are often the domains of science
or technology, but they are also our history
books and our philosophies. And also, our
art.
The symbol of the black swan is one
example. When the Roman poet Juvenal
wrote of a black swan in the second
century as an imaginary creature that
didn’t exist, he never anticipated the
existence of Australia’s Black Swan.
Instead of a metaphor for the impossible,
the black swan became a symbol of
possibility, and suggests that knowledge
always changes with new evidence.
Because the unknowable isn’t the same
as what’s unknown. It is the place beyond
that. It’s recognition that what we reach
for – familiarity – will never actually be
attained because knowledge, like space,
is infinite.
Artist Robert Hollingworth feels drawn
to this idea, that what we imagine isn’t
possible can be possible. “I love the
shifting notions of what’s real and what
isn’t real,” he says. He often returns
to the image of the black swan in his
large paintings. Most recently, placing
the outline of a black swan against a
constellation of faraway stars.
“We’ve always had mythology. We’ve
always had ideas about where fact ends,
and fiction begins. And animals feature
highly throughout all cultures in terms
of symbolism,” he says. As Hollingworth
reflects on the symbolism of animals
from the Middle Ages to contemporary
adaptations, he also looks to the stars.
Constellations have always carried
meaning throughout western cultures as
Robert Hollingworth, Sydney Hawk Dragonfly 2023,
acrylic on canvas, 122cm x 168cm
Robert Hollingworth, Mantis 2023, acrylic on canvas,
122cm x 168cm
Robert Hollingworth, Mantis 2 2023, acrylic on canvas,
122cm x 168cm
memorials for the dead, and as records
of heroes and gods. Up there you
can also find birds: Apus, the Bird of
Paradise; Aquila, the Eagle; Cygnus, the
swan.
Hollingworth’s exhibition Realms of
Possibility at Shoalhaven Regional
Gallery brings together over a decade
of thinking about these interstellar
symbolic landscapes. For Hollingworth:
“It is the place where reality and gods
are created, the apparent realm of time
and space, poorly understood, if at all.
This is relevant today, when we are still
coming to terms with our own mortality,
the fragility of the planet, climate change,
lost species, depleting resources.” His
paintings offer new constellations that
reflect this contemporary occupation with
the natural environment. Hollingworth
asks us to consider, what are the
constellations we would read in the stars
today?
When viewers enter the gallery, they
are confronted by Lyrebird (2023), a
four-metre long work that dominates
the space with the semblance of a
lyrebird against a cosmic background
of blues, greens, and gold. Hollingworth
often paints and manipulates these
larger canvases, folding them to create
duplicating forms and unexpected
colours. Like a Rorschach, he hopes
audiences will find things in his paintings
that are interpretations of themselves.
In another work, the vibrating gold and
yellow of Hollingworth’s painting Sydney
Hawk (2023) mirrors two dragonflies
against deep space. This mirrored form
is a figuration of the shifting realities the
artist is intrigued by – the Sydney Hawk
Dragonfly is endangered and eternal –
multiplying across time and space. Now
stilled, without the rapid movement of its
wings, time slows down too.
Two other artists have also contributed
a work each to Realms of Possibility.
Juz Kitson offers one of her enigmatic
sculptures, The mother tongue; a
delicate and fragrant being. No II. Kitson’s
work is complex and large scale, an
exquisite musing on nature’s cycles
of metamorphosis, decay, beauty and
abundance. Wade Marynowsky presents
a video work, The Lyrebirds, echoing the
fusion of nature, myth and reality. As such,
all three artists seem to collude, their
single mission: to make the world strange
again.
The evocation of deep space in
Hollingworth’s paintings captures unknown
landscapes of the future, as space so often
encourages a view of futuristic ideas of
what’s possible. We don’t know what’s
out there; it is ‘the last frontier.’ “Today, on
a planet colonised in every corner, our
“Sublime” might very well be deep space,”
Hollingworth explains.
The Sublime in art refers to the sense of
wonder and awe inspired by seventeenth
century painters onwards that captured
the expansiveness of the natural world,
often hinting at the scale of humanity’s
insignificance in this context. In reverse,
we witness it in The Overview Effect
experienced by some astronauts who feel
a cognitive shift in how they understand
our planet once they see it from space.
A cosmic sublime would sit somewhere
between these two extreme views – the
immensity of the natural environment, the
insignificance of our fragile blue planet
hanging in space. Hollingworth’s paintings
suggest both, and he claims the sublime
in his art through this contrast – like the
wings of a dragonfly from earth against the
deepening infinity of space.
Brooke Boland 2023