linda joy

‘In the Dry’ Paul Johnstone Gallery 16th November ~ 21 December 2018

extract from catalogue:

EARLY MAY AND THE REMNANT HUMIDITY FROM the wet season fades with the oncoming southeast winds. The great dry season pilgrimage entails careful preparation: First, camping gear is retrieved from the deep recesses of the shed, 4x4 vehicles are scrutinized, recovery gear is checked and portable fridges tested. Next, ring friends and family and coordinate days of holiday. Finally, place a cross on the calendar and let the countdown begin.

Sixteen months have passed since Linda Joy held her inaugural exhibition. Few would argue that the paintings successfully highlighted the reasons we reside in
the Territory. Whether it is lying in a swag under the stars, witnessing a bushfire or climbing the imposing escarpment, the power and wonder of the Territory landscape is epitomized by Linda’s skill and imagination. This November Linda will present her second exhibition that cements her position as a leading artist in the Northern Territory. If you need to be reminded of why you live here or why you visited, you need to see this exhibition.

Opens 16 November at 6 pm.

Linda Joy, Stone Country, Paul Johnstone Gallery, 30 June 2017- 29 July 2017. Extract from review by Koulla Roussos Published Crikey Aug 2017

 Landscape is perhaps the most value laden of genres within which to peel back the layers of influence in post-contact Australian history.  Landscape in Australian art history and in particular “pastoraphilia” as the leitmotif of Australian nationhood and identity, mitigated the harsh historical realities and made palpable the strange and un-picturesque landscape for European eyes.   Landscape is infused with the legacy of (and in this part of the world the ongoing) dispossession of land and wholesale destruction of people and culture. 

 This review intends to highlight and support Chip Mackinolty’s acute observation back in 2011 when he articulated a phenomenon happening in Central Australia, namely “ in central Australia where non-Aboriginal artists- the vast majority of whom have worked in various forms for and with Aboriginal organisations- have stopped giving a flying paranoid toss about being whitefella artists…and are producing what I believe is amongst the best visual art in the Northern Territory”[1]

 Linda Joy is a Darwin artist and one of these white-fella artists whose landscapes attest to the legitimacy of lived experience and with her recent exhibition Stone Country at Paul Johnstone’s Gallery in Harriet Place, can now be regarded as having produced a body work in the landscape tradition which is worthy of being regarded as amongst the best visual representation of Northern Territory in the landscape tradition. Linda Joy studied photography at the Queensland College of the Arts. She moved to Darwin in the mid-1990s and continued her studies in  painting and printmaking at the Northern Territory University. Landscape overwhelmingly cries out to an artist with photographic sensitivity to and need for representation of place.  

 To non-locals, places like Kakadu, Litchfield Park conjure up tourist brochure images, the touristic memories of most visitors from the back of a tourist bus. However for some people who have made a home and a history in this place, the regularity and ease of accessibility to such places leave a rhythmical impression on memory, so that the vastness and exotic strange otherworldliness of this space becomes familiar and interesting subject matter for artistic self-expression. 

 In Linda Joy’s works, we get a sense that the artist is depicting  a place and a space that she has spent many hours in on site, camping, walking, and swimming or in plein airsketching her impressions. It is not chance that generates an overwhelming affinity for the sublime.  Her acute awareness of the phenomenon of place stems from constant observations that repeat, on loop, a silent conversation between artist and the land.  The habitual ritual of entering and exiting the land and the impressions made by such intensity is captured in her materials, forms and studio practice.

 In the same 2011 speech, Mackinolty referred to artists becoming captives of the extraordinary Australian landscape. The state of meditation has commenced even before the watercolour or inks are applied. By taking her sketches and works and reworking these back at her studio Joy relives hypnotically the spell cast on her by the land. The canvas is sanded; the gessoing makes it smooth and illuminating the whiteness and brightness of the unfiltered light. The work dictates the amount of layers of gesso and polish with some works requiring 8-10 layers. 

 Marking the canvas with the intensity of memory of this land, we feel her presence is in every rock, every tree, and every strip of pandanus.  We trace the silent vastness of the bush.  In this silent meditation we follow each line, each form.  We can hear incantations inhaling and exhaling affirmations that speak of love for rock and crevice, love for waterhole and waterfall, love for escarpment, bush, tree, grass, leaf.  Calm, clean, pure, again and again. It is evident she is seeking with such determination to justify her presence in this time.  The repetition of ink marking the canvas speaks in form of the artist’s drive between inner and outer resonance; the invisibility of her subjectivity tunes in with the invisibility of nature and through her interpretation, the landscape becomes an apology for her body and for her presence in this time. 

 Paul Johnstone has described her as a romantic in a harsh landscape. Her work certainly captures the tension between the melancholia and sacredness that a romantic, in the face of nature’s eternity, finds sublime.   However, In an uncanny fashion she overcomes the romantic tendency towards sentimentality by asserting the modernity of her time. Linda Joy paradoxically illuminates inside the most ancient of landscapes, the most modern of forms, superbly exposing the contemporary relevance of the landscape genre. By highlighting the geometric forms inside the land, serendipitously inherent in the stark blotchiness of black ink, she rescues the landscape tradition from anachronistic atrophy.   Experimenting with this approach she has developed a distinct contemporary visual language that has now added to the broader corpus of the visual representation of Northern Territory landscape. 

Full review https://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2017/08/08/linda-joy-stone-country-paul-johnstone-gallery-darwin-review-koulla-roussos/

ALICE SPRINGS ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

I had the opportunity to visit Ayres Rock with my family in October 2013 to watch the Darwin Symphony Orchestra perform in the desert at Uluru. Fabulous!! After exploring the Uluru region we traced the Kings Canyon and the Mereenie Loop back to Alice Springs. I was so inspired by this exquisite country, took photographs, did some sketches and vowed to return to the region to complete a body of work.

The following year, I was offered the inaugural 2014 Artback NT Artist in Residence in Alice Springs.  This residency enabled the development of a body of work focussed on the Red Center, complementing the Top End focus of my existing work. Alice Springs and Darwin are arguably the two contrasting and dynamic regions of the Northern Territory. The offer of a studio in a creative space, with a dedicated timeframe to pursue these inspirations, seriously excited me. An awesome experience.

These works were completed on the Artback NT residency 1 October – 6 November, 2014.  

The Exhibition 'Alice Rocks' was presented at Charles Darwin University Alice Springs NT, 6th - 21st November 2014

A selection of works from this residency was shown in melbourne 2015 ‘Desert Roads’ Glimpse Art Space, Northcote, Melbourne, Victoria.

WATER FOR OBJECT

Water for Object is a series of ink drawings on canvas and paper depicting Top End landscapes, water being the object of composition.

These linear landscapes are intricately created through the process of repetitive miniscule coils and washes, representing the land and rock that embrace and balance our fluid worlds.

Water for Object was on exhibition at Northern Centre of Contemporary Art September 2013.