Joshua Yeldham: Hawkesbury River Series

Invited on-board his ‘spirit vessel’ to travel with him upriver, Joshua Yeldham takes us on an intimate journey along the Hawkesbury, into his inner world of prayers and secret offerings. As much a passage through time as in consciousness, this work draws its energy from the fresh and vital connectivity of water. The stark seclusion of his distant desert series is replaced by the thriving kinship of his local river. With bird-guides in tow, we are passengers and spectators privy to a kind of sacred theatre, set within the watery domain of an attentive, poetic adventurer. In search of blessings and hidden powers, this river has become his personal source of ancient knowledge and a living connection to the natural world. Yeldham’s work is animated, almost shamanistic in its intentions, promising to cure dislocation and find hope in a tangible sense of place. His visual ‘cycle play’ engages eternal themes of life/death, change/constancy, and darkness/light, which are accessed through a process of private contemplation. Referencing fertility rites and devotional ceremonies inspired by Eastern mystical traditions, this artist articulates an ongoing metaphoric dialogue with the forces of nature. Here we experience art as a cleansing process, in a poignant form of visual eloquence to which we can all relate.

From ground level, flying overhead, even underwater to catch a glimpse of nature’s churning wheels, we see a palimpsest of imagery reflecting the spirit of this spectacular coastal country and its shadowy prima materia; where a generous river runs and snakes, gum trees flex their sinuous limbs, and optimistic mangroves send out sentinel roots into the light. Yeldham imagines plant shoots as lovers cradling, oyster plots as welcoming uterine beds, and birds as spirit guides. We see amoebas, seedlings, placentas, embryos in their amniotic oases, water nymphs; a myriad of forms flourishing in these individual experiments in renewal and growth. Narration of these images, and his active efforts to cultivate their inter-connective meanings, ensures this ‘waterman’ is harvesting as directly as the oyster farmers themselves. His figures overlap; shapes unfold, fragment, and intersect in continuous succession. The result is a series of beautifully rhythmic, idealized lines stitched onto interchangeable colour planes; deep Prussian blue for the lower river, burnt umber for the murky upper regions. All of which seems to defy the elusiveness of time and insist on the fleeting miracle of synchronicity.

Instead of winged omens of death, as lamented in the 1928 ‘Death Bird’ of Colo River legend, Yeldham’s birds foretell the mysterious cycles of life and rebirth. As navigational beacons, their stares portend not doom, but nature’s inexorable wisdom and the artist channels their secrets into his river tales. Metaphorically, they keep harm at bay and provide safe and successful river passage. Synonymous in Greek mythology with Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, an owl was often seen perched on her shoulder or flying alongside. The symbolic charge of Yeldham’s owl companion, an old, authoritative protagonist in life’s drama, with penetrating, apotropaic eyes, seems to challenge the insecurities battering our own minds. As a totemic and clairvoyant ‘underworld messenger’, its incomparable sight, beyond illusion, alerts us to threat and encroachment. 

The river’s environmental truths and sorrows, even its violence, are distilled in a spontaneous series of recordings; elaborate calligraphic notes of the artist’s experiential memory. His paintings are studies in meditation from the porthole of awareness, opening onto a panorama of inner culture. As splendid topographic illustrations, they are quite literally stories that delight the weary mind and refresh the spirit; each arising from the metabolized, communicative energy of an artist as translator, capturing thought in one medium to free its potential in another. This continuum of line work is applied like tapestry, paralleling the depth of field found in nature’s details. His hieroglyphic, abstracted figures can be drawn out and decoded as fervently as the viewer’s own imagination. And whilst the artist may be aware of their significance, the processing is left to us.

Yeldham is part of a great tradition of artists and explorers lured by the raw power of seas, rivers, mountains, deserts, and canyons. More than a passionate witness, he is entirely immersed in the landscape, receptive and interactive. From within the belly of this river, he loses all sense of time and its waterholes of living art provide the necessary refuge and grounding. In the artist’s words:

"I camp out on the river for days, carving, sitting, meditating in the stillness. Working with a simple drill and a limited palate of colours, characters emerge from the shimmering water. Mark making links me to time, sorrow and joy; it strips me down to what I have inside. Colouring, spiralling, filling that space, I finally grasp its meaning…and there is a fearless element to it, a love of the death and detachment that drives me to work an image into something else.” [1]

Landscape here becomes the very medium for expression and its truest goals are realized introspectively; making contact with a transcendental self from which both artist and viewer may regain a sense of sacredness despite the surrounding secularized world. The structured discipline of this process is emphasized, as he nostalgically recalls his childhood reveries.

We may differentiate Yeldham’s narrative practice, with its symbolic intensity and definitive statements, from his poetic method, with its figurative ‘middle ground’ and intuitive insights. He is simultaneously focused on microcosmic details, such as the leaf venation of the lilies at ‘House Boat Bay’, and a macro-cosmic perspective like the geography at ‘Portland Reach’. Created from memory, there is a shifting of foreground and background defining his vision of the oneness and reciprocity of reality. This kind of relatedness is found in literature, where immeasurable dimensions are held together by a series of minute poetic connections. His templates from nature’s book of knowledge are etched on clay boards, like transcripts of fading memories, with pictorial phrases that run into each other in a free flowing exercise. And there is some need to specify these thoughts from an internal monologue, which would otherwise remain unconscious and subject to a nameless, camouflaged symbolism. 

While his visual style, in its fluidity and concerns, is associative to Williams, Whiteley, Olsen, Aboriginal dot paintings and ancient calligraphy, his textile-anatomy of expression, essentially an unfolding of oneself, is all his own. His sculptures and jigsaw panel carvings, depicting mud crabs, water currents, rock surfaces, animals, even energy lines, are achieved using basic materials, sticks, wire, plaster and paint, and are as much his visual poetry as a commentary on the fragility and tenacity of life itself. The carved tree trunks in his ‘studio forest’ continue their indigenous story in the hands of this artist and emerge as the ultimate feminine archetypes in an eternal symmetry of sensuality.

Heraclitus's pioneering affirmation that the harmonious structure of the world depends precisely on its internal tensions and contradictions, such that ‘one can never step into the same river twice’, is particularly pertinent to an artist who makes a daily prayer of his art. Ultimately, Yeldham is concerned with chronicling that freedom from time and space that makes way for a new birth of self, where obstacles, limitations, and fears begin to die in the fabric that wends its way through the stories of our lives.

Tracing emotional landscapes with any precision requires a particular sensitivity to the joys and struggles of the human condition. To see them mirrored in the very environment which surrounds us is to enjoy a rare and heightened communion with one and the other. Yeldham's art contains the kind of narrative that invites reflection and provides the very pretext for the stillness required to achieve it. Profound and intense personal experiences engender the development of a spiritual context to his painting, enlivened by a virtual documentary of personal prayers, as much as by an empathetic eye for colour, texture and form; always with deliberate, meditational devotion.

Les Murray’s Australian poem ‘The Meaning of Existence’ echoes a similar sentiment in its acute self-awareness:

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.[2]

Instead of anchors on which to secure our preconceptions, Yeldham casts lines of musing, which tow us along a journey of quiet self-interrogation. Perhaps an artist’s most authentic efforts consist in his or her constant openness, equally arduous and inspiring, and a willingness to put their own equilibrium and convictions on the line each time. Since perspectives change, as surely as reflections on a river, a good artist's relentless search seems metaphorically suspended between magnanimous daring and ineluctable providence.

What is truly exciting for me about this extraordinarily accomplished Australian artist is that I have the distinct feeling his talent and interpretive powers have only just begun to surface.

? Rosa Maria Falvo

Motherland Exhibition, Melbourne & Sydney (2008)
catalogue essay by Rosa Maria Falvo

[1] Conversations with the artist, June 2007
[2] ‘Collected Poems’, Heinemann, Melbourne, Australia 1994