“ Seed to Seed “ collaboration with Claudine Marzik
Photography : Michael Marzik
Tweed Regional Gallery , Murwillumbah NSW
2017
As part of the exhibition ‘Objects of Desire”
Curated by Shannon Garson
Artisan Gallery , Brisbane , as part of the exhibition “ Objects of Desire “
Curated by Shannon Garson . 2016
Northern Centre for Contemporary Arts . Darwin NT
. Collaboration with Claudine Marzik 2015
“ Seed to Seed “ Collaboration with Claudine Marzik .
Working intuitively, Claudine Marzik and Tijn Meulendijks allowthe inherent properties of plant materials to guide their creative process. From childhood in their respective countries of Switzerland and The Netherlands, both found solace and peace in nature, and now in their mid careers, both artists return to the natural world for release and inspiration.
Those retreats into European heaths or meadows and into Far North Queensland rainforests, dry sclerophyll bush and cultivated gardens, continue a lifelong urge that Marzik and Meulendijks share, to closely observe the germinating, growing and wilting of flora.
In Seed to Seed Meulendijks works with colour derived purely from plant and soil pigments. When crushed and dried onto paper, the Rubus alciefolius fruit (wild Blackberry) becomes the colour of a soft-hued tea, in contrast to the deep violet stains of an introduced wildflower found by the side of the road. The integrity residing in Meulendijks’ sculptural installations and in Marzik’s spare, layered paintings comes out of their time spent discerning the morphology of plants and their distilled colour, their intricate prickliness and smooth shapes, their grace and vulnerability. Ultimately, the affect of the plant world upon human emotion is inspirational.
The incursion of Rubus alcefolius in the gallery space was guided by Meulendijks’ meticulous hand work, transferring energy to each Blackberry cane bound and entwined with another. The resulting organic thicket is an animated form sprouting from the gallery’s high ceiling—hard and soft, heavy and light. Meulendijks’ other medium comprises residual traces of grass seeds germinated on paper through which he wrought massed drawings of delicacy and mystery, with shooting stalks now softly imprinted.
Grass, its knotted forms and angular stalks also spoke to Marzik. Her stripping back of multiple paint layers releases stems and pods of colour, restrained at a distance but alive at the close -up level of fine texture. These coloured striations are absolutely attuned to the vegetation tenderly observed in the Seed to Seed project. Marzik’s two-dimensional works also pick up the dialogue of Meulendijks’ tensile installation and she talks of the spontaneity shared with Meulendijks in jointly creating this, their third exhibition together, describing the collaboration as a ‘lucky ensemble’.
Gut feeling, that natural emotion, is a reaction to art made from an authentic emotional state, and is far stronger than an intellectual response. The latter automatically places a barrier between the creation and the viewer, objectifying and analysing the art. But in their collaboration, Marzik and Meulendijks’ very personal expression of the natural world seeks a shared gut feeling—a fundamental recognition of the life force around us.
This evocative exhibition speaks to nature’s elemental cycles and has a visual corollary in the first line of the eponymous Dylan Thomas poem, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The ‘feel’ embodied in Seed to Seed is European with an Australian influence but the intent is beyond place or nationality, it is universal, like Thomas’ metaphorical poem about youth, growth and death.
I hope in Seed to Seed, viewers truly perceive the unsentimental beauty of flora in its purity. I also hope viewers are able to take pause from their hectic, multitasking lives and appreciate the quietude of Seed to Seed, contemplating the world’s natural phenomena in communion with two very distinctive, accomplished Cairns-based artists.
Ingrid Hoffmann
Director
KickArts Contemporary Arts
Photography : Michael Marzik
Umbrella Studio’s Townsville , QLD
Collaboration with Claudine Marzik
The natural world has always fascinated us, challenged us and captured our imagination. We seek knowledge and pleasure as well as reassurance and revelation from our environment, often altering or even transforming it in this process. It is many of the perilous changes to our environment that have become so concerning and that are pressing us to look ever more closely and urgently at our impact upon it. This inaugural collaborative exhibition, Germinating, growing, wilting, by Far North Queensland-based artists, Claudine Marzik and Tijn Meulendijks, reflects the current interest in and concern for the environment and its future and also, importantly, considers the wonder and poetry of the natural world.
Marzik and Meulendijks, both born overseas, have established a long-term artistic relationship after seeing each other’s work and meeting in the context of an industry in which they have trained and worked. The discovery of kindred spirits and artistic similarities including their floral design training and European connections, have inspired them to work together on this exhibition and plan future collaborative projects. Working together on a prize-winning sculpture as well as an artist-in-residency at Trinity Bay State High School affirmed their ease and interest in working alongside each other. Their meeting has been a true coming together of artistic minds and aesthetic sensibilities: both respond to the other’s work with a deep knowledge of exactly the source of inspiration, the motivations and the use of materials. Both artists look to their close environment and north Queensland surroundings: the earth, rocks, landforms, plants and vegetation, including the minutiae of the landscape, the humble, the almost hidden and often overlooked. The simpatico between Marzik and Meulendijks has given a new impetus to both their individual and collaborative work. Based on this implicit trust and artistic understanding, the two artists also support each other’s independent art careers.
The work of Marzik, an established, consummate and prominent painter, suggests the influence of many factors including her Swiss background, her floral design career and living in far north Queensland. The textures, colours and patina of her minimalist yet complex paintings reflect the milieu and layers of these influences and experiences. The contemplation of her Australian environs is imbued with her European context as well as deep-felt connectedness with the natural environment of both. Within this framework, with layer upon layer of paint on canvas, she works back through the subtle tones, hues and marks to find the sensual poetry of, for instance, vegetation on a forest floor. In Germinating, growing, wilting, Marzik has reached new levels in her refined and graceful sense of spatial relationships created by lines and slashes, fine and broad, revealing and concealing colours, which give structure and unity to what might appear, at first, random and spontaneous. The experience of viewing her work is immediately a sensory one: we are drawn into the canvas as we discover the flash of orange-red in a field of pale creamy yellow or a surprising dark line that whips at a diagonal angle across the surface. We feel enlivened by this view of the natural world. The works are suggestive, evocative and energetic. Marzik coalesces the harmonies, discords, traces and spirit of the landscape. Paradoxes emerge and, so too, tensions arise and disappear again. For instance, the black marks of oil crayon and thick acrylic paint, sanded back, criss-crosses the canvas in a structured yet, at the same time, apparently random manner, controlled yet expressive, strong yet fragile, and substantial yet delicate. Thoughts and questions are posed: Is that a horizon? Are these fallen twigs crackling underfoot? Is this the pink blush of the sunset reflecting on the rocks? When did fire come across this land?
In much the same way, such questions arise in Meulendijks’ work. Indeed, his thoughts are in the materials he uses: he thinks with his natural materials finding both the media and concept of his works within the material. Meulendijks, an installation artist, began his career in his birth place, The Netherlands. Combining Masters training in floral design and a lifelong interest in botany, his work crosses countries and also, significantly, the boundaries of contemporary art and natural sciences. This symbiosis of the close analytical observation of a botanist and the sensitive aesthetic perceptiveness of an artist creates works of particular subtlety and elegance. The realisation of such work is achieved with the artist’s high level of dexterity and ability in constructing natural materials into new forms while at the same time preserving the integrity of the original material. We see and feel the presence of nature and the natural world in his work. The veracity of the material is always manifest and uncompromised. Standing before Meulendijks’ works is akin to the awe, curiosity and, indeed, aesthetic pleasure that we might experience within a natural environment – the rainforest, the sclerophyll bush, the river bank or the ocean shore. We too are discovering the world of nature with the artist and encountering the fragile but durable structures, shapes, textures, colours and even aromas.
Meulendijks and Marzik are on an exploratory journey into the natural world. They find nature as it is. They present an experience of the natural world and a contemplation of nature. Underlying this reflection is a deep knowledge of plants and an understanding of the phases of germination, growth and dying but so too the impermanence and, conversely, the resilience of nature. Marzik and Meulendijks burrow beneath the surface appearance of the natural world bringing to light internal and inherent qualities. The artists are sensitive to the innate structures and forms of nature but also to its chaotic and haphazard qualities. Significantly, they are acute to the poetry and aesthetics of nature: their work is like being in and of nature. The essence of nature is conveyed without frills or frippery.
The artists’ uncertainties about being on the right path in their collaborative ventures can surely be dispelled. While, indeed, there is a rightness and pertinent cohesiveness between their bodies of work, there are differences which establish creative tension and dynamics between the works and which play off each other. Apart from the evident dissimilarities of material and support – the paint and canvas of Marzik and the natural material of Meulendijks – we can distinguish the passionate collector/observer/artist alongside the accomplished colourist/abstractionist/artist. Importantly, however, the illuminating and sensory perspective of Marzik and Meulendijks enable us to see and cherish our natural world anew.
Barbara Dover
2010
Photography : Michael Marzik
Tijn Meulendijks
Untitled
Installation using Calamus mottii (wait-a-while) and earth on Board.
Niche Gallery, Cairns Regional Gallery
6 April – 20 May, 2007
Calamus mottii (wait-a-while) winds and weaves its spiky vines through the dense tropical rainforests of North Queensland. The barbs of this robust vine trip up and hook the clothing of bushwalkers, interrupting their determination to reach a destination. We humans are forced to pause, to slow down and take our time through the undergrowth and wait-a-while. Where sunlight reaches through into patches of forest, cleared by natural events or human activity, wait-a-while dominates its habitat. This is most visible where extensive tracts of forest are felled to make way for electricity supply poles. Along these paths, as with the forest clearings, wait-a-while claims the land and in doing so is seen by humans as a menace.
From an anthropocentric view, the natural world is perceived and understood through the role attributed to it by humans. Any experience of nature is mediated by the languages we have available to us. From this limited view, nature is given meaning according to the use human’s make of it: recreation zone, home surrounding, pest (as in the case of wait-a-wile) tourism product, resource, or just pleasurable experience. Invested with human attention and intention in this way, positions nature as something of a human artifact.
“The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation.
Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed.
Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.”
When measured by its utilitarian qualities the ‘being’ of nature or immanence, to borrow a philosophical terms, is left outside the field of knowing or experiencing. Observing human’s failure to connect with ‘nature as it is’, provides the impetus for Tijn Meulendijk to bring to our attention its phenomenological qualities. In this latest installation, the artist works in tandem with the materiality of wait-a-while, investigating its qualities and allowing the material itself to guide and inform the way in which it is placed and the final form it will take. The artwork becomes an embodiment of the nature of the material. In the case of wait-a-while, its strong energy and thorny, aggressive behavior form the plant’s inherent nature. The artist has no illusion about the material and no desire to change it or invest it with meaning. Rather, in working with the material, a new order is created and in this sense the artist curates the material, enabling artistic meaning to be found. This is poiesis - the process of working with a material or a thing to bring it into being. The artist’s intentionality and the palpable nature of the material come together to make the artwork tangible. The third element is the viewer whose participation brings the artwork into actuality.
Nature’s power is in its capacity for transformation through the direct physical influences of human activities or natural events. Wait-a-while is an embodiment of this power and the blackberry plant in Europe shares its resilience and dominating qualities. This installation then forms a connection for Meulendijk with his hometown of Geldrop , in the Netherlands where the blackberry thrives and where he produced a sister installation formed by the nature of the blackberry plant. Whether picturesque landscape of a field of virulent weeds, for Meulendijks, nature is all we have.
Susan Reid
Curator Cairns Regional Gallery 2007
Photography : Michael Marzik
“Untitled” 2007
Centre for Contemporary Art . Cairns QLD
Part of the exhibition ,Earthy ; Nature and Essence in the works of Tijn Meulendijks , Yoshi Mizuno and Cara Stevens .
Photography ; Michael Marzik
