Audrey Tulimiero Welch
Songlines
May 7 - June 25, 2022
Nancy Toomey Fine Art, San Francisco
Meet the artist Reception Saturday, June 4, 2022 from 4-6pm
“Through her conjuring Welch transforms the particulars of place into achingly lyrical odes to that place’s spirit, . . . as Aboriginal Australians with their Songlines have for millennia melded music, navigation, and cosmology, singing the very world into being. These maps are not literal but mnemonic; they share with the late Joan Mitchell’s paintings a mission to reconstruct memories, places, people, experiences, and the intangibles that give them meaning.”
In the studio Audrey is working on “Cosmic Dance” and reveals on stage of her layered process
Artist Statement
For five years, from 2011-2016, I had the opportunity to live with my family in Western Australia. It was during that time that I first learned about the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to the Aboriginals as ‘Songlines’. During a ‘Walkabout’ the name of every plant, rock, and waterhole was sung out. Therefore, a Songline implies great awareness and respect to one’s place and to the present moment; but even more interesting to me and relevant to my art practice, is the implication that ‘a Songline’ was both map and way-finder. For the Aboriginal, land is not hemmed in by frontiers but rather is conceived as ‘an interlocking network of lines or way through; all their words for “country” are the same as their words for “line”. (B.Chatwin).
As my understanding of Songlines grew it affirmed and enriched my instinctual use of line as way-finder in my own work. For over a decade, I have filled canvases with lines, maps, and marks in the assertion of place. The new paintings in my exhibition, Songlines, at Nancy Toomey Fine Art continue exploring my long-standing visual curiosity around diagrams and structures found in multiple sources including: maps, the branch systems of trees, street signage and nautical flags. Yet, what is new, is my attempt to push through the certainty of the diagram, the mapped lines and move into more uncharted and improvisational waters. Also, given these challenging times I have made an intentional choice to work with a palette and methods that speak to a certain lightness and buoyancy as a counterbalance to the weight and heaviness we are currently living with.
For me, the best work arises when I can step aside and allow the unexpected guest to arrive at my door. That is one reason why I am attracted to abstraction. As a painter of abstraction, I embrace this duality: seeking certainty and clarity; yet simultaneously welcoming improvisation. And related to improvisation is the concept of song. By singing the world into existence the Aboriginal Australians are poets, a walkabout was a type of ritual journey. In Songlines, I respond to and explore these rich themes with paint, line, and colour.
-Audrey Tulimiero Welch, April 2022
Nancy Toomey Fine Art