This
new series of work is an outcome of a residency on Flinders Island last winter.
Flinders being part of the Furneaux group, a collection of islands which
sporadically bridge Tasmania across the Bass Strait to the mainland. My process
of exploration of islands is quite specific to the shoreline; Tasmania’s edges
in particular offer a collecting ground of potential. Objects that I am
attracted to through their textures and inherit meaning, their secret
narratives potential agency when they enter my studio.
Fragments of Flinders opens 23 May, 2014 at 146 Artspace, Arts Tasmania 146 Elizabeth Street, Hobart.
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| Marisa Molin, Fragments of Flinders #limpets (2014) bronze, resin. Photo credit: Mel De Ruyter |
Marisa’s Flinders Island residency
has been the catalyst for her making a key shift from the species level to that
of the site specific with the fragments, or species, becoming contextualized by
their geographic locale.
Being an island child, I remember
the satisfying moment when it became known to me that islands are in fact
inundated mountains. If the sea drained away, these islands would remain and we
would climb them seeking horizon lines. How pleasing the logic that these apparently
marooned objects or spaces are in fact mirages of fragmentation, interconnected
by submerged geographies. Thus, our forays along beaches are times spent on the
finest skree slopes edged by clouds, sea, water, or surf.
It is often upon these finest skree
slopes that Marisa’s practice as a landscape artist is worked. A locale that I
think is no accident given her maternal lineage to the island of Corfu where
the colour of the sea is an anchor, and a familial house is dissolving back
into the island: a back room still spinning on a child’s grace.
Core to Marisa’s work is the
meditative practice of combing beaches. A practice of surrendering to the
gleaning: you find what you find (fragments), you accept your gifts and you
make do. They are guides. Determinants. Encouraging of evolution. The precision
of the comb is incongruous. In neat twists in semantics, Marisa takes these
fragments, edges of the edge, and transfers them into pliable imprints, and
reforms them into new wholes, or, new fragments.
At which there is the consideration
that fragment implies that at one
point there was a whole (a whole continent, an entire land mass, earth plate)
and I wonder at the secret ratio between ‘entirety’ and ‘fragment’: the tipping
point between a chipped whole, a shattered teacup, a main-land, the unraveling of lace-coral.
-Words by Gillian Marsden
