David Noonan: Only when it’s cloudless

“. . . works with an enigmatic, moon-lit magic of reinvention.”

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Dr Joseph Brennan speaks with David Noonan about Only when it’s cloudless – collage works of beguiling complexity.

“It’s the title of the central sculptural installation in the exhibition,” David Noonan tells me about Only when it’s cloudless. “And then it’s been applied to the show as a whole.”

When asked about the artistic relevance of this phrase – attributed to observations of a fourteenth century Japanese monk, Yoshida Kenkō – Noonan says it’s “evocative of the idea of a full moon. And in the central installation, the moon motif appears a number of times.” Noonan goes on: “Also, the way in which the figurative elements within that piece are lit, it sort of appears as though they’re lit under moonlight.”

The exhibition features predominantly new works together with loans. In it, the central sculptural installation appears alongside works that include two major tapestries, several new collages on linen and the 2021 16mm film Mnemosyne – the artist’s first since 2001 (with a score by Warren Ellis) – with all works “specifically chosen to fit into a particular palette.”

“Some of the works I’ve made in the past using more natural linens and sepia linens,” Noonan explains, “they’re these more natural tones. None of those pieces are in this show.” Instead, “there’s a very strong aesthetic that’s looking at greyscale or monochromatic imagery, and that’s in the tapestries and also the silkscreen works. And then the film itself has this extreme colour in it, this yellow that appears. It’s a black and white film, but it has intense colour sections.”

All works, in other words, are “tightly chosen”, where “everything’s connected and everything’s related: it’s an installation-as-a-whole show.” This exhibition, conceived as a single installation, was achieved in collaboration with TarraWarra Museum of Art Director Victoria Lynn, who serves as curator here.

Though tight in curation, there’s also a dazzling variety of materials used that “shows all the different trajectories” of Noonan’s practice. “There’s the tapestries, the silkscreen collages, actual collages, paper collages and there’s a whole corridor of all these small works . . .  [that] often show some of the processes that go into the larger works.”

When I suggest that there’s a continuity across disparate aspects of the artist’s practice here, Noonan says: “That’s a really good word; I keep thinking about it being really tight . . . even though there’s these disparate material elements to it, they’re harmonised in a way. There might be raw linen or dyed linen, tapestry, the aluminium – but the aluminium has the linen on top, so the linen relates to all the other linen works. And even the collages are all mounted on linen . . . and even the film is shot against this particular type of linen that I use.”

“The show’s really a lot about materials,” Noonan says. “How materials behave and how they relate to one another.” Together with the exhibition’s namesake, Noonan singles out Mnemosyne as particularly significant: “The film forms a backdrop to it all . . . by watching the film, you get a much better understanding of my process and the way I think about images.”

In a pinch, “underpinning it all is collage,” but looking also plays its part. Mnemosyne, for example, includes some imagery the artist has been carrying around for more than twenty years. So “it was this idea of looking back over this twenty or so years of collecting and how I use collage materials.”

Looking, and time, and the idea of time-temporality, are all central, and make sense given the artist’s reputation for haunting juxtaposition of figures from theatrical traditions. Certainly, these are all key Noonan threads – that many will associate with the artist – and were front of mind for me speaking with the artist for a second time (as I, too, looked back – to 2020 and our conversation about Stagecraft).

The chance to be in conversation again stirred curiosity on my part: of the role of the viewer; of changing perspectives on found imagery; and of how Noonan’s practice may have evolved with the – if any – weight of the present historical moment on a practice that draws together artefacts across time.

“They become these things where you can project onto them,” Noonan says about the figures and the imagery, framed by a desire to keep the show’s works open. In doing so, returning to Mnemosyne, Noonan believes that viewers might make their own connections with current and recurrent anxieties, be it COVID or climate or Ukraine; I certainly read displacement in the faces and assemblages of the film’s figures.

Here, connections come without any prescribed or preferred artist reading. A resistance to artwork-decoding that, to my eye, kicks off any anchorage to a particular time or place – a true strength of collage as the “art of juxtaposition” that, in this artist’s vision, leads to works with an enigmatic, moon-lit magic of reinvention. And Noonan seems to support my stance: “I’m much more drawn to things that are beguiling and confusing and perhaps evocative.”

 

Dr Joseph Brennan is an art critic, author and cultural scholar based in Far North Queensland.

 

TarraWarra Museum of Art
Until 10 July 2022
Melbourne