Jennifer Tyers
Exhibitions
Silent Forest - 2008
Jennifer Tyers Silent Forest January 31 - February 28, 2008 Essay by Dr David Hansen, Writer and Curator Forests loom large and dark in the stories of western culture, from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to the literary epics of Narnia and Middle Earth to the screenplays of Miller's Crossing and The Blair Witch Project. They are generally frightening places. In the forest Little Red Riding Hood finds the wolf in bed at grandma's; Hansel and Gretel find the gingerbread house with its cannibal witch. Forests are the abode of thieves and outlaws, trolls and wodehouses, bears and wolves. They are sites of abandonment and hunger, darkness and mystery"¦ Jennifer Tyers is a remarkable draughtsman. Born in northern Tasmania and trained in printmaking at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, she now lives and works in Melbourne. She is the author of two picture books: When it is Night, When it is Day (with text by Minami Aoyama), Penguin, 1995, and Bear Hour, Blabbermouth, 2006. A third, Cicada Daughter, 1998, reached dummy stage before being finally rejected by the publisher as 'too weird':) She has also made a number of exquisite limited edition books of coloured etchings. In all Tyers's graphic work there is something oddly photographic, even filmic, in her structures of close-ups and cut-offs, of spotlights, silhouettes and shadows. There are, too, implicit cinematic narratives in her compositions: sometimes bizarre, sometimes picaresque, some times quietly domestic. Yet the story line is never fully explicable or even retrievable. Linear, logical progress hiccups, stalls, jerks and twists into engaging non sequiturs. In her most recent work, an extended sequence of large-scale watercolours, Tyers has left the storybook and entered the forest. In these snow-cold, snow-silent sub-arctic woods, we encounter not only bears and wolves but also cowboys, gangsters and masked Mexican wrestlers; figures in Indian animal masks and others swinging sticks at a piata; a three-metre hare, a giantess and a girl with a tree-trunk leg. Nevertheless, these pungent incongruities, these allusive and elusive images are still only part of the story. Much more than whimsical illustration, or fashionable twig drawing, they are polished works of art articulated through a rich graphic vocabulary. Tyers possesses a mature personal style, a dialect of deft outlines, of hypnotic parallels and concentricities, of drawn and implied edges, of subtle tonal overlays. With their limited chromatic range - Tyers is an exciting natural colourist, but here disciplines herself to a black-white-blue-grey palette - and strong linearity, the forest drawings have the flavour of woodcuts, particularly those of the German Expressionists of the 1920s. In some, sweetly curving trees dance and sway in long brushstrokes with a fluid sensuality. In others, the rough bark of pines is expressed in vertical patterns: flows of water, blood or eels; flesh of scars, wrinkles or fingerprints. Tyers's forest may be dark, her stories noir, but the shadows are made wonderful, magical, by the artist's lightness of touch, the lightness of snow falling.
F I G H T - 2009
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