NATURAL ABUNDANCE: Lyndal Osborne’s lyrical vision
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Photo: Mark Freeman
Lyndal Osborne in her studio
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Photo: John Freeman
"Endless Forms Most Beautiful"
Lyndal Osborne, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful," 2006, mixed media installation, 7’ x 25‘ x 15’.
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Photo: John Freeman
"Endless Forms Most Beautiful (detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful (detail)," 2006, mixed media installation, 7’ x 25‘ x 15’.
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Photo: Mark Freeman
"H2Oil (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba, detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "H2Oil (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba, detail)," 2011-2012, mixed media installation, 4’ x 12’ x 3’.
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Photo: Mark Freeman
"H2Oil (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba, detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "H2Oil (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba, detail)," 2011-2012, mixed media installation, 4’ x 12’ x 3’.
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Photo: M. N. Hutchinson
"Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)," 2010, mixed media installation, 10’ x 9’ x 4’.
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Photo: Michel Dubreuil
"Counterpoint (in collaboration with John Freeman)"
Lyndal Osborne, "Counterpoint (in collaboration with John Freeman)," 2009, mixed media outdoor installation, 12’ x 26’ x 30‘.
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Photo: M. N. Hutchinson
"Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)," 2010, mixed media installation, 10’ x 9’ x 4’.
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Photo: M. N. Hutchinson
"Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)"
Lyndal Osborne, "Darwin and the Arc of Time: Barnacles to Volcanoes (detail)," 2010, mixed media installation, 10’ x 9’ x 4’.
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Photo: Mark Freeman
"The Space Between Cities (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba)"
Lyndal Osborne, "The Space Between Cities (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba)," 2011, mixed media installation, 8’ x 30’ x 20’.
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Photo: Mark Freeman
"The Space Between Cities (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba)"
Lyndal Osborne, "The Space Between Cities (in collaboration with Sherri Chaba)," 2011, mixed media installation, 8’ x 30’ x 20’.
NATURAL ABUNDANCE
Lyndal Osborne’s lyrical vision
By Portia Priegert
Lyndal Osborne lifts the top off a cardboard box, revealing a thick bundle of moss. She wiggles another carton forward and gaps the lid to show pale half-mooned rinds. “Every grapefruit I ever ate, I kept,” she says. “A lot have gone into artwork.”
Boxes are stacked like downtown condos, covering one long wall of her basement. Even among the sizeable subset of artists who collect, Osborne is remarkable. She has sponges, wasps’ nests, lobster shells, emu eggs, coconut stalks, cow parsnips, eucalyptus nuts and much, much more. And not just one or two of each item, but dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands. Suspended from the ceiling in see-through plastic bags are sunflower heads from her garden. The stalks, bundled separately, are piled against a far wall. Closer to hand, three large garbage bags of kelp from a recent artist’s residency in Newfoundland wait to go up to her studio.
Deep in one stack is a box labelled “Xmas Stuff.” At first glance, it seems out of place. But maybe not – after all, each of these cartons holds a gift from nature, things odd or beautiful that have caught Osborne’s eye on long walks near her Edmonton home or during trips to Australia, where she lived as a child. This subterranean trove might well hold a dismembered holiday tree – or perhaps even the makings of some fantastical forest.
Osborne’s collectables are really best understood as metaphors in-waiting, with each object’s latent capacity to become part of some larger whole – a garden, say, or perhaps a tidal pool – bequeathing an aura of mystery, majesty and magic. In her hands, something as mundane as the tangled roots of dill and corn, dyed and replanted upside down, can evoke a primeval grove. Seven thousand jars, their rounded mouths rippled with light, become a river. Papier-mache bowls that hold everything from kelp balls and sea urchins to cottonwood fluff and dogwood berries coalesce as dappled islands.
It’s the prospect of seeing Osborne’s collection that has drawn me to her studio, my curiosity fuelled years ago by To the Surface Surveyed, which, at its most literal level, is a mound of dried banana peels, accumulated one by one over the years. Faced with such abundance, I feel compelled to ask if she ever feels overwhelmed. “No,” she says, flatly, as if such a possibility has never occurred to her. For if Osborne has the gene for collecting, she also, fortuitously, has one for organizing, perhaps courtesy of her engineer father. She thinks about storage issues from the moment she first plucks or uproots something, deciding how it will fit into a standard file-sized box, and, if necessary, spends hours on her deck with a gin and tonic, pruning it down to size.
That attention to detail also extends to her finished work. At the end of an exhibition, components are placed in labelled boxes, wrapped in plastic and stacked on pallets that are placed in a storage building on the five-acre property where she has lived for the last two decades. Osborne and her husband, John Freeman, also an artist, joke about Ikea warehouses when they show it to visitors.
Early in her career, Osborne, 71, was a printmaker known for layered and labour-intensive lithographs that featured objects from nature. Sometimes she presented one item over and over, indulging her visual pleasure in the slight variations that occur both in nature and in the printmaking process. At other times, her prints were inspired by small maquettes that she made by binding or wrapping organic materials. She has made such objects since she was young, influenced by indigenous art in Australia’s museums as well as her own explorations along the coast of New South Wales, where she roamed freely with her two sisters. Even then, she would bring home kelp and bamboo to create installations in her bedroom that her mother, an artist, would show to visitors.
It was a curator, Roger Boulet, who, in 1990, suggested that Osborne include actual objects with the prints she was showing at what was then the Edmonton Art Gallery. For that exhibition, Songs of the Stone, she also constructed a few larger objects. They drew attention from other curators and more shows followed. By 1996, she had largely abandoned printmaking to immerse herself in a new three-dimensional language that spread off the wall and onto gallery floors.
Long a close observer of the transformations that occur in nature, whether seasonal ebbs and flows or the littoral zones between land and water, Osborne’s early installations were inflected with memories and personal meaning. For instance, Point of Departure juxtaposes local birds’ nests with shells that evoke the seashores of her youth. Similarly, Shoalwan: River Through Fire, River of Ice, a 2003 work she is reconfiguring this summer in Winnipeg, reflects two rivers, the North Saskatchewan and Australia’s Shoalhaven, where she collected material singed by brush fires.
Repetition has remained a constant element in Osborne’s work. As Saskatchewan artist and curator David Garneau wrote in one of her exhibition catalogues: “She strives not for ideal forms, but for the view that encourages us to look over her shoulder: The one that brings the struggle to find patterns in the chaos, universals through particulars.” Certainly, Osborne’s work invites viewers to spend time, to meander, to observe – for nothing is ever entirely quite what it seems. Indeed, it is this capacity for metaphorical expression – and here, consider the insight of Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky – “what the human mind must do in order to comprehend a metaphor is a version of what it must do in order to be wise” – that lends her work much of its power. Aesthetic and ethical, lyrical and ecological, her installations encourage new synapses between thought and sensory perception.
In recent years, responding to changes around her home on Edmonton’s southern fringes, Osborne has become deeply concerned about environmental issues. “The first thing I noticed was that the crops around me were all genetically modified,” she says. “That became something I wanted to research because I’m a bit of a foodie and I’m interested in what I eat and making sure that it’s healthy.”
Her explorations led her to create one of her favourite pieces, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, a 2006 installation composed of nine giant seeds supposedly undergoing genetic modification in a laboratory. To build the seeds she combined the technical – coloured pipettes and ceramic capacitors – with the natural, whether lemons, cornflowers and chicken bones or poppy heads, tea bags and wolf-willow seeds. Some of her transgenic structures are seductive in their beauty, while others are grotesque, reflecting public debates about the promises and threats of biotechnology.
From her home above the North Saskatchewan, Osborne has been watching as developers buy up farms for gated communities jam-packed with cookie-cutter houses. “This beautiful farmland out here is being converted to urban land,” she says. “Topsoil is all scraped off and they’re building houses on this rich, rich soil.” She does what she can, lobbying developers to plant trees and create walking trails, but has few illusions about turning the tide.
Those concerns prompted her to collaborate last year on Witness, an exhibition that considered pollution, urban sprawl and land use issues. She worked with Sherri Chaba, an artist whose material comes from memorabilia on her family’s farm near Redwater, northeast of Edmonton. One collaborative piece, The Space Between Cities, features old agricultural implements and myriad other objects in a steel-mesh cage. “It’s sort of like a trapper’s cabin,” says Osborne. “But it’s also about the abandonment of rural land, the way people are moving away. Schools are closing. Stores are closing. Rural communities are very lonely.” In H2Oil, another collaborative work, the artists placed old keys, tool handles and shards of blue glass on tables built to mimic the odd shapes of toxic tailing ponds in the oil sands. “Farmlands are being ruined by things that are happening on the land, things that pollute the water, destroy the streams, take out hundreds and hundreds of trees,” says Osborne. “And oil is seeping on the land.”
The exhibition had an air of protest, albeit modest compared to the scope of the issues it critiqued. Some, no doubt, would dismiss it as futile tree-hugging. But Steven Harris, an art historian at the University of Alberta, notes in his essay for the exhibition catalogue that the processes of accumulation and integration needed to create such installations are useful. “If art cannot change the world,” he says, “it can offer another way of thinking that is necessary in order to be able to change the world.”
Osborne earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1971 after completing undergraduate studies in Australia. She was hired that same year at the University of Alberta, where she taught for more than 30 years. Now a professor emeritus, she remains vital and engaged. If her walks are less frequent, it’s because a busy exhibition schedule – 14 shows in the last two years – leaves little time for leisurely rambles.
Over the last few months, Osborne has been working toward a yearlong children’s exhibition, Cabinet of Curiosities, for the Art Gallery of Alberta. Riffing on science fiction tropes, she works intuitively, spreading bits and pieces from her collection – along with finds from second-hand shops – on her studio floor. “I want to make it a bit scary,” she confides. To this end, she has set out chunky cow bones dyed various hues of green, perhaps for a waterless aquarium. A black spider strolls nearby, a large eyeball attached to its back. She holds out a jar filled with translucent slivers of soap, their rainbow hues a fiendish temptation for tiny tongues. Osborne’s ideas are in flux, but she is by no means dismissive of her diminutive audience. Rather, she seems acutely aware of children’s capacity for wonder, their pleasure in the magnetic spectrum of attraction and repulsion, and, above all, their need for tactility.
Art is an occupation driven by the internal motivations of its practitioners. Osborne is no exception: She seems to both occupy her work and to be occupied by it. It’s too glib to say she has found her voice; the reality is more fundamental, more visceral, more symbiotic. Perhaps, the best analogy is the lichen, in which fungus and alga have fused into a new organism, inextricably linked one to the other and to the place they inhabit. Some people might object to such a comparison, but I doubt Osborne is one of them. She – and her art – seem anchored to the deep, throbbing pulse of the land. And those who can connect with its beat, wending with her through copse and cove, may never see the world quite the same way again.
Lyndal Osborne’s solo exhibitions are Rivers, at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, in Winnipeg, from July 12 to August 23, and Cabinet of Curiosities, which opens June 30 at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. She is also part of Size Matters: Big Prints from Around the World at the University of Alberta Museums at the Enterprise Square Galleries to June 29.
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