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== LONE GUINEA FOWL = = KickArts Gallery - May-June 2006
A prolific exhibiton of 2d and 3d work, encompassing paintings, wall assemblage, sculpture, installation and performance.
"I tried to explore idea's about the human. In its social, emotional and physical environments - including my story. As a means to expose, educate, examine - to find and search for answers and other possibilities to dialogue with you, the viewer or myself, the artist and person."
"This experience has been an accumulation of idea's, thoughts, attitudes and experiences, from my life and the life of others. I believe "Lone Guinea Fowl' speaks of an identity - survival - we people and all the existing life forms and environments take on the need to identify the needs from the wants, the need to continue, the need to learn to let go and live, to make mistakes and make corrections, to cope with change, to modify one's perception of self and the surroundings of the surround."
Review by Jill Chism (published by Arts Nexus) - www.artsnexus.com.au
KickArts Gallery - May-June 2006
The Lone Guinea Fowl struts through its dwindling environment in a park in Kuranda North of Cairns. Seemingly unperturbed by its solitary existence and committed to its singular plight, it nonetheless offers a poignant and powerful reminder of a diminishing presence. Saunders who embodies the Lone Guinea fowl in his singular commitment to a spiritual path and messages of hope for indigenous Australians conveys a modern-day survival story in his current exhibition of multiple art forms at Kick Arts.
Refreshingly removed from the need to contextualise the work as installation, Saunders employs multiple art forms and is able, like Robert Rauchenberg, to move freely between assemblage, sculpture and painting.
In this exhibition Saunders reveals a developing personal strength by exposure of his vulnerable shadow self and honest exploration of insights and attitudes to such things as colonialism, racism, family, friendship, abuse and misuse of personal power.
The paintings are the most hard-hitting. Leaving nothing unsaid, his wish is that honest self-exposure will ultimately be ‘a lesson’ as he is convinced that we can only transform when we see the depths of our depravity.
Saunders appears oblivious to the references his paintings make to such luminaries as Gordon Bennett, however the same determination and intensity are present. The difference with Saunders is that he is blatantly self-referential and disinterested or unfamiliar with appropriation as a conceptual tool.
Honesty for Saunders is a catharsis. By being self-exposing it is his wish that he might expunge the guilt he feels in relationship to his less admirable behaviour. That by doing so he might create connections with all of us (in the vein of all great art) and in particular with his nieces and nephews who are exposed to the same temptations he is/was.
In his painting Perpetration, he explores domestic violence and his own abusive behaviour, while in Twer, his arse facing the viewer he explores his own survival mechanisms while being racially and emotionally abused. In Perversion, he openly explores his own corrupting behaviour as a way of ‘being real’ about who he is/has been. In Slut, he explores these again as a metaphor for our national mis-treatment of the Australian environment/mother earth. In Friend, he explores his struggle in connecting with people. He asks the question of ‘who is a friend’ and recognises the need for ‘being a friend to my-self’.
Hopefully, he sees these works as a stepping off point for change, for developing new and more insightful perceptions of behaviour and the meaning of life.
Saunders is unashamedly spiritual; a spirituality that is foundered primarily on Christianity. It is this newly found vision that has given Saunders the means with which to order his reality. There is no doubt that it has also given him the vision for all of our possibilities. In Star, each person has a galaxy around them, because, ‘each person is special’ and it is ‘important for us to see it’. In Giants, with its central image of a Sumo wrestler, he likewise explores how ‘small people are giants’. He notes that ‘the beauty of a child and innocence are qualities that are sometimes overlooked and that it is often ‘the small things that provoke admiration’. In Shipwreck, while acknowledging that something needs to be done about Aboriginal street people, he casts himself with all of us on the periphery; Standing back, not sure of what he could do; a non-participant in a possible change of direction. Having photographed individual street people and listened to their stories, this work contains each person’s portrait as a singular outline overlaid and surrounding a dotted painting of a shipwreck. He paints himself in the distance looking on but explains he is not comfortable in being there. Meanwhile he has gone further that most of us, by giving the subjects a story with a stage for protest.
Saunders is obviously admiring and already open to the smaller ‘special’ things that exist in all of us; particularly seen for me in the amount of flowers that he gave out on the opening night (never have I seen so many) and the amount of people that he thanked for assistance with getting the work together.
Sculpture, assemblage and performance art make up the other two thirds of this exhibition revealing the aptitude Saunders has for materials. The references in the rest of the exhibition are to family, which is obviously at the forefront of his interests and racism. With racism there is, unlike Bennett who blatantly targets the misdeeds of the colonists, some references to these mis-deeds in You Came From and Now You Go, presenting the wish that white colonists had never arrived.
However the importance of family and the value of combined effort is paramount as seen in Crossing, a floor piece where a series of clay hands hold up a long line of squashed silver aluminium wire resembling water and Circle which altruistically is a symbol for togetherness. While the circle (a series of feet holding a circle of bamboo) is broken and parts distributed through the exhibition Saunders acknowledges ‘the work needed to create community and family’ and the worthiness of doing so.
And it is a ‘family’ effort that is the backbone of how Saunders arrived at the body of work on display; the unfailing commitment of KickArts staff to support artists, creating catalogues, invitations and curating exhibitions, the grant from Queensland Arts Council, the assistance by many in creating the work under Saunders instruction, the unfailing support of Saunders church, family, wife and children to continue being an artist when income is scarce. One might even see this commitment to his career and acknowledgement of his talent as the gleam of gold that elusively twinkles at the edge of Shipwreck’s frame.
