Tunnelling into personal experiences of place, Annika Romeyn visualises the loss, life and longing embodied in the natural Australian landscape. Through a combination of drawing, watercolour and printmaking processes, the Canberra artist engages with sites of erosion and flux to express the precariousness of the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. Sheer cliff faces, weathered rock formations and twisted trees symptomise the plight of nature as it staggers on the edge of no return.
In her latest series, ‘Endurance’, Romeyn captures the mnemonic power of place. She draws from time spent at Guerilla Bay, Yuin Country, a profoundly personal place that embodies the final Summer shared with her mother in 2016/17. It was at this time she encountered Rebecca Solnit’s thoughts on ‘the blue of distance’ – the blue at the horizon, which we can never quite reach. For Romeyn, blue became the symbolic colour of memory and emotion in the process of revisiting Guerilla Bay from the physical and temporal distance of her studio. Tones of ultramarine, pthalo and indigo reconstruct the coastal landscape with brisk detail, which recedes into the cool hues and indistinct washes of aerial perspective. There is the echo of traditional Chinese blue and white porcelain in these densely detailed compositions, each mark dancing between representation and abstraction to suggest a liminal space between the landscape experienced and the landscape rendered.
This is Romeyn’s first series using the watercolour monotype process, a new medium that has created more subtle tonal variations than her previous oil-based monotype technique. Fluid marks buzz with energy like particles assembled together to forge an image, threatening to dissipate at any moment into the hazy abyss of reminiscence. Aqueous drips become ladders between sea and sky, clouding the horizon and conjuring the psychological distance of memory.
Though these works seem serene and sublime, there is the hint that the landscape is – and will be – the helpless victim of humanity’s hamartia. Viewing them, we become aware of how easy it is to marvel at nature’s beauty and strength whilst ignoring the fragility in front of our eyes. The cool blues and rainy atmosphere depicting the NSW South Coast stand in stark contrast to the infernal imagery of the present moment. Yet buttressing the vulnerability of Romeyn’s watercolour washes is the elemental fortitude of rock and water, carving open a symbolic space for endurance and hope.
Scaling her works in relation to her body, the artist explores how place imprints itself not only on the mind but also physically, corporeally. The encounter between ourselves and the land is a haptic exchange: it overcomes us and we, sadly and slowly, overcome it. Retaining traces of her hand – the white marks made with the tip of her finger and the darker areas with her brush – Romeyn’s works beckon us to step into this in-between space of physiological and psychological encounter; of landscapes felt and landscapes remembered.
Ultimately, Romeyn does not seek to express a place of the present moment, but how place seizes us in its absence, how it summons the imagination and speaks to our emotions. In her works, blue is the colour of longing, evoking the fissure between us and the glow of our past. If we can look out across that vast gulf of memory without wanting to close the gap, without yearning to possess the horizon, then the colour of solitude and desire becomes the colour of healing and endurance.
Elli Walsh, 2020
