Nanan’s moment of quiet

REVIEW BY PAT GANASE

What is the essence of quiet? From what does it emerge? And what is its effect?

Is it silence? Is it meditation? Is it time out?

Descend the spiral staircase at Medulla and enter the white box below.

Wendy Nanan’s collection is spare.

Large burgeoning shapes on the walls. Pods three or four feet high and bursting with sea shells, If you touch them, you expect they might spill and clatter, a rain of seeds around you. Are these pods of some giant otherworldly tree?

Vulval some reviewers say, and we are immediately drawn in by the sexual idea, the personal, the intimate shells that we inhabit. But think bigger and beyond: seed pods of the universal sea.

Here are Nanan’s conceptions from spendthrift Nature. Imagine foraging and collecting hundreds, thousands, of discarded sea creature skeletons, many of them looking the same but no two alike, admiring the beauty in multiplicities, in repetitions, the sloughed shed carapaces of creatures numberless as the stars in the expanding universe.

Giant seed pods

Circle the room. The six giant pods were part of the recent exhibition (June- August 2022) at the Ford Foundation Gallery curated by Dr Andil Gosine, everything slackens in a wreck. Lips, labia, bracts bearing inflorescences of shells arrayed as if ready to burst forth to sow and seed an ocean of life. My favourite is the Blue fluted furl inviting inspection to what’s inside: a conference of shells in an inner auditorium. They draw you in like a mantra, repeated and repeating, numberless and timeless.

Breath ciphers

Pause for breath at the Prana wall. Stillness and shape suggest and simulate movement, a pulse rises from mere indentation in pillowed forms. Breathe in. Breathe out. Nanan says she thought of creating this work seeing a clam stranded on the sand out of the water, watching it open and close, trying to breath air, gasping for the ocean.

Moai: monuments to sentient beings

Enter the inner circle. No one is quite sure who or what the Easter Island moai represent; some believe they were monuments to ancestors. Nanan’s sentient beings are static, stoic, still, unseeing; with empty shells for eyes, nose and mouth. Stand still in the centre and be a witness to witnessing. According to the artist, the imagery of these "Other Sentient Beings", echoes the masks of the Alaskan Native American and Japanese Tengu rituals of magic used to drive off evil spirits. Could you be part of their unspoken conversation, if you stand in the middle, if you are still and if all you do is listen.

Wendy Nanan’s A Moment of Quiet can be experienced at Medulla, 37 Fitt Street until April 15. The gallery is open Monday-Friday 10 am-6 pm and Saturday 11 am-2 pm.