​In The Wind 
JAMES KERR | September 2021

The paintings in Chaos Theory sing with a joy of colour and rhythmic gesture. The marks feel primal, free and wild as they stretch out across the boards. However the compositions posses a tension and on closer examination of the layering, there is a sophisticated cohesion in the series. The works deal with memory and attempt to tell stories of the landscape. There is a continuity that suggests intention and the artist frequently works with found and recycled material including paint in order to create control but to also work sustainably. The frenetic gestures and dichotomy in these works bring to mind the late American painter Joan Mitchell. Imbi Davidson is able to achieve a balance and harmony in her paintings that speaks to her show title. The mathematical theory in which she refers is one of underlying patterns and repetition. Systems of control and notions of cause and effect. Imbi Davidson seems to tease out contemporary issues through her paintings while maintaining a focus on remembered landscapes and a connection to nature.

‘Chaos Theory’ is branch of mathematics that deals with dynamical systems and how patterns and interconnectedness within systems govern result. It is this interconnectedness that seems to inform these paintings. There is rhythm in the series and I think the success in these works is the result of a very refined practice. The control comes through setting parameters such as the size of substrate and the use of only recycled paint gives us a continuity that at times almost presents the series as one painting. Despite this consonance, the paintings also feel like the result of frenzied battles on the surfaces. The works when viewed in isolation are bold, the marks are aggressive and intuitive. It is this fury pace that gives the work its power. The process seems to almost be performative and this comes on the initial read. These bold areas of rich colour are then tied together with scratchy, dry and more translucent passages. In the work ‘Creation Story’ we can see the complex layering and weaving together of colour but also the arching curved forms that are prevalent in the show. It is as if the soft pink is reaching out to connect with the blue tones. The colour pushes out to the edges and is layered and built up in varying levels of translucency. There is depth but also a raw energy that keeps your eye scanning the surfaces.

Colour seems pivotal like in most of the great abstract expressionist work and according to the artist the balance of colour and colour association are at the forefront of this series. Davidson states “Colour has ultimately played an important role in creating this body of work. Striking reds, pinks and warm hues form the dominant colour scheme, and for me, tell a story of the feminine (women, blood, lipstick, power, girls, prettiness and birth). Juxtapositions of bold yellows, blues and grey green temper the angry fire of reds and pinks, while layers of marks, opaque and translucent colours are pushed and pulled across the surface” The use of recycled paints is very interesting in relation to this and according to the artist a way of stepping outside of her comfort zone. It is this kind of process or control that leads to the serial nature of the work. It becomes a challenge to work with what is at hand and the paintings begin to chip away at each other with the artist’s guidance. The studio, the material, the gesture are all connected to one another and this is then fuelled by elements of the everyday, weather systems, political climates, people, and most commonly places.

The work ‘The Butterfly Effect’ also manages to achieve equilibrium through many of the processes already mentioned. For me it is the minor moment of olive green and brown that set the whole composition off and charge the higher pitched colours. Once again the title referring to Chaos Theory and interconnectedness. “You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.” (Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 1800). It is this notion of understanding and appreciating the small and simple elements within a system and how they can have an effect on a larger and more complex system. I can feel that this speaks to the way Imbi Davidson lives her life, feeds her painting practice and explores the complexities of contemporary society. The mark acts as a meditation, an attempt to understand and make sense of the world.

One could imagine music playing while the sun streams in the studio window and boards scattered and at varying stages of completion, with many cans of recycled paint open and ready to mingle. I think the works are in conversation, different issues, people and places fleshed out on the surface. The gestures feel therapeutic and a process of connecting to the world. When beginning to think about this text I thought about an image that the artist had sent me. The paintings were lined up side by side in the grass, with foliage surrounding them. This felt refreshing for me. The image is honest and also speaks to the way Imbi processes what she does as a painter. I think back to the recycled paint, and other found materials, to the remembered landscapes and I wonder if Imbi is telling us the works are of nature and belong in it and to it. Perhaps it is important to consider it as cyclical, but for me it certainly conveys the artist’s connection to landscape. The image and the paintings are chaotic and beautiful at the same time.

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Mailbags from the very edge.  
NICOLAS ROTHWELL | February 2011

 A detail from Imbi Davidson's 2009 work Incognita. Source: Supplied 

THE word spread slowly, insistently, during the height of the build-up season in 2009, when Northern Territory gallerist Dallas Gold staged the first solo show for a young, unknown Darwin artist with a strong expressionist lean to her work. 

In those humid weeks, with dark storm clouds reaching skywards and maddened fruit-doves crying out their mating calls, almost anything can appear feasible. And so the first reports of the suite of paintings by Imbi Davidson on view at Raft Artspace - vast, rich-hued paintings, made on canvas from old mail bags - seemed to fit perfectly with the temper of the time.

The paintings were lush, exorbitant and unconstrained. Deep veils of black and Prussian blue, scored with lines and stencil-marks, with symbols and letters cut almost through the fabric: this was an art unlike anything seen in the northern capital, yet it was instantly recognisable as the product of the tropics and their shimmering, intensifying light.

Lost at Sea, the set of mail bag canvases was titled: the images evoked the experiences of mariners, sailing on turbulent oceans towards the southern continent, but they were also imbued with the hazy textures of monsoonal skies.

The first collector to see the works on the gallery walls snapped up the entire show.

Gold moved his Raft Artspace from Darwin to Alice Springs mid-way through 2010 knowing he had fulfilled his desire to uncover a great original among the ranks of non-indigenous artists active in the north.

"Each one of those works was like a night ocean journey in itself," he says. "Imbi's canvases take you into a strange space, you go on a voyage of your own deep into the paint."

Just past 30, Davidson came north more than a decade ago and spent some years living on a Yolngu clan homeland outside remote Ramingining, on the margins of the Arafura swamp. She engaged in protracted university art studies while based in Darwin, but her real teacher was the landscape: it bore in on her, and shaped her. Her environs seem reflected in every canvas she makes.

After her 2009 Raft show, Davidson embarked on a year of travel: India, Canada. She produced a stream of distinctive works. There were drawings based on botanical sketches, turbulent skyscapes, hectic panoramic views, thick with lines, arcs and hatchings. They had the feel of views from high in the air and mingled, in novel relationships, blues, whites, deep reds and burnt shades of earth.

Pieces from this series, Tar and Feather, go on view in May at the new Chan Building gallery in central Darwin, as part of a three-artist show. That exhibition will also mark a hinge-point in Davidson's life. For, after so long living in the Territory, and so long studying the Top End's landscapes and their effects on the imagination, her northern phase is done. In a recent entry in her episodic website diary, she reflected on the effect of constant exposure to the landscape. "Even in its gritty bloodthirsty intensity," she wrote, "there is on this edge of the world a glory, a splendour and untamed harshness."

In person, Davidson is contained, almost self-effacing.

Unlike most university-trained contemporary artists, she has no easy words to accompany her paintings. Works more expressive of an individual tilt on the world are hard to imagine.

In discussion, she sets out the elements of ordeal and struggle that hold centre stage in her art-making. She speaks of the importance of wounds and scarification-marks in the Aboriginal world she came to know in Arnhem Land. Scars, and healing, and recovery from the blows of life: these are the ideas uppermost in her thoughts.

Art in the north involves battle, survival and a resultant insight: "I see here a sharpness in the art, an edginess: being able to speak the language of the bush is essential, feeling the bones of the country, seeing them and tracing them."

And the artist in such country has a specific task: to find a means of conveying ideas and impressions that lie beyond easy understanding and the simple reference frames of our experience.

"There are things in artworks that provoke thought, but that we don't have words for," she says. "Isn't that our part, as artists, to make people feel things they didn't know they felt, and show how we can be in that place of not understanding, and that can be a good place to be?"

This is unsteady ground, and Davidson sees herself clearly at the start of a path, only grazing the surface of the sensory world. "Much in art today lacks that uncertain element," she argues.

In the north, though, she has been able to find ambiguities and uncertainties aplenty: a hazy frontier zone where Western authority over the landscape is not yet established, where Aboriginal culture, with all its rules and codes, is still palpable, where the past and its wounds are present in the wartime shards and relics strewn along Darwin harbour and the shore.

Art, in such places, must proceed by jumps and intuitions: the artist who wants to reach beyond mere tropical sheen and beauty must gaze inwards, and find a deeper rhyme with the murk and depth of the hidden world.

This is a doctrine of inspiration, if it is a doctrine at all. Yet craft and skill, as much as loose improvising, lie at the core of Davidson's work. Expressionism of the highest order is born only from precise technique: you need to master the codes before you can break them. The colour washes Davidson employs look back to Nolde and Matisse, just as much as they summon up the responsiveness to place of a Drysdale or Fairweather in full flight.

Davidson's way of looking, which stems from close attention to country, also highlights her belief in the knowability of the landscape of the north: a sense that stems from her long immersion in the indigenous realm.

The country may be at first unfamiliar, but it is not foreign.

"I really believe we share the same country, Aboriginal people and us, the same landscape. Indigenous people are inspired by us, and we by them, there's no strong divide any more up here. Aboriginal work has its roots here, in some deep past trajectory. My work has its roots here, and now."

There are other artists working in the north, and in remote Australia, who respond to their surrounds in this kind of instinctual fashion, and seek to transcribe their feelings and reactions through their art: indeed, there would be little point to working in such environs while remaining wholly impervious to their effects.

Davidson, though, stands apart in her aim of self-removal, which may account for the strange authority, the air of the inevitable that her best work holds. It is an austere procedure she adopts.

"I don't just record things and impose upon them," she says.

"I try to give a voice to them. The landscape, the tropical world, it's all a part of a whole. I try to make myself into a reciprocal of the country."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/mailbags-from-the-very-edge/story-e6frg8n6-1225989826413

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It's time to reflect on art. 
REBECCA FITZGIBBON | February 13, 2013
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AT a well-known museum recently, a very fragile and much-loved work was inadvertently destroyed by a visitor. 

"Well, it was only a matter of time," was the museum management's reaction.

The response was surprising. It displayed an unusual acceptance of impermanence for today's art world, where commoditisation is king and permanence is a widely prized attribute for acquisitions.

Some art is made to last, such as Aboriginal cave paintings in Western Australia and Cro-Magnon cave paintings in Lascaux, France, terracotta warriors buried in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in 201BC, Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, and Egyptian sarcophagi on display at the Museum of Old and New Art.

Conversely, some art is made not to last, such as the deliberate impermanence of Buddhist sand mandalas, contemporary "time-based art" like that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude or Andy Goldsworthy, ice sculptures and chalk drawings, and performance pieces that exist for a short time only.

Exploring our understanding of time has always been at play in art and in creativity, as depicted in some of our earliest considered art works, and as explored in modern ephemeral art movements.

Time is a new exhibition opening at Poimena Gallery in Launceston on Friday, featuring 11 Australian artists capturing, measuring, experiencing and documenting physical, mystical and conceptual aspects of time.

Curator Katie Stackhouse conceived the exhibition's premise when working in collaboration with American essayist and poet Naomi Shihab Nye in North Maine in the US. Every day Nye would give Stackhouse a handwritten prose, to which she would respond in printmaking.

One handwritten note asked "What are you waiting for?" This provocation inspired the exhibition's curatorial theme.

"This provocation, like a Zen Koan, reverberated, a question that is always unanswered and always answered all at once," Stackhouse says.

"I started to make work about time. I also became curious to ask the question to other artists, to ask how they engaged with time elementally, conceptually, mystically and formally throughout the making of their work."

The exhibition, supported by the Australian Government's Regional Arts Program and the Regional Arts Fund, includes paintings by John Wolseley, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Kate Tucker, Dawn Csutoros, Greg Wood, Imbi Davidson and Michael Schlitz; installations by Jacqui Stockdale; sculptures by Ilka White and Nick Maxwell; photographic work by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff; and video work by Ilka White.

Time can both perpetuate and swallow cultural tradition, as Regina Pilawuk Wilson's delicate fish net painting, Syaw, illustrates by paying homage to her Northern Territory family's traditional heritage of weaving fishing nets.

Painting itself has history, as referenced in John Wolseley's An Inventory of the Plants of the Maquis, a painting about the historical use of pigment and the lengths that people would go to collect and extract the highly treasured hues.

The use of art materials through time is also expressed by Dawn Csutoros, whose alchemical use of coal from petrified forests millions of years old connects to contemporary living and aesthetic appeal.

Art practice develops a personal history over time for the artist. Jacqui Stockdale's self-reflective work The Procession looks back at her journey as an artist, acknowledging the characters and family of art makers both in her own life and in humanity's larger creative process.

Our understanding of time abstracts with closer inspection, as Kate Tucker's painting Broken Edges explores, deconstructing the creative process.

Even our measurement of time is flexible and scalable, as Michael Schlitz's sculpture Singularity Flock and Nick Maxwell's sculpture Big little hand address.

Time carves its own artwork on the landscape, as seen in Imbi Davidson's Bloodwood, with raw marks indicating the markings of time, memories and scarification upon landscapes, while the lasting eeriness and intrigue of the Tasmanian landscape is evoked in Greg Wood's Stormont, painted on a cold and wintry field trip.

Ilka White's video piece Drawing Breath documents the creation of an ephemeral drawing through repetitive movement, making time more elastic by inducing a mystical trance-like state.

Time is flexible in art. But as French artist Eugene Delacroix said, the role of art is to give value and substance to the passing of time, to interrupt the terrifying monotony of our days with glimmers of understanding.

"The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities," writes David Bayles, photographer and author of Art and Fear.

"Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art."

Art is a practice observable cross-culturally in all societies, regardless of their degree of economic or technological development. It is much more than a modern luxury.

Since time immemorial, humans have made art to document, express and comprehend. 

Making art is an evolutionary tool, according to ethologist Ellen Dissanayake. 

It is the practice of commemorating important rites and occasions in society: birth, marriage, wartime, sickness, and death. So even in evolutionary terms, time is of the essence.

The Time exhibition opens at Poimena Gallery, Button St, Launceston, on Friday and continues until March 8. For details, go to www.timeexhibition.com

http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2013/02/13/372328_opinion.html

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Unchartered Territories
DAVID CORAZZA| ​July 2012

Uncharted Territories is a microcosm of Imbi Davidson’s work. Starting in Darwin and Terania then reworked and added to, in this time and place, here in the Northern Rivers. It maps memories and stories of rebellion, assimilation and emotion of Imbi’s experience with landscape, place and history and her place in it.

There are apparent influences, such as that of Australian artists, Fred Williams, Ian Fairweather and Tony Tuckson, and there is her own narration of living with indigenous people in Arnhem Land and the inspiration provided by the disparate Australian landscape and the physical forms of its native plants.

In the work there is an intuitive visual language as an abstracted cartography of the organisation of nature, its natural scars, its layers of impacts and habitation. An authentic exploration of her response to self, in mapping ‘country’ and employing history and an inextricable link to place, latitude and longitude, colour, transparency and the play of light.

The artist is ever-present here. Imbi herself is just as much a part of this abstraction, of meaning and spirit expressed and deconstructed, the landscape as it is felt, the plants as they are observed.

There is an intuition and immediacy so palpably employed; sometimes a stridency and sometimes something that is more forgiving - and more yielding - in these works.

Somehow, though, it is possible to emerge from the tumult and beauty of Imbi’s expositions into this landscape of place and mind, quite gloriously.

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Arts/Craft Photo Project 2010
TOM DINNING | September 2010

​Charles Darwin University is not the sort of place I would expect to find an artist. Art and academia seem as distant from each other as Antarctica and aardvarks. Even in the dictionary they are held apart by words like ‘arrogance’ and ‘archaic’. After locating a car park I could afford somewhere among the mangroves of Rapid Creek, I make my way to Orange 11 Room 1.24a. The universities system of navigation has been designed by a Phd student studying abstract mathematics and its relationship to mental stability in the visiting public. I pass numerous zombie-like creatures searching for colours and numbers that have no obvious relationship to any location system. An elderly woman sits crying in the courtyard between ‘red’ and ‘blue’. She is whispering the word ‘green’ over and over to herself in a desperate and distance voice. Best not to interfere, I think, for fear of shifting the bell curve.

‘How can art exist here?’ I ask myself? How can freedom of expression and creativity coincide with such formality and rigor? I hope I am about to find out as I stumble upon room 1.24a. In the continuing effort to remain abstruse, there is no indication as to the contents bar a picture of a regal looking woman tacked precariously to the door. I look either way into the prison-like corridor for a sign of life. My IQ diminishes with every breathe. A door slams behind me and I am alone; a solitary spaceman on a distant, hostile planet. Desperation mixed with a modicum of courage and anticipation entice me to open the door. On entering, I am immediately transformed into a different world; the diffused light from a distant window engulfs me and a soft, alluring voice, the Loralie of the open seas, becons me to enter. If I were dead, and there is no evidence to the contrary, I might well have arrived in Heaven and now being irretrievably drawn to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Signs of the creative process are everywhere. Abstractions splashed across the walls, fragments of thoughts transposed into something concrete, impressions of life, the ‘tools of trade’ for the artists, chaos among order, a disordered refuge among the logic of supposition. I have found my art and my artist. Home at last.

Imbi appears from the light as my eyes adjust to the imagery. A young woman (I guess at 30) with a strong confidence in her manner and voice. She sweeps some papers from a chair and offers me a seat. The room is dimly lit. All is still but everything moves. Flash-backs of my father walking me through musky museums surface in my frontal lobe. Creatures on the walls follow my every move. There is order here but it is well disguised. All things connected but the threads are loose and convoluted.

‘I work here and at home’ she says as we enter into conversation.  'I can’t use oils here. The smell gets into the air-conditioning and …..’ A twist on the ‘academia stifling art’ theme, I think. We launch into a discussion of the anomalies between her work and her chosen surroundings as though it is necessary to clear the air before any further discussion can ensue.

‘I’m a hypocrite, really,’ she admits embarrassingly, ‘but it provides me with the means to do what I want to do and be what I want to be – an artist. Art helps me to make sense of the world’.

Imbi explains the connection between her art and her place of work. She is part way onto a Masters Degree, which provides her with space, a meager stipend and a schedule, which she admits is ‘not one of her things’. Her undisciplined nature is somewhat evident in her work. ‘Scratchy’ she calls it. In return, the university expects a ‘plan’, purpose, research and a submission to the critical review of her peers and mentors; a process which she finds uncomfortable, to say the least.

She, like many of the artists I have spoken to, has no ‘vision’ of what will appear on her canvas. Her actions are as a result of some convoluted thought processes guided by her memories, feelings, culture, observations and thoughts about the world around her. It’s her way of finding answers to indescribable questions. Beauty is not a criteria for her work, she emphasizes, although I find beauty inherent in what she does. There is a painting of what appears to be a seascape above her head that flows and floats like a cloud, tempering the mood and answering a question I have not yet resolved or even asked.

‘Some days I just paint in blue’ she adds. I’m conscious that she might be reading my mind. ‘Its instinctive’ but we agree that this may not be the case. The learning process can be subtle and the results of that learning may manifest in different ways; like the sense of painting instinctively. 

Her love of her children, plants and gardening is strongly expressed. She is experimenting with plant representation using a technique that is best described as brutal. Taking a hammer to a leaf seems a bit extreme but the results are quite fascinating. Imbi described the process but I become more interested in the results. It must show. The excitement in her voice wanes and her explanation becomes disjointed. Maybe the camera is distracting. But I sense there is more to it than that. It might well be that the process is not clearly defined or it may even be insignificant. The process is as seemingly disjointed as the mental processes she engages while painting. As I have discovered in many others, creativity has no formula, no prescription. As Imbi says,’ its what I am’. And once again, I am intrigued by the relationship between art and academia. How can one person or even a group of people, with any sort of intent, make a critical judgement on the creativity of another person. I know there are many answers to that question and I am yet to find them. My search continues.

‘Let’s go to the Gallery. There are some things you might be interested in’. 

The Gallery is where Imbi has recently ‘run the gauntlet’ of her assessors. This inquisition is to justify her continuation with her Masters Degree. She has my vote. 

Ansel Adams said ‘There is always two people in a photograph: the photographer and the viewer’. The same certainly holds true for paintings as well. Imbi’s art encloses the space around me like a soft blanket. It is unmistakably her work. Even after such a short time I would recognise her work anywhere. This work is truly ‘her’. It is as though she is dismantling instead of constructing; creating her images by rummaging through a complexity of thoughts and ideas with a brush in her hand. As a photographer I am reminded of the concept of 'looking behind'; when looking for the image look behind to see what is revealed. Imbi is 'looking behind' in that same sense. There are no distinguishable figures or recognizable images here but its alive with shape, form, colour and texture. As I move around the images hanging before me I am conscious of three things: Imbi is talking non-stop about her work in that unsure, disjointed uncertain manner that is evident in her painting, I am absorbed in the presence of it all, and the art has become the connection, the link, the interface between the two people Adams refers to.

So this is what art is all about.

My task is over. I have found what I came looking for. I am one step closer to finding the answer to all things. In her search to find her own answers, Imbi has provided me with my own.

Thanks Imbi.