Contemporary Australia: Women

74 Every artist remembered with Mike Parr 2009 Installation view, First Draft Gallery, Sydney, 2009 Image courtesy: The artist Opposite Cruising with Wrongsolo (preparation) 2010 Workshop documentation, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2010, Image courtesy: Kathryn Gray Working drawing for We all walk out inthe end 2012 organised with nine artists from various disciplines and stages in their practice. As described by Gothe-Snape: the task was to remember every artist. So, for two hours, each artist and myself would recall artists’ names in concurrent succession — I would say one name, they would say the next. Each name had to bear some relation to the name said before, in order to build a ‘drawing’ constructed entirely from written names. 2 The resulting drawings build a compelling picture of how a local artistic community maps itself onto broader artistic discourses — in one rather comedic sequence, for example, we read: ‘Janet Burchill, Fridah Kahlo [sic], Carla Cescon, Louise Bourgeois, Michelle Hanlin, Archille Gorky [sic]’. The key to these works, however, is not the particular form taken by each list, but the manner in which they describe an erratic and extraordinarily agile series of connections. The overall image conjured by the drawings is of an idea set in motion — each invokes the liveliness of the conversation and portrays a mental exercise urgently redefining its system of reasoning from one moment to the next. In her commission for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, the text ‘we all walk out in the end’ is written at a monumental scale on the 15-metre high GOMA entrance wall. With the directness of a pop lyric, Gothe‑Snape provides a pithy commentary on the motion of people passing through the Gallery foyer, while also employing the metaphor of movement to describe emotional life. We regularly use expressions that link our feelings with movement, and the melancholic inevitability of ‘walking out in the end’ resonates because it’s more than just a metaphor. As the idea of embodied cognition proposes, there is a causal link between motion and emotion whereby bodily movements promote the recollection of emotional memories. Walking out of the Gallery is thus brought into sharp relief by Gothe-Snape: she mischievously reveals the connection between this ordinary, unavoidable act and intense moments of change in our emotional lives. If motion underpins Agatha Gothe-Snape’s various individual projects, we might think of her overall oeuvre as a psycho-geographical map that traces connections between spaces, bodies, emotions and ideas. In an interview published on Susan Gibb’s blog, Society , Gothe-Snape describes the activity of making art as akin to attempting to navigate through a series of fogs, each representing different areas of knowledge and experience. 3 As she explains, ‘I guess it’s about trying to navigate the crisis of being human.’ 4 Nicholas Chambers