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Crossing the Field
Introduction
Brett Ferry’s latest series of work “Crossing the Field” looks at bridging contemporary techniques with traditional oil painting. Taking inspiration from the land mark 1968, NGV exhibition “The Field”, Ferry leaves the traditional canvas shape of the rectangle or square, explores industrial processes and hardedge techniques. His aim is to create a formal dialogue between contemporary media and traditional methods, symbolically suggesting an era at a major ideological and environmental crossroads.
Catalogue Essay by Melanie Caple 2021 Brett Ferry is an artist with a continually evolving practice that responds to the juxtaposition between the natural world and the electronic, technological era in which we live. In Crossing the Field he has taken that concept a step further, responding to the shift in perceptions, norms and wonts over the specific period from 1968 to 2018. Using the 1968 Field Exhibition (and its fiftieth anniversary recreation in 2018) as a catalyst, Ferry’s new work is making a statement about the turning point of society.
Ferry has appropriated utopian ideas, techniques and forms to describe the folly of continued colonial mishaps. In doing so he prompts the viewer to question the path humanity has taken in the five decades since: could there have been another direction? Could more value have been placed on the environment? Could we have come to appreciate indigenous understandings of place and time over the furious march of technological achievements?
By using knotted and twisted forms from flora that border transitional spaces to symbolise ideas of excess and greed, Ferry is able to create a visual sense of innocence being corrupted. It is clear that Ferry sees this corruption as the collateral damage – to employ modern military vernacular – of progress. Effectively, he teases out these ideas in combination with the Field aesthetic, techniques and structures.
Reading this essay in isolation to the works, it would be easy to assume that Ferry’s work emphasises the conceptual and intellectual over the aesthetic, but nothing could be further from the truth. These works are – in addition to being thought-provoking – arrestingly beautiful. Ferry effectively uses pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns in a random stimulus, to enhance audience connection with his art. He does this not only with the forms he employs and conjures, but also by using digital intrusions to enhance these responses. This is clearly apparent with the use of the neon that has taken up the space of the digital marks in a sculptural form, and links the work to Field artist Clement Meadmore’s flowing and gestural sculptures. Other Field artists whose work is echoed in Crossing the Field include Robert Hunter, James Doolin, Col Jordan, Janet Dawson and Ron Robertson-Swann.
Just as the Field artists moved away from the traditional canvas shapes of the rectangle and square, Ferry explores these ideas and melds them with what is considered a traditional genre of landscape. He has laser cut panels, employed digital technologies to manipulate, compose, blur and distort, and added electrical components. Similar to the Field artists he is referencing, he creates his work using meticulously affixed tape to define painted borders, considers how colours sit alongside one another and dances between the known and unknown. In doing so he is ‘crossing the field’ from tradition to something new and unique. Beauty is presented alongside distortion in three distinct senses: the natural, painterly and technological.
Crossing the Field is a remarkable body of work. It is art produced by an artist who is looking back, looking forward and using his talents to sublimely articulate the modern human condition. Come, take my hand, Cross the Field with me.
ARTIST PROFILEBrett Ferry completed his Bachelor of Fine Art Printmaking at Victorian College of the Arts, and also holds a Diploma of Education from the The University of Melbourne. He has been a finalist in the Bayside Art Prize (2017) and winner of the Roi Art Prize (2020). Ferry first exhibited with FLG during our annual emerging artist exhibition, Exploration 18, and was subsequently signed on to the gallery stable in the same year. His work is held in the collections of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne Library and Maurice Blackburn Pty Ltd amongst others.
