Disquiet

CATALOGUE ESSAY BY SARAH JONES 2025
Rebecca Solnit opens her introduction to the posthumously published essays of Barry Lopez with a quote from philosopher Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Solnit admires Lopez as an environmentalist and essayist whose practice was, at its core, this very equation of generosity with attention. The book is one, stacked among others, on Kim Anderson’s desk. Anderson, like Solnit and Lopez, tracks our accelerating descent into an ecological alienation that will eventually cost us our lives, and she too gives her undivided attention.

Anderson’s drawings for Disquiet are film stills or windows, and though increasingly abstract, their reference to one another immerses us in a single, timeless scene. Not so much still as unimaginably vast. Anderson’s masterful chiaroscuro keeps the sun’s rays shifting imperceptibly through pendulous eucalypt leaves, as deep shadows ripple across the ground. It is unclear if the rays that burst forward are white for the dawn or if they carry the gold of the day’s afterglow. Is it possible to draw nature in its own time? Years of rendering the regeneration that follows colonial devastation, months of minute strokes shooting epicormic branches after fire, hours of breaking open the canopy so that light might dance across the page. Anderson’s works belong in the company of the contemplative, those who will give, and be gifted, the sublime experience of being deeply attentive.

This is the first series of works based in the bush around Anderson’s home on Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung Country and correlatively the first time the artist has not appeared as a subject in her works. Anderson wrestles with the complexity of loving this place that is stolen and on which she acknowledges her trespass. The cost of making a life on this Land is incalculable and the landscape wears the sgraffito of destruction. Anderson’s presence is complexly inscribed in her own ideographic markings, each gesture exploded, her own body fragmented throughout the landscape. In this light, the major work exhibited, an exquisite triptych titled All the Beauty and the Terror might invoke McCubbin’s The Pioneer (1906) reimagined through the lens of the ecogothic.

In ‘Six Thousand Lessons’ Lopez laments the collapse of “six thousand epistemologies” into “what we all believe.”’ He decries the photograph of the phantom orchid that purports to stand in for all phantom orchids, reflecting the terror that “if you’re pressed for time, one thing can justifiably take the place for another.”[i] And so he dedicated himself to waiting, looking, reading, for hours, days, months. Anderson’s drawings shimmer with this same remarkable patience. Every line is drawn, as opposed to etched, and their irreproducibility speaks to the infinite novelty of every lifeward tending event. Against de-skilling, assimilation and the pressing of time, Anderson returns the slow worth of a thousand words to every picture. These works are not made in an impassioned flurry, a panicked or possessed trance. They are made in a long and fearless embrace with our burning world. "Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows." Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

[i]Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays, Cumbria: Notting Hill Editions, 2023.