Sonder

CATALOGUE ESSAY by ANDREW STEPHENS 2025
While writing Landscape and Memory, a profound work of literature examining humanity’s interactions with landscape across the ages, historian Simon Schama was struck by this: despite rushing headlong to exploit nature, mere mortals always seem to make room for its sacredness. Even now, having provoked climate crisis, humans cannot help being awed by the woods, the waters, the rocks. Perhaps it is because the life-span of homo sapiens is so very fleeting compared with Earth’s immense 4.5-billion-year-old presence.

“Sonder” is a word that Schama, who published Landscape and Memory in 1995, might well have loved. Sonder, however, was only coined in 2012 by writer John Koenig, who wanted to capture the empathic “Ah!” feeling a person has on realising that other individuals inhabit lives as rich and complex as their own. Liz Priestley takes “sonder” and applies it to the landscape: through her evocative art-making, she recognises the landscape as having its own quiet life, independent and layered.

Amid her local environment in north-eastern New South Wales, Priestley encounters much quiet majesty in her frequent walks and drives through various types of landscapes, often in the early morning. There, she accumulates not only the visual material for her artworks but a deep sense of the enduring presence of nature. This recording is neither mimetic nor traceable: the process of transference from Priestley’s keen eye to the birchwood supports in her studio is more about her being an intuitive conduit, a sort of translator. Her role runs far deeper than that of the detached observer because she does not look at the landscape; rather, she plunges into it with emotional connection.

Working from the memories of what she sees and feels, Priestley’s work traces associations with Romantic and Italianate painters; as a child she adored looking at those grand canvases reproduced in books and how they were characterised by immersion of both artist and viewer. And so, growing up on a small farm, she recounts having always felt awe for what was around her, especially when watching the sky: “We’d go and collect bones and play with things we shouldn’t in the back paddock; we were always outside. As I got older, I realised that wherever I lived — in Sydney, or Canberra, or outside of town — I have always been naturally drawn to all the green spaces. My earliest memories are of storms coming over our property, feeling very in awe and connected; growing up with parents who would always be pointing out things that encouraged us to look for clouds, the light, the atmosphere, bird life.”

Now, having worked for many years with encaustic, an historical painting technique (used by ancient Egyptians) in which pigment or oil paint is mixed through molten beeswax and then applied in layers, Priestley never tries to recreate what she sees with any sense of realism, even though she loves appreciating the skills of artists who take that route. Rather, she hopes for an otherworldly atmosphere that allows the “real” world to manifest in the translucent stratum she applies, an interweaving of light, darkness and feeling. That might take any viewer to an interesting and essentially personal place. In that zone, anyone contemplating one of Priestley’s works might get a strong sense of a universal exchange of energy that goes beyond the transactional: it is a moving experience of connection, of sonder. Nature proceeds whether people are present or absent: and the true honour of being in its company is deftly wrought in Priestley’s art.