Static

Amber-rose Hulme Artist Statement: ‘Static’Everything stopped. The bustling streets of Melbourne are empty. The constantly evolving graffiti laden walls of the city stand frozen. Layers of paint that would have repeatedly been covered are left unexpectedly to peel and age as we are locked away.

When I look at these highly textured walls of abandoned and peeling graffiti, I can almost hear the fuzz of static floating through the empty streets, like a deep breath, waiting for us to return.

Predominantly working with pastel on paper, Amber-rose Hulme creates evocative, photo-realistic representations of the urban and industrial everyday. Interested in the idea of graffiti as a visual form of conversation between the many individuals who contribute to these constantly evolving murals, Hulme uses light, texture and the inevitable nature of decay to draw out ideas of social circumstance and the experience of a personal or cultural identity. Laneways, back alleys and abandoned industrial sites, each emptied of human presence, serve as the many backdrops for a melancholy awareness of the transience of human endeavour, and the beauty of the graffiti that enlivens the spaces we inhabit.

Catalogue Essay 2021  By Elli Walsh

Exploring the ever-changing physiognomy of the urban landscape, Amber-rose Hulme captures quiet in-between moments when the streets seem to stop and exhale a long, restorative breath. Working with pastel on paper, the Melbourne artist is drawn to the temporality of street art and the almost geological ways in which it is formed, layered, engulfed, exposed – the ways it encases architecture like a skin that is shed, continually, for new iterations. She draws our attention to the beauty of unintentional artistic collaboration; how each graffitied mark speaks to the next in a vivacious dialogue of surface and colour.

Human trace lies at the heart of Hulme’s tightly detailed works, which evince metropolitan synapses of presence and absence. Responding to the Melbourne lockdowns of 2020, she captures the changing energy of the city’s laneways – specifically the popular graffiti hub of Hosier Lane, which was then deserted. In these works on paper, the ‘Road Closed’ sign acts as an emblem of lockdown – a forced intermission of the city. A deep breath. ‘As lock down continued, it felt like everything was stuck, like there was the buzzing noise of static running through the streets’, reflects Hulme. This idea of static resonated with her, both through notions of stasis and stillness, as well as the concept of grainy static – a texture commonly seen in ageing graffiti. Her colourful streetscapes mark and mourn a year of solitude, their vibrant hues garish against a blackened moment in history.

This idea of stasis stands, paradoxically, against the energy implied in Hulme’s photorealistic scenes. In many of the works, graffitied marks seem to writhe under and above layers of peeling posters and derelict wall surfaces, pushing and pulling for visibility as if not to be forgotten. These are living motifs evolving with time – mutating and dissolving, being buried and reborn. Textures collide in each energetic composition, emphasised by the traditional medium of pastel on paper. The artist explains, ‘The feeling of the dry pigment beneath my fingers was somehow reminiscent of running my hand along the wall itself.’ Just as the natural world recolonises abandoned built environments when given the chance – like the rewilding of Chernobyl – so too do these scenes give the sense that graffiti has taken on a life of its own, slowly seizing the landscape in the absence of humans. The catch is, of course, that each mark has been created by people, yet the anonymity and absence of their makers brings a sense of autonomy to these living artworks.

Despite the sense of solitude steeping these urban vignettes, Hulme reminds us of the very human face of Covid. In her two self-portraits, monotone faces are cleaved by colourful fragments of the graffitied landscape – silenced, and stifled. On the one hand, these hyper-detailed drawings represent the enforcement of masks during lockdown, and the ensuing sensation of ‘static’. In a broader sense, the portraits mark a continuation of previous series where the layering of graffiti analogises the voices of many people forced onto a wall. ‘When I put graffiti on a portrait, it symbolises the words and labels of others unwittingly placed on us’, she comments, ‘though I always stress that these words could be positive; not just negative’.

While it is tempting to read Hulme’s new works as confronting reminders of the tribulations of last year, there is a glowing sense of peacefulness enshrouding her silent scenes. Devoid of tourists and taggers, Hosier Lane represented a moment of forced respite; a turning inwards of an otherwise outwards world. The artist concludes, ‘We may have found it hard to breathe through our masks, but perhaps our streets and environment had a chance to take a deep breath before we descended on it again’.