Summer bummer summer

Pacific Trash Vortex Bummer Pacific Trash Vortex By Will Cox

“All Souls are indued with the Plastick whether of Brutes or Men.”

– Henry More, 1682

At the dawn of the century, the organic evolved to feed on the hostile and alien, at last. In 2001, Japanese scientists discovered Ideonella sakaiensis, a mutant bacteria that eats plastic, found in a sludge-filled tip outside a bottle factory in Osaka. They set about turbo-charging its evolution, both to combat the huge build-up of plastic waste in the world’s tips and oceans, and to make room for our own voracious appetite for plastics. It’s too late for us, however. Microplastics have been discovered in our drinking water, in our bloodstreams, in our organs. They have become part of our being.

Summer Bummer Summer presents a series of controlled accidents in paint. It also collates a season transition: of heatwave, bushfire and family illness for Michael Gromm. 100km/h winds carried ash from the burning Grampians over his home in Stawell. Sweat dripped down the walls of his studio. Text messages and phone calls threatened to induct a family member into another state of being. The other definition of ‘plastic’ comes in handy here: adaptability, malleability, mutability.

Gromm constructed these paintings with a mix of abandon and painstaking, meditative precision. It’s not always clear which bit came out of which. Soft focus, synthetic gradients cut sharp into toothy canvas. Fragments of plasticky colour lay jagged in the depths. Ghosts of nothing haunt the foreground.

In describing the works, Gromm uses the phrase ‘almost grotesque’. They are 'difficult to look at'. He describes his process as turning him as a machine. An inkjet printer. The contained textures, the most garish parts, are the most meditative to produce. Gromm constantly repeats his process. Wet paint on wet paint. The colours explode.

The titles offset the interior nature of the works: Icarus should have flown at night. The sun only shines in one direction. Burning bridges while mountains burn.

Those familiar with Michael’s work might find themselves disoriented. The hard-edge abstraction remains, but it’s spliced with something else. He is breaking out. The usual clear backgrounds and defined compositions have given way to something altogether murkier and less contained. We’re no longer looking at a discrete island, but a close-up of something part synthetic, breaking out of the frame, part organic and entirely unknowable. Are we looking at an organism absorbing hostile objects? Teleport accidents? Are we wading through the poisoned waters and glimmering plastics of the Pacific Ocean’s trash vortex?

Stawell is an old gold mining town. Deep beneath the town are subterranean tunnels, stripped of minerals. In the 2020s, the disused mines became the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory. As the nearby trees turn to char and ash, scientists a kilometre underground research dark matter — the undiscovered sub-atomic particles that live in all of us, and promise to make sense of everything. 

Having eaten all the plastic, and the gold, we now scour the tunnels for the hypothetical, the non-luminous, the ghosts of nothing.

Will Cox is a lutruwita-born, Naarm-based writer and critic. His novella Hyacinth came out in early 2023 to acclaim.