IT all makes sense, really.
A pencil is made from graphite, graphite is a form of carbon, and carbon is a building block of human life.
South Fremantle artist Liesbeth Goedhart became so fascinated with the mysterious and transmutable properties of graphite, she spent a year making it the subject matter of her new exhibition.
“I see graphite as a world in itself,” she says.
“Something that far transcends the role of a mere mark-making tool. It is, in fact, my subject.”
Goedhart’s love of graphite stretches back to the late 1990s, when she created an artwork in response to the TV footage of people fleeing Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
“It came about almost by accident when I brushed some rice paper across densely applied graphite and discovered it turned into a luminous streak,” she says.
“With nothing more than pencil and paper, a drawing had turned into ‘metal’.
“To me, at the time, this power to conjure such depth of reflection, felt like alchemy.”
After she completed her fine arts degree at Curtin University, life got in the way and Goedhart settled into a nine-to-five job to pay the bills.
But 26 years later, after retiring from her consulting job, she secured an artist’s studio at the Naval Store and finally rekindled her love affair with the Big G—graphite.
“Its pull was so strong I decided to experiment with it exclusively for one year and see where it would lead me,” she says.
“Since then, I’ve pushed it beyond paper onto all kinds of different supports like canvas and plywood.
“I have been allowing it to develop into three-dimensional wall objects on salvaged materials such as refuse cardboard, Styrofoam and other found objects, cutting into it, drilling and punching holes, stitching and stapling through it.”
The end result is a slightly eerie and otherworldly exhibition that is like discovering artefacts from an alien tribe on a xenomorph planet.
Shimmering pools of colours mingle with gouged words and crumpled black objects.
It’s unsettling, yet beautiful at the same time.
“To burnish the graphite, I use a wad of thin rice paper, a homemade burnishing tool (the back of a flat smooth spoon) and sometimes a very light-grain sandpaper. It requires a lot of elbow grease,” Goedhart says.
“The graphite I use is sometimes a solid graphite stick, without the wood casing of a pencil, but more often I use the powdered form, which I then mix with a combination of water and acrylic binder medium, and sometimes just water.”
Based in Western modernism, Goedhart’s art is influenced by Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, who used unconventional mediums like marble, dust and sand, and contemporary artists like Matthew Allen, Callum Innes and Rosalie Gascoigne.
“Depending on how it is applied, graphite can be evanescent or dense, luminous or dark,” Goedhart says.
“I love how old and elemental graphite is—it’s a form of carbon, literally the stuff the stars and all of us are made of.”
GRAPH:ITE is at the Current Gallery, 141 Queen Victoria Street, Fremantle from June 19-22. For more info see current.gallery.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK