SAMMY HAWKER

Salt

The Mixing Room Gallery | 9 feb. — 25 mar. 2023

Exhibition notes | Sammy Hawker 

To me, everything that is is magical and mysterious. Our retina is completely covered by the cornea, even overgrown, so that we no longer perceive it. I would say that I am not a romantic, but a realist who perceives the world the way it is. It simply consists of magic and mystery.

... It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again.

Byung-Chul Han ‘How Objects Lost Their Magic’

Were our oceans formed from space dust? In 2010 a Japanese space probe landed in the South Australian outback after a seven year mission to collect dust samples from an asteroid known as 25143 Itokawa. Analysis of this material suggest that our oceans were created from forms of water that came from outerspace, a combination of icy comets and grains of solar dust.

Many of the works in this exhibition have been processed with ocean water from along the east coast of Australia (the Yuin Nation and Arakwal Country). They seem to sing with an interstellar resonance. There are recurring motifs of fractals, stars and a looming presence of dark matter. The alchemical steps in creating an analogue photograph is in itself a process of matter transforming. Silver halides react to light and chemicals to fix the image within the frame. Adding salt to the equation adds a level of unpredictability to the process. Co-creating the image with the input of the site it was taken, breaks open the permanency of the fixed moment, corroding and changing the image till a new type of visual logic emerges.

I've started to understand this practice as a facilitation of the voice of a deeper frequency. A resonance, an energy, a frequency (call it what you will) that exists around us but is only observed when we also break ourselves open enough to bear witness to it.

***

I drove past the site the Japanese space probe landed when travelling home from Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre (Arabana Country). Kati Thanda is Australia's largest salt lake and at its lowest point is approximately 15 metres below sea level. Visiting Kati Thanda is a literal invitation to step into a deeper realm.

On my first visit I was travelling with two friends in a Prado (christened 'Precious'). We were on a mid-winter trip to remind ourselves of the bigness of the world, driving roads with signs that warned 'soft edges' and sleeping together in a rooftop tent under the burning desert stars. There is no way to simplify Kati Thanda, it is a shimmering, deadly, place of paradox. The horizon disappears into a mirage and it feels that there is nothing beyond but the absolute. On our first day we were there, Anna went for a walk while Jess and I made lunch. When Jess and I returned to the lake Anna was nowhere to be seen. Jess and I walked together along the lake edge following a stretched out mass grave of dead cicadas. Death is present everywhere on Kati Thanda, the salt arresting the natural process of decay, and carcasses of birds, lizards, insects (and who knows what else) are to be found lodged and slowly withering into the salt. Kati Thanda is empty and vast but claustrophobic at the same time and when Anna didn't appear, our feeling of unease grew. There, in that moment, it seemed highly plausible that this was a place where sensible people inexplicably disappeared, swallowed up into the ringing silence. Calling out to Anna was unsettling. Our voices fell flat and refused to travel, the air dense, compressing in around us. It was like yelling into a wall of pillows.

Eventually a small figure appeared on our edge of vision, at first moving in an out of focus but eventually finding a fixed form as Anna. She'd been a few hundred metres out and was surprised at our unease. Looking back the other way she'd been able to see us at the shore the whole time.

***

Salt challenges our understanding of time, slowing and accelerating natural processes through its ability to both preserve and corrode. At its essence salt is a truth-teller. When salt preserves it has the ability to fix objects in their original, indisputable three-dimensional form. 2000 year old bodies preserved in salt discovered in north-Western Iran, still had skin, hair, organs and even clothes intact. As Professor Thomas Stöllner, archaeologist at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, states “It’s as if they’d died yesterday." 

However salt is equally an agent of change and transformation, it corrodes away the rhetoric until only the absolute remains. The photographs in this exhibition were given back to the places they were taken, inviting the salt from the site to make marks on the frame. The salt has a mysterious ability to communicate a resonance of the site's material history. The same way ocean water will consistently make marks of celestial bodies, the salt from Kati Thanda formed a scaly crust, reminiscent of a dead Lake Eyre Dragon I found frozen in time on the lake. 

Photography by nature is a process of omission and I've always been interested by what haunts beyond the frame, beyond our scope of vision. By breaking open these photographs it feels the photographs are no longer inert, static relics of a past moment, but instead animate and living. My photographic practice has been described as post-human but I also wonder whether there is something pre-human about it, something more-than human. I am often inspired by the new materialist Jane Bennet's text Vibrant Matter, which argues for an energetic vitality, a resonance of memory, intrinsic to material beings.

When exhibiting these salt works I am always intrigued by the way they communicate with their audience. I’ve had various reports of visceral responses including crackling or tapping sounds, ASMR type tingles, the works reappearing vividly in dreams and more eerie synchronicities such as a work communicating a message from a loved one that has passed.

***

2022 was a difficult year for me. A carbon monoxide leak in my apartment at the end of 2021 triggered a series of health consequences and I spent a good part of 18 months feeling corroded and inflamed. The prolonged exposure to the poisonous gas turned my body into a dysfunctional ecosystem, host to ulcers, parasites, aggravated skin conditions, anxiety and migraines. It is a terrible thing not to feel safe within your own body and I cried many salty tears while I struggled to find acceptance within a painful reality.

However it is also in these times of rupture that we are invited to go deeper. On my second visit to Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre I was alone. I sat at the edge of the lake and stared out towards the mirage which hovers over the horizonless horizon. I fought the compulsion to flinch away, it was like staring into the void, my mind trying to distract me from the inevitable. Voices entered the space around me and I had a distinct feeling I was not alone. But when I returned to the campground I was somehow not surprised to find it empty. The voices I heard when staring out at the horizon appeared as a strange hovering presence in the 4x5 photograph I processed when I got back to camp. Another eerie revelation.

The difficulty I found in staring at the liminal horizon-line of Kati Thanda was similar to the resistance I felt in sitting with my physical pain and discomfort. But it felt the act of staring into the unknowable, was the pathway back to a place of peace and acceptance, beyond the vicissitudes of health, time, thoughts and emotion. As Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches in Our Appointment with Life ... when we acknowledge that death is always with us and not just there at the moment when we breathe our last breath, we are not devastated by events over which we have no control...". It is from this space that that we can find perspective, to begin to see beyond the frame, and to stare unflinchingly into the potential of the unknown.

Exhibition essay | Virginia Rigney

Salt is perhaps the most ubiquitous of minerals. Essential for the preservation of food and for drawing out flavour, but also for the healthy functions on the body; a ritualised substance used in ceremony and an ancient symbol of fidelity, a powerful agent for everyday cleaning and useful for manufacturing including the act of setting the dye. Its’ balance in the soil and sea keenly watched as a sign of change.

Very briefly - between about 1841 and 1855 – salt was also a key ingredient used in the then newly emerging practice of printing a photograph from a negative. The physical alchemic act of carefully wiping a solution of water and salt onto paper then letting it dry, was one step in the process of fixing an image. But the usually hazy brown toned matt picture that emerged after the paper was exposed to light, was fragile and fugitive, and the process became quickly and resolutely superseded by silver albumen.

In this new body of work by Sammy Hawker, salt has emerged as integral to the process of conjuring an image, but not for its predictive chemical qualities, but as an expressive partner with the artist, as actual places of embodied narratives that she must spend time with and as an unruly and literally exciting force.

I met Sammy Hawker in early 2020 when we both began a course through the ANU School of Art and Design that invited participants to respectfully learn about the country on the coast to the southeast of Canberra – Yuin Country – from elders and custodians, historians, artists and writers. We learnt about the pathways to the high country from the coast, the yam daisy and the oyster and, in-between lockdowns, our group managed a visit to Beowa National Park where custodian Nathan Lygon from Jigamy, took us to middens and ochre sites. On a glistening hot day that I will never forget, we all floated together in the fast-flowing tide on the Pambula River.

Around this time, Hawker was also awarded the Dark Matter Residency at PhotoAccess, which gives an artist unlimited time and a supportive environment to basically play and experiment in the darkroom. Useful to have as a base for productive work while the world took a giddy spin, but Hawker, like many, quickly took the opportunity for release into far places when it was once again possible to do so.

Hawker has a very expanded idea of the studio. A set of open lipped glass jars for collecting water, lines of string for hanging negatives to dry in the wind, thick rag paper, a wide brimmed hat and sturdy boots to clamber, a detailed diary of notes to record activity, a laptop and the cameras; the medium format 6x6 Mamiya C330 that forces the creation of a view by looking down into a reverse reflection and the large format 4x5 Linhof Technika.

From them come images - but they also feel like objects for the texture generated by the slow work of the forces that emerge from within the process. They are not simply representations of a moment when the shutter has fallen, but for the time that Hawker has allowed for the salt in the water that has been gathered from the site, to react with the surface of the negative. Veils pass across the image forming and reforming, some as intricate geometric crystalline patterns, others as swirling eddies.

It is here that the thinking about the places were the images have been made becomes important. Hawker’s representation of Mt Gulaga at the centre of Yuin country completely defies a colonial rendering of this place. You may find a remnant of the outline of a shape of this majestic peak, but this new rendering speaks respectfully to acknowledge the rich cultural knowledge of women bound up in this place that were previously unseen in settler encounter.

In 2022 Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the giant ephemeral playa-salt endorheic lake in central Australia drew Hawkers’ curiosity to travel with friends ‘to remind ourselves of the bigness of the world’. There with her own body recovering from a strangely uncomfortable sickness and the years of Covid induced uncertainties now distant, came new challenges of seeing within this apparently clear and open landscape that had just witnessed unusually high rainfall earlier in the year. The vast spaces observed at close detail and from 3000 feet are abstracted without losing their form. Her fascination parallels the observations of Roma Dulhunty who travelled throughout the 1970s within the area with her geologist husband recording and observing. They witnessed the greatest filling of the lake in 500 years in 1974 and her remarks from over 40 years ago in 1978 are perceptive with what we know now; ‘Seasons of drenching rains in the desert are brought about by rare swings of the pendulum in the weather pattern. They are the dying kicks, as it were, of an almost continuous wet land slowly bushed aside by climatic change, bringing the onset of aridity which eventually superseded it with its every strengthening, triumphant march through 30000 years of time.’ (Roma Dulhunty When the Dead Heart Beats Lake Eyre Lives, 1979)

Hawker’s images of this litmus country reveal both the marks of salt, her mineral partner and her own purposeful and creative enquiry.

Virginia Rigney
Virginia is the Senior Curator of Visual Art at Canberra Museum & Gallery. 

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