Exhibition Preview for Time & Place by Verity Nunan.
Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery.

Published in the Barrier Daily Truth, Wednesday May 3, 2023

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A new suite of drawings to be displayed at the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery map a “memory of things I’ve done wrong” explains Verity Nunan. The works bring forward a clear tension between making statements about the wrongs of the world and experimenting with the formal boundaries of drawing, something the artist does “wrong” over and over until the point of exhibition.

Nunan’s currency as an artist has a great deal to do with how she productively metabolises architectural convention into a rigorous examination of the drawing space – her drafting table a place that confuses homogenous and cartesian co-ordinates to revisit ancient concepts of Time & Place as interconnected if not wholly unified.

Although one foot is firmly planted in the studio, walking remains central to Nunan’s enquiry into human-water relationships; traversing the bed of Stephens Creek where some 180 years earlier Charles Sturt faced the limits of his own perception, led estray by the allure of mirage.

Two stories about evaporation from different times reveals a sustained commitment to unravelling the complexity of water policy (a mirage of another kind) while simultaneously developing a water-knowledge through the qualities of drawing; sgraffito line work “scarred’ into layers of charcoal collected from Country. Each addition a push and pull of intrigue, understanding, obscuring & redaction. Within this map a wobbly Sturt is frozen in mirage, an apt antidote to the celebratory nature of the recent Sturt’s Steps project - one that omits the sinister aspect of his expeditions to conquer.

Exploiting the architecture of the Sully’s Emporium, three large black canvasses occupy the primary space of the main gallery. Their assured presence draws the audience in, bringing you eye to eye with Black Water. The works are haunting, visceral tombstones to the martyr Bony Brim of the recent fish kill and whose ashes are memorialised in the surface of the canvas. Nunan lets go of drawing altogether, a moment too sad to mark on any map. These works should make you uncomfortable because we too, die without water.

Albeit reactive, Nunan’s menacing works begin to develop a spiritual knowledge through this sadness while wrestling with concepts of water-colonialism. Bringing into view water below the surface, an undercurrent is exposed. Although the riverbed is dry, perhaps in our current Time & Place, we just might be drowning.