live the story to tell it
A response to new work by Elliot Collins

When I was younger we stayed in various places on summer trips, places of memory, happy places, much further north from here; these were family trips in endless car rides. 

We would arrive and I’d leap out of the car running to the edges of places, to see the distances I could travel, to survey the sunny ‘nothing-in-particular’ spaces, noticing only the whipping of grass at my ankles. Or trying to chase the wind, or watching the clouds for hours, swirl above the turgent tide that would come and go as it pleased.

It’s funny that now as we get older we no longer want to rush over the landscape, to expedite our journey, to hurry the day; we want to embed ourselves in it, to slow time. It’s as if we might have a better idea of how quickly it passes. 

This is how I enter Judi’s works, not from above or outside, but from within, with time on my side, and I won’t be rushed. The works speak to me differently each time, if I take the time to watch and listen.

Covid lockdowns seem like a lifetime ago, and within those endless days of walks around the neighbourhood and distanced ‘check-ins’ with loved ones. It was also a time for many when silence descended. Not complete silence, but a hushing, a great quieting of the suburban streets not that of deep forest walks or riverside explorations. Within that quietening was also a distillation of Bagust’s practice and only now with poetry, as a kind of medication, a voice returns, the same old voice but one with layers and exactitude. 

The same can be said of Judi’s desires, longing for the Pelorus, with its cool, clear water, and deep green of lush native flora and fauna towering above, broken every so often by cold cobalt sky. While the  South Island feels foreign to me, for Judi there is a profound connection, what could only be called a tūrangawaewae, it imbues us and lives within us, surely that is why we feel so connected to these sacred places. This river runs through her memory, from a deeply cherished childhood, etched into her mind like the rock carved out by rapids and movement of smaller stones, taonga being carried out to sea. This river memory begins to enter the brush marks, taking over the movement and even capturing earlier gestures to articulate the whenua or flight. Her current works remind us that we really are just a collection of memories and stories; and speaks to the importance of their record. You have to live the story to tell the story. Judi is at once the brush, the ink, and the page; moving, vibrant, fluid, and still.

Poetry has landed within this process, a gentle language that guides the reader to another place, the way all good poetry should. These stepping stones of imagery, visual sonnets, link through generations, and like the brush marks, one line communes with the next. These works describe a journey that refuses the ordinary linear path. Perhaps this is a more truthful way to tell a life story, to not ignore the twists and turns for the smooth passages but to embrace them, perhaps that’s where all the good stuff of life is anyway.
Judi mentioned that she had ‘made more Tūī song, as [again in lockdown], I was struck by our stuck-ness and their freedom.’ The contrast seemed important to remember, we were all feeling it. This reinforces the work’s ability to take us outside of ourselves, even if only for a moment, to soar on words and upon turns of ink and line. 

These works are many things, to many different people, they have their own lives to live once they leave the studio. Once hanging joyfully together like many tūī in the kōwhai tree, alone they can play a different role. They greet you, arms open, inviting you to stay and travel together if only for a moment.

– Elliot Collins, October 2024

reviews

Judi Bagust creates breathtaking, ephemeral painted drawings, which sit outside time and space in an attempt to grasp a thought and hold it openly in her hands. Much like the story of Jacob wrestling the angel, she does so relentlessly, in her search for a kind of visual truth.

This work, though presented with the utmost honesty makes me question how the artist has managed to simulate bird flight and at the same time suggesting ancient marks made by a people concerned with explaining motion and movement.

More specifically I think of native bird flight that is uniquely ours. We have all observed the lumbering upward swooping of the Kereru, or the drunken spring flight of the Tui performing aerodynamics from tree to tree. Even the Piwakawaka could be involved with its fanned tail dipped in ink as it dances from branch to branch.

If one was able to touch the work I imagine that they would read like sedimentary rock under my fingertips. Storing memory and temperature, time and loss, reminding me of the lingering resonance that occurs after an orchestra plays in perfect unison and finishes suddenly the sounds still resonating from the wood and brace, wires and skins.

Like cave paintings, they tell a story in a language we have long forgotten, maybe we were never meant to read it but instead to simply follow it and in doing this reveal the message. In their whispered gesture, they do ‘speak’ much the way a dancer speaks with their body, which I suppose is not surprising considering the physical motion needed to create these paintings. There is an active silence within the work that can only be produced from a deep connection with the body and its alignment with breath and the work cannot escape this meditative state.

If you will allow it Bagust’s work will guide you on a restful journey. In this journey you will encounter a meditative spirituality and witness the hopefulness that springs from the potential of the upward stroke. It says yes, this is life and it will be hard and there will be the moments of challenge and heartache but we are together, joined in some way that we still haven’t figured out, to one another and maybe this togetherness is where we can rest.

– Elliot Collins, September 2017

Seemingly floating in space, Judi Bagust’s brushed ink marks stretch, loop and fold across their paper substrate in one elegant, oscillating movement. Within each mark, the fine linear trails of individual brush bristles mimic and echo each other’s every twist and turn. The effect is that of a delicate yet lively stratum: a fleeting sliver of a memory of a geological form or musical phrase.

Bagust describes her marks as representing place. For her place is deeply personal; it transcends the commonly shared landscape in that it is, as Lucy Lippard states, “layered with memory and histories.” It is composed not just of form and matter, but also of the individual’s lived, relived and ongoing experiences and the values he or she brings to – and ascribes to – these experiences.

Another way of putting it is that place is both a physical site and a mental construct: a tangible location and a related intangible collection of thoughts, feelings and sensations. As the latter may be displaced from the former through time and space, and accessed through memory, the individual may be bodily present in one place while mentally immersed in another.

For Bagust, in the act of making a mark, conjured experiences of landscape enmesh with real-time corporeal perceptions, so that the resulting representation is both a “memory and a mirror of place” or what she simply terms as a distillation of “being in place.” Accordingly, each distillation is an exploratory movement, inscribed slowly and enquiringly, occasionally blindly, with a hand that is informed equally by memory and touch.

The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, suggests that a drawing’s “puissance” or potency issues not from its persuasiveness or its objective, but from the gesture or action of the mark as symbolic of the artist’s presence or self. I engage with Bagust’s drawings on both of these levels. I follow her mark as it traverses the terrain of its substrate: at first immersed in its apparently swift and sure motion, yet later, upon closer inspection, seduced by its occasional shakiness – a shakiness that speaks of more tentative and contemplative moments.

Yet ultimately, I am held in the ebbs and flows of the brushed ink as it collects, bleeds, catches and fades on the paper’s tooth; an interaction of elements reminiscent of all kinds of natural processes that knowingly or unknowingly work on each other, continually informing and reforming. It is here, in this place, that I find my place in Bagust’s drawings.

– Melissa Dines, Artist/Writer November 2012

Judi Bagust leaves marks on paper as a rebus for the viewer. As you look you are not searching for physical anchors that liberate meaning (although as you stand and contemplate, an unexpected motif might brush against your peripheral vision – a wing, a curtain, a mesh). Instead, looking is a gateway to movement where the intellectual deciphering of a tough visual code (an hermetic seal) makes way for the intuitive harnessing of motion.

Movement is the pulse of the mark – with its flickers, flashes, dips, stutters, soars, plummets, flights.

The gesture of ink (how does this stage a concatenation of steps to the unconscious of either viewer or maker?) is the most intimate thing – not so much in the way delicate and miniature marks have long held an association with the feminine – but in the revelation of the private moment (unconscious, conscious) of making. You receive a map of its making that you as viewer can follow, and you are bound within.

At first you pursue the readerly convention of left to right but then movement abandons prescription and you dip and soar, flicker and surge, float and waver. You fall upon dense pockets of ink (hardly delicate) and are then stalled by translucent, net-like traces. With each shift in the register of movement, from shadow to solidity, from curve to splint, the intimate moment is heightened.

The mark stands as script of the body (experience, mood, daydreams, comfort, discomfort, thought, not- thought). You could say this is a visual and gestural autobiography.

The mark stands as a script for things that look the same, for the mind that wanders to surprising anecdote or place, for the luggage of art history (always in debt to the marks that have preceded you).

You open out, and are opened out, by movement that is a shape on the paper. There before you: a crease, a pleat, a fold.

– Dr Paula Green, Poet/Anthologist/Reviewer November 2012