Essay by Nycole Prowse

NVC – Spy, Voyeur, Flâneuse, Alchemist? How to Brand the Uncontainable Art of Nicole Voevodin-Cash? Perhaps the trees have answer.

Introduction

Tracing Nicole Voevodin-Cash’s artistic journey, as she leaps into her latest incarnation as NVC Studio, is one of expansion and contraction – one that resonates with a Bachelardian sense of space from his seminal text A Poetics of Space. For Bachelard the artist and artwork inhabit each other and the spaces they journey through in a physical and psychical shift between the miniature and the immensity of space. Recent followers of NVC would be aware of and even experienced one of NVC’s billy can walks, from Sydney to Sunshine Coast and the Arts Ablaze Regional Conference at Kooralbyn Valley, Queensland.

The Billy Can project – tracing the movement within journey through the precariousness of a dangling pen in a can – exemplifies the poetic dance between immensity and miniature that has emboldened NVC’s multi-award-winging work over two decades. Capturing a landscape in a can, indeed a world in a can, parallels NVC’s poetics of space and also her own journey as cheeky observer, spy and artistic flâneuse. A feminist appropriation of the notion of the flâneur, ‘a man who saunters around observing society’, the flâneuse celebrates the wonder of the female artist as wanderer.

From her beginnings as a visual arts student at Seven Hills Art School, Queensland to attaining a Master of Visual Arts, NVC has incorporated research and design expertise into her art practice to reimagine the way we interact with space and objects. It has been an exploration that has crossed boarders and boundaries. Her oeuvre moves from detail to expanse – ranging from anthropomorphic re-functioning of furniture design (including fabric woven with pubic hair); interactive sculptural exhibitions that invite the viewer to become part of the sculpture; to a widening sense of interaction  – a re-envisioning of landscape and self from Milan to Liverpool to regional and urban Australia. In every instance, NVC draws on the micro to understand the immensity.

The spatial tensions and insights revealed in NVC’s work enunciate her own interaction with socio-cultural spaces. As a female artist and mother of three she has explored the confines of small spaces created by what she sees as an ever-shifting milieu of cultural gatekeepers. Her movement outside of those gates to become a flâneuse of landscapes, accentuated her sense of espionage, voyeurism, and indeed the artistry required of a spatial alchemist.

Trapped into freedom

…the miniscule, the narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world, which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.  [Bachelard The Poetics of Space]

A sense of freedom is quintessential to NVC – her art and artistic journey. NVC has continually resisted cultural, spatial and temporal expectations. It’s been a paradoxical freedom though – one gained through the very constraints that tried to trap. It’s clear that very early on art offered NVC escape from the smallest of spaces. Growing up with dyslexia, at a time when the condition often went undiagnosed, was the impetus for her love of art:

When I was growing up my grade three teacher, a very old stoic teacher, said, “Well, Nicole, you can just sit there and draw in the corner cause that’s as good as you ever gonna be.” This wasn’t a compliment. She was saying you’re not very smart and that’s probably as good as it gets so you go off and do that. So I just went you beauty I’m quite happy to do that. That was where art came in and I just kept going. I was trapped into freedom.’

It was an attitude that empowered her to ignore the many kinds of cultural gatekeepers she’d come across. Her place of offer at Seven Hills Art School in the 1970s raised concerns in her family, “But what are you going to do for a job? … You should be a nurse, you’re so caring”. Nicole laughs at the thought, “a nurse? I couldn’t even pronounce half the names – I’d probably be giving someone Sudafed when they really needed something a stronger.” Brought up in South Brisbane, one of five daughters born to a Russian father and mother from the tiny town of Dulacca, Queensland, if a comparison were to be made with Jane Austen’s famous family of daughters, Nicole would be akin to Elizabeth Bennet. And art school didn’t see the end of gender gatekeepers. Her choice to initially train as a painter was influenced by what she considered the ‘real boys club’ of sculpting students, “They made an awful lot of big phallic shapes, you know, out of metal and so forth.  Even though I was one of the first girls in Queensland to do tech arts as a subject, I could weld, I could do all of those sorts of things, I just found it quite threatening to work in that sort of a group.”

Painting three dimensionally

Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness … by living in a world of miniature, one relaxes in a small space. [Bachelard The Poetics of Space]

Becoming a mother created the shift from painter to maker. Instead of viewing motherhood as restrictive it allowed her the psychical space, albeit a very small physical space, to begin the ‘making’ that eventually widened her career.  In a Bachelardian sense, NVC’s inversion of the ‘perspective of size’ stimulated ‘profound values’ in her as an artist, “I’d been painting for some time when I realized that I was never going to be a great painter, having three children meant I didn’t have the time to be a great painter. I’d put my paints down to do something with the kids and come back and they’re all dry. I had to find another way of being creative.” It was in a confined studio-come-children’s-craft-space where NVC turned to making. “I made small boxes. I felt quite contained so was reflecting how I felt and putting little objects into boxes that were quite significant. Things I’d collected or made over periods of time with the children.” While not viewing herself as a sculpture at the time NVC recognizes that having children enabled her to make the move to “do painting three dimensionally”. It would be a process that allowed another kind of birthing, a Masters of Visual Arts and a first major exhibition.

I am an inanimate object

Motherhood honed the particular sensory elements accentuated in NVC’s artistic work – observation and interaction. “Interaction comes from watching your kids interact in the world. They don't need direction, it's a sensory engagement, the process of growing as a human.” While working at the Queensland Art Gallery, Nicole became adept at observing how people reacted and interacted with exhibitions. In particular, it was her experience with visually impaired visitors that inspired a shift in her artistic strategies and the concept of interaction, “We'd have these Rodin's that we would pull out for these particular visits, and they would make them wear gloves. And I asked why? We can't make them wear gloves, they won’t be able feel anything.” NVC’s questioning of the “tuck your hands behind your back” museum etiquette of the time was the impetus to study a Master of Visual Arts and begin working on interaction as a sculptural strategy. “I really wanted people to roll and play and feel and experience the work.”

For her first sculptural exhibition, NVC again looked to her children for inspiration,  “we forget that childlike quality – picking stuff up and sniffing it or touching it or engaging in a tactility and using your senses. We block all those things off and become quite inhibited. I wanted to tap into the haptic of touch and encourage people to engage in things before they realized what they were engaging with because if you said it was art, they wouldn’t touch it.” Her first show So You Want to be Touched, which encouraged interaction and even conversations with furniture, reimagined not just the physical but also the metaphysical constructs of design. “Furniture to me was very anthropomorphic – it had this personality – and even when I was a kid I think my teddy bears talked to me you know that sort of stuff.  So all those inanimate objects actually had some sort of human quality to them. So I dressed them and then they had their own function and personality and how they behaved.” For NVC it was a way of getting people to step out of that zone of just looking and instead engage in art. It also revealed her delight, and humour, of the artist as voyeur, exemplified at a particular exhibition in Townsville:

1. 'What if? - Youth Arts Offices, together everyone achieves more.

2. 'Reception Dics' movement activated video receptionist for  arterial foyer

3. 'Into you' Judith Wright theatre Foyer, coin operated vibrating interlude seats

I put pubic hairs into the felt, then I made the fabric, then I felted this piece where you had to sit on it. It was like a big flower when you looked down on it. So you had to spread your legs, sit right in the centre to sit on it, and when you sat on the centre it vibrated, then they’d put their hands back and go ‘oooh’ and then they’d go ‘fuck its got pubic hairs in it’. I’d sit and watch people all day.

NVC’s foray into furniture design collapsed object/human, animate/inanimate boundaries but as an artist she was also destabilizing disciplinary boundaries. NVC’s focus in furniture and design, including an Australian Arts Council residency in Milan, saw her exhibit in design shows alongside and in collaboration with leading Australian designers. But her artistic boundary riding convoluted the cultural gatekeepers.

“They couldn’t put you anywhere. They couldn’t place you. You weren’t architecture, you weren’t furniture, you weren’t industrial design, and you weren’t straight art. So you’d be in this sort of area where they’d go you’re crossing all these boundaries, which was true.” Refusing to be siloed NVC embraced her artistic bricolage, and stepped into the immensity of land art.

Where I Am

We are not ‘cast into the world’, since we open the world … Immensity is within ourselves. [Bachelard The Poetics of Space]

NVC shifted her artistic processes to include more and more time outside. The shift into the landscape was a process that rekindled her artistic beginnings: “I’d always maintained the painterly quality that’s why I embrace landscapes because I see the big picture. I see the landscape as a painting, and then physically put in the layers not just painting the layer, which is much more fun, and a lot more energetic. It’s a lot more work but it’s more of a sense of achievement.” Increasingly she followed the process of walking, drawing, facilitating studio workshops and then exhibiting.

This led to an artistic shift entirely into landscape and a stronger ontological collapse between artist and space: art as landscape – landscape as art.

The spatial shift expanded to include movement, walking/movement as art; art as walking/movement. In a Bachelardian understanding of inhabited space NVC practices a heightened awareness of the spaces she works in. “When I’m making work. I’m really conscious of where I am and where I’m making the work, so it’s not just where I come from. It’s where I am. And what that means to the people that live there.” Her sense of artistic voyeurism accentuates this process:

I like to talk to people about what went on, the history, what do they do in those sorts of spaces. If I can’t do that, I’ll do an empirical study so I’ll sit there and I watch. And I look at how people engage in spaces and move through those spaces and activate them minimally as well as bigger gatherings of people. I’m a bit of a voyeuristic spy.

NVC’s shift into land art was at a time when public art was just starting to get legs, but also a time when “blokes still seemed to have a monopoly on the big sculptures that cost a bomb”. Life as a male artist was made easier than that of the female artist. It was however NVC’s renewed sense of movement and rebellion when the landscape flâneuse was born. As Lauren Elkin’s celebratory study of the flâneuse suggests, “it’s up to the flâneuse, the female artists fighting to be seen, to rewrite narratives of space.” NVC’s large number of exhibitions and commissions in public art over the past ten years is testament of her continued refusal to abide by gender gatekeepers in the art sector.

Driven by what she suggests is an environmentally conscious approach, rather than a radical approach, NVC’s public art provides a mindful juxtaposition within grey landscapes of buildings and urban constructions. Bundanon 2006 is a response to the growing residential sprawl on the eastern coast.

Inflatable landscapes as part of Art+Place were temporary commissions installed in six Brisbane CBD locations – including the State Library, The Judith Wright Centre, The Old Museum and Southbank Piazza – each time morphing and changing itself and the public’s reading of its landscape.

The Carpette at Artisaan, a mountain range of lounges in a small gallery space became affectionately known as Mounges. The mounges continued their life outside with the I-LAND commission pop up for the Brisbane Airport Corporation – and the 2012 treeme performance series. “To have the mounges pop up like mountains coming out of the ground trying to reclaim the space is definitely part of an environmental approach, even though they’re plastic, and they’re polystyrene, it’s really about the visual that they give – that they are trying to push their way back and push the city out. At the same time people enjoy to roll and play on them and sit on them – a play between the real and the unreal.”

The Kangaroo Point Park commission, The Green Room, began in 2009 and was groomed for a total of three years. Part of the commission at Kangaroo Point Park were the inflatable ghost trees – in memory of all the past, present and futures trees of the park. “The inflatable trees were harking back to the ghost trees of what was and what could be planted in those spaces.”

Falling and Freedom

The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea. [R.M. Rilke]

Space has always reduced me to silence. [Jules Valles]

NVC’s acclaim in sculpture parks led to a three-month residency in the UK as part of the Liverpool Biennial research into sculpture parks. It was a journey that began the deepest collapse between a sense of inside/outside and her identity as an artist. Within the expanse of the English landscape NVC channelled the micro “to capture the residue that goes unseen.” It was a way of seeing “more deeply, more intimately and the environmental awareness that is increased through that process.”

Upon her return to Australia, Nicole was to experience personal family crises lasting a number of years and including the death of her father. “I couldn’t focus on my work I wasn’t making any work.” Taking time out for family and being out of the sector for years impacted her practice. Her absence from the sector created a memory vacuum of the years of work and she found she was being overlooked by a new version of cultural gatekeepers:

Public art, and any opportunities were really thin on the ground and they weren’t engaging someone like me. They just dismissed me. Maybe read the cover, I was older and less interesting, less attractive to them. When I did put myself and my work out there people had no idea I had that depth of practice. And the new cultural gatekeepers are on a completely different level now. Before it was just boganism and bullshit. But because I hadn’t worked in Melbourne or Sydney and tough it out with all the other buggers I was considered ‘regional and parochial.’

NVC found herself falling but returned to the poetics of her art process for restoration and a new sense of freedom. Connecting with the metaphoric of landscape NVC examined this sense of ‘free falling’ in her observations of the trees and their cycling. In particular, she became interested in collecting and examining that which is left behind, “The trees would drop things and so I was like the collector of this aftermath.” The process reignited her exploration of land scanning using a lens scanner and digital rubbing process she began in Liverpool.

It was an examination of the residue of what is left behind in the environment that ameliorated her own sense of being left behind,

Things that are left behind, that nobody else is looking at. Seeing it with fresh eyes or different eyes as an artist can capture it in that way. I suppose it’s about existence and for me I was then relearning and rediscovering and becoming more existent again in myself.

It was the process of art and movement in space that NVC found liberating. In particular it was the movement within trees that she found captivating – and in turn, the trees that captured her fall.

The trees have branded me

Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:

If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,

Invest it with inner space, this space

That has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions,

It knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree

If it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation.

[Rilke in Bachelard The Poetics of Space]

Bachelard believed that we could discover the immensity within ourselves in familiar environments and objects. In particular, the forest was a metaphor of this liberating extension of ourselves: “Forest peace…is inner peace. It is an inner state.” The trees facilitated NVC’s reconnection with her art, and herself as an artist.  During an immersive weekend workshop in the landscape NVC began to interact with the trees through a process of rubbing and meshing images and moving through and tracing the surfaces. She then found herself talking to the trees, patting them, moshing them, watering them. Eventually, she found herself asking the trees for help, knowledge and inspiration.

The trees wrote back– this is what they said:

For 18 months NVC continued her conversations with the trees. They enunciated a belief in herself and a renewed a sense of gratitude and respect: “You are the centre of your making, the landscape where you find yourself and you will know”. It was this symbiotic relationship with the trees that led to a residency in Ashfield, Sydney: “I decided to go to the city to talk to their trees, did they say the same? Why, yes, they did.”

The impact of this conversation with the trees changed the entire process of how NVC makes art. It forced her to into the landscape in a much more symbiotically engaged way, “I wasn’t just in the landscape making art anymore, I was within the landscape. I started to become. I’m actually the environment here, you know, I am that tree. It connected me back to where I needed to be and it started to ground me. The trees helped ground me. They branded me. I realised I am air. I am wind. I am an element of Alchemy. Some would say I had fallen. But for me it is a more beautiful place where I find myself today.”

NVC reflects on the continuity that the trees symbolise in her practice as artist, “I feel like the trees, they give you that sense of longevity.” Bachelard, too, recognised the lesson of trees in understanding our limits as “mere accidents”.  He believed that the tree, like every genuine living thing, is taken in its being that “knows no bounds”. And as is evident in the journey of Nicole Voevodin-Cash as artist, as woman, as mother, Bachelard illuminates, “together, the tree and its dreamer, take their place, and grow tall.”

Sources:

Bachelard, Gaston. (1958/1994). The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Beacon Press, Boston.

Elkin, Lauren. (2017). Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Dr Nycole Prowse is a writer, story facilitator, educator and academic scholar whom founded Peripheral Arts in 2016 upon completion of her PhD in Literature. She has over 27 years’ experience in teaching at tertiary level and in the creation and production of creative and literary projects and festivals in urban and rural communities in Australia, Japan, China, the UK and the Middle East. Nycole has published widely in the area of literary representations of gender, space and the body, including editor of a multidisciplinary anthology Intervening Spaces (Brill 2018), a transnational examination of the inter-connective impact and potential of literature, performance, art and design on people and place. And has recently published her book Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature (Gylphi 2018).  She is currently writing a chapter on Australian writing and addiction for an upcoming edition of the Routledge Companion to Australian Literature. www.peripheralarts.com.au

 Essay By Nycole Prowse

LANDscan self portrait - the Artist Nicole Voevodin-Cash