The Wall

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This 8 minute film, of almost Lutheran silence, is of time suspended on the continental edge. It is absence of thought against a sound-mirror of sea water. It may be read as a manifesto of sorts, a liminal pause between the laying down of things past, and the readying for creative journeys ahead. Here, all things are ethereal, given form only by slices of arctic light and the circular echo of water on stone, while the contrasting solidity of the harbour wall cuts blackly through a space that transforms from sea to sky as the world tilts.

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The story of art in Norway is grounded in both naturalistic and symbolic, even visionary interpretations. Echoed, quite subliminally, in Tregoning’s film are traces of Harald Sohlberg’s Winter Night in the Mountains (1914), with its silent, sublime expression of the Norwegian landscape, or more closely Fisherman’s Cottage (1906), where human presence in the commanding seascape between forest and mountain is implied only by a hint of candlelight from within the house. In 19th and early 20th century Scandinavian art the unattended candle, or the gossamer drape of fabric across an opened window, are symbols for an unseen human presence; the objects of ritual domesticity, and the crisp sounds implied by their arrangement and use, stand for a life lived with purpose and quiet simplicity.

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Tregoning’s Liminal series of monotypes bear out this spare and considered sense of existence on the edge. In a further mirroring of ritual, repetition and refinement, ever more fragmented and ghostlike images have emerged from the monoprinting process. In The Wall, flickering threads of cool light, salt bleached wood and the ice blues, whites and greys of sky, cloud and pebble mirror the unmistakable and soul-stilling palette of art made in the Northern hemisphere, in a culture where silence is understood as a spiritual discipline. In the stillness the artwork itself acts as witness, as an impartial imprint on the retina of the space between self and horizon. The outside and inside are separate, yet one. The sea wall protects, while bonding together the shifting planes of visual space. Ideas of aloneness, exposure, protection and safety are finely balanced within a cut-glass landscape of light, surface and sound.

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Aloneness, exposure, protection, safety, all questions of 21st century existence in the real world, a world away from suspended time and absence of thought. If the artist’s role is to present and frame the existential, to make material the poetics of being, of belonging, of our fleeting and privileged moments of sensory experience here in the universe, all they need communicate is the perceiving entity, the wide world, and the ringing of birdcall on a silver surface.