LYNNE ROBERTS-GOODWIN: BEYOND THIS POINT
@ Kronenberg Mais Wright, October 2020
In the 1780s, the Lucchese daredevil balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi, traversed the skies over the British Isles, Italy, Spain and Portugal, famously accompanied on one journey by a pigeon, cat and dog. Renowned for his antics as a pioneering aeronaut, he was equally infamous for many navigational disasters in his hydrogen flying machine. Intrigued by Lunardi’s aeronautical ventures, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin took to the “unknown realm of the atmosphere” in an air balloon to follow sections of Lunardi’s flights along the latitude of 37° North.[1] Commencing in Lunardi’s Italian birthplace of Lucca, Roberts-Goodwin travelled along various historical routes to the Convent of the Friars Minor Capuchin, in Sintra Portugal, the site of Lunardi’s demise in 1806.
A vertical notion of airspace, particularly in terms of navigational failures, has long occupied Roberts-Goodwin in her renditions of geopolitically contested sites across the globe. BEYOND THIS POINT extends this research with navigational satellite images, photographs, and traces of topographical terrain as a way to reflect on spatial ambiguity, navigational complexity, and the vertical notion of aerial terrain. Embracing multiple levels of vertical space from the ground to the atmosphere the photographic series ‘everything remains’ reveals the tension between orientation and disorientation, between knowing one’s location and being lost to the spatial temporalities of flight. The diaphanous lungs of the air balloons engulf the surface of ‘everything remains’ as if in the act of inhaling and exhaling, their corpulent volume billowing in the effort to soar. Indeed, the red fabric of one balloon seems almost volatile in its capacious hold on space with its luminous surface and volume, bearing a striking contrast to the sensual folds and creases in the depth of the image. A disorienting sense of vertigo pervades the senses here as visual perception slips in and out of register.
Airspace over cities is increasingly capitalised and regulated making an aeronautical endeavour over cities such as Rome impossible to navigate. So, in addition to her own adventurous air journeys, Roberts-Goodwin worked with a German company to obtain satellite images over specific locations along the path Vincenzo took as a failed aeronaut. These black-and-white images of ‘the north parallel’, in both positive and negative, trace the flow of air across the atmosphere, the cloud formations denoting a sense of anywhere and nowhere. These elusive images, captured by a machine situated in space, are nevertheless renditions of the earth and the air above from a view none of us will physically see. Such is the nature of scientific imagery that is used to measure our planet, weather systems, land erosion, and global conflict. And yet, these images are strangely corporeal in the visualisation of the earth’s lungs and the physical surface of its global form; they seem both familiar and strange. Our capacity to interpret such images highlights Jonathan Crary’s claim that the sudden emergence of subjective vision in the nineteenth century “grounded the truth of vision in the density and materiality of the body.”[2] One of the consequences of this shift, as Crary puts it, is that vision “became dependent on the contingent physiological makeup of the observer, thus rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and even, it was argued, arbitrary.” Such is the nature of vision, as is the nature of navigation, subject to both science and human frailty.
The concept of seeing from a distance—from either a celestial or terrestrial perspective—is continued in two further bodies of work. In ‘37 Parallel North’ we encounter the sublime vision of mountains of salt shimmering under the warm blue tones of an open sky. Captured at a distance, such industrialised salt evaporation ponds have been an inextricable part of the global terrain for centuries, and this site occupies a tectonic depression fed by ground and rainwater. The salt here shimmers from the sun’s reflective rays as it highlights the surface and seems to hold the flowing traces of the waters within its molecules. In one image, the ebb and flow of the salt landscape, forms waves of sumptuous creases and folds across its form mnemonically referencing the billowing qualities of the air balloon’s fabric. Roberts-Goodwin has grounded these salt mountains quite literally in the photographs, the horizon line pressed into the edge of the picture field compressing our view and enhancing the claustrophobic tension between the land and the sky. Similarly, in Terrain seen here in both photographic and sculptural form, the terrestrial surroundings of the salt lake have been mapped and rendered in multiple dimensions. Optical perception is put under pressure in these renditions of a site which is both somewhere and nowhere, and where notions of distance, near and far are contested.
In BEYOND THIS POINT Roberts-Goodwin takes us on a perceptual journey to hidden topographies that are subject to being contested, industrialised, regulated, and capitalised. By following the route taken by Lunardi in the 1700s Roberts-Goodwin reveals glimpses of celestial, geographical and terrestrial views that are subject to the slow and fast time of geological and geo-political shifts.
Donna West Brett, Sydney.
[1] Inaugural Affiliated Mordant Family Artist-in-Residence Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts.
[2] Jonathan Crary, “Unbinding Vision,” October 68 (1994): 21–44.