Memory traces: Jacqueline Rose’s ‘Enigmagnetic’
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Jacqueline Rose’s recent series of drawings made for a subtle and beautiful viewing experience that responded to and set off the light-filled main room of the relatively new Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf in Warrang/Sydney. Continuing but also innovating on her long-held concerns with the possibilities of the abstract line, these works riff like improvised music or choreography, but are very much grounded in the physicality of their materials and processes.
Rose begins with neutral-coloured handmade papers, which she overlays with washes, brushstrokes or pencil, crayon and ink marks, open to how each medium yields or resists. This then becomes the substrate for collage, often comprising of coloured paper strips, a material that lends itself to playful improvisation while maintaining the sharp rigorous lines distinctive to the artist’s practice. The works’ apparent formal simplicity comes from a multitude of creative decisions that balance colour, line and texture, a layering that sometimes resembles stitching. Alive to rhythm and pause, the process manifests in subtly pulsating images whose energy flows through circuits, grids and cycles.
Scale also plays a part: Rose’s drawings are not large and were installed in such a way as to create the possibility for a more intimate exchange, gently angled on a long table at hand level as if inviting touch. They keyed into the memory traces still embedded in this unique space from its many years as a local library – one the artist remembers from her childhood – while the works’ soft organic palette dialogued with the glints of blue and green entering through the harbour-facing windows.
With a well-honed balance between meticulous mark-making and openness to process-driven change, Rose produces works conducive as much to meandering thoughts as to meditative stillness. Each drawing is a self-contained composition with its own rhythms and phrasings, but together they connected to keep the movement, of memory and sensation, open.
Jacqueline Millner, Warrang/Sydney
‘Jacqueline Rose: Enigmagnetic’ was displayed at the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf from 30 November 2022 until 8 January 2023.
