While speaking with Rhonda Stevens at Regardé Aqua‘s opening, she mentioned that the writer Colette, on her death bed, expressed the word “regardé,” that is “to look, to see” more deeply, to respect.
This solemn inspiration induces a disembodied, meditative silence. To enter death, to enter birth. Look closely, look and hold only into this one moment and you will see the sun in a dust mote, the temporality of a wave in a wellspring…
Commissioned for the North Australian Festival of Arts program, through the auspices of Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts in Townsville (where it is currently exhibited), Regardé Aqua is an emotive intimation that transcends our gaze through geologic time. The work formulates a gesture of origin and loss.
Stevens’ installation serves as a literal fountain. The sculpture, as if situated in a starlit cavern within the studio, hosts a reticulating pool of water – a natural font that bathes an obsidian rock. The imaginative expands. The shoulder-level arrangement, an arch formulated from boulders, surrounded in ink black walls, acts as a portal to sublimation and prayer. The installation, atmospheric and contained, brims with sacredness, revealing a profound spirituality.
This sanctity extends as a spiritual aura, a vibration that alters the gallery itself. This power heralds the traditions of art installation, but Stevens’ work moves beyond gallery spaces, expanding into one’s subconscious as a primal repose. This primordial quiet resonates with the human intimacy with nature, and water is experienced a source of nascent, cyclical awakening.
The scale and sheltered space of the blackened sculpture, appearing as if volcanic or charred limestone, evokes the sense of having been discovered at the edge of a cave. Primal. Alive. Connected – as those who were there, we who arrive, and in this contemplation are made whole.
Shade and sound echo as if observing a natural tomb or burial chamber. Or is this a gaze into the Magdalénien caves where a crevasse of water remains a vital source of life? Is this shimmering the sea’s interior? Home, which harbors its own memory, is like a secret, now recognized: as origin.
Mineral. Basalt. Coal. The flame is missing. No, the flame is distant. The angle of the ‘rocks’ quietly beckons yet eludes the viewer’s entry. Spare boulders adjacent to the centre arch, frame a secluded clearing.
This cromlech-essence, host to bubbling water, glimmering and mica-brushed, celebrates, replicates, and honours the otherworldly nature of the four classical elements: water, earth, air, and fire. This prima materia is a necessity for alchemical transmutation and life, straddling both ancient and contemporary dimensions.
Regardé Aqua excels beyond the flat black of Louise Nevelson’s sculptures, and the thick, organic mark-making of Antoni Tàpies. Stevens’ work offers a celestial softness. We’ve found the grotto where that dim and secular mystery is shared.
The Rothko Chapel comes to mind: ponderable, elysian. Or Isamu Noguchi’s Water Stone sculpture – meditative and spare, reminiscent of a zen garden. Stevens draws influence in her work from Japanese art and culture, including the concept of “Ichi-go Ichi-e” (for this time only), which magnifies the intensity of our impermanence.
The interconnection between humans and water, a fluid mirror, is amplified by Regardé Aqua, as a source of survival, but also underscores the transience of nature and of human interaction. This, our presence, our existence is a fleeting experience. What occurs now, with heightened awareness, is to be absorbed. In physics the “observer effect” changes the object being observed, Regardé Aqua, changes the observer.
Though the piece is three-dimensional, there is another dimension we cannot see, we cannot touch. It is sealed forever in that hidden cave or deep in the succulent, terrestrial strata. Imprints of carbon, charcoal, an afterspace. To “regard water,” we stop and rest inside a textural dark, a dreaming reverential gaze.
Rhonda Stevens’ Regardé Aqua is commissioned by Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts in partnership with the North Australian Festival of Arts.
Rhonda Stevens: Regardé Aqua
Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, 408 Flinders Street, Townsville
Exhibition continues to 27 October 2024
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.umbrella.org.au for details.
Image: Installation view of Regardé Aqua – photo by Margaret Wallen
Words: Maureen Alsop, PhD