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The Forest for the Trees...
For over 15 years the Bett Gallery’s annual PLATFORM series has introduced audiences to the work of early-career artists living and working in Lutruwita Tasmania. The Gallery’s work cannot be underestimated, as lineages of culture emerge and influence one another, throughout the institution’s lifetime. The scale and effect of this can be at times, unimaginable.
In the works of Lili Montefiore, Helen Goninon and Deborah Leisser, introduced through PLATFORM 2025, this imaginability of scale might lead our inquiry. We do not mean the physical scale of the works themselves, rather the concept of scale as a threshold, as a collection of observational experiences set in relation to one another; a series of mereological shifts that take us a/part and push us together. Montefiore, Goninon and Leisser invite us beyond the point-of-view to a space between memory, experience and knowledge where significant shifts in observation destabilise our I’s. Scale, beyond measurement, celebrates and dissolves distinction through networks of familiarity, through abstraction and connection and perhaps in the case of these works, through a kind of ultimately inclusive permeability.
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LILI MONTEFIORE
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Lili Montefiore
Harbour, 2025acrylic on board
70 x 60cm (board size)AU$ 3,500.00 -
From Lake Macquarie—made eerily warm by the nearby powerplant where visiting sea turtles somersault in a false tropics—to Tasmania’s Southern Ocean that sparkles like something that is always new, Montefiore makes refractions, reflections and relations—infinitely complex in pigments and droplets—shimmer as a single body. The works are as entirely familiar to Tasmania’s audiences as tree is to forest,and yet they are as entirely incomprehensible for the detail in every stroke. As a single drop of saltwater is lost in Montefiore’s tide, islandness is inverted by invitation of water as a net/work of connections. The scale of the sea moves us, always in two directions, rising with the urgency of the present and receding to a childhood on the lake.
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Lili Montefiore
Dodges Ferry Boat Sheds , 2025acrylic on board
diptych: 51 x 81 cm (overall size)AU$ 3,000.00 -
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HELEN GONINON
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As Montefiore’s water holds us together in a confabulation of cellular memory, we witness Goninon’s gentle breaking apart of our measured bodies. Her drawings make us permeable, through thousands of dermic tributaries, to the rising tides of cold sweats and tears. What enters and is given in our seepings and spillings when the body is beaten by the pathogens of which it is made? The scale of anthropocentric superiority, our destructive triumph is sketched masterfully away. The pristine isolation of the clean white paper lays bare the pathologized figure, invaded by the invisible. Sterility is flooded by an excess of life; feverish and exhausted beneath plastic that folds along the lines of the crumpled figure, its suffocating exclusion hardly a protective sheath. At the pathogenic scale the body is no longer discreet, it is lost to teeming multitudes of bodies, unmappable as if made of exhalation.
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Helen GoninonExposure, 2024graphite on paper, framed76 x 112 cm (paper size)Sold
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DEBORAH LEISSER
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This unmappability also shapes Leisser’s subtly cartographic inquiries. We find ourselves at yet another border / corner / threshold / crossroad that is similarly, unevenly permeable. Familiarity with architectural forms and features is destabilised through shifting viewpoints, softening of scale, and the deepening of shadow. Leisser’s scapes are heavy with the weight of un-inhabitance, implied but not guaranteed by an ambiguity of scale. There is a vastness to the most reduced and intimate line and it is unknown if the forest or the trees here have been cleared. Perhaps it is only our distance, or the darkness before dawn, that has exhumed each site of the evidence of coexistence?
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The Forest for the Trees...
When we cannot see the forest for the trees we are lost between the one and the many. The scale of lostness is cosmic and it is here that we are perhaps at our most intimately connected with our milieu. The bodies of work exhibited for PLATFORM 2025 are as singular as they are universal. As we witness here rising sea levels, traces of a global pandemic and the privatisation of the planet, we also see ourselves together. Vulnerable to the infinitude of scale, we share the sunlight that catches in the ocean, the softening of our bodies that crave care, and the land that unfolds around us with its myriad possibilities.
