serious play – scenes for an imagined theatre by Eleanor Zecchin / Flying Gardens by Jasmine Jones

Eleanor Zecchin

Since 2001 Eleanor has exhibited 10 solo exhibitions and contributed to 37 group shows across Australia. For over 10 years she has contributed to art education at Adelaide College of the Arts as a lecturer in visual arts, studio head of painting, and adjunct lecturer at Flinders University. Her work has been shown at GAG Projects (Greenaway Art Gallery), SA, Hill Smith Gallery, SA and James Makin Gallery, Vic. Most recently, she has engaged with a number of community spaces including Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre through the Centre for Creative Health and Newmarch Gallery, Payinthi Prospect. Her paintings have been included as finalist works in The Waterhouse Natural History Prize, the Heysen Prize for Landscape and the Tatiara Art Prize.

Eleanor recently launched her largest project to date, *1000 ways to rainbow*, in February 2021 at Newmarch Gallery. Over two years she made 1000 A6 watercolours, in which metaphorical readings of rainbows were used to explore the inexhaustible potential of watercolour in parallel with the discipline and pursuit of an optimistic mind.

Spielraum is a German word. ‘Spiel’ translates as play. But spielraum is a different concept, describing the idea of scope. It suggests that scope and its adjacent concepts of latitude, freedom and leeway are intrinsically linked to play.

As a set of possibilities spielraum evokes with clarity a state of autonomy. From this point experimentation – with things and ideas – is possible.

Spielraum could easily describe the artist’s studio, a space in which the artist engages in making through a process of experimentation with materials and ideas. To it she brings materials and tools: brushes and paper, canvas and clay, board and paints. She contends with their properties; from the porousness of paper to the absorbent surface of bisque fired clay. She works both quickly and slowly, alert to line, gestures and repetitions that develop and emerge from spills and splats like emergent life forms at the junction of the observed world and imagination.

The work requires attention to chance, a willingness to experiment and capitulation with happenstance. It anticipates nothing, other than the movement between action and observation. It’s a practice that takes practice. Maybe this is why it’s serious play. The discipline is the artist’s capacity to return to this space over again and re-engage in it: to step across the threshold of the studio and to encounter the material objects anew, reconfiguring relationships between maturing things and new thoughts.

Theories of play emphasise its role in developing language, social skills and imagination. Imagining anything involves forming a mental picture, one that draws on our memories and ability to form analogies and narratives. It is an action that primarily describes a relationship with our inner life – a psychic space that includes our fantasies and daydreams.

Imaginary fragments are the realm of fantasies and daydreams. They are also the foundation of narrative. We string imaginary fragments together and, over time and with work, these develop into scenes and sequences. Assembled together they constitute the form of a play.

We have arrived at the imaginary theatre.

The etymology of theatre is Greek; the term comes from theatron. It means the people in the theatre; a show, a spectacle, a place for viewing. It comes from theasthai: to behold, relating to thea: a view, seeing: a seat in the theatre.

In the theatre the play finds an audience. As such it is the realm of the social, a civic space where play and imagination are transformed into a public proposition. If the analogy carries – and I think it does – to the gallery and the visual arts, what do we behold?

In Eleanor Zecchin’s exhibition serious play - scenes for an imagined theatre the artist has brought together a constellation of objects. Taken individually and together they extend an invitation to viewers to experience the tremulous space of possibility. Candy striped umbilical cords and mutating cells. Bright biomorphic shapes and critters in states of adaptation and change. Blobs. Nascent organisms, transforming, at the juncture of becoming. Come, they urge us. Come play.

serious play – scenes for an imagined theatre
Anna Zagala

Anna Zagala is a curator at Samstag Museum of Art and creative director of sweetpolka. She lives and works on Kaurna land.

Eleanor Zecchin, climbing right through and into the view (detail), 2021, acrylic on clayboard, 12.7x17.8cm.

Jasmine-Jones-2021-Meow-Meow-acrylic-on-canvas-board-40.6-x-50.8cm-46A6568.jpg — Jasmine Jones

Jasmine Jones is an Adelaide-based visual artist who has been exhibiting since 2006. Over the past fifteen years, Jasmine has explored a variety of mediums and in her current practice predominantly works with paint pens and markers to produce rich, layered abstract works. Her work is bold and expressive; Jones lets herself be absorbed in each mark she is making. Jones has been involved in major South Australian festivals such as Adelaide Fringe and SALA. Jones’ extensive exhibiting history demonstrates her commitment as an artist and her love of creating art.

Flying Gardens presents a narrative of Jasmine Jones’ artistic career of nearly two decades. Filling the gallery in a riot of colour and texture, these works show the subtle changes and progression of Jasmine’s practice over the years. Using paints, markers, pencils and ink, Jasmine has created a mesmerising body of work across canvas and paper.

Jasmine works in an abstracted style, with the subject of her paintings often only revealed through their titles. Although Jasmine clearly draws inspiration from the world around her, she has explained that when deciding what to draw she does what’s ‘in my brain’, giving her work a raw honesty. There is no room for pretence in Jasmine’s work and her creations are directly related to her experiences and emotions at different points in time. To Jasmine, creating art is an everyday occurrence and says she enjoys ‘seeing the patterns’ when making her work.