EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 7/6–13/7
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INTRODUCTION :
These works are the result of a genuine collaboration with the landscape. They are literally constructed from light, earth and flesh. I love this technique of lumachrome glass printing for its ability to make dead animals and birds seem alive again. It is light alone that manifests these colours and shapes - not paint or anything that can be completely controlled.
I have largely invented this process, which involves arranging clay, sticks, leaves, seeds, resin, ochres, etc, with road-killed animals or birds, on light-sensitised paper. Exposed 24 to 36 hours, while the sun arches east to west, fibre papers produce surprising arrays of colour. Over this I layer cliche-verre plates coated with resists of wax or paint, scratched with wire to create lines.
Sometimes I run electric currents over these plates to produce crystals in the ochre. For finer detail, I use chemigram variants, painting compounds like selenium or copper chloride directly onto feathers, scales or fur. I have called this Lumachrome glass printing because light produces colours in the emulsion (Lumachrome) and I use layered glass plates. The resultant enduring works are created from ephemeral images, continually decomposing, simultaneously exposing in light. I render them in archival pigments on paper, hand annotating them with gold/silver leaf, charcoal, graphite and other markers.
I have largely invented this process, which involves arranging clay, sticks, leaves, seeds, resin, ochres, etc, with road-killed animals or birds, on light-sensitised paper. Exposed 24 to 36 hours, while the sun arches east to west, fibre papers produce surprising arrays of colour. Over this I layer cliche-verre plates coated with resists of wax or paint, scratched with wire to create lines.
Sometimes I run electric currents over these plates to produce crystals in the ochre. For finer detail, I use chemigram variants, painting compounds like selenium or copper chloride directly onto feathers, scales or fur. I have called this Lumachrome glass printing because light produces colours in the emulsion (Lumachrome) and I use layered glass plates. The resultant enduring works are created from ephemeral images, continually decomposing, simultaneously exposing in light. I render them in archival pigments on paper, hand annotating them with gold/silver leaf, charcoal, graphite and other markers.
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My process is different, adaptive, for each print. If an animal is still bleeding, I paint this into the image during exposure. Ochres, seeds, sticks, and other materials, are sourced where the animal or bird was found. If maggots and flies appear, their tracks are incorporated into the work. When the print is complete, the creatures are respectfully buried.
This approach has arisen from my efforts to reconnect with Country and culture, after decades of tracing my family’s Indigenous roots. I am always trying to create a dialogue with land through my images and poems—by raising up the smallest of fallen creatures and bearing witness to their passing.
Judith Nagala Crispin, 2024
ONLINE CATALOGUE :
“I have no memory of waking. An awareness slowly formed in the dark — scratching acacia, the strum of powerlines in wind. There had been a voice.
I throw open the bedroom window, admit the calligraphic night. Saturn and Mars are spiders on the edge of black. The Milky Way, a curving string. Somewhere beyond sight, Cassini is dropping through Saturn’s rings like a jewel.
Judith.
Wake up.
I surface outside, the way someone drowning strikes upward toward a lit line of air. My feet sink in lawn, breeze tugs at my pyjamas.
Something is wrong with the sky.
Behind the house, black cypress pines should lift the mountain’s shoulder, in starwort and bitter pea, until fire trails tumble the leeslope down to the airforce base below. But tonight’s sky does not disapear behind the mountain. Stars fall to a flat line, a plataeu, spinifex grasslands thinning to clay. Wind-thrashed salt lakes, opaline as cataracts on the desert’s eye. And horizon to horizon, low ridges snake out like lines in the Martian dust.
I throw open the bedroom window, admit the calligraphic night. Saturn and Mars are spiders on the edge of black. The Milky Way, a curving string. Somewhere beyond sight, Cassini is dropping through Saturn’s rings like a jewel.
Judith.
Wake up.
I surface outside, the way someone drowning strikes upward toward a lit line of air. My feet sink in lawn, breeze tugs at my pyjamas.
Something is wrong with the sky.
Behind the house, black cypress pines should lift the mountain’s shoulder, in starwort and bitter pea, until fire trails tumble the leeslope down to the airforce base below. But tonight’s sky does not disapear behind the mountain. Stars fall to a flat line, a plataeu, spinifex grasslands thinning to clay. Wind-thrashed salt lakes, opaline as cataracts on the desert’s eye. And horizon to horizon, low ridges snake out like lines in the Martian dust.
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Along the skysill, mares’ tail clouds distort the constellations. Stars appear and vanish over sleeping creeks. A handspan in front of my face, the air is displaced. An owlet nightjar drops in blackness, open-beaked and quickened in the bones that hold her. She hisses and is gone — a flung shadow on the gulf of Magellan’s aerial lakes.
And I saw them then, low on the starfields — a night mirage. A noctilucent shape, dividing itself into figures. I count five, immense and dingo-headed, striding out in the direction of deserts. Purposeful as thunderheads, their bodies are wild and dark. Starry. They camouflage themselves against night’s shifting hollows. Constellations rise and set in their organs. Their arteries are zodiacal light. A satellite circles a thigh. And always
And always their anatomy morphs and shifts — sparking cells become galaxies become electricity, branching out into the sky like lightning.
A caravan of star mongrels walk a horizon that can’t exist. They vanish in cloud, reappear against the brightest falls of stars. A dream. A vision so strong the world breaks beside it.
I want to call out — but the half-formed word catches in my throat like a burr. How can I speak to Country in a language it can’t understand? In the tongue of slave ships, in this murderous tongue. After all these years, the miracle arrives on my front lawn, all burning hair electric, and finds me voiceless.
The vision is fading. Dawn returns the mountain, this yard with its hills hoist and mimosa. The caravan passes west with the first fingers of sun. They’ll be gone in seconds. In the last breath before waking, I saw one turn back its canine head, like acknowledgement.
It is morning. The dog sleeps on his snowman and yeti print blanket. Pedalling his legs, he chases dream brumbies. On the water tank, pied butcherbirds lift up their voices, gifting this fledgling day their cascading brilliance. Soon the daily news cycle, the ordinary pressures of email and work. But something is different. I am different.
Because I know they are out there, somewhere in the north-west. They will trigger floodlights in the mines and joint military facilities. They will withdraw, following starlines until the vanishing of roads. Where shale gives rise to bloodwoods, the great sentinels of desert. Starswarm of leaves and torsos thrumming with owls.
They withdraw to older places — speargrass and comets. The cordon will not hold. Bombing ranges tattoo strange geometries on the heat-fused clay. In the empty communities, nightjars surrender their hymns– in a time of weapons and of wind, in the last age of dingoes.”
Judith Nagala Crispin, 2024
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BIOGRAPHY :
Judith Nangala Crispin is an Australian visual artist, and award winning poet and a descendant of Bpangerang people of North East Victoria. Her skin name, Nangala, was given to her by the Warlpiri people of the remote Tanami Desert in northern Australia, a place she has lived for a few months each year for over a decade. Her work includes themes of displacement and identity loss, a reflection on her ancestry, but it is
primarily centred on the concept of connection with the land. This work forms a part of Crispin’s ongoing series depicting the transcendent ascending forms of recently deceased fauna. Crispin’s camera-less method of photography incorporates a range of processes. Her own developed alternative process of ‘lumachrome glass printing’, combines elements of lumen printing, cliché verre, chemical alchemy and drawing. She works within a mobile geodesic dome which functions as a giant lens where light streams penetrate its plastic walls. The mobility of her studio allows her to go to the site of her subject, prior to respectful burial. The muse, is raised onto a plastic box, rested on special photographic paper for up to 50 hours as the passage of sun and moonlight exposes its posthumous portrait. Each work is viewed as a collaboration with nature, where honouring the subject is a key objective. In each workork the animals are diaphanous where light has literally passed through their bodies. They appear drawn in a primitive motion by a slipstream of spirit, levitating in a space of brooding luminosity that appears sentient and wholly focused on the task of enfolding each creature back into its care. The result offers a profound sense of what lies beyond.
Crispin is a proud member of FNAWN (First Nations Australia Writing Network) and Oculi collective. She holds a Ph. D from the ANU and a Doctor of Arts from the University of Sydney and has published three books “Pillars of the Temple’ (Cambridge Scholars Press), ‘The Myrrh-Bearers’ (Puncher & Wattmann), and ‘The Lumen Seed’ (Daylight Books). Her verse novel ‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ was shortlisted for 2023 Arles Recontres Dummy Book Prize. Her recent prizes include the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry and the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize. A representation of Judith’s work ‘At season’s end, fireflies fill the ribbon barks, down by Shoalhaven river. Sunny, lost to traffic, waits all night for dawn, for waking fireflies, and weaves a new body from their glow’, will be deposited on the Moon in 2024, as part of NASA’s Lunar Codex.