Audrey Tulimiero Welch: Songlines

Reception | Saturday, June 4, 2022 |  4–6 pm

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Audrey Tulimiero Welch titled Songlines.

Artist Audrey Tulimiero Welch had the opportunity to live in Western Australia with her family from 2011 to 2016. It was during those five years that she first learned about the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over the country and are known to the Indigenous people there as "songlines." During a walkabout—a ritual journey—the name of every plant, rock, and waterhole is sung out. As art critic Richard Speer says, in his essay on Welch's exhibition, with their songlines they have for millennia "melded music, navigation, and cosmology, singing the very world into being.” Even more interesting to Welch, and relevant to her art practice, is the implication that a songline is both a map and wayfinder. For the Indigenous Australians, according to travel writer Bruce Chatwin, land is not hemmed in by frontiers but rather is conceived as "an interlocking network of lines or way through; all their words for 'country' are the same as their words for 'line.'"

As Welch's fascination with songlines grew, it affirmed and enriched her instinctual use of line as a crucial construct in her own work. The paintings can be read as her own metaphoric maps that contain, in their embedded layers, personal stories and lived relationships of her own daily life. They express the human impulse throughout history to seek home. The work uses line and gesture to lead the viewer to locations that are both familiar and unknown. Welch, in her paintings, also continues exploring her long-standing visual curiosity around diagrams and structures found in multiple sources including maps, the branch systems of trees, street signage, and nautical flags. Significantly, the new work is her attempt to push through the certainty of the diagram and mapped lines, and move into the more uncharted and improvisational. As a counterbalance to the weight and heaviness of our current times, Welch has chosen to work with a palette that speaks to a certain lightness and buoyancy.

Welch layers paint, gestural drawings, taped lines, and plaster on canvas and then subsequently cuts away and excavates these materials. This back and forth process creates a cadence, rhythmically similar to walking a trek in search of refuge. Line in her work performs acts as a wayfinder and roadway, charting pathways for the viewer to enter pictorial space. The plaster serves as a skin that overlays and conceals underlying brush marks. At the end of her process comes the thrill of digging through the plaster, tape, and paint. Ultimately, the painting’s surface conveys a sense of dispersion and displacement, of losing and finding one’s way across unknown territories.

"The best work arises when I can step aside and allow the unexpected guest to arrive at my door," says Welch. "That is one reason why I am attracted to abstraction. As a painter, I embrace this duality: seeking certainty and clarity, yet simultaneously welcoming improvisation. And related to improvisation is the concept of song. By singing the world into existence the Indigenous Australians are poets, a walkabout was a type of ritual journey. In my Songlines exhibition, I respond to and explore these rich themes with paint, line, and color."

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