"Whispers of the Vanishing" - Exploring Threatened Species in New South Wales, Australia
A wildflower bobbing in the breeze; the blur of a bird’s wing. Each work in this series has a singular identity, tied to a species in nature, yet each speaks the unmistakable language of Graziela Guardino – the tension between delicacy and strength, of material experimentation and minimalist restraint. Here we witness Guardino testing the boundaries: expanding the possibilities of her practice while retaining its essence.
Guardino’s work has long been concerned with the dualities of fragility and resistance. She has explored this through abstraction and materiality, transforming colour and form into evocations of emotion. These new pieces explore the balance between humans and the natural world. Environmental concerns have been an ongoing interest to Guardino in her first and second homes of Brazil and Australia. This body of work takes as its starting point the endangered and vulnerable species around Bundanon in the NSW Shoalhaven, where Guardino recently undertook a residency.
The threads that traverse these works span the interval between the organic and the human-made, representation and abstraction, construction and deconstruction, composition and decomposition. The landscape is expressed through the evolution of Guardino’s visual vocabulary – textiles crumple, colours intermingle, new forms emerge. The swooping weft fibres of Magenta Lilly Pilly are distinctly Guardino’s, while the tufty pile of velvet, the languid, un-reinforced edges and the handful of dangling lilly-pilly pom-poms are an unexpected invitation to sink into softness.
These works see the artist incorporate found textiles for the first time, as well as other new materials and forms – a flake of paperbark, the drape of gauze, a snaky tangle, the glint of golden beads. In nature, beyond the controlled laboratory of the studio, colours, tones and textures intermingle, creating their own harmonies. In Colour notation piece Guardino has woven a new textile, rather than unpicking an existing one. The colours of leaves, wood, flowers and seeds overlap. A suggestion of a Redwood Treethrough the combination of two found objects allows the materials to speak to the sensation of being in the landscape.
The plumage of the Diamond Firetail is evoked through the red tendrils of thread which spill out of the canvas and cascade spectacularly to the floor. The effect is onomatopoeic as a flame is lit within the frame and races down the wall. In Biconvex Paperbark, the wooden stretcher has been replaced with the rough bark form, leaving a trail of fibre tendrils behind it echoing its own form and colour. Black Cockatoo Male and Black Cockatoo Female have also shrugged off the stretcher. Their distressed, slumped forms embody vulnerability, while the introduction of a single-coloured thread is a subtle signal of radical departure for the artist.
The forms of Guardino’s artworks are often created in reverse, through painstaking deconstruction, with shadows as an important element – an inverted version of the world created through void and absence. In bringing these endangered and vulnerable species into the studio and the gallery, Guardino’s works are an act of recollection, preservation, and regeneration.
Chloé Wolifson -Writer/ Curator
