ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Tane Andrews is an emerging Western Australian artist who has been included
in exhibitions locally and nationally since graduating from Curtin University of
Technology in 2007. In 2009 he held his first solo show at Kurb Gallery titled
Repetitive By Nature, which was followed by Stimulus: Response at Alda’s Gallery
and Project Space in 2010. Andrews’ was recently included in the group show
Infest, Gallery Central, Central Institute of Technology, Perth in 2011. His work is
held in the John Curtin Gallery Collection at Curtin University of Technology as well
as in various private collections.
Above: Insect Form 2 (36 hrs, 3mins, 23 secs) 2011, pencil, ink, watercolour on paper, 102 x 152 cm
Cover: Form 1 (23hrs, 3mins, 0secs) 2010, pencil, ink, watercolour on paper, 76 x 57 cm
Leaf: Form 2 (17hrs, 12mins, 9secs) 2010, pencil, ink, watercolour on paper, 76 x 57 cm
Inside: Insect Form 3 (21hrs, 37mins, 18secs) (detail) 2011, pencil, ink, watercolour on paper, 102 x 152 cm
All works are courtesy of the artist and Venn Gallery
G A L L E RY
Photography © Ross Wallace 2011
supported by
l A l 16 queen street perth WA l p l (08) 9321 8366 l W l venn.net l E l [email protected]
Nabokov applied the same level of fastidious observation to his prose, crafting some of the
most finely written novels in the English language. Is this eye for detail, this attentiveness to
beauty, characteristic of the lepidopterist? Certainly, it is a trait shared by Tane Andrews.
their images into ink. His close observation can be seen as a form of veneration, elevating and
ennobling the most delicate and transitory links in the great chain of being, organisms that are
typically beneath our notice.
In the artist’s studio the wings of butterflies and moths are neatly piled, each pair nestled in
its own small, tissue paper envelope. These feather-light, variegated skeins must be gently
handled; death has made them extraordinarily brittle. But nevertheless, Andrews keeps
them close at hand, as a source of inspiration. The intricate patterns of the natural world are
everywhere in Andrews’ work. Insect wings and flower petals proliferate, his lavishly produced
and finely detailed drawings are alive with beautifully realised organisms.
The abbreviated lifespan of Andrews’ subjects also brings into focus notions of mortality and
death, an underlying theme in much of his artistic output. In a previous body of work Andrews
depicted a series of lifeless moths, the tips of their wings singed by some unseen flame. This
allusion to the presence of a candle evoked associations with the vanitas paintings of the
Dutch Masters. However, where these artists would arrange a clutter of symbolic objects,
each alluding to the brevity and futility of life, Andrews substituted, with powerful concision,
a single, stark emblem. In this show, images of death are juxtaposed with those of birth and
life. His triptychs depict the rhythm of these organisms’ lifecycles. Every ending is answered
with a renewal. The seedpods that make their spiralling, leisurely descent to the gallery floor
are withered and dead, but have within them the promise of new life.
Each drawing in this show represents the work of many months; they are created by a
painstaking process of stippling, whereby the image is meticulously built up through the
application of thousands of tiny dots of ink. Using a pen nib as fine as a hair, Andrews’
works for five to twelve hours at a stretch; the process is meditative, almost, one imagines,
devotional. The gradual accretion of microscopic marks, thousands of pinpoints of black
ink, finally coalesces into the gossamer thin wing of a bee or the glossy black carapace of a
humble worker ant. The lightness of his touch seems to deny, though in whispers only, the
permanence of the ink.
Although executed with scientific precision, these works have none of the antiseptic coolness
of entomological illustration. Rather, they vibrate with life; the subtle engineering of a mandible
or the complicated fan-like folds of a wing are caught with an uncanny sense of frozen motion.
This evident fascination with the delicate mechanisms of the natural world is borne out in
Andrews’ kinetic sculptures. Echoing Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of
animal locomotion, Electronic Form 2 replicates the butterflies’ flutter, their iridescent wings
opening and closing in a synchronised simulation of flight. The vitrine in which they are housed
may evoke associations with stuffy natural history museums, but Andrews has enlivened the
austere, artificial stillness of taxidermied specimens with the ingenious novelty of Nineteenth
Century automatons. Meanwhile, secreted in the rafters, Electronic Form 1 sends desiccated
seedpods tumbling to the gallery floor, activating, with minimal intervention, the wonder of
nature’s design.
THE FUNERAL RITES OF THE ROSE
A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and
closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the
hindwing margins; [I] disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they
fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
It may not necessarily surprise you to learn that Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the controversial
novel Lolita, once earned his living by studying the minute intricacies of butterfly genitalia.
Driven out of Russia in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917, Nabokov eventually
settled in the United States, where he was employed by the Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology. There, he was responsible for the taxonomic classification of butterfly sub-species,
sorting the myriad variations of blues, coppers and hairstreaks, often distinguishable only
by subtle differences in the male’s complex, sculptural genitals. A skilled and passionate
lepidopterist, Nabokov would spend six hours a day, seven days a week peering through a
microscope; after six years of this work, his eyesight was permanently impaired. As an author,
These kinetic sculptures represent an organic evolution in Andrews’ art. Although his practice
remains rooted in drawing, he is constantly seeking to innovate. In this show he has introduced
a number of new techniques to his work. By embossing, cutting and curving the paper,
Andrews is attempting to disrupt the rigidly two-dimensional picture plane, using the paper in
a more sculptural sense. But this is never innovation purely for innovation’s sake, as each new
refinement harks back to the artist’s fascination with nature. For instance, though Andrews’
lightbox works may represent the greatest departure – marrying technical experimentation
with a shift toward pure abstraction – they still draw inspiration from the same source. By
overlapping sheets of laser-cut paper these pieces create a harmonious tessellation of light,
their geometric patterns and symmetry suggesting the dappled shadow cast by the wing of
a dragonfly.
Within Andrews’ work there is a reverence for the fleeting and the fragile. In this show, the
lifespan of his subjects – the mayflies and day lilies, the night blooming cereus – rarely exceeds
twenty-four to thirty-six hours; they exist for only a fraction of the time it takes to translate
Andrews’ technique of foregrounding these short lived organisms in order to prompt reflections
on mortality is reminiscent of the work of the English cavalier poets of the Seventeenth
Century. In the midst of the English Civil War, these writers would pen paeans to typically
inconsequential and overlooked forms of life, such as the flea, the grasshopper or the flower.
Poems such as Robert Herrick’s The Funeral Rites of the Rose were meditations on the brevity
of life and the imminence of death, often urging the reader to seize every moment and to
treasure the vibrancy of youth:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
Appropriately, ticking away beneath Andrews’ perpetually fluttering butterflies is a mechanism
not too dissimilar from the workings of a clock. Contemplating the various works in this show
can lead to a subtle shift in one’s conception of time. A single rotation of the earth, an all too
brief twenty-four hours, comes to represent an entire lifetime. It is all a matter of scale. Like a
single human breath, one small exhalation, caught forever in a piece of blown glass, the work
of Tane Andrews slows time, allowing us to better appreciate what is otherwise ephemeral
and invisible.
Andrew Purvis, 2011