Michael Schlitz - light memory dark ground
Since 2004, Michael Schlitz has lived in the Huon Valley in Tasmania, on a hill property
surrounded by trees. Embedding his life and work in the natural environment, Schlitz’s
knowledge of its rhythms and systems has informed the thematic tributaries of his work - the
layered metaphors of landscape, land, nature, environment, our processes of observation
and gesture, and the bonds between the forces of the natural world and our emotional lives.
To date, much of Schlitz’s work has taken the form of woodcut prints upon which he has
developed his reputation as one of Australia’s finest printmakers. His prints are renowned for
their bold black and white contrasts, their poetic visions of the human figure metamorphosing
through various forms of tree, stump, field, forest, and fine contours of sound, line and wave.
In ‘light memory dark ground’, a commissioned solo exhibition for Contemporary Art Tasmania,
Schlitz abandons his usual medium of relief prints on paper, offering instead an exhibition of
light, wall mounted woodblocks and sculptural assemblage. Drawing on the principles and
techniques of printmaking and assemblage, Schlitz’s installation is a mixture of figurative and
formal elements – two large woodcut figures at each end of the gallery, a large branch-like
form suspended in the centre of the space, and a field of delicate woodcut glyphs filling the
main wall. Throwing UV light into a darkened gallery, Schlitz creates an illuminated scene of
‘light prints’ as black light reacts with luminous paint in the carved grooves of the woodcuts
and on the branching form. In a slow cycle of illumination that brightens and dims over six
minutes, images emerge from the dark ground of the woodblock and surrounding walls,
glowing momentarily as ‘light memory’ before fading into darkness and the cycle begins again.
The overall effect is one of a living, breathing theatre of signs where our knowledge of the
natural world is thrown into relief against a backdrop of imaginary beings.
As the exhibition title suggests, Schlitz’s installation is structured through a set of poetic
hybrids and contrasting elements. The tonal arena of light and dark sets the scene for the
interplay between the carved, illuminated lines and the shifting ground of positive and
negative space. Hovering between the immaterial world of light and memory, and the
material world of paint and wood, the works evoke something of a dreamscape, a space
where subtle processes of exchange and synthesis take place. The combination of darkness
and the inscriptive nature of the glyphs and figures, creates a cave-like space through which
Schlitz makes subtle references to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s text, the philosopher
Socrates compares human beings untutored in his Theory of Forms, to prisoners in a cave. For
their whole lives, the prisoners live facing the cave wall, watching only the shadows of objects
moved against firelight by puppeteers above them. The shadows are the only known reality
for the prisoners – they are the ignorant in Plato’s allegory, knowing and believing only the
phantasmagoria before them. Only the philosopher escapes the prison of the cave, and thus
learns to discern the shadows from the real objects.
In Schlitz’s cave, we find this play between the shadow and the object, the illusory sense of
the phantasm floating in darkness set against the material reality of the woodblocks and
branching form. His human figures belong to the realms of myth and belief, embodying the
dualities of light and dark, the visible and invisible worlds. Consoling in their presence, their
large scale imparts a sense of landscape - emotional, gestural, human - suggesting different
levels of affect through their hand gestures and facial expressions. Loosely based on the
Japanese sun goddess Amateratsu, the powerful female figure gestures towards the source
of light, her centred stance and direct gaze recalling the sun as the power that illuminates
the visible world, the nature of reality and knowledge. On the opposite wall, the male figure
evokes a less certain world, his self-protective stance and anxious gaze reminding us that with
the sun comes shadows. With shaded brow, he seems to bear witness to the unknown future
or glimpse the ignorance of those around him, before retreating to the underground - a dark
mirage, a vibration.
The language Schlitz crafts is not one of pure surfaces or logical order, but of poetic
exchanges between singular and multiple forms, symbols and their possible meanings.
Alongside the singularity of the figures, his field of symbols suggests a language of sorts, a
set of glyphs - literally ‘carvings’ - each a unique sign within a multitude. There is a lightness
to Schlitz’s field, like a muttering of thoughts they recall Paul Klee’s abstract symbols in
a landscape, suggesting many things from stems and filaments, agricultural symbols and
tools, ancient hieroglyphs and notations, the combined effect evoking both evolution and
knowledge. Natural history tells us that the process of reproduction is not one of perfect
repetitions, but similarities, each form its own unique print within a continuum, a lineage. As a
printmaker, Schlitz knows this too – each print from the same block resembles the last but is
unique with its own shadows and lines. In Schlitz’s field, each individual symbol seems to hold
the memory of the last and foretell the next – the seed becomes the seedling, the seedling
becomes the tree, the tree becomes the forest, the forest returns to seed – evoking the cycle
of a naturally evolving system. Such a process suggests the workings of a living knowledge
born of Schlitz’s direct observation of living forms and his abiding awareness of nature’s interrelatedness, a kind of bio-mnemonics based on the interplay of memory and form.
This sense of lineage and connectedness is echoed in the branching form at the centre of
the installation. Constructed by Schlitz’s own hand and drill, the branch is comprised of
sticks and twigs of several different species of tree gathered from his property. Through a
meticulous process of bifurcating and inserting twigs within twigs, Schlitz’s branch suggests
the assimilation of differences into a singular form, an ideal of wholeness within the biological
order and connection to a sense of place. On another level however, the branch is profoundly
disconnected, appearing in the unnatural glow as though made of bones, a ghostly canopy of
bleached remains suspended and out of place. Above the dark ground of the gallery, it hovers
uneasily like a giant network of capillaries without an organ, or a root system, unearthed.
Schlitz’s branch is a harsher phantasm than we find in his figures - a spectral memory of trees,
an etched antenna searching for earth, or perhaps more lyrically, a dream of synthesis amidst
the shadows. Through the unsettling combination of ethereal light and real material elements,
Schlitz offers a view of a natural system set adrift, a hybrid sign of a lost environment and our
desire to reconnect.
In ‘light memory dark ground’ Schlitz takes us to the space of the cave to glimpse the
workings of a hidden knowledge and to explore the mythic realms of the natural world and
our relationship to it. Beyond what we can see and observe of nature, Schlitz suggests there
lies a landscape that we can only perceive in certain lights, where knowledge may emerge as
something felt within us like a memory, a trace or a dream. In the shifting fields of darkness
and illumination, we can sense the workings of an artist practicing the art of memory in its
most traditional sense – forging new schemas from space and light and reorganizing the
relationships between images to recall and connect us to the natural world as we exist within
it, and it exists within us.
Eliza Burke, 2017
All images: Michael Schlitz, light memory dark ground, 2017, an installation comprised
of various timber twigs from Tasmanian species, carved plywood, glow-in-the-dark
paint, acrylic paint and ultraviolet light. Photo: Lou Conboy
Michael Schlitz is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart; Grahame Galleries, Brisbane, and
Beaver Galleries in Canberra.