Blue Skies Moody Blues
by Sebastian Goldspink
Catalogue text, The Lock Up, Newcastle
February 2020

‘These are uncertain times’ is a common refrain in moments of chaos and upheaval. In the recent and continuing bushfire disaster that has gripped Australia, the idea of uncertainty has come to the fore. An uneasy uncertainty based on the very real possibility that we are seeing a fundamental change in our planet. That this is not an isolated incident like Cyclone Tracey, the weather event that decimated Darwin in 1974, but rather that this uncertainty has morphed into the constant. That our future will be beset by these changes, defined.

Personal uncertainty is a strange phenomenon - it comes in waves in life and hopefully abates but always returns. We as humans, as thinkers oscillate between this state and states of carefree abandonment. Our lives have been defined by these movements yet our memories have the ability to seemingly, partially wipe the slate clean only to have the pangs of anxiety flow back to us in crisis.

This exhibition seeks to find a state of calm amidst this chaos and static of contemporary life. Artist Lucas Davidson draws on his memories of childhood, growing up on the Central Coast of NSW and visits to Newcastle and his early memories of this site serving a seemingly oppositional purpose to its current use as a place of beauty and creativity.

He recalls a simple life revolving around the lakes and beaches of his home and the ever-present blue sky. An Australian sky, stark and stretching across the seemingly endless vista of the land. He remembers the simplicity, he remembers the Lock Up space in its former guise. But above all, literally above all, he remembers the sky.

This exhibition features three key works that cross over each other in subject and form. They could be read as one or as three distinct changing meditations on a theme. The work Living with Uncertainty, which shares its name with the title of the exhibition, reflects concerns and areas of interest common to all three installations. A series of blue acrylic panels hang from the ceiling. They are in the shade of Translucent Blue Number 300 a type of acrylic colouring that resembles the soft blue tones of the sky. They are reflective of the environment but also the viewer. They challenge the viewer to look around their surroundings but also look inward. The blue is not a dark blue, a moody blue, it is the blue of the limitless expanse of the sky and the soul. It is that point that the blue of water merges into the blue of the sky, seamlessly blending across a hazy threshold.

A small video work As Time Parts occupies an altogether different threshold that is immediately identifiable as a space concurrent with the galleries former use. The work was created by filming a white wall soaked with the blue ‘dead screen’ light of a video projector projecting no content, through the suspended shards of the kinetic work Living with Uncertainty. The footage is flipped, moving the flowing panels of the installation from vertical to horizontal. Moving its aspect into the orientation of landscape, technically and figuratively.

The final work, In Search of Solitude rekindles elements of both the aforementioned works. The acrylic reappears but is layered on top of itself at points creating a change in the blue, a blue that at times approaches the dark and the moody but then gives way to clear skies. Analogous to the initial idea of these notes around the pulsating return of uncertainty in everyday lives. It reaches back to the video and its bars and reflects the built environment on which it sits. Above it bars or lines that appear horizontal and vertical depending on your viewing point. Above those, a sky. This work leads the viewer along a path to an end point that could resemble a diving board or a plank. A point where the floor gives way to suspension. To the unknown. The work functioning as a linear proto-graph for a life coloured by changes in tone that leads to a point that unites us all. A point of closure that for all of us in undefined.

The only certainty that we as people share is that of uncertainty. How we react to this most fundamental of human conditions defines us. Our ability to see beauty beyond it is what ultimately sustains us.