Joshua Yeldham: Endurance

Joshua Yeldham’s new collection ‘Endurance’ nurtures a space where boundaries collapse and binaries converge. Through his highly symbolic visual vernacular, the artist takes us on an inward odyssey inspired by recent travels throughout Japan, Arizona and India, as well as his ongoing affiliation with Australia’s Ku-ring-gai and Hawkesbury regions. Working across painting, kinetic and musical sculpture, carved works on paper and photography, Yeldham explores the shared threads that weave cultural ideologies, philosophies and religions across East and West.

For the artist, ‘Endurance’ is about ‘going beyond’; about breaching the borders of personal limitation. ‘The parameters placed on our lives are porous, and with creativity you can challenge your perceived limitations’, he says. Embellished with signature tapestries of cartographic carvings, organic pigments and hand-made instruments, Yeldham’s works conjure a creative sphere where past, present and future collapse into one, allowing the artist to become, in his own words, ‘transient’. He explains, ‘In my work, I can go back through thousands of marks and pull up a symmetry that I had practiced years ago, and then I can move into a new space I’ve not seen before – this is really the genesis of being transient’.

Inspired by his travels in India, he assimilates Vedic philosophies about the cyclicality of existence embodied in the Sanskrit word Samsara. Yeldham analogises the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction inherent to Hindu mythology as a snake shedding its skin, weaving his works with powerful serpentine imagery. In Snake boy, figure and snake coalesce as the artist draws on an idiom he came across in India: ‘learn to live with the snake in the corner of the room’. This allegory of taming one’s fears and coexisting with creation and destruction is continued in Brothers – a painting inspired by an Indian miniature from Rajasthan. Wrestling in a midnight cosmos, the interlocked brothers represent the Creator and the Destroyer, and in their movement hatches a life force. Emanating from the figural mass is a constellation of cane sticks, a motif often used by Yeldham to represent mangroves yet here it becomes astral. It is as if, at any moment, the forms might transmogrify or disperse into the cosmic void. Poised between struggle and embrace, the brothers enact a language of love as Yeldham reveals how within opposition there is intimacy; within destruction there is creation.

The exhibition also guides us through Japan as Yeldham harnesses the philosophical and pedagogical tenets of Kyudo, the Japanese art of archery. He mediates on the cognitive state called zanshin – the period after an arrow is released when the archer continues to hold her position in a state of total awareness. In the painting The archer’s bow, the arrow is a trope for transience, a pointed vector aimed off the picture plane that symbolically allows the artist/archer to draw from the past and shoot into the future. For the artist, archery represents a process of reactivating the redundant into something powerful and meaningful; just as a stick on the forest floor can be left to decay or transformed into a bow, so too the artist activates his material with conscious thought. This idea of curving destruction back into creation is allegorised in the work as the once-feared snake becomes the protagonist’s ally, signifying the importance of surrendering oneself to destructive forces so that a new skin can be born. In another Japan-inspired work, Owl of Yeoman’s Bay – blue moon, the motif of an owl characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre represents the power of perception. With binocular vision and binaural hearing, the owl interprets the world from different perspectives to effectively hunt – much like the archer shooting his target. Rendered in indigos recalling Edo Period ceramics, Yeldham’s owl is both agent and instrument, ready to be played by the viewer whilst also poised to strike its prey.

Traversing the native terrain of Arizona, ‘Endurance’ assimilates Hopi cosmology, which tells of spirits called katsinas who bring rain and represent the natural world. Yeldham channels this tradition into his ‘rainmakers’ – kinetic assemblages to be moved by the viewer in symbolic communion with nature. In his work Cedar rain maker – Arizona, an Australian red cedar slab sits atop a photo of an old western cedar tree in Arizona, its body etched with dots and lines like nets to catch thoughts. A turning apparatus, carved with the forces of fire, water, ether, earth, sky, spins to create a united image – the cycle of life. The artist reflects, ‘the quicker you spin creation and destruction, you no longer see them as binaries but as one’. In another kinetic work, Young girl who could make rain, Yeldham casts his daughter as a kachinainspired rainmaker, where the harmonic forces of nature spin to spawn a symbolic lightning bolt of rain that reverberates in the slow ring of the bell.

The works in ‘Endurance’ ultimately represent a coalescence of local and global; personal and collective; history and contemporaneity. Voyaging through Yeldham’s existential vignettes, we become passengers privy to the artist’s inner world.

Elli Walsh