Beamers
CASPA, Castlemaine
2022
‘A beamer is a ray of sunlight. A beamer can range from soft orange morning illumination to more focussed blinding-white circles in the late afternoon. Beamer! is a catchprase you can exclaim to yourself and others when you notice the sunlight showing itself. A beamer is a fleeting manifestation of trust and anticipation, a glimmer of realisation dawning on you, the little door in the painting opening to a pathway after a long while of being shut. By the time these paintings reach you it’ll be spring… the sun will continue to shine on Earth for billions of years to come.’
Curated by Karl Halliday
Beamers marks the latest chapter in Tamara Marrington’s exploration in painting, presenting a new body of work that follows the Naarm-based artist as she wades further through the muddied waters that flow between the figurative and the formless.
The exhibition signals a turning point in Tamara’s practice. No longer referring to pre-existing images as source material, Beamers sees Tamara purge her paintings of scripted outcomes, choosing instead to brave the journey without a destination in mind. For Tamara, painting is a method of investigation, of “searching” and “following leads”, intuitively pursued in the hopes of discovering unexpected serendipities and synchronicities that supply shape and meaning to the work. With this gesture of creative liberation and self-conviction, the canvas becomes transformed into a tabula rasa of unknown potential to be excavated. The paintings, much like the show’s title, encourage this probing, patient means of observation, carrying with it the prospect of revelation as reward.
With Beamers, we are reminded that the word painting is as much a verb as it is a noun, each picture the product of a process, each brushstroke the record of a decision gleaned from doubt. Often in the paintings, abandoned artefacts of previous layers and discontinued threads are left visible, converting the static, fixed object into a living, breathing archive of its own becoming. It is within this restless space of movement, mutation, and mirage that Tamara channels her pictorial language, an ambiguous syntax of symbols and signs that appear to us as celestial bodies of fugitive forms, singing and flickering in some sublime cosmic dance. Drifting through this cosmic forest of infinite possibility, Beamers faithfully hands you the torch, the promise of illumination.
All that we see is light.
Tell me, what does it reveal?
Text by Karl Halliday
Install documentation: Karl Halliday
Painting documentation: Lucy Foster