ARCHIVES, ABSTRACTIONS AND Anna Higgins ARTIST SPOTLIGHT Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 2013, Anna Higgins has been exploring the expanded potential of photography to create images that blur the line between abstra- ction and figuration, fiction and fact. Acquired by the NGV in 2019, Flower arrangement , 2018, and Rose in the dark , 2018, are highly abstracted images, with recognisable features of flowers and hands. Often incorporating found imagery, Higgins ‘works’ her images extensively through methods of collage, digital distortion, painting and other analogue effects. As Higgins says, each image is: ...a combination of digital and analogue processes, involving painting on top of scanned crops of larger found photo- graphs. The works form out of extensive studio experimenta- tion, however the final process is reshooting the collages on film, giving the work its soft grainy feel. I am very much interested in things sitting on the line between figuration and abstraction, especially when viewed in person, they fluctuate based on how close you stand to them and the eye finds it difficult to rest.’ Australian artist Anna Higgins, in conversation with NGV curator Maggie Finch, speaks about her work, notions of memory and nostalgia, the still life tradition and the influence of particular works from the NGV Collection on her practice. BY MAGGIE FINCH (left) Anna Higgins Flower arrangement 2018 (detail) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019 © Anna Higgins (above) Allen G. Gray Summer holiday (1960s) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1971 © The artist (p. 33 top) Luigi Schiavonetti (etcher) William Blake (draughtsman) The Soul hovering over the Body (c. 1805–1808) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1954 (p. 34 bottom) Rosslynd Piggott Italy 1988 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 © Rosslynd Piggott 31 NGV MAGAZINE ISSUE 35 Higgins made the works in 2018 in London, where she has been living since 2017, and is currently a student of the postgraduate program at the Royal Academy Schools. I asked her about the ideas behind, and origin of, the images, while living far away from home, and the role that memory has played in the making of the works. She explains: It was the first body of work where I was primarily focusing on the idea of emotional and visual phenomenological states. The origins were quite simple really – I was looking on Instagram actually, in the middle of British winter, at all these Australians during their summertime, on the beach or by the river ... and I was thinking about the emotional state of looking from afar, which has a kind of beauty and nostalgia but a highly distanced version of that ... like a mediated version of beauty. Rather than homesickness, it was a feeling of beautiful melancholy. I became quite interested in how you can convey something with a complex emotional life within a work that’s not a pure expression of one thing or the other. The title of the series, Faraway Beach , for example, references a Brian Eno song that I was listening to at the time and the pleasurable dissonance I felt in the joyful but sad qualities of the music. So instead of having particular rational or conceptual reasons for choosing the images I focused more on how you can see the world through a particular emotional or psychic lens. That was the origin of the series: looking at the aesthetics of nostalgia and aesthetics of mediated beauty. Another key thing I was thinking about was erasure, and how removing information and cropping in evokes something in the mind, or creates specific visual associations, or conjures something in a poetic sense as well. Indeed, when looking at the works, it is difficult to ‘read’ a narrative, or understand a sense of depth or perspective. Layered imagery transitions between photographic and painterly states – which swirl and push and pull in and out of the images. They are, ultimately, evocative, and indeterminate. Higgins chose to use the imagery of flowers as they are highly symbolic forms that allow for multiple readings and emotional, often poetic, responses. She has also drawn on the complex histories of the ‘still life’ tradition in art history, such as the traditions of Netherlandish paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their depictions of natural and organic forms, as a way of exploring ideas around the tension between photography and painting and the inherently fraught attempt to ‘freeze’ objects, images or time. Higgins says: Flowers can represent celebration, mourning, spring, they can represent death, they can be all these different things and how they are treated can create a different evocation. Another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the idea and value of beauty and I think there is something unknowable in beauty, inherently. I’m also interested in a kind of internal logic in my work – I don’t want them to feel like they are just a random collage, I want them to feel like they are placed ‘just so’, but that the internal logic is not quite accessible. Similarly, the interest in ‘still life’ as a genre, in my understanding, is that historically it was this idea of some- thing that was preserved and, through painting, something that was going to decay instead stays fixed. In Flower arrangement , 2018, and Rose in the dark , 2018, I incorpo- rated images of hovering brushstrokes and blurred moving hands into the images among the flowers as an intentional ‘trigger’ – a visual clue that the images are derived from real world moments, rather than tableaux ... and in that way there’s almost a play on the idea of the ‘still life’ because the images are not very still; that slight sense of movement is essential. The idea of movement and bringing contrasting things together, and conflating time periods and memories in these photographic collages, also derives in large part from Higgins’s experiences of working as an art handler at the NGV between 2013 and 2016. The ability to observe the Collection, at close hand, during that time had a profound effect: One of the things which had a really big impact on me is the way that the NGV Collection spans from ancient to contemporary art, and you’re constantly moving between different moments in art history – and I think that sensibility of being around such different eras that are ‘collapsed together’ is something that is also really important in my work ... I am constantly thinking about the collapse of time in visual objects, and I think that was strengthened from working at the NGV – not differentiating between what’s contemporary or historical. Higgins recalled several works that she became familiar with during employment at NGV that have continued to resonate – Rosslynd Piggott’s Italy , 1988 – for its ‘melancholic beauty and sense of space... the sense of ‘in-betweenness’’; and William Blake’s The Soul hovering over the Body , (c. 1805–1808), for its ‘relationship between the physical and ethereal’. Living and studying in London during the COVID-19 pandemic was, and continues to be, inevitably, a profound experience, during which she observed and experienced the devastation occurring in the city, from afar and in close proximity; Higgins has since reflected upon the ways in which the periods of isolation affected her, and her ideas around art and creative practice: During lockdowns I went even further into this line of enquiry about beauty and poetry and spiritual life because when I started at the Royal Academy, pre-pandemic, it was this very high-pressure London life ... Once I eventually felt more stable [from a health perspective], I came to realise that everything you need to make work is already here, you don’t necessarily need external stimulus. It is this focus on seeking out states of unknowable and irreduci- ble beauty, whether direct or mediated, and a focus on both the natural world and one’s immediate surroundings, that underpins Higgins’s current research and practice, and a desire for an emotional response. As Higgins says, ‘Whatever I do I would like to create not-nameable connections, but rather connections that you feel’. MAGGIE FINCH IS NGV CURATOR, PHOTOGRAPHY. EXPLORE THE WORKS FEATURED IN THIS ARTICLE AT NGV.MELBOURNE/ARTIST/32819 33 NGV MAGAZINE ISSUE 35 32 NGV MAGAZINE ISSUE 35