The Art of Healing HEALING PROFILE
John Dahlsen began his artistic career during the 70s as a student at the Victorian College of the Arts where he says he learnt what it meant to have an energetic response to the creative process. John started out as a figurative painter because he felt he had “a narrative story to tell”, but moved to abstract work because he wanted to convey a ‘spiritual’ message, which he felt was better articulated through this creative form. John says he has found that being alert and open to the benefit of ‘accidents’ occurring in his art-making processes has led to some of the most profound breakthroughs in his work.
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One such ‘accident’ occurred in 1997 when he was collecting driftwood, on a remote Victorian Coastline. John suddenly stumbled upon vast amounts of plastic ocean debris and was immediately affected by a whole new palette of colours and shapes revealing themselves to him. “My challenge as an artist became to take these found objects, and to work with them until they spoke and told their story” he says. “I believe art to be my spirituality”, he continues.
“Over the past 20 years I have tried to maintain a pure commitment to contemporary art practice; I have never looked for a safe place to rest. What happens with my art generally runs parallel to my life, meaning that I learn from my art and apply some of these insights to my life and vice versa. When I sense that I am becoming too comfortable in what
I am doing I will consciously move on to something new.”
While John’s art practice changes and evolves, his underlying commitment, as an artist has never wavered. He has always been motivated by a professional duty to be aware of and express current social, spiritual and environmental concerns through his art practice.
The central concerns of his work are with contemporary art practice. He has for many years been working with found and recycled objects, most hand-picked from somewhere along the Australian Coastline.
“The unabated dumping of thousands of tons of plastics has been expressed in my assemblages, installations, totems, digital prints and public artworks.
And yet, despite my outrage at this environmental vandalism, I returned to the beach daily to find more pieces for my artist’s palette. In an uncanny way, these plastics, as I sorted them and arranged them in my studio took on an unspeakable, indefinable and quite a magical beauty, which always fascinated me” he says.
However in the last few years he has begun creating a new body of work, – a series of Synthetic Polymer paintings on Belgian linen, based on the subject matter of plastic “purges” – plastic fabricator machine end waste.
This work considers cycles and recycling, and re-presents paintings of sculptures that are inherently plastic fabricator machine end waste. “The use of plastic materials and their place in the evolutionary motions of recycling are important to me in constructing these images” he says.
In this new series of work, John explores the mechanics of how an object is put together, and what place it occupies in a cycle of life, organic or man-made.
The work concentrates on cycles, momentum and the multiple of non-recyclable purged plastic objects, which represent everything and nothing at once.
“The plastic in its petroleum state has undergone millions of years of evolution to get to this stage. And then, it is discarded as a by-product of societal needs.” he says.
“Essentially I am exploring the duality of meaning and perception and the illusion that is created in between. I am presenting an image of a non-object, in a painting of an informal Formalist sculpture.
My paintings will create the profile of a solid sculpture, moulded and plied to present the essence of formalism.
The subject of the paintings, exhibit abstract geometrical imagery and constructivist diagramming of space that is playfully organic and blob-like.
The present direction in my work also incorporates sculpture and assemblage, and is a natural evolution for my return to painting.” Robert Smithson once claimed that ‘art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist’ (Kastner: 32), in reference to his many (unheeded) proposals to mining companies to participate in projects of land reclamation.
Dahlsen’s retrieval of the waste product of plastics manufacturing partakes of the same spirit, serving to remind us of the interconnectedness of environmental issues, but also attempting to reclaim waste and the destruction of nature in the beauty of art.
This tension between inorganic abstraction and emotionally charged organism lends these works particular resonance, given their inception in the politics of environmental art.
They play out, in elegant and economical aesthetics, the unstable boundaries between the natural and the artificial, reminding us of Wendell Berry’s paradox that ‘the only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity’ (Kastner: 17).
