Rhizoming: Language of print and place

RHIZOMING
LANGUAGE OF PRINT AND PLACE
Craft ACT Craft + Design Centre
16 MAY – 6 JULY 2019

Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre is supported by the
ACT Government, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy –
an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments,
and the Australia Council for the Arts – the
Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory
body.
CRAFT ACT CRAFT + DESIGN CENTRE
Tues–Fri 10am–5pm
Saturdays 12–4pm
Level 1, North Building, 180 London
Circuit,
Canberra ACT Australia
+61 2 6262 9333
www.craftact.org.au
This project was assisted through Arts
Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts and
by the University of Tasmania.
Front Cover: Rocks Entanglement (detail), 2019, woodblock
print on kozo and woodblock matrix.
Back Cover: Photo: 5 Foot Photography.

Artist Statement
Jan Hogan
Rhizoming is about my slow immersion in Hinsby Beach on the Derwent Estuary as I
locate myself in my new home. I walk and swim in this space, exploring the rocks and
caves, the tidal shifts and seasonal changes. The concept of rhizoming assists me in
locating myself and my practice in new places, accepting that I am an outsider but
slowly allowing the new environment to weave into my way of being in the world. My
art practice is my way of learning and responding to place. As a settler Australian I am
like a rhizome, a shoot that breaks off and adapts to new environments, sending out
tendrils to ground myself in a location. I start with sketches and drawings, immersing
paper into the water to see how this environment changes the patterns and marks,
allowing the matter of the world to reveal the meaning of place. It is a slow process,
time is required to allow place to seep in, past the beauty and spectacle and into
resonance.
The woodcuts aim to find a language to enable negotiations between the many agents
committed to, and structuring, a place. This language is formed by materials and
forces and effects. Patterns are made that we can interpret and respond to in order to
break away from the western tradition of binary logic to a more natural system. The
philosopher Deleuze posits in his rhizome theory that it constantly makes connections
between systems, from natural formations to social struggles to organisations of
power. A rhizome model allows for travel in every direction rather than in a linear
fashion, as it can move in all directions and dimensions. It is about performance,
the performance of the mark, and the performance of forming identity, a constantly
shifting field of negotiations. The rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced,
constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable and
has multiple entryways and exits with its own lines of flight. This theory assists my
practice as a form of speculative way finding to tread a sensitive path on this earth.
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Rocks Entanglement, 2019, woodblock print on
kozo and woodblock matrix.

Slow Looking
catalogue essay: Anne Brennan
The installation of prints and related
objects in Rhizoming is a trace or
record of the artist’s open-ended
relationship with her site, a suburban
Hobart beach, and her materials. She
spends time observing what the site
is doing, and how time operates on
it through the movements of water
and light upon its surfaces. Her work
does not depend on mastery, either
of the place itself or the materials she
uses. Instead, she watches what the
materials want to do, sometimes giving
up even more control by surrendering
her materials to the action of the site
itself, laying out paper on the ground
and allowing it to absorb the stains and
marks of earth and weather. Through
this process, she comes to understand
the patterns of her site.
The work, which explores the
relationship between her swimming
and the rocks below the water’s
surface, requires a special kind of slow,
embodied looking to grasp hold of
its enormous, reiterated immersive
program of patterning. It encourages
you to move through it, echoing the
physical journey of the artist across
her beach, picking your way around
and across the woodcut matrix that is
mirrored in the composite woodblock
print upon the wall of the gallery. The
slow investment of time spent with this
work, moving around and immersing
yourself in the installation, twisting
and turning with the ‘artists books’
that are three-dimensional drawings in
space, closes the circle between you,
the artist, her materials and her site
and mirrors the way in which she has
slowed down her own time to match
the temporal pulse of light, land and
water as it acts upon the paper.
Anne Brennan
Honorary Visiting Fellow
ANU School of Art and Design, Centre
for Art History and Art Theory
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Photo: 5 Foot Photography

Detail of Rocks Entanglement, 2019,
woodblock print on kozo and woodblock
matrix. Photo: supplied by the artist.

Photo: 5 Foot Photography
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Biography
Jan Hogan is a mid-career artist and
academic specializing in notions of
place; interweaving material traces and
memory held in natural and cultural
sites. Through relocating around
many sites in Australia, including
remote areas such as Kununurraand
Uluru, Jan has become interested in
how landscapes have agency in the
development of natural and cultural
systems. Through her relocations Jan
has set up a site-responsive practice
that involves immersion in long term
drawing projects that accumulate
knowledge, marks and detritus that
gradually seep into her unconscious.
Her current location on the Derwent
River in Hobart has involved a new
understanding of the behavior of
freshwater and saltwater on ecologies
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including the cultural materials of her
art practice. The concept of rhizoming
has accompanied her journeys
around Australia that accepts her
drifting status as a settler but allows
a focus on environmental and social
justice. Rhizoming provides a creative
mapping that retains traces of places
and people encountered over time as
her art practice settles and matures
in each site. Her discipline and craft
of printmaking has become focused
on large-scale woodcuts that are
developed after the initial drawing
research. Like a rhizome, the woodcuts
behave in response to environmental
conditions, and are developed from
the patterns and energies discovered
over time.
Photo: 5 Foot Photography

List of works
1 Rock caress ii, 2019
woodblock print on Kozo and
woodblock matrix
$5,000 unique state
2 Rocks Entanglement, 2019
woodblock print on Kozo and
woodblock matrix
$5,000 unique state
3 Wayfinders, 2019
artist book
$200 large, $120 small
4 Submersion, 2019
Woodblock matrix
NFS
5 Rock Rhizome I, 2019
Woodblock print on Kozo
$500
6 Rock Rhizome II, 2019
Woodblock print on Kozo
$500
Prints 5 and 6: Edition of 5 each,
sold in consecutive edition order.
$500 each.
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