Julia powles measuring the rain
10.11.21 - 04.12.21
Installation images, Julia Powles; Measuring the Rain. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
Julia Powles’s exhibition Measuring the Rain takes its title from her father’s daily practice of collecting data for rainfall charts.
The science of meteorology has long fascinated Powles as she finds within it an embedded poetry: the desire to calculate the immeasurable; the impossibility of translating into numbers the enormity of natural phenomena. In dream analysis water often signifies emotion, and in this context measuring the rain takes on another meaning altogether, perhaps indicative of the difficulty of containing the enormity of our feelings. After her father’s death, Powles was left with years of paperwork to dispose of, correspondence that mapped the ordinariness of life, bills and receipts carefully filed away, as well as the years of meticulous rainfall data. In her sculpture Measuring the Rain Powles has taken her father’s accumulated paperwork and turned it into papier mâché disks, made by pressing the pulp between her hands, and then threaded together in the gallery to form a single stratified column.
The study of weather, or changes in the weather, can be found exactly and symbolically in other works in the exhibition. The Last Trickle of Melted Ice (2021) is a photograph Powles took on Deception Island in the Antarctic Peninsula. Moved by the politics of melting ice she chose to document not the glaciers but their puddles. The looping shape of the pools of water connect to the loops and curves in her drawings and paintings, a motif she repeatedly returns to. The series of fourteen framed drawings Sound Waves (2020) offer another interpretation of a scientific phenomenon. Here again we find an interest in the symbolism of science as the drawings illustrate not so much actual sound waves but the relationship of sound to memory. These drawings represent the looping, circling, echoing quality of thought.
Abstraction offers the opportunity to draw connections between divergent concepts. Materially the paintings in this exhibition are rich, offering passages of paint that suggest the gesture of abstract expressionism combined with the experimentalism of the early twentieth century. Imbued within these paintings is a methodology Powles refers to as ‘subjective abstraction’, where each painting is formed uniquely and without preconception, in conversation with the artist’s internal dialogue and in relation to coalescing themes and contents. In this sense, these paintings emerge as a sequence of uniquely discordant and irreconcilable narratives; problems the artist has set herself to solve.
The two orange and yellow suspended sculptures The Parent Traps (2021) are again made from the piles of paperwork Powles inherited from her father. Shredded and stuffed into tubes she has stitched together from her mother’s woollen blankets, The Parent Traps appear as costumes or large-scale puppets. The potential for the loop motif she so often uses in her paintings to also represent a trap has not eluded her, as the tile of the sculpture ambiguously implies. In the process of stitching, pulling looped thread through fabric, an obvious sense of time is embedded into her work. The Worst is Over So Don’t Worry (2021) declares a needlepoint tapestry made during the recent lockdown. Composed using remnants of wool the artist was given by a friend, the message is ostensibly hopeful. We do wonder however, given Powles’s sustained engagement with the psyche if there is not just a touch of irony.
