Michele England’s garden delights
To compliment her 2024 art show Il faut cultiver notre jardin (We need to cultivate our garden), I wrote this short essay Material Matters / Materials Matter.
Canberra visual artist Michele England loves her garden. It’s her touchstone teacher full of practical offerings. Sitting at a wooden island bench in her kitchen to talk about the exhibition Il faut cultiver notre jardin (We need to cultivate our garden) at ANCA Gallery, we sipped freshly picked peppermint tea while surrounded by her own-grown plums, exaggerated zucchini and ripening French heritage pears.
This body of work offers a variation on England’s consistent art themes - threatened native plant and animal species and extinction due to human activities. This is less about the alarming science of global warming and more about the vibrancy of nature as a stabilising but moving force. If you notice nature then you know that every day is different, she says.
Complimenting the subject are the painting materials and methodology. England shifted from using only quick-drying acrylic and oils to including organic materials: egg tempera as a binding medium with dry pigments and inks made from plant material. Mixing pigments with egg yolk, a practice dating back to the ancient Egyptians produces a very elastic and temperamental paint - certainly compared to other types of paints. And while akin to watercolour, it offers greater luminosity.
So much artwork today, if I can generalise, sees artists trying to say something about the environment and their professed care for it, but still engage in processes that employ toxic industrial material. England shows, here, the possibilities of integrating both subject and method; that work about the environment can also embrace an environmentally conscientious practice that excludes materials made from fossil fuel by-products.
It’s not easy to do so and that’s the point. The exhibition speaks to the adage that you can’t love anything at speed. Her reappearing snails serve as a totem. Nurturing a garden and learning from it, takes time. It requires curiosity. Caring demands an adaptable, usually slower pace. It delights in small things. I never stop learning.
England’s choices come after months of research informed by philosophers and writers including Matthew Evans, author of ‘Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the Earth and us healthy’ and Thomas Berry - a self-declared ‘geologian’ combining study in Christian theology, earth history and evolution (England is drawn to all life-affirming faiths and none in particular).
Her interest in earth systems and spirituality, sees her explore religious imagery and form. The polytich or multi-panelled piece references an altarpiece to facilitate something higher than yourself. My garden is a stepping-off point rather than something I slavishly try to capture or follow. Father Berry’s three principles ring true for England’s practice: One, differentiation, which allows for creativity, two, a subjectivity which appreciates intelligence and interiority, and three, communion, seeing all things connected and working together.
With this infectious vision, there is something monastic about England’s approach as she works in her garden-based studio with intentional rhythms. Employing just one locally-produced egg every few days with different earthy dyes, England painted mandalas on mostly reclaimed boards. These geometric designs - Sanskrit for "circle" - represent different aspects of the universe and are used as an instrument for meditation and prayer, chanting and enchantment. The idea emerged when England observed circular posies, those gifts of nature people give as gifts to others. Poises appear too, in oils and in their own series, against a dark backdrop.
After our tea and fruit, we stepped out into her garden for an ambling tour, full of gratitude. England, wearing a large sombrero, pointed to the complex and diverse system of actors outside, from bees with their noses in sunflowers to the common brown butterflies dancing with light and each other. There’s nothing common about those butterflies, she added.
Image: Michele England. Purpose, 2024. Egg tempera on board.