Heavy as the afternoon

On Barbara Tuck’s Caterpillar Chemistry, 2012

It’s stone fruit season, and for a time that’s what I see when I look at this painting: a heat mirage, February, the end of summer. My eyelids feel as heavy as the afternoon air. The colour settles, solidifies and regroups into arid ochre hills. Five layers, each with its own sky or channel of water. Two orange parts: one split like a peach, the other standing vertical like cliffs. There are trees in the foreground, unfamiliar at first and then I recognise the sage and bone colour of gum trees, and gold blooming acacia. 

Barbara Tuck developed and painted Caterpillar Chemistry after travelling in 2011 to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia. This visit followed one decades earlier, in the 1960s, she visited her sister in New South Wales. It was on that trip that Tuck first started to draw. At that time upgrades of the massive Hume Weir, an embankment dam across the Murray River, had just been completed. This required the movement of a small town, Tallangatta, eight kilometres west to allow for the expansion of the dam’s reservoir. The landscape was substantially redrawn, a body of water swallowing the former site. Tuck writes of seeing the drowning trees as the flooding took place.

Caterpillar Chemistry is grounded in an awareness that no landscape stays still. In many respects even huge human-interventions like the Hume Weir are dwarfed in scale by those brought about over time and by the elements. Perhaps an awareness of these shifts is especially pronounced in a place like Uluru-Kata Tjuta, a desert 1.5 million years old. The traditional land owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park are the Anangu. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park is named for two landmarks; Uluru is a giant sandstone monolith (also known as Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta is a series of 36 red dome-like hills (the name is a Pitjantjatjara term that means ‘many heads’), covering twenty square kilometres of the plains and looming above them. The landforms each hold ancestral narratives that inform their physical shape: for example, the rock surrounding Mutitjulu Waterhole (a permanent water source, rare in the region) is carved into grooves by the movements of a woman python, Kaniya, and venomous snake, Liru.^[1]




In the Alice Capricious Compass series Tuck responded to the desert landscape as a record of the deep past, as a series of forces and marks made by movement. In her 2016 article on Tuck’s work Jill Trevelyan notes that, “Compared to the openness and fluidity of the New Zealand landscapes, this series has a muscular, tight-knit quality, every rock face and chasm locked in place, part of an underlying geometry.”^[2] I think you could go further, to say, in Caterpillar Chemistry the landscape is a muscle, a body that turns and shifts, wrinkles and stretches, ages.

Since 2005 Tuck has developed a series of square format oil on board paintings, the surfaces of which are dense with imagery; often there is no fixed horizon. Caterpillar Chemistry is typically condensed in this sod-like square. It is a painting which feels like it holds compressed energy in its layers, the entire surface of the board replete with information. Within the Alice Capricious Compass series, six paintings in total, Caterpillar Chemistryis the most clearly organised as strata. Perhaps it is this layering that creates the effect of energy, the contraction of particles, incrementally intensifying tectonic stress lines in the earth that bring about the separation of continents.

Certainly, the caterpillar is a symbol of transformation, of inching movement, the processing of plant matter into bodily or geologic substance, of cyclic change. The work shares a title reference with Colin McCahon’s 1947 The Caterpillar Landscape, an oil painting from a map of Wellington’s Hutt Valley. It was years after making her work that Tuck became aware of McCahon’s. The two are fundamentally different. McCahon’s work describes the lines of the Remutaka Ranges, panelled like stained glass or cut fabric, from a distant perspective. In Caterpillar Chemistry there is less sense of a ‘view’; rather, it is as if one has crawled inside the landscape, following its contours almost blindly, or through a sense of touch. If there is a sky it is very close, crowded or enveloped by the land.

It’s this sense of being tightly held, in the grip of something large, that Caterpillar Chemistry impresses most strongly. It’s an impression with weight, and with a kind of warmth. I find it too in the writing of Jorie Graham, an American poet whose work often articulates ecological crisis as psychic experience. Graham writes in Poem:


The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was 
accidentally 
listening, I

heard it, I felt it
like temperature.^[3] 


In a contemporary context, with accelerated warming, erratic weather patterns and increasing water scarcity (a primary factor in Australia's 2020 wildfires), we might read this painting as a kind of heatmap. It is hard to look at it and not feel thirsty, particularly in relation to the experience of those soggier, more vegetable-like or forested landscapes that Tuck painted in Aotearoa both before and after this work. The year this painting was made, 2012, is also the year the United Nations Climate Change Conference voted to extend the Kyoto Protocol, an international acknowledgement of the reality of global warming first drafted in 1992. Art historian Lucy Lippard brings such international politics closer when she writes, “Local landscapes reflect global crises. Nothing is more local than ecology (from the Greek work for home.)”^[4] Tuck’s paintings also locate us within the local environment, rather than engage with it as an abstract idea. Others in the Alice Capricious Compass series, such as Lacrimae Rerum — its name an Aeneid reference translating to “the tears of things — register a pervasive sense of loss held in the landscape, the loss of something close and closely known.

There’s another kind of warmth in this work too though, maybe even an inversion of the climate change narrative in this ozone-depleted hemisphere, in which the sun has been refigured as a menacing presence, rather than a life source. Caterpillar Chemistry holds the heat in the way that soil does, residually and as energy: think of the way seeds crack open as they germinate. The painting’s multiple horizons don’t allow you to move out of the glow of this heat. There is no point from which to survey distances or map points between here and there. It is the kind of heat that you feel in the soles of your feet.

Published in Barbara Tuck: Delirium Crossing, 2022