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What was that you just heard in the dark, on the edge of intelligible sound? The creatures of the night. And what beautiful music they make! Something breathing an inarticulate serenade, something more aware of you than you can be of it. Not overtly threatening or stalking you but accompanying you, whispering close by and howling far away a senseless, wordless instinctual lullaby. Yet this estranging noise belongs to neither a totem nor a guardian or nurse. It doesn't protect you: quite the contrary, it exposes you...

This is precisely the situation we find ourselves in when trying to speak about Louise Hearman's art. There is an undeniable strangeness - not only an idiosyncratic but an estranging inarticulateness - to much of Hearman's work: a legion of incongruous images that strike you as unmannered and even effortless, and executed with an abruptness, candour and vivid intensity that indicate not only the artist's technical fluency with her medium but also a 'mediumistic' vision. Look here: in a forest clearing a girl's head emerges partly from a snow-drift, which melts away in front and beneath her like tattered bridal drapery revealing an underside of tangled fibrous roots, of thrusting bony limbs and ribbing, as if exposing a mutilated, eviscerated carcass frozen in its death agony. The strands of her hair are described with the same layers of hatched brushstrokes which, as they flow and flick through the snow, turn it from a thick paste into whorls of white animal fur. A dazzling sheen of sunlight swathes her blond hair in the same dense whiteness as the glare off this snow, mirroring a sunlit patch of cloud looming high in the sky above her; a glare so momentarily blinding it dissolves her face, smearing her eyes into two blurred bruises...

These mutations of sky and earth, displacements of matter and flesh, these metamorphoses of snow with cloud and fur and hair with gleaming congealed light, of eyes that turn to black stone or blood or teeth, have the suggestive morphology of oneiric delirium, of nightmare grotesques. Evidently, there's no consciously controlled or contrived system of symbolic correspondences, no matter how esoteric, behind them. They seem simply to appear, singularly, without names and without purpose...

Yet there's a disturbing sense of evil about even the most benign of these oddities. It's as if something remote and inconsequential, an obscure and likely insignificant thing peripheral to one's vision, was subtly if magically positioned directly in front of your eyes. The scenery and the event become singularly lucid, yet remain incomprehensible and indistinct. The perceptual anomalies that usually go unremarked, or at least seem to be unremarkable, when kept sequestered along this perimeter of sight suddenly strike you as being cryptic signals from a hazardously close zone of abnormality, of freakish nature, of atrocity, circling your focused and self-assured psyche like shark fins flashing in and out of an increasingly murky sea. By analogy, this is a liminal state of consciousness in that it suggests an involution - the contraction and inversion - of the very edge of what we may be conscious or optically aware of: an outer limit (with all the sense of misrule and metamorphosis and threat that delineate the frayed and uncertain margins of consciousness) relocated into the spotlight of our attention. The effect of this involution is like a vortex, subtly violent and dissipative, perhaps delirious, as the intention of our gaze is displaced hypnotically onto some tangential, unidentifiable but ostensibly valued, presumably desired - even beloved - yet nameless thing...


This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.