Seismic Activity

Published Interview of Creative Director Julie Masterton, Artform gallery 2020

There is so much seismic activity at work in the Muuse Art House Studio's multilayered rock photographs that, on first glance, one could mistake the canvases for zoomed-in satellite shots of lunar terrains or geographical fault lines recorded by heat sensors. Any closer examination, however, reveals the work of expertly controlled chaos—or rather, neither control nor chaos but the gulf in between where all the material discoveries happen. By painting rock faces in the Australian outback, layers are applied of water based spray-paint—a process of accretion that works in association with the Australian sun. The result is a congregation of skins of surface and image that invade, bubble, ripple, crumple, ooze, or contain to the point of sculptural relief. "It’s a
patternation, a reading of the sculptural surface of the rock that records the image of light' Creative Director Julie Masterton "says before a photographic record of the painting. "The whole point of having these layers is to create this object that has a physical potential all of its own. When you have wet paint and photograph in varying Australian light it creates layers moving with shadow, it's something that we are responding to." Chance plays a part here as it takes days to find rock faces that contain the gestural qualities we are looking for—as well as the limits of Masterton's patience. But in their finished form, the photographs affect a quixotic industrial-organic synthesis. While the presence of a fastidious overseer informs these works, there is no expressive stroke of the authorial hand. "I've always been interested in abstraction," she says. "But I've always found the gesture to be incredibly problematic in sculpture. When studying rock faces in central Australia, I began to see a gesture that naturally occurred in the rock, like someone had run their hands or body through clay, it reminded me of an Yves Klein painting. And in sculpture school [at The Royal College of Art, London], a big focus of mine was gesture in sculpture. I'm interested in recording that back into a type of sculptural relief as image, I guess that’s why a lot of the photographs are life sized and left on the floor to prop up against a wall."

Each of the canvases almost appear like test studies in the limits and control in photography and light. Another experiment has involved the gesture of physically maneuvering over rock faces with water based industrial paint. After researching safety apparatuses that commercial painters use,
Masterton has taken to wearing physical harnesses to get into rock face crevices. "We've had to discover a lot of new techniques," she admits, "in the making of these artworks."