Between life and death you’re a miracle

Self-nature is subtle and mysterious – Tree Woman / Woman Tree is a self portrait belonging to a group of figurative sculptures made or conceived by Nell between 2008 and 2013. For these works she used casts of the body (her own and others) in walking or resting poses. These sculptures are at once recognisably human and ostensibly mythical. One holds the tusk of the narwhal, a whale sometimes called the unicorn of the sea. Another is covered with silver script, as though her thoughts were made manifest – a woman as open book. Other sculptures, including Tree Woman, are flanked by ghosts that while minimally articulated are of a colour as warm as ember.

The ghosts in Nell’s work have appeared and reappeared for many years. They are something for which she’s known, part of an artistic language that is both materially diverse and implicitly tender. The legibility of her work and its broad appeal have also to do with her use of familiar forms to embody and elicit complex ideas. Here there is a strategy at play, informed by a lineage of artists. She refers to Mike Kelley’s use of nostalgia and Colin McCahon’s deployment of words – emotions and phenomena that the viewer feels and handles daily, into which the artist instills their message.

Nell often makes her ghosts from glass. They seem delicate but they’re formidable. They are made by a process of material transformation involving extreme heat, gravitational pull and human breath by which they’re gradually given form. Nell says that the ghosts originated ‘as a result of self-investigation and psychotherapy’ and a commitment to ‘recognising her ghosts’ rather than ‘banishing them’. Depending on one’s perspective, their open mouths could be singing or screaming. But it’s not polarities that interest her so much as their intersection. Her work is marked by openness and curiosity, by a willingness to be led into darkness and light. She says: ‘I am always looking for that place where both things are true’.

In the mid-1990s Nell took the honours year of her Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her courseload included New Genres, a subject which advocated hybrid and emerging art forms, taught by artists such as John Baldessari and Joan Jonas. The work of Jonas, a film and performance artist with an affinity for spirituality and shamanism, resonated. In her essay ‘Future ghosts’ in Forms of enchantment: Writings on art and artists (2018), the cultural historian Marina Warner writes that the ghosts in Jonas’ work ‘are familiars not ghouls; they’re spectres approaching from the times that lie ahead as well as from memories stretching behind us’. Something similar could be said of Nell’s work. In looking for the place where ‘both things are true’, her use of the ghost speaks as much to life as to death.

This impulse, or way of communicating, is evident in some of her earliest work. When Nell was 24 she was selected for Primavera 1999 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Ghosts were yet to enter her vernacular, but she made another kind of amorphous form – a scaled-up drop of water that she called The perfect drip. Years later she reflected in Primavera at 25 (2016): ‘At that time, I wanted to make a work that impacted on one’s body before one’s mind had a chance to think.’ This is still how her work tends to operate – a flare of recognition, then deepening comprehension, a gradual opening up of art and viewer.

Nell sometimes fears that the ghost has become too recognisable within her practice. Yet its power resides in her articulation of a minimal form in which associations can accrue, allowing a richness of meaning. The ghost is atemporal, independent of and unaffected by time. It is of every culture. It is a symbol for the things that cannot leave us, and which we in turn cannot leave. In some sense, Nell’s ghosts reflect the expanding discourses of hauntology which, since the late 20th century, have ranged over philosophy, literature, art and music, endeavouring to account for the occurrence and persistence of collective memory, and the ways in which the past inflects the present.

Nell is an artist whose intellectual life seems grounded in feeling and in the kinds of observation that are at once careful and serendipitous. The titles of her work and the texts within them can seem like litanies of small and startling revelations. When we meet, she closes our conversation with one such comment as clear and beautiful as the peal of a bell: ‘Between life and death you’re a miracle.’