Talia Goldsmith

Ground cork, beach sand, pigment … This and the gnash and twist of hands. Talia Goldsmith’s new work – ‘Vesuvius’ – is a molten drama. A roughly hewn colour field, as sculptural as it is painted, Goldsmith’s new surfaces are also wounded, as anxious, as traumatized as the earth itself. Turmoil is the governing register, a ‘state of great disturbance, confusion, or uncertainty.’ This state is not the content of the work but its condition. The artist is unconcerned with statement. Rather, it is the psychic unrest that courses through everyone, irrespective of alliance or value, that is inescapable. WE ARE TROUBLED.

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Goldsmith has been working with cork for many years, though never before has it assumed it current invisible iteration. Barring shards that break from the molten surface, cork is structurally utilized, as part of an emulsified mulch pressed to a canvas. Applied to the surface of soil, mulch is generative, germinal. It speaks to growth, the eradication of or protection against eradication. This affirming quality is Goldsmith’s counterintuitive drive against destruction. Which is why, when one looks at her molten colour fields – deep red, ochre, clay, blueberry – not only is it an impending apocalypse that is conveyed, but the sumptuous beauty and wonder of a deep time.

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In his beautiful book, Underland, Robert Macfarlane explains. ‘”Deep time” is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past.’ As a means of knowing, deep time confounds paltry secular passions, it defeats prevailing dogma, defies nihilism, the toxic root of all our current ills.

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It is in-and-through a deep time that Goldsmith is able to address and bypass notoriety – the banal currency of the art world. Disinvested in the issues of the day, drawn, rather, to an art as primordial as it is futuristic, the artist calculates our raw truths, our silences – our greater heart. Her new works are as funereal and they are generative, as darkly honest as they are hopeful. If Mount Vesuvius is the framing trope, it is because it is the trigger for one of the greatest, most destructive volcanic eruptions in 79AD. An entire world changed in that growling hissing lethal deluge of fire. Molten rock, pulverized pumice and hot ask blasted outward from the earth’s mouth, ‘releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’

 

If Goldsmith’s new series of abstract relief works evoke this doom, it is because it understands that art, too, is a living force that is as violent as it is generative. Art remembers deep time. Art counters calculated meaning and opinion, thrusts us into realms in which consciousness no longer keeps us in thrall. Abstract art in particular can allow for this freedom – when not grasped as yet another commodity. Rather, after Jerry Saltz, Goldsmith understands that ‘Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.’ The descriptors are key – imagination-decipherment- depiction – they speak of abstraction as a rune. Each aspect plays its part in the construction of ‘Vesuvius.’ At best, the series is a conjuration, ‘the performance of something supernatural by means of a magic incantation or spell’, except, in Goldsmith’s case, the conjuration is physical, haptic.

 

A sculptor first and foremost, Goldsmith extracts human and geological truth. Unlike Michelangelo, Goldsmith is uninterested in the merely inductive nature of sculpture. ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ Michelangelo’s view, now convention, understands sculpture as a derivative mechanism, a means to reveal meaning in-and-through supposedly inanimate matter. For Goldsmith, however, the earth itself is the story – the earth expressed and experienced by humankind. This is why her art possesses its human-hewn and raw tactility. Why it is not only the story of the earth that it expresses, but also human civilization. ‘Vesuvius’, then, must be understood metaphorically.

 

Of the ancient imprint of a hand in a cave, 35,000 years old, the first great human masterwork, Macfarlane ponders. What is it a sign of? ‘Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?’ These same questions can be attached to Goldsmith’s new series. It is as vexed, as engaging.

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