HOME GROUNDTHE RECENT WORK OF NICOLE SLATTER

When the suburban homes went up around post-war Perth it must have been difficult to imagine their pristine concrete drives and their shiny roof tiles, luminous in the sunlight, as anything other than sparklingly new. Seventy years on, their newness has worn off and the sunlight illuminates a more complex set of relationships between these streets, their inhabitants and their destiny. As houses become scuffed round the edges with use, as foundations shift and shady trees loom precipitously over roofs and sagging car ports, these suburbs are revealed as spaces in which entire lives have been lived and generations of people have come and gone. In her paintings of this care worn suburban space resting between the city and the shiny contemporary suburbs at the end of railway lines, Nicole Slatter reveals a world of seemingly random physical, metaphorical and visual spaces. She paints life in this transitional place as a patchwork of experiences revealed by our daily routines moving in and through them, and in doing so connects us with their intrinsic value as reflections of our own lives.

The suburbs have long been contested spaces in Australian culture, often dismissed as ersatz city and in his recent article, Is suburban living a neurotic condition? Alan Davies neatly summarises the historical antagonism of the media and artistic elites towards the suburbs. Even before the advent of the uncontrollable suburban party made the genteel classes shudder, the suburbs have always been contested spaces, characterised as either bland or uncouth, yet like it or not, that is where most of us live. Using David Flew’s research to reinforce the point, Davies reveals the endlessly tense dialogue between the huge numbers of people who want a safe haven in the suburbs and the way in which this desire for stability is condemned as banal by “an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics”.

Refuse Arrangement, 2012 Oil on plywood

45 x 63cm

Refuse Arrangement Study, 2012 Watercolour on paper

40 x 48.5cm

Cnr. Canning and Sth., 2012 Watercolour on paper

45 x 53cm

COVER // Refuse Arrangement (Detail), 2012 Oil on plywood, 45 x 63cm

Slatter’s paintings have productively removed themselves from this angst ridden Australian trope of worrying whether living in the suburbs is an authentic experience or not. Or at the very least her work can be productively set outside those debates that sustained so much academic anguish and produced so much dull painting on the subject in the 90s. The ‘suburbs good or bad?’ debate was ultimately self-defeating, but its masochistic broodings are useful in helping to understand why the suburbs were considered inappropriate for serious aesthetic examination on their own terms.

Historically the city has been seen as the crystallisation of human cultural endeavour, and the suburbs as an inferior urban sub-set of it; either a kind of battery that runs it, or a repository for those workers who keep the wheels of the city running but who are not quite urbane enough to be seen on its streets. The city used to be the place where special, shiny things were bought. This helps explain why, as the sociologist David Harvey characterises it, “the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development” is now subject to a kind of pastiche urbanism. Coffee shops, beauty parlours and health clubs are introduced into the suburban strip as a way of sublimating the desire for the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that the city used to represent, but which is now available in a more readily accessible local environment.

Salvage, 2012 Oil on canvas

60 x 77cm

Despite this ‘also ran’ quality, the suburbs are rich with life, and to characterise them as places that are bereft of valuable emotion and intellectual life is to accept the fantasy of the city dreamt up at the start of the 20th century by the leisured flaneurs of the European metropolises. The centres of empire were always dynamic places, but the city itself is an administrative centre, and these are not of themselves innately exciting places. What cities principally provided, and what the suburbs lacked were dynamic public spaces for play and cultural exchange. It is generally acknowledged that the communal, social function of the city is changing (most recently in Ali Madanipour’s Whose Public Space? ) and that urban public space is vanishing as traditional city interiors are being transformed into spaces for managed recreational consumption and little else. The suburbs encircle them, stocked with cafés, and by a process of osmosis, increasingly displace the difference between the centre and periphery.

To borrow Henri Lefebvre’s phrase, what is more important is not the distinction between city and suburb but the production of space that characterises them materially and symbolically. It is the production of space that Slatter’s paintings address. Any contemporary investigation of the ‘sub/urban’ and its relationship with the landscape, whether aesthetic or sociological, is not about demarcating populations and buildings geographically. It is not about finding centres and then deriving sets of hierarchical meaning from them. Ultimately all of the contemporary sub/urban amalgamation is significant, because all of it is socially constructed and every bit as much a manifestation of our desires and aspirations as the 19th Century city square. What Slatter’s paintings do is to engage with these framing concepts phenomenologically. Her paintings provide partial, intimate glimpses of what is out there, refusing to command, demand and instruct, but instead giving us discreet portions of information that we can look at, consider, and then match with our own experiences. Her paintings help us complete our understanding of what is out there.

Skip Drawing, 2012 Oil on canvas

60 x 77cm

Skip Drawing Study, 2012 Watercolour on paper

41.5 x 43cm

Trench / Range, 2012 Oil on canvas

31 x 82cm

Site, 2012 Oil on canvas

182 x 240cm

Lefebvre observed (in his book State, space, world ) that there are three ways in which social space can be understood. There is the official space conceived professionally and theoretically by urban planners, property speculators and cartographers. This officially sanctioned space then is perceived in a ‘commonsense’ way through everyday interaction: Do traffic lights work? Is there a decent school nearby? How long does it take to get from home to work? Am I happy here? Lefebrve suggests there is also another way of understanding social space, that of the L’homme (and la femme) totale. This fully emancipated individual engages with social space through their imagination and exists in a lived space that Lefebrve calls le vecu, which is nourished and sustained through the arts. This space not only transcends officially conceived and functionally perceived spaces but holds the key to their reconfiguration.

Satellite, 2012 Oil on canvas

31 x 82cm

Satellite Study, 2012 Watercolour on paper

47.5 x 38.5cm

Specimen, 2012 Oil on canvas

60 x 77cm

Any art that addresses le vecu is dealing with the intersections of people with the built environment, the natural world and our ideological attitudes towards them. If we can reveal the ways in which our social, material and cultural ecologies are managed (either for us or by us) then we can also reveal the ways in which landscape and cultural space impacts upon us and in turn frames our emotional and intellectual world. It is in this way that we begin to understand that the suburbs are more than just an embarrassing addendum to a city centre. They are spaces in which life is lived and in which those lived lives impact upon others. Slatter’s paintings examine in miniature form what Lefebvre called ‘everyday life’, the intersection of “illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control” (1947, p 40). These paintings are not miniature because they are small, they are miniature because they concentrate on tiny observed moments of absurdity, unexpected beauty, or fragments of grander plans that may have fallen into disrepair. Like an explorer she marks out the things that she has observed, giving us glimpses of the world as it exists at the edges of our understanding. With this partial guide as help, we can navigate our own way around the suburbs finding our own spaces of melancholy and joy.

It is right that her paintings only give us glimpses of what is there, because, as the past has shown us, the whole problem of confronting the Australian suburban phenomenon is that the analytic approach to it has been reductive and universalising. If we think of the suburbs as fluid spaces, ebbing and flowing, less like Frankenstein’s monster and more like Perec’s fictional Apartment Block at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier we can slowly realise that the suburbs are places of infinite wonder, no matter how infinitesimal those wonders are. When they are shared, “those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidents or accidents” as Perec calls them, can only make our lives richer (2008, p 23).

Nicole Slatter’s paintings edit a communal world on our behalf, and give us back pieces of a puzzle that we can reassemble. The puzzle is the suburb. Rambling and inexplicable, it cannot be reduced to an archetype because it is too vast and too contradictory to make any coherent sense. All we can hope for is the painter’s patient eye to reveal its details to us that may then have resonance in our own puzzling experience.

Façade Study, 2012 Watercolour on paper

45 x 53cm

Site Study, 2012 Watercolour on paper

45 x 53cm

High Water, 2012 Oil on canvas

80 x 105cm

Davies, A. (2012). ‘Is suburban living a neurotic condition?’ Accessed, 4th January 2013, from: http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/22/the-urbanist-is-suburban-living-a-neurotic-condition/

Flew, T. (2011). Right to the city, desire for the suburb?’. M/C Journal, (14)4.

Harvey, D. (2008). ‘The right to the city’, New Left Review. (53) September – October.

Lefebvre, H. (2009). State, space, world. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, H. (2002). The Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso.

Madanipour, A. (2010). Whose Public Space? London: Routledge.

Habitat, 2012 Oil on canvas

65 x 80cm

Nightlight, 2012 Oil on plywood

45 x 63cmISBN978-0-9874975-0-5

ESSAYDr. Christopher Crouch

PHOTOGRAPHYAcorn Photo Agency

CATALOGUEFor Love or Money Design