Texts 

Nina Miall, for Comapnions, Olsen Gallery, Sydney,2019.

Keeping sculptor Anna-Wili Highfield company in her latest exhibition at Olsen Gallery is a suite of spirit animals, deftly conjured, and with striking immediacy, from the unlikely entwining of wax, brass, wood, white clay, enamel and hand-torn cotton-rag paper. Many of the artist’s familiar totems are present - an owl, a robin in flight, a watchful cat - evoked with an economy that is born of close observation, a practiced hand and abundant natural sympathy for her subjects. Some such as ‘Goat’ are proudly disembodied, their wall-mounted heads alluding to the vernacular of the hunting trophy, while others such as ‘Budgerigar’ have been captured mid-flight by a few swift gestures, seeming to strain against formal representation by the artist’s hand.
 
A precarious balance between figuration and abstraction has characterised Highfield’s sculptural output for the past decade, struck through the sophisticated collaging and assembling of disparate materials. Arrested at the miraculous moment of coming-into-being, the forms of her spirit animals cohere and coalesce just enough to animate the works, while resisting any overt resolution. Some appear almost sketched in air, such is the skill of Highfield’s puppetry, her ability to extrapolate a restless wing from a torn fragment of painted paper appended to a curved brass rod.
 
Despite their deliberate unfixedness, Highfield’s animal sculptures possess a vivid and penetrating intensity, conveyed through their life-size scale and distinctive materiality: their luminous eyes and downy wings. In using wire armatures for the delineation of bodily features and brass hardware for eyes, and in the way she builds three-dimensionality through the interlocking of different planes, the sculptor draws on Constructivist materials and techniques, but tempers Constructivism’s harsh geometries through delicate applications of gold leaf and the handmade irregularities of torn cotton-rag paper.
 
Working consciously against the heroism and solidity that is the conventional language of statues, Highfield’s animal totems are instead invested with a lightness and airiness, a barely-there ethereality. Her exquisite crafting of the animals’ partially-constituted forms demands that the mind’s eye of the viewer completes the depiction. In a new development, Highfield has introduced wax, exploiting its volatile qualities by either dripping it or painting it over the underlying ceramic, paper or brass form, as if to preserve the work in its constant state of becoming. If the hand-torn paper and bent brass rods imply the struggle of realising these spirit animals, the wax embalms their resistance to resolution.
 
The malleability and viscosity of wax is also apt for an artist with post-human leanings. Previous readings of Highfield’s work have understood her zoo of animals as functioning in some sense as proxies for the artist herself. The individual character and mien she is able to invoke through the subtlest of gestures and a very considered melding of materials does indeed suggest a finely-tuned sympathetic identification with her animal subjects; at the same time they sit outside time and place, serving as emissaries to other worlds.
 
The plainly descriptive titles (‘Goat’, ‘Budgerigars’) the artist has given her animals belie their rather fragile and mercurial existence as sculptures. Untethered from any prevailing narrative, these chimerical avian, feline and capricornian forms belong instead to the realm of the symbolic, the spiritual, or the surreal. Constructed intuitively and vibrating with almost spectral agency, they are especially redolent of 19th-century Symbolism, with its embrace of imaginary and dream states over naturalism and realism. Though Highfield is highly attentive to the various possible cross-cultural and trans-temporal interpretations of these works, she is careful not to labour these associations, preferring instead to let the animals’ more enigmatic qualities resonate.
 
Presiding over Highfield’s menagerie in this exhibition are the elegant, oblique forms of three Companions, partial ceramic busts of the artist which she understands not as self-portraits, but as spirit houses, surrogate homes in which alternative subjectivities or energies may dwell. Thin brass rods wend their way loosely and gesturally around white ceramic body parts, each Companion anchored by a central, anthropomorphising wooden beam. With its understated classicism, this current body of work departs from previous series of Highfield’s sculptures in which, with their extravagant and spiky gestures and the gleam of highly polished brass, a more baroque aesthetic prevailed. Profoundly pared-back, these three female figures convey not the heroic idealism of the Graces, but a more embodied and human vulnerability, with fragments of an incarnated or materialised self frequently dissolving into abstraction.
 
The graceful, calligraphic arcs of the Companions’ brass armatures articulate Highfield’s central line of enquiry in this exhibition. At times suggesting fingers or necks with sensuous observation, at other times veering with abandon into abstraction, they express the empathetic and fundamentally fluid entanglement between self and otherness that lies at the heart of Highfield’s work.

Nina Miall
November 2019

Oliver Watts, for Spirit Faces, Olsen Gruin, New York, 2018

Once after dinner Anna-Wili Highfield took up her napkin and, in a few practiced gestures, laid a linen horse’s head tenderly on the table. All of her work has this ease and friendliness, like tokens of goodwill between her and the viewer. Highfield is an animalier, she has for some time created an exceedingly well observed and realistic paper menagerie. Taking this everyday, commonplace material, with a few studied tears and cuts, and sewn together often with thin tendrils of cotton thread, sometimes painted with watercolour, the animals are fragile yet strongly present. They reach out to the viewer like magical totem animals, finding some sort of sympathy through shared vulnerability.

In this body of work there is a sustained move towards more traditional sculptural materials: brass, pearl, wood. However the works still resist the heroic and the permanent. The work is not shy, but doesn’t exclaim, it wants you to come closer to it and explore in a collaborative effort; the works remain playful and open ended. In Transmission 2 for example a breast is conjured quickly through a curved piece of brass, painted white and pink, conjoined with a similarly curved found shell. In a joyful move, a squirt of milk, like some baroque Madonna Lactans, is represented by a pearl atop a whitened brass rod.

Even with these more permanent materials, with their hard edges, Highfield manages to retain the feeling that the work comes in to being easily and could equally fall apart. It feels in a way underdone like a dream. In the shift from scissors to tin snips, Highfield has had to innovate a language which makes brass seem soft and malleable. One strategy used in Transmission 2 is a spray of white paint, with a pink blush, that on one hand fades out the brass, dematerialising it, and at the same time unifies everything (while not wholly coalescing). The wire armature also shows the workings of the structure never letting it become too complete. Highfield’s work always has the immediacy of the maquette.

The other big change in the work is the more obvious presence of the human body and gesture as a subject. Perhaps Falcon is the intermediary work, with the gauntleted hand of the falconer calling for the falcon to land. Highfield’s animals seem always in the end to be deeply connected to her. They are if not self portraits at least some sort of stand-in. The image represents something of her own spiritual life or for others maybe her psychological state. In this exhibition though Highfield has confronted the portrait head-on, not through proxy. Her work Self-portrait as Naturalist, depicts the artist as a beast conjurer and mad scholar, in some sort of steam punk mash up of Disney’s Snow White and a post-human Beatrix Potter. The sculptural material demands to be seen as beautiful and tangible (the ebony and shell eyes for example) but something here is worrying and odd. Highfield seems unable to hold on to the image of herself in this bust, usually the most stolid of genres. It depicts her instead as fragile and humbled, as she falls apart and flits away like a bird.

The airiness of the works suggests the dreamlike quality of the Symbolists and their more famous legacy, the Surrealists. Odilon Redon is full of strange animal/men, Camille Claudel is full of feminine longing and sexuality, and perhaps most famously

Edvard Munch created images that were in between the real and the fantastical. It was the Symbolists who allowed the material (or words in poetry) to speak and resonate for themselves beyond the common and rational syntax of things. In Highfields work the pearl or the ebony resonates beyond the work itself. The shell has its own history, its own story that pushes laterally, though still connected, to the image it represents. So for example in Goat, the human hair is an amazing analogue for the goats fur but it is also a voodoo charm, or memento. All of Highfields materials from paper to gold demand to be seen for themelves; they seem to resist their sculptural use.

The Symbolists also began primarily from the abstract, the spiritual and psychological and then sought out an image or a poem that could conjure that feeling in their viewer. I feel Highfield’s work, especially in this exhibition, functions in that way; her animals are emotional states, affirmations of power and resilience, of seduction and vulnerability, that we can all relate to.

As sculptural works this show is characterised by a contemporary hybridity. Highfield has been very interested in the anthropology of objects and various fetishes and totems from different periods. She likes the magic in objects and although in a gallery setting her works lead as sculptures they also allude to different forms, from religious icons to mourning jewellery, from portrait busts to kitsch souvenirs. For example Lion, with its pink finger between its teeth, and its feather boa halo, is confusingly part baroque reliquary, part rocker chic. In most of Highfields sculpture it is life size, as if her work becomes an effigy, a second body, or voodoo doll of thing she represents. I note that there is not much above life size, the size of authority and power; here everything is in direct conversation with the viewer as an equal.

There is something magical about watching Highfield work in her studio, there is almost something of the coven about it. As she takes shells, and drills eye holes and places her own daughters hair on an image of a goat, you feel like she is in the work of conjuring. Part modern constructivism, part futurism, part steam punk and surreal, it is very hard to pin down Highfield’s approach. We seem to be at the aftermath of a party with spattered paint, and streamers, feather boas draped over furniture and stained sheets. Although a modernist cliché, it is clear these works are genuinely deeply connected to Highfield’s life, bot hpsychological and material. Although based in her identity, there is however, a lot of poetry for the audience to find.

Oliver Watts

2018