Marian Hosking
Left: Heart Shaped Round Leaf Gum Necklace, 2006
925 silver, heat coloured with black linen thread
Dimensions: Each Unit 40 x 32 x 4mm
Photographer: Julian Hutchens

Right: Gum Nut Chain, 2006
925 silver, heat coloured
Dimensions: Each Unit 10mm diameter
Photographer: Julian Hutchens

What does pinning a gum leaf, or wattle, or fern on your clothing represent? It could be a pragmatic decoration using whatever is handy, it could be a traditional use of floral emblems, or it could be the display of national or regional allegiances. It could be just a sample of a collection kept elsewhere. And it could be all of these things.

This exhibition of work by Marian Hosking shows how all of this could be so in the one gesture. The exhibition demonstrates that we like to wear a range of things such as brooches, rings and necklaces; it also makes explicit the artist's investigation of flora as a form-giving source, and her commitment to specific landscapes as the context for creative work. And despite the plethora of new works, it is a kind of retrospective, a demonstration of the artist's vision and touch that she has developed over the last decade or so.

The complexity of the enterprise is made accessible by the division of the work into four groups. Each group identifies with an Australian climate and landscape type. One is the desert of South Australia, another is the forest of southeast Gippsland, another is the heath-land near Sydney. And finally there is a generic coast without specific location. Each zone is represented by a container surrounded by many small objects. In the first three, all is in silver, in the coastal group, other materials encroach to the extent that difference of shape, colour, texture and weight become primary.

Marian Hosking
Eremophila/eremophila #1, 2007
925 silver
Photographer: Julian Hutchens

Each zone has been identified and gathered as a collection, and exhibited in a cabinet. Each zone's container (or vase, or bowl) provides an image of the collection as an idea, but without systematic or epistemological constraints, while at the same time providing direct clues to the represented zone. Thus the arid container mimics a salt-lake, the forest container has crusty sides cast from bark that has been burnt, and the heath-land container depicts coral fern profiles. The coastal container is pierced with holes based on Indian patterns - but more of this later. Each container is far too small to hold all of its surrounding flock and therefore contextualizes the objects around it.

For the three inland zones, there is an easy resemblance or commonality to the scatter of objects. They are all silver, although the silver has been subjected to various kinds of manipulation and finish. Some pieces are castings of real fragments of flora; some are sawn profiles. The castings are sometimes left as copies, combined to produce obviously artificial ropes and chains, or combined to become larger pieces of flora. In some of these, the silver has been subjected to degrees of patination that looks remarkably like the progressive desiccation of plant matter. The sawn profiles are sometimes overlaid to make signature pieces which are formal bilateral patterns in which the composed symmetry contrasts to the informal symmetry of stems and leaves. Also among the objects are a number of other signature pieces of a disc or rectangle covered with an array of small repeated elements, either firmly or loosely attached so that that they either optically wiggle, or actually wiggle when touched. In this entire range of things, Hosking shows how to imitate nature without disguising artifice - in fact, the artist demonstrates how to make artifice seem natural. This can be understood as the characteristic that holds together the pieces in the arid, forest and heath-land groups: at a prosaic level they are metalwork things, largely wearable and thus of a specific type - brooch, necklace, ring - but at another level, they reify a relationship between the plant world of growth and the human world of manufacture.

Marian Hosking
Eremophila/eremophila #2, 2007
925 silver
Photographer: Julian Hutchens

The coastal group shares some of these characteristics, but there are crucial differences. Firstly, no specific place is identified; rather, the idea or generic experience of the coast is suggested. Here one can imagine that the three inland zones are places of settlement or intricate exploration of the established order, while the coast is a liminal zone of reception. Hence the coastal zone of Hosking's vision is signalled by an exotic container, purer in form than the others, and not derived from landscape. Further, its surrounding scatter is detritus-like, with found and introduced objects of the sort one might gather in a beach walk. Here the rules of making, of creating a physical substitute of a given fragment are relaxed. Many of the coastal objects are the actual things, not one-to-one silver casts. Being real things, then, and not subject to the silver-makes-all rule, the bits and pieces (the coastal flotsam and jetsam) are somewhat ambiguous in origin: from nature but altered, and from culture but altered. Here the artist has found, not made. Significantly, the container's decoration is derived from culture, and one that is not indigenous to or historically connected with this landmass. Finally, within the coastal set, there are suite-like effects in which the contrasts of adjacent objects cause surprise and novelty.

Theoretically, sets of all kinds are defined only by their common characteristic, and the number of members in a set is not an issue. Nor is a set's distribution in space. These rules apply to this current assembly of Hosking's work. Although it is limited to a specific number of landscapes and a limited number of things representing them, there is a strong sense that the collections could be added to easily; also a sense that more objects would not alter the intrinsic properties being revealed. Nor would these properties change when, sometime in the future, these objects are dispersed as single items to individuals who will handle, wear, display and store them. The set that is made actual in this exhibition would remain but become scattered and diffuse, returned to the larger space of the whole continent, and maybe even regions beyond its coast.

Alex Selenitsch
23 October, 2007

Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect, and a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne.