In this gift to the Collection from artist Martin Smith, he juxtaposes his recollection of a traumatic moment with the destruction of an old tree, reminding the viewer how crucial context is to understanding an image.

Brisbane-based artist Martin Smith is well known for his emotionally charged photo-media works. Comprised of seemingly benign photographic images that have been interrupted by lengthy texts cut by hand from paper, Smith’s works often take a confessional tone. The labour-intensive practice of hand-cutting each letter mirrors the experience of fixating on certain intimate memories, replaying them over and over in our minds. Although photography is habitually employed to capture significant moments in people’s lives, Smith’s images are often taken in unpopulated urban or natural environments, and in contrast to the focus of written narrative. As former QAGOMA curator Michael Hawker has noted:

Text and image fight for dominance in Smith’s works: you need to focus on one or the other — both can’t be seen at the same time. The gap between memory and the event is implied in the missing pieces cut from the photographic paper.¹

Smith’s habit of littering the foot of the image’s frame with the cut-out letters reinforces this observation.

On the right-hand side of Fix it up, typescript has been cut from black photographic paper to reveal a white background. In the text, Smith recounts hearing of his father’s cancer diagnosis and resulting trip to the hospital. Alongside to this traumatic event, Smith also recounts, in equally vivid detail, a seemingly unremarkable scene of arborists working in his parents’ backyard, mulching a large old tree. Within the transcript, this banal occurrence and his father’s life-and-death situation appear to have equal importance. With this juxtaposition, Smith suggests that, while significant events may shape our lives, it is often the minor details that fill our memories. At the same time, this weaving of stories also acts on a symbolic level: the unexpected and comparatively violent end of the long-standing tree is prophetic of his own father’s sudden decline. Both figures — fixtures of the family home — now cast an absence.

Giving image to the narrative, the left-half of Fix it up shows a close-up photograph of mossy old branches that tangle and wind across one another. There is nothing particularly notable about this image; it could be an illustrative image in a botanical magazine or a generic photograph from an image database. When placed alongside the transcript, however, the image becomes charged with life. In this framework, the gnarled matured branches, which are providing a base for new growth, take on new significance. The work questions whether images have intrinsic meaning, reminding the viewer how much context impinges on the way that images are read.

Fix it up complements an earlier work by Martin Smith in the Collection, Yellow and very spacey 2007. Sliced from an image of a spacious park filled with tall deciduous trees in winter, the text for this work reveals the artist’s experience of being told about his sister’s diagnosis with bone cancer. Although they are not figurative, both Yellow and very spacey and Fix it up can be considered self-portraits: through them, Smith has made public highly personal events from his own life. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) in The Confessions, he seeks to wrestle with their significance as part of a larger question about the meaning of life.
 

Ellie Buttrose is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art.

Endnote

1. Michael Hawker, ‘Yellow and very spacey 2007’ [Collection essay], 2007, QAGOMA Research Library.