Forrest Summons: An Experience

Angus Kinloch

Installation view of Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 2022-2023. Featuring Hannah Gartside, Forest summons (for Lilith) 2022. Photography by Sean Fenessy.

There is a different expectation when you come into a gallery with the express purpose of looking at the artworks for an assignment. You can no longer just walk through the gallery. Rather, you scour the artworks for anything to be able to write on. First floor? Interesting pieces but nothing for me to write about. Second floor? I was told there would be exhibitions that wouldn’t count so strike that out. That leaves the third floor. Arriving on the third floor all I can hear is the Death Simulator. The beeps from the heart monitor ring through the corridors as I walk past it into the next room.

Entering the next room, there’s an almost ephemeral silence. It feels like I am walking into a church to see a holy spectacle. What I find is Hannah Gartside’s Forrest Summons (for Lilith). An experience in which fabric is tied to metal frames and spins in a circular motion. I didn’t think when going through all these artworks that this would be the one that I would write on. I stare for a long time at the moving fabric. A memory of a silent afternoon in Canberra (where I grew up). A strong and grey afternoon threatening rain but not at the same time. I sit by myself at a bus stop and all I do is watch the treetops. They bulge and breathe as the wind goes through them, barely any cars pass me. It’s a nice memory, almost meditative just how silent and beautiful an afternoon that was. Peaceful. 

Even more than that I look at another one of these pieces and all I imagine is a beach house. The sun is shining through in a bright hot way. A small breeze comes through the white framed window. The horizontal window frame is open. A white, sheer curtain dances with the wind.

It reminds me of various contemporary arts where complex human experiences and emotions are transcribed and transposed. The experimental game 2:22AM is an experience rather than conventional video game. The design of the game is an odd one. You don’t really interact but rather go from point A to point B until the game changes up on you. The entirety of the game is a sequence of things that happen, like digging a grave or simply walking through an empty city. You witness, explore and interact with these sequences in succession. It was created to emulate late night TV. Playing 2:22AM drove me into buried memories, deep in the nooks and crannies of my brain.

I sit in my dark room, the only light the white TV glow that slightly highlights the items in my room. I am alone, my parents too far away to really be a presence in my world. I watch random TV shows and movies, not really able to understand anything that is going on. The silence that I feel in the game felt parallel to the emotions and solitude that I experienced when I was a child watching the TV. There’s a connection between 2:22AM and Forrest Summons. These small and quiet artworks are able to remind me of these memories. They make me feel these complex emotions of nostalgia and of belonging.

With time and age, new modes of art continue to carry me back to my childhood, like Skinamarink (2022). The premise of this abstract film is a nightmare, a child’s nightmare to be exact. It reminds me of a nightmare I had as a child. It would be in the middle of the night; everyone is asleep and yet I am awake. From where I sleep the door is ajar with the light of the family computer in the next room giving off a faint glow. I watch the corridor from where I lie, afraid that any movement will attract monsters to me. I vividly watch the shadows move in the pale light. Classic silhouettes of people move and stand just on the periphery of the doorway and hallway, always just out of my vision. Skinamarink’s cinematography correlates and entwines with a child’s nightmares, like mine. The film focuses on isolation and loneliness, mixed with the feelings of confusion and of a child wanting the protection of their parent’s attention. Specifically, the cinematography and the sound effectively communicates these indescribable emotions and memories. The cinematography highlights the isolation of a nightmare, much like my own nightmare. Shots focus on the house rather than the children themselves. We, the audience, inhabit the POV of the children. Connecting us to the children as they experience this nightmare. The sound in the movie is also minimal, quiet, and sparse, reminding me of the silent nights where I would stare at those shadows at the end of my corridor, only hearing the wind from my window.

In Hannah Gartside’s Forrest Summons, she uses 100-year-old women’s clothing to construct her trees. In her didactic panel, Gartside explains that the reasoning for the use of the fabric is because it is imbued with ‘our emotional experiences: yearnings, pains, and delights alongside the physicality of our bodies’.

Like the fabric trees that Gartside uses for Forrest Summons, 2:22AM was created to give the person the feeling of something unexplainable. Like a nightmare, history or even an experience like watching TV late at night that normally art doesn’t usually explore. That is what I find so enticing about Forrest Summons. The fact that these motorised ‘trees’ are able to give me these feelings and memories are something that press the importance of art like this. The artists, like the garments, imbue their art with these memories and feelings and transpose them onto the viewer. These experiences, these moving landscapes made of fabric or even polygons on a screen, can somehow make me think of trees on a summer morning, or a summer breeze at a beach house, or a lonely night when I watched TV as a child.

“There is a silent reflection that comes from the constant reminder of death and the silent beauty of watching trees dance in the wind or remembering the times as a child when you watched TV alone.”

Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker is a 6-hour music album. An album that degrades as it goes on, repeating its music with scratchy record sounds that pop and crackle in your ear. Sometimes the music just stops without warning. There are no song names but rather stages. It works itself on you. First, it’s just jazz that plays on loop but sometimes you’ll notice that something is off. By the end of the album there is no music at all, just a low drone that you could hardly call music. The final stage, ‘Place in The World Fades Away’, ends with a glorious, almost church-like finality. The album represents the descent of dementia. Some of the most striking art I have encountered, it portrays this disease in all its brutality. The stages convey the erasing of someone’s mind in its entirety until the end, when the person dies. Yet, it portrays this descent with nothing but music. Like the metal and the old fabric of Gartside’s trees trigger memory from nothing, there is a link with the way that Everywhere at the End of Time translates this inexplainable circumstance for anyone that listens. Their ability to express something without words elevates it in my eyes. How can these artists describe and talk about these complex ideas so flawlessly and with conviction?

It does leave me with a question, however. Earlier I spoke about experiencing the art outside of the context of an art gallery. I still find myself finding asking why Forrest Summons (For Lilith) was placed where it was. Next to the Death Simulator, the beeps of the simulator is a constant reminder of death. Forrest Summons, next to it is … well, I don’t know. It is impossible for me to know but its place in the gallery has clearly been thought out. I have a theory. I guess it has to do with death and life. When thinking about death, doesn’t one think of their life, their memory? There is a silent reflection that comes from the constant reminder of death and the silent beauty of watching trees dance in the wind or remembering the times as a child when you watched TV alone.

This is why I enjoy the art in the first place. The ability to say what words can’t. That to me is what makes art so special and worthwhile.

Forrest Summons (for Lilith) is an artwork about women’s freedom and liberation. The fabric represents the trees in the Garden of Eden and the motion of the wind. One could even argue that the wind represents the freedom that the fabric can now experience. It’s clear that that aspect also applies to what I am talking about here. That even the movement of the sculpture can communicate something like freedom. I thought that because I couldn’t connect to this idea of women’s liberation that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it within this piece, that because I am a cis man, it would be moot. But it does connect to me. It is deeply connected to the way I connect to art and the reasons I connect to art. That it is the idea of transforming something into an experience. From demon to icon, from the historic oppression of women to liberation and freedom … the fabric, landscape and experience is used to transcribe these feelings of freedom and liberation to the viewer.

All these artworks have things in common: movement and landscapes. For me, the most obvious is that they are all landscapes. 2:22 AM shows landscapes in various shapes and sizes. Skinamarink shows landscapes of the house that the kids inhabit. Forrest summons, while a sculpture, is itself a moving landscape of a forest. Even Everywhere at the End of Time, with what I would argue is a landscape painted in the mind through its music. Maybe it is the movement of these pieces that make it easier for me to connect. Or maybe it’s that I engage with art more outside of galleries that it allows me to make these connections. Even with more traditional paintings like Edward Hopper that connection is clearly there. I feel lucky to be able to have gone down this rabbit hole to make this connection with Forrest Summons.

I think it is obvious that art has a clear, intrinsic value within human society. I guess at the end of the day what I am exploring is the use of art to explore complex emotions and experiences. These artists imbue their artworks with their memories and feelings in order to express it with their audience. Forrest Summons (for Lilith) is an artwork that I didn’t think that I would be able to connect with—my usual art is movies, books and even games. Going to Melbourne Now has opened my eyes to the possibilities of understanding different types of art.