Design and Art Australia Online

Artist and senior lecturer, Louise Fowler-Smith has been actively making and exhibiting art since the late 1970s. Her early works were predominantly paintings, drawings and collage but more recently she has concentrated on photography, particularly at night. Her formative experiences as a painter are reflected in her approach to her photographic works, which have focused on trees as their central subject matter.

During her childhood the family moved every three years until she reached high school. They finally settled in St Ives in northern Sydney in 1968. Fowler-Smith and her three sisters emerged as a highly creative generation with Juliet practicing sculpture, Penny filmmaking and Judy photography. Time spent near Dungog on her father’s farm is where the artist first learnt the beauties and wonders of the land.

Fowler-Smith has studied in several universities and countries. After leaving school she headed to London where she studied for six months at the Sir John Cass School of Art, City of London Polytechnic, London, gaining a certificate in 1977. She returned to Australia in 1978 where she studied for her Diploma in Art Education at Alexander Mackie CAE, Sydney (now College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales). She gained a Graduate Diploma in the Professional Art Studies in 1981 at the Alexander Mackie CAE and a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) at the City Art Institute (formerly Alexander Mackie but not yet College of Fine Arts) in 1983. At this point she headed to Santa Barbara, California where she gained a Masters in Fine Arts from The University of California in 1985.

Much of Fowler-Smith’s gallery based work focuses on the veneration of trees, a subject she was drawn to not only for the magnitude of its environmental significance, but for its universal and pan-religious symbolic importance (pers. comm.).

In Australia Louise has been particularly interested in the Mulga Tree, found in the arid zone of far western New South Wales, with its umbrella like form and isolated existence. To date the photographs she has taken are always of singular, lone trees, which, through her manipulation and placement, she manages to imbue with a poetic resonance. Her process is similar to that of a painter, whereby she layers or glazes light onto specially chosen trees that may otherwise have been disregarded and ignored; she regards this process as one that allows her to concentrate on a tree’s individual qualities or personality, drawing out the tree, making it special, individualistic and ethereal (pers. comm.).

The artist feels that arboreal personalities can be seen best at night not so much with the blinding light of a camera’s flash, but with the softer, fragile and flickering light of torches and candles (pers. comm.). The artist regards this layering of lighting on the trees as akin to a glaze over their surface, which she has captured both on canvas and on artist quality paper (pers. comm.). She makes it her business to notice trees disregarded by the community; in so doing she aims to provoke the viewer to co-examine societal indifference and the artist’s own commitment to nature. The artist insists that the medium she has developed is most sympathetic to the expression of her idea (pers. comm.).

Fowler-Smith takes all of her photographs at night, using candle light and torches to illuminate her subject. This is seen in FG Golden Night Trio (2009), Dawn FG (2009), Imagination is a Tree (2009), Sturt Mulga (2009) and Night Pillar (2009). She has a particular interest in the Mulga tree, which survives in desolate land with very limited water supply, yet is treated as a weed and disliked by farmers and the community (pers. comm.). By contrast, the artist is fascinated by its perseverance and endurance (pers. comm.).

An understanding of the cultural importance of trees is especially evident in her writing and artwork on India and its culture. Since 2006 Louise has traveled across the sub-continent, photographing how trees are decorated as an act of veneration or worship, and interviewing people in the field. She published some of this research in an article 'Hindu Tree Veneration as a Mode of Environmental Encounter’ in Leonardo: The Journal of the International Society for the Arts , Science and Technology (2009, pp. 43-51). This has developed into a larger project incorporating her visual and interview-based fieldwork where she seeks to visually record how the tree is decorated across contemporary India, and how this practice has the ability to protect the tree.

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Philosopher and the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics at CaseWestern Reserve University, Cleveland, USA, describes Fowler-Smith’s work as “interesting” because “it is poised between the aesthetic approach to art and the ethical. Her photographs of ephemerally transfigured trees are signs pointing to communal practices we – in the world of global art flows – have not yet developed. Equally, they are memorials for what we have lost – an ethos” ('Geo-Aesthetics in the Anthropocene’ Conference, 2010).

Fowler-Smith’s art aims to inspire people to think differently of the land. These goals have also inspired her teaching. In 2003, with colleagues Idris Murphy and Ian Grant, Fowler-Smith co-established ILIRI (Imaging the Land International Research Institute), a research centre at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), that has continued to attract researchers and post graduate students to undertake fieldtrips at Fowlers Gap in far western New South Wales. In December 2009 she assumed the role of its Director. In the same year she established the 'Creative Laboratory’, also at Fowlers Gap, where artists, architects and scientists – people concerned with the environment – can collaborate on projects that explore new ways of perceiving, interacting and living in a land starved of water. Both within her artworks and the broader goals in her research and teaching, there is a focus on changing the way people understand the impact of climate change, learn to perceive the land and live in it.

As an environmentally concerned artist, Louise Fowler-Smith has come to focus on notions of perception in the belief that how we perceive and contemplate the land affects how we treat the land, and ultimately how we live within it (pers. comm.). She believes that we are less likely to honour and respect the land if we see it as separate from ourselves (pers. comm.). For Fowler-Smith, this perception remains pertinent irrespective of how the land is ideologically managed across cultural divides (pers. comm.).

Writers:

Son, Shiny
De Lorenzo, Catherine

Date written:

2010

Last updated:

2011