Design and Art Australia Online

The subjects for Siné MacPherson’s meticulously coloured canvases rarely stray far from home. This has included field guides for plants and birds, and dictionaries from her bookshelves, newspapers and even her painting apron. As she noted, her “interests lie in colour, the descriptive languages of visual phenomena, and visual systems.” These interests can be solidly traced in her work as far back as the 1970s, such as Pear Box 1978, in which three painted canvas covered plastic pears are framed with a painting of the same pears. She questions how we visualise objects, what is real, what has greater visual authority? Her fascination with the ‘already made’ has a strong tradition in art history, becoming popular in the 1960s, it describes a way for artists to look at and engage with the stuff of everyday life.

This new body of work, Still Lifes, is almost an exception to her rules. Some distance from home, MacPherson found an already made subject with which she could tackle the tradition of floral still life painting. These striking white crosses, with their cacophony of coloured plastic flowers, carved names and assorted tributes, resonated with her, lingering in her memory. She had made note of them as interesting possibilities but rumours that roadside shrines might be removed was the impetus to begin. All were different, but generally contained the same four ingredients: white cross, text, flowers, tributes. Unlike her previous themes, this one came loaded with other’s emotions, with their losses, grief and memories. The shrines were very personal and extremely public displays. They were also warning signs to motorists. MacPherson had chosen a difficult subject, but it was an ‘already made’ that deserved attention, because like no other floral still life of our time, they were a significant part of our local history. These were beautiful ready made, already made, floral still life arrangements.

MacPherson began documenting them in 2010. She recalled, “I found the subjects for Still Lifes on the Albany Highway. I had looked at them in passing, for years, but in 2010 I had a driver willing to slow down, turn around and wait while I took photos. It was hot, there were bugs, there were cars passing just meters away at 110, but great flowers – great artificial flowers already arranged.” Over several years she has created a series of exquisite paintings. Time had faded the artificial flowers to soft hues, and MacPherson’s palette reciprocated. The paintings hone in on the flowers, eliminating much of the background landscape, becoming essentially still life floral paintings.

It is important at this point to return to MacPherson’s starting point of using “descriptive languages of visual phenomena and visual systems”. As she states, “the Still Lifes are found subjects, ready mades, already mades – I never make things up.” She is not setting out to document local history, to paint a story or create a narrative, she paints subjects that interest her. These are not real flowers, they are not real shrines. These paintings consist of oil paint carefully applied to canvas, according to a strictly limited palette, yet one cannot help but be moved when viewing them.
Allison Archer 2016