Forged from fire

In conversation with Jen Mallinson

It’s the 11th September 2021 and the annual outdoor sculpture show Swell at Currumbin Beach is in full swing. We are arriving just as the sun is going down. There are people promenading down the beach with the giant blow up white rabbits, a thousand paper cranes blowing in the wind, the grand, the simple, the bizarre and the intriguing. Swell is Queensland’s answer to Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi. Luckier this year to be able to host the event whereas Covid restrictions in Sydney have closed Sculpture by the Sea for the second year running.

I find my friend Jen Mallinson’s piece at the northern most end of the beach where the river meets the sea. By the time I get to it the sun is a mere glow and the blue of the sky is slipping away.

From the Catalogue online ‘Brain Freeze- is Like fragments of brain coral washed ashore, this multidimensional work is aimed at bringing awareness to the effects of warming waters on our coral reefs.
Brain corals are important reef builders, a ‘robust’ coral with the unique capacity to generate an essential amino acid. New research suggests that this fact makes them more resilient to the impacts of bleaching, providing more hope for the survival of coral reefs globally.
With penetrative patterning, this sculpture shows its resilient life force through a slow breath like internal illumination.’

It’s more than that. It is sensual, elegant, the organic shapes are adorned with a delicate patterning lit from within. It glows.

I have been watching this work evolve. we have shared the marvel at the shapes being put through the rollers, the forms, the stories behind the themes. The despair at what is happening to our planet.

A few weeks ago Jen was thinking she may have to give up her sculpting. It looked like Swell would not go ahead and Sculpture by the Sea was holding its breath as Covid restrictions loomed. We hear a lot about the plight of musicians and performers due to lockdown but little is said about the impact of the cancellations of these big sculptural events. Since I saw Jen in December 2019 at her home on the south coast of New South Wales, she almost lost her home when the black summer fires came right to her door just weeks after our visit, she has had the collapse of a major international commission when the project went into hiatus due to Covid and now the cancellation of Sculpture By the Sea for 2021.

Works like these don’t happen overnight. It begins with a concept and research, it means detailed drawings, maquettes and then engineering reports and then fabricating or construction. That can take months. It is not a cheap exercise.

Sculpture is an art form that requires an artists eye, attention to detail, sensitivity, skill and experience to be truly great and timeless. In my mind Jen has that in spades.

However, she is a woman, she lives in a regional village far away from galleries and the art scene and she is by nature dedicated and reserved. This doesn’t always spell success in the art-world. So let me tell share a conversation I had with Jen and why I admire not only her incredible artistic ability but her perseverance in having a creative voice for climate action.

It is the 10th December 2019 and I am on a road trip from Queensland driving down though New South Wales, Victoria then through South Australia and back to Queensland. We have left behind the fires still burning in Queensland and have driven through burnt National Parks, smoke filled skies from Gosford to the Southern Highlands. Have been diverted across the Snowy mountains because roads are closed from fires and thick smoke. Everywhere is dry.

Jen Mallinson lives in the small coastal town of Pambula on the far south coast of New South Wales . Jen has always been an artist, working in graphic design, ceramics, painting and most recently focussing on sculpture.

Her house is full of her artworks but it is her studio that has me intrigued….

Tell me about your studio.. Its a bit higeldy piggeldy but I love coming down here. It’s totally my space, things stay where I put them. There’s no body else in here but me.

So what is it about the studio? Why do you love this studio? It's probably a really good meditative space because when I come here, I just work and I don't think about anything else.…you need to be so focussed on everything you are doing , with this kind of work…every tool in here : cut off discs, grinders, plasma cutters, every tool in here is basically is really dangerous. You've got to be very present with what you are doing. Specially cut off discs, you could so easily cut your fingers off or the blade could shoot off into your head…

When did you first know that art was your passion and you had to do it? I guess a really horrible experience in my life has made me focus a lot more on my artwork…I was close to losing everything. I had to decide how was I going to get my life back together? What do I do? How do I make a living? I had worked for myself for quite a long time, and then when everything kind of fell apart I had to really think about how am I going to live ? Do I go back to the city get a job as a designer? What do I need to do? What can I do ? I always wanted to learn how to weld and didn't start welding until my children were old enough for me to go to TAFE at night to learn how to weld so and that was only in. 2009 .

So you went off to a welding class, were you the only woman in the welding class? There was one other woman. I’m the only one who has stuck with it. I started off with a friend of mine. We had done an artist residency at Broken Hill together, and she's actually a ceramicist and I was a painter at that stage . I had done Ceramics at Tafe years and years ago and always loved it loved making sculptural forms.

I always wanted to work with steel anyway, when we got back from our residency we both enrolled at Bega TAFE to do the basic welding course, and then I went on because I loved it. She left. I loved rolling steel, which is how you get organic forms and what puts the softness into steel … steel is such a hard medium .

It's very masculine and its mainly men who work with steel, and so they produce sort of masculine things and I've always loved curving steel and rollers, so if I wanted to keep using the rollers at TAFE I had to do an engineering course so that’s what I did. A two year course in Engineering for heavy metal fabrication.

So tell me about the forms , what you are trying to get out of the steel, what you trying to capture ? My works are all abstract, some more abstract than others but rooted in nature.

Their inspiration is usually from nature,: whether that’s the look of surface of the water, or the patterns that water makes coming out of the sand at low tide.; all these little rivulets or a mangrove seed or some microscopic part of a plant that looks really incredible.

That is the basis to the inspiration of the work.

Because nature is amazing , its perfect.

So that's probably why living here in Pambula inspires you? Well. I'm very lucky. It's peaceful, we are sitting here looking at this gorgeous floodplain, gums and grass , it’s really beautiful, it's very quiet, and I'm about 5 minutes drive away from the beach, and abundant unspoilt coastline. It's halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. Even in the height of Summer you can go to the beach and see nobody. It’s just gorgeous the colour of the rocks; it’s different everyday. There's seaweed, animal life ,the weather..

I get a lot of energy from the ocean because I usually meditate when I go down there too. I suck in all the energy of the ocean as I breathe, I'm conscious of it and that's a form of inspiration for me .

I guess I’m on a slightly spiritual path, but you know, it's just my way of life. There are much bigger things than us out there. and I just ask for universal help and knowledge and try to breathe in what ever happens- happens.

We are sitting in Jens studio.

Coreten sculptures , maquettes, shining steel , rippled surfaces, swooping curves . Heavy machinery, tools of all kinds abound. Her dog stands sentry curiously eyeing the visitors, cicadas hum in the background. I photograph Jen in front of an amazing winged work

How do people react to your work? Those that I have spoken to get the connection to the plant life or wherever the Inspirations come from ….people see different things and like different aspects. She points to the texture in the piece she is working on if you look closely at this its like shimmering water on the side of the stainless steel.

So this is a Public Art commission have you done much of that work? No I haven’t I have done one really big art commission , that was in Bega it was my first.I had the best and the worst experience with that. It was a really big learning curve.

Tell me about that. It was for Bega, Littleton Gardens. It was a site specific piece for place .. and people had to connect with it. I chose to look at the actual place, and it's significance to the ancient cultures of the land and so it's where the Bega river, and the brogo river conjoin and the sculpture was was called the meeting of the rivers and because it was such a significant place for the Koories in the past., Mount Imlay and Mount Gulaga to the north (Mount Dromedary)

It's on a song line so I consulted with Elders here about the native flora and fauna of the area and their stories, and I was allowed to use their meeting symbol which I Incorporated into the work.

Also the design of the cut outs in the Sculpture was inspired also walking along the beach I found a piece of driftwood that I've liked for a long time where a eucalyptus beetle that eats underneath the bark and a makes all of these little unit patterns like you often see it in squiggly bark gums - little eaten patterns, and I would always see animals and things in those patterns, and I just thought that's a really cool patterning so that's what I did… I based the look of that the patterning in the work of these little eucalyptus beetles and Incorporated you know the stingray, kangaroo, and goanna and birds and the black duck and the eel from the Bega River and then there's a Casuarina nuts and a grass tree. There is various kinds of vegetation. …. it said the place was all of these things plus the meeting symbol.

The actual sculptural forms come out of the ground , two arch like arms that wrap over each other but don't touch. It symbolised an embracing of cultures and place. The sculpture leans over to this beautiful Boulder that came from that Mt Gulaga The Koorie elder I was talking with referred to them as tears of the mountain. Mt Gulaga is very significant. It's a woman's mountain there’s a birthing place nearby. So all these things all kind of came together.

And how big is this sculpture? About 4.8 metres high , 7.2 m lentos of steel that have been rolled so they're like two big elongated triangle that wrap over each other .

That was a commission from the local council? Yes it was
That was the first piece that you actually didn't fabricate but had others fabricate for you.? So it is a huge learning curve as well because when you're working that large you still have to be responsible for the engineering and all of the visioning …then you had to hand it over to a fabricator and I gather there was some issues there…. what lessons would you have learnt about that process that you would pass on to other artists ?

Ok …..the first fabricator I employed ,because I I didn't know anybody that could work that large . It’s quite specific rolling steel, and welding it, fabricating. There's not that many people that can do that. So I went online and found this guy who turns out to be very shonky… he wouldn't hand the work over to me after I had paid him… So I found another fabricator in Queanbeyan that made the work which was great. I could actually make it with him. It was like he was working for me. Honestly which was which was lovely and actually I worked on the piece… but the advice I give to people is …….totally question everything.

Make sure you have a contract and a lawyer goes over the contract with you. Make sure you write down everything.

I had all my emails. Of course, but if there's conversations make notes after the conversations, keep everything in a diary that's a really important thing. It's not something that artists like doing …we like to go with the flow but ….its a really important thing so you've got track of day and time when people said what If you are engaging a fabricator or someone to make some of your work….there’s no way you would ever think of doing a court search on them or their company ..but it’s not a bad Idea

I guess what is at risk is someone taking over your intellectual property. That is a massive learning curve and makes you more careful about the jobs you take on going forward.

We are sitting in front of this incredible piece at the moment, what is the inspiration for this wing piece is it a seed, is it a bird? It’s a bit of a combination, inspired by a winged seed. I don't know how I came about wanting to make wings of some sort, not birds wings or animal wings- nothing that was a recognisable. So it's based seed the form, but then it has the cutout patterns in the wings and they’re inspired by seaweed and deadman’s fingers.

It is like the wings of a cicada or ripples on the water. It's got this incredible organic feeling I like that its anything you want it to be really. You don't have to know it's inspired by seaweed. I like the random look of things that you don't really know what it is and it's not too….I’ve never liked that thing…. To be too precise. I like that spontaneity… it's a bit difficult in steel ..

Well you’ve managed to capture that fluidity , its like its blowing in the wind as though its made of something not steel, quite extraordinary.

So what's next for Jenny Mallinson well I do I have a really big projects on the horizon that I can't really say anything about that yet but that could be very exciting if it comes off, ….but I still have to keep my feet on the ground, keep working away . Every piece I make, my skills keep increasing… and I don't know how much longer I can keep working with steel for , I’m 58, and it's bloody hard . My wrist got really sore recently and I went to the physiotherapist …and she goes no wonder, you are pushing your body like you are a 20 year old male. But I just we are a wrist brace for a whole and keep doing it.I love the physicality of working with steel. And as I said my skills every piece I make, they get better and better because I keep learning every bit is different.

It's like reinventing the wheel with every sculpture that I make cos there's new problems with actually fabricating and putting them together knowing my limitations of the process I use which is plasma cutting steel and forming it myself rolling it cold forming it, and then you know and then joining it all together. Working within the limitations of the process.

Where can people see your work? Mainly in sculpture shows mainly around the country there's one in Kangaroo Valley. Theres a sculpture show in Mudgee in Bermagui there's heaps of sculpture shows coming up all over the country at the moment, and I can only get to the ones that I can make for really cuz I'm just an individual making

I was lucky enough this year to be in the botanical gardens in Sydney and artisans in the gardens, and that was the largest that I made by myself. I'm probably the most expensive one that I've sold so far. ($25,000)

If people were interested in seeing your work, they could see that on your website

Who are the great sculptors, great artists that inspire you ? I always loved Calder and Miro as a painter he’s kind of sculptural paintings in a way- very abstract. Anthony Gormley , Richard Serra huge sort of monumental works very abstract. They Look quite simple, but a technically very difficult to make and huge ship building equipment is used to build his works….but a woman that I have always loved is Beverly Pepper. She's been very inspirational …there are a lot of people making her kind of work now but its got to be large scale and I don’t have the kind of equipment that I can make anything that large for my self at the moment. It would have to be a commission.

As an artist making work in a regional area of Australia what advice would you provide for creating a better Arts landscape what do you think of the ingredients that we need to make it easier to support artists ? I know there are various arts grants you can apply for but they are not really for individuals, they have to have a community base to help multiple people rather than an artist.You know, there is I have what is it called Southeast Arts here, but they seem to be quite performance arts-based.

Do you think Australia has a good art market I don't think there as many people that buy artwork for their houses and things like that as Europe

so maybe fostering a culture where we value the arts on the day to day, basis? Yeah, that would be really lovely. I mean what do you know from ancient cultures? What do you Remember? Its the artworks! So support the arts!

On the 5th of January 2020 Jen posts on her Facebook page….

Just went back home to my studio in South Pambula, Far South Coast of NSW, to hose down the deck for the last time. This pic is from midday, no filters. Everything covered in ash. We haven’t seen the sun in 2020 yet. It’s totally weird, just waiting, huge fires all around. I’m safe with family in Merimbula, ready to run to the beach and jump in if it comes to that. My heart goes out to everyone affected by these insane fires. 1/3rd of all of Australians have been affected in some way. Take care.