2023

Vanished Light

By Tiarney Miekus

A shadow is vanished light. They are a kind of inevitable question for painters—to portray or not, and if so, how? Ella Dunn’s instinctual resolve is to intensify this absence.

In an obvious sense, Dunn’s oil paintings of objects and shadows, or shadows without objects, are broadly realist—but they are also metaphor, haunting and company. In Boy reaches out, we see the feet and ankles of a child, cast against a full-length shadow with ludicrously elongated arms. The shadow grows under his feet with something peculiar to the pose: it’s playful, reminiscent of a child casting illogical shadows on the pavement. Like many of Dunn’s paintings, it gestures toward, rather than explicit represents, the body which is tied to the shadow.

Another painting has a woman swimming alongside her shadow; is it comforting or inescapable? Water persists in these paintings, and in Watering the Garden, the body, water and shadow merge in one hazy image. In I touch my shadow, no my shadow touches me, a woman moves through a body of water, the title and image gesturing toward the circular question of relation. Yet another painting, Pull up a chair, is not so much a shadow but an opaque human outline, the pendant lighting cast a dramatic exposure, as if priming the subject for a monologue.

These paintings start from Dunn’s observations. A scene or moment may find itself rendered in a pencil drawing and later into painting. In previous works, Dunn painted with thicker gestures, but now an opaqueness has entered. While the marks often feel energetic, and the signature layers are still there, there is a thin skin that lends to the nature of a shadow. The paintings have beauty to them, but they are not attempting to be beautiful. Dunn rather evokes the Philip Guston view that the pleasure, or at least the meaning, of painting derives not from the satisfaction but the frustration.

Yet there is one precise moment that prompted this series, when Dunn was pushing a child on a swing, the sun behind the pair, casting their darkened forms onto the ground. Persuading the swing to rise and fall, Dunn remarked, “Look, you’re touching your shadow.” The child replied, “No, my shadow is touching me.” It is these moments that pervade Dunn’s paintings with demanding quietness: a friend sitting on a water tank at her parent’s regional property; the dappled light when watering the garden; the camaraderie of gathering around the dinner table; picking fruit on the streets of Coburg; a Paul Kelly lyric. The mundane often ends up being a domestic topic, which is to say a feminist topic—and while Dunn is influenced by painters like Joy Hester, Chantal Joffe and Marlene Dumas, and writers like Helen Garner, Elizabeth Strout and Diana Reid, these paintings were also made while listening to Nick Cave, with Dunn not immune to the kind of agnostic, yet deeply felt, religiosity he summons—and the sense of story.

Dunn began painting almost 10 years ago, turning to oils by the mere chance of being gifted some in a suitcase, previously intent on printmaking and drawing. She grew up on the northern coast of New South Wales, near Coffs Harbour, where, from an early age, she paid attention to how the sun rose and fell, the way the light changed on her family’s property, to later taking stylised teenage photoshoots in a Tumblr-appropriate field. Each is a snapshot of time, and painting is another way to apprehend daily experience. Not for Dunn to impose her own observations, but to communicate experience itself.

In this, Dunn is a classic ogler with human situations as the fodder: she’s an appreciator of the very act of observation. Not that everything comes back to childhood, but it doesn’t seem insignificant that Dunn was a painfully shy child, only speaking to her mother, father and brother until she was four years old. The cliche is that watching replaces talking—but Dunn’s paintings really do show how looking, and sharing this look, is a charged, telling action.

While Dunn could have painted shadows of anything, she only centres shadows of people. If these paintings are metaphor, what are they metaphor of? It could be tempting to read the shadow as a kind of psychological other or fantastical projection, but the trick of shadows is how they eclipse this tension between self and other. Dunn is capturing something more akin to a semi-other: your shadow is you, but also not you. We look at the shadow and the thing it’s tied to, in this case the person, and we apprehend both; it’s just as we look at the brush mark and the thing it’s tied to, the painting. It’s as metaphysical as painting gets: the question of how to perceive the marks on the canvas and the depicted object at the same time.

Something about all of this resonates so personally—after all, we each have a shadow, we go swimming, sit at dinner tables, both ask and fear the ancient question of “how to live”. Yet after seeing these paintings, walking out the gravelly back alley of Dunn’s Melbourne studio, I realised I hadn’t noticed my shadow in years.