Marking the Threshold
By Althea Kuzman

Emily Ebbs is an artist based on Gadigal land whose paintings resemble a form of alchemy. This body of work was a seedling of an idea stemming from a fascination with mist. Ebbs developed an interest in the Irish folklore of féth fiada - the magical druid mist that acted as protection and sacred concealment. Ebbs’ drive to explore this idea came from the freedom of the Cloudstone Residency in Lutruwita (Tasmania), where Ebbs lived among the tall reaching trees, the weaving mist, and the bounty of pigment nature can provide.

Each morning Ebbs was greeted by the mist on long walks in nature that surrounded the residency. On these walks, the mist was her company, watching her revel in this protective cloak whilst picking fallen organic material from the ground - fallen pine, eucalyptus, charcoal and ash from the burnt remains of trees. The bright purple hues of the Kangaroo Apple flower made their way back to the studio to be mixed with lemon and bi-carb soda, leaving a blue wash to be experimented with. Mixing natural elements with paint, Ebbs works to include the environment that surrounds her. After painting the canvas, she allows nature to run its course by leaving the canvas outside for the elements to interact with her painterly gestures.

Permeation is central to these works, both in the process of their creation and their mist-like surfaces. Mist in a landscape gives the appearance of rising up from the grass, embedding itself between the grooves and the lulls of the rolling hills; it shifts, shimmers and filters through the tall trees. It is both everywhere and nowhere at all. It cannot be touched, and it cannot stay. Even an attempt to capture mist through a camera lens does not interpret its affect. Ebbs’ work in this show conveys an attempt to capture the féth fiada that morphs through the landscape. It is captured both in material and in feeling. Mist is mystical. It creates a sense of awe whilst being slippery and ambiguous. There is something uncanny about mist, in the way it is simultaneously opaque and transparent. It is visually hard in the sense that it obscures your line of sight, but soft because you can move through it with ease. There is a visual dissonance.

Ebbs’ work encompasses the duality of an evasive and non-haptic subject matter. These works are soft like mist, they compel and draw you in and it is captured into a two dimensional surface, one you cannot move past.

Ebbs’ tools for experimentation in colour and material are of the earth, and are returned there too. She boils fallen eucalyptus leaves to create a wash, then places the leaves back where she once found them. This process is grounding, it situates the studio, the body, and the landscape, which allows the creative process to flow for Ebbs. The scent of the boiling eucalyptus has become a starting ritual. The hue it extracts is earthly, and mixing it with paint and other pigments makes its liquidity unpredictable. Ebbs’ process is intuitive and organic - never quite knowing where the pigment will seep down the canvas.

These works act as a veil, between our eyes and Ebbs’ hand; between her ritual and our observation. They capture her experience of the body in a landscape, the feeling of immersion, the feeling of longing to understand the mysticism of nature, and to pierce the veil. Her works are the mist, they’re of the mist, and they are us - watching the mist but never quite passing the threshold.