This piece is adapted from our Artfull Sunday newsletter. Subscribe to receive artfully informed content, every week.
Words by Jessica Agoston Cleary
Photography by Artfull & the artists
Read time 5 minutes
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According to a headline on RNZ this week, Aotearoa New Zealand has been on the receiving end of an extreme 'Atmospheric river' which delivered yet more record rainfall. In its wake, this 'atmospheric river', has caused widespread flooding and damage up and down the country. Once again, our thoughts are with those who have been displaced or left reeling in the aftermath.
This is not the atmosphere I am referring to however. I shall leave analysis of the delicate balance of gases that swirl above us to meteorologists and others in scientific fields. When we talk of atmosphere within the context of art, or day to day life, what we are referring to is the ambience and emotional resonance of a place, space or situation. In this human experiential context, atmosphere arises from nuance. It is subtle, intangible, yet palpable.
In art theory and history, atmospheric art is art which presents us with a landscape or cityscape from a wide open, often aerial perspective. No doubt we have all seen paintings or photographs that depict the sweeping grander of a mountain range bathed in exquisitely captured light. In showing us the familiar, the artist manifests a viewing experience that is a simulacrum for the calmness or tempest like energy of the natural world. Yet atmosphere can be found in contemporary and abstract work too, not just within traditional aerial landscapes. Deborah Crowe's complex digital collage photographs, Tallulah Nunez's intensely detailed dreamscapes, and Michelle Reid's delicate, subtle abstract works each produce a distinct atmospheric quality that seeps into our pores. While the subject may not be familiar, these works work on us.
Atmosphere in these works arises from what is left to emerge from the spaces between. It is developed by the artist through their use of colour, composition and materials, which coalesce into a whole that draws you in. The atmosphere the artist generates reaches beyond the four corners of the frame, filling the space the work is in, as well as the deeper recesses of our mind and soul. That's the thing about atmosphere - it is all around us. It is simultaneously scientific and metaphysical. Artworks like these speak to us in a language beyond words. They work on us incrementally, evoking a multiplicity of thoughts, feelings and sensations. We are drawn first to their surface, observing and attempting to decipher the subject. And then we enter into them.
Deborah Crowe is a visual artist working in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her practice involves building 2D and 3D environments that explore architectural, spatial and environmental characteristics.
Originally trained in textiles, underpinning all of Crowe’s work is the concept of weaving threads of ideas together; assembling imagery, materials and objects to observe, explore and propose real and imaginary scenarios.
Tallulah Nunez is a self-taught artist who has been making art for more than 30 years. Nunez's describes her working style as expressionist maximalism/surrealism. Creating work that is extravagantly detailed, inclusive, eclectic and often unashamedly Beautiful.
Michelle Reid is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland who explores atmosphere aesthetics and emotional spaces. Reid is interested in the smudging of space between locatable and lyrical references. Her current body of work draws on pattern, romanticism and modern environmentalism and uses an eclectic mix of research, intuition, and materiality, often dissolved in a composition of watercolours, oils, ink or occasionally organic fugitives.