Catalogue Essay for 'Travelling Without Moving' at Megalo Print Studio, Canberra by Ren Gregorčič

Featuring a survey of etchings produced between 2018 and 2021, Damon Kowarsky’s ‘Travelling Without Moving’ reflects on the fundamentally human and constructed nature of modern places.

The show’s title references the 1996 album by Jamiroquai, commenting on the relationship between simulation and modern life, and the closing gap between the lived and technologically augmented experience of the world that has come to punctuate the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this contextual reading of the title stands in contrast to Kowarsky’s practice, which does not use any technological devices (such as cameras) as production aids. Instead, each artwork is created through a combination of looking, drawing, remembrance, and hand-production as a way of navigating an expansive duality between concept and materiality.

Tied together by their colour grade, the red and green hues characteristic of Kowarsky’s etchings reflect a harmonious juxtaposition where the mountains that surround Port Louis, Mauritius (2021) can co-exist with the site of Angkor Wat, Cambodia (2019). This equalling of place mirrors a key aspect of Kowarsky’s process; the production of sketchbooks. The artist’s vast collection of hand-made journals are full of rich visual notes documenting scenes of interest. Within these pages half-drawn figures and views often overlap, distances between faraway places are levelled and seemingly un-connected elements come together on a single page. These drawings regularly become references for completed works. The ‘travel-look-draw-make’ method of working generates scenes and subjects with a sense of constructed fluidity that is echoed in the distinct precision of Kowarsky’s etchings.

Seductive and velveteen, the textured surfaces and clear lines of each print in ‘Travelling Without Moving’ reflect the haunting presence of the pristine; that part of the world somehow imagined to be separate from all human intervention. Our human need for order can produce an idyllic landscape or a crystalline metropolis. However, the pursuit of a different type of ideological order can result in catastrophes such as those seen in 'The Diameter Of The Bomb' (2019). Titled after a poem by Israeli poet and author Yehuda Amichai on the impact and far-reaching resonance of war, the print expresses the all-encompassing bluntness of violence:

… the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle…

This bluntness is not confined to instruments of war. Just as the foliage of Kowarsky’s landscapes stretch soft-edged across expanses of paper, within and through landscapes, cities, and buildings, so too are the rhythms that construct our inhabited places.

In ‘Richmond (Naarm)’ (2021) we are reminded that the world includes our immediate surrounds. Depicting a view of Richmond (Melbourne) near the artist’s home, this etching was created from reference drawings made on a rooftop overlooking the suburb during breaks between lockdowns. ‘Richmond (Naarm)’ offers us a view of an industrialised place dominated by a voluminous canopy that contradicts our expectations of urban landscapes as desolate and hard-edged places. Vegetation is the prevalent structuring device. The distance between nature and city, people and the world, is presented as a matter of perspective, positioning, and construction.

In ‘Travelling Without Moving’, as in life, there are no clear divisions. Nothing is neat, order is always outside our reach, and little remains untouched by representation. Yet Kowarsky’s highly aesthetic etchings resist cynicism or despair. The artist’s complex, layered compositions do not yield firm understanding or knowledge of the places they depict. Instead they suggest landscapes as sites of potential, places to be travelled and discovered, and not endpoints in themselves.

Ren Gregorčič is an artist, curator, and current PhD candidate at Australian National University. In 2018 he curated 'Sans Frontiers' at Warrnambool Art Gallery, a substantial survey exhibition of Kowarsky's prints and drawings.