Bear witness with your body.
Go outside and lie on the ground. Relax your body and breathe slowly. Look up at the sky above you. Watch the clouds as they move. Notice the sky is not a single blue, but many, layered with subtle variations, streaks and drifting forms. Spread your fingers across the cool grass and feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Listen to the vibrations around you.
Now imagine your body falling into and merging with the ground.[1] Imagine listening to the earth with your whole body — tuning yourself to nearby vibrations and connecting distant ones. Imagine the sound of your own thoughts and the sounds of your body vibrating with everything around you. Listen for slow groans of clay and mud beneath the surface, and for the faint hum of electrical cables and machines.
Now imagine you are floating in a river. You are no longer held by the ground, yet not fully separate from it. Relax your body and allow it to drift gently with the current. Trail your fingers through the cool water and feel the shifting contours of its surface as you are carried along.
Be open (not apart).
For Margit Brünner, drawing is a bodily encounter; an entanglement with place and an act of discovery.[2] In each of the eighteen watercolour drawings that comprise Falling Open (not apart), at Sauerbier House, the sense of discovery is evident. Created over eight years through sustained engagement with two rivers, the Onkaparinga River/Ngangkiparri (whose mouth is visible from the gallery entrance), and the Swan River/Derbarl Yerrigan, the drawings explore place, memory and identity, questioning the embodied experience of “home” following Brünner’s recent relocation from South Australia to Western Australia. Both sites are entangled through the body, and, in turn, enact a series of correspondences that colourfully mark the work.
In each of the drawings, the paper’s clean white surface quickly becomes a site of experience. Colours bleed and run in these investigations of place – pink, yellow, blue, purple, and touches of green too. Diffuse, precise, and intricately layered, the movement of the colour records these acts of correspondence: an encounter with the page both drawn and embodied. Perhaps, as Brünner suggests, they can be better understood—or experienced—as atmospheres. I think of them as a form of anamnesis: a collection and recollection of effects.
Despite the nourishment of the colour, the presence of the white page remains notable and active. As in Edgar Degas’ Factory Smoke (1877–79), the apparent emptiness of the page reveals the fullness of the drawing. Here, however, Brünner’s ‘rivers’ flow in counterpoint to the vertical columns of billowing industrial smoke in Degas’ work, inviting viewers to trace their own connection to place and reflect on the interwoven natural systems around them.
Displayed in the Hallway Gallery of Sauerbier House—a modest corridor within the Victorian villa—the drawings engage viewers as bodies gently navigate, shift, and negotiate the space. The works are finely hung to allow the breeze flowing through the gallery door to agitate them. Further movement comes from an accompanying video work, presented in a pair of screens in the manner of a diptych, where Brünner enacts the Onkaparinga River/Ngangkiparri site through dance. These entanglements continually discover and rediscover the shifting landscapes of the two rivers, and our place within them. The result is delicate, immersive and beautiful work.
