Moments of Beauty (2010 - 2024) captures the ritualistic lighting and observation of a fire which had been prepared by my father and left unnoticed for 12 years. After the last fire in 2010, he had meticulously placed scrunched paper and kindling/wood ready for the following winter, a winter he did not live to see. This fire sat hidden until the one remaining item left in an emptying house, a fire screen, was removed.
Moments of Beauty, records this fire’s wondrous transformation, unveiling it’s 12 years of hidden potential: the fire confidently takes, crackling and popping with life, reaches its peak, roaring in anticipation and then slowly subsides, petering out, leaving its material trace of memory: documenting the passing of time, a reminder of the fragility of temporal existence.
Moments of Beauty by Anne Stevens - Essay by Bernadette Klavins
Anne Stevens’ practice is led by an appreciation for the traces that all material things leave behind. Contemplating the temporal existence of humans and non-humans alike, Stevens responds to matter as it moves through transient states of change and decay. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Giuseppe Penone who considers time and transmutation as mediums, Stevens’ work meditates upon the ‘continuous flow of change and substitution [where] nothing remains and nothing disappears’.[1]
Stevens’ work explores the potential for physical marks to act as ‘memory records’.[2] Akin to layers of sediment embodying stories of deep time, a tarpaulin marked by stratums of paint contains its own relative history. By tuning into the nuances of the often humble and familiar matter she encounters in her daily life, Stevens intuitively responds to her chosen materials. Whether working expansively in sculpture, painting, printmaking or moving image, her works look to ‘answer’ the moments of material transformation they are informed by.[3]
This sensitive dialogue with the material world is distilled in her first moving image work Moments of Beauty, 2010-2024. The work began when Stevens visited her parents home for a final time. Moving aside the last remaining object in the house, a fire screen, behind it she discovered carefully arranged pieces of timber and disintegrating crumpled paper in the fireplace, poised ready to be set alight. In a moment of significance, she realised this unlit fire had been prepared over a decade earlier by her father, in the winter prior to his passing.
For Stevens, the time passed between her fathers and her own interactions with the latent fire underpins the poetic and affective resonance of this encounter. Her experience of wonder and intrigue invoked upon the discovery calls to mind theorist Jane Bennett’s proposal that matter is ‘vibrant’ and has the ‘curious ability…to produce effects dramatic and subtle’ particularly when observed over long periods of time.[4] As the mesmeric fire builds and burns down, the viewer sits with the parallel traces of presence and absence.
This meditation on the ephemerality of life and matter is underscored by the time-based nature of Moments of Beauty. As stated by video artist Bill Viola, ‘we come from the stars: our earth, our world, our bodies, our bones…literally, and it just keeps getting reconfigured’.[5] Here, Stevens poignantly answers this assemblage of chance, matter and memory, to leave behind her own perceptible trace.
Written by Bernadette Klavins
[1] Drathen, Doris. 2004. ‘Time Leaps’, Vortex of Silence’ Charta, Milan, 231-242
[2] A. Stevens (personal communication, 31 January 2024)
[3] Ingold, Timothy. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Routledge, New York, 108
[4] Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, USA, 6
[5] Bill Viola in conversation with Rachel Kohn, ‘Bill Viola’s Spiritual Art’, The Spirit of Things, Radio National, 2 January 2011