Auckland Art Fair

with Dominik Mersch Gallery 2018

Essay by Ineke Dane

I’ve known Lottie Consalvo since we met in a garden over twelve years ago. Our lives have been inextricably linked as we’ve moved across the globe ever since, an incessant stream of communication that we’re both bound to. So my thoughts on her works made for Auckland, 2018, come in the form of a

letter. // Ineke Dane

Dear Lottie,

...

You told me once the fact of being entwined with someone does not, will not, negate the ubiquitous ambush of aloneness.

One feels it, and lying next to a loved is no barrier, no knight in shining armour.

The feeling is lead-sunk and feather at once, but ultimately free.

All the times are in those moments (you said it was long, but you didn’t say it was forever), your 3-year old self and your 80-year old self at once. The nostalgia for what was and what’s to come is heady.

...

(Holding) usually implies an object but for you you can the sky. I notice this with you, you are the anti-hold of the inanimate, both in work and in life, moving Bedouin-like before air gets its chance to become stale. You save all our breaths by doing so.

What does it mean to hold the skies, and if you become tired, will they fall when you drop them? Will they break, shatter or bounce?

...
You told me an anecdote (I saw you over the sea) and it looks like this –

You wake in the lighthouse, run through Anne’s and you’re a birds-eye view of your self, your self is a dot, running down to meet a peninsula and then you jump.

(The middle of endlessness)

Are you trying to reach the horizon? You say it is not about falling, it is about flying, and I know you know the horizon is a pot of gold at a rainbow’s foot.

The running-dot-jump repeats and repeats, but it is not linear (just as your horizons are not horizontal).

...

You told me that as soon as your painting stops at the edge it’s ruined. That vertical lines are disadvantaged by gravity, one end is always spoken for. But the horizontal is completely free to worm its way through space and time, a liminal creature.

Endlessness is paramount, like an hourglass whose sand time is luxury and infinitely re-determined.

...

We’ve talked about you and Agnes Martin, more recently, and while you might disagree, and while your styles may be unrecognisable if they met in the middle, nonetheless I sense a simpatico.

What Agnes says with precise, mathematised lines you do with the imperfect of human as it teeters on the sublime.

Your strong work ethic, your stoic, your pilgrimage to depict in stasis what’s otherwise fleeting, as fragile as a moth.

And you write (I can’t even tell you what it looked like). ...

The suspense, the time waiting for forever endings and forever beginnings. We wait, just as do oranges, just as apples.

And so it goes on. Und so weiter.