Artwork: Honey Moon, 2021, Jumaadi, watercolour on paper, 30 x 42cm.
Liquid Dreams Exhibition Essay
By Taylor Hall
For Indonesian-born, Sydney-based artist Jumaadi, active audience participation forms a key part of his artistic practice, whether that be through engaging with his entertaining shadow puppet performances, or his intimate, small-scale paintings which seem to defy both simple and complete description.
Jumaadi’s latest exhibition at Jan Manton Gallery, Liquid Dreams, presents a series of work which similarly asks the audience to engage with their sense of immediacy, insatiable curiosity and poetic musings. In each work, Jumaadi creates deeply nostalgic fantasies guided by nonlinear narratives on life, birth, death, domesticity, love and survival.
Painted with gouache and watercolour on paper, Jumaadi creates each work with a sense of intuition, fuelled by daydreams which flow, like paint, through the brush and onto paper. In describing his works, Jumaadi says they, “accommodate my thoughts and feelings… before forming their compositions intuitively; flowing through the grass in some meadow… they become the answers, and at the same time they also become the questions. They are a record of my liquid dreams.”
Given that Jumaadi often travels between Sydney and Jogja, Indonesia, it seems apt that he focuses on gouache and watercolour as primary mediums in his work, which are easily portable and usually accompany him. These materials offer a sense of intimacy and closeness which is felt both by the artist and by the audience.
For Jumaadi, dualities and recurrences – of symbols, memories and dreams – appear across much of his work. Throughout this exhibition we find the opposing forces of inside and outside, awake and asleep, large and small, among others. Amongst these oppositions, Jumaadi depicts curious scenes seemingly caught between nostalgia and fantasy, which delve into grand epics, pilgrimages and mythologies.
Other works in this exhibition differ significantly in their depiction of minimal, bare vistas and silent horizons. His three large works, comprised of forty-two individual sheets of paper, record an imagined, barren landscape which stretches endlessly. In each work, the landscape becomes an ever-present witness – whether that be of the past, present or future. Despite its emptiness, it offers a nuanced metaphor into the persistence and universality of loneliness, and of being alone. Jumaadi urges us to absorb this silent, absent and liminal space, and to find beauty in its simplicity. “What I’m trying to show the audience,” Jumaadi states, “is that with watercolour works, even the edges of the paper offer significant beauty.”
This exhibition, then, not only presents a body of work filled with opposing forces, but also states of liminality, an experience surely felt by many since the Covid pandemic. This exhibition, Jumaadi argues, describes: “love, between hugs and releases, between unity and isolation, between closeness and displacement, between waking up and dreaming, between those who stand and those who float, between here and there… Liquid dreams are like the liquid salt in the sea that separates us from one island to the next.”
Like the salt in the sea, liquid dreams are perhaps what keeps us buoyant during those quiet, lonely and liminal moments while we wait to be pulled to the next island shore. Jumaadi’s works lovingly puts his dreams to paper, and in doing so, asks us to consider what our own dreams might be.