The Greater Entanglement
2020-25
Oil on linen
150 x 250 cm

Excerpt from the artist statement in Hill End Entangled, published by Bonfire Books

The Polyptych

Polyptych is Latin for a group of images, and in the artist's vernacular refers to a painting composed of more than three panels, which would be a “triptych”.

The ambitious polyptych The Greater Entanglement evolved from the Hill End Fantasy (2020-22) picture after countless field sketches and studio concepts. Each return to Hill End revealed new vantage points, imagery, and deeper insight. My time in Europe, and by reflecting upon great artwork of the past also informed this suite of paintings. Three original outer panels were begun, then abandoned in 2019. The new panels, started in 2023 became more ambitious, attempting to reconcile both Christian and Pagan traditions, however difficult that may be.

Australian artists like Brett Whiteley, Gary Shead and William Robinson have all worked with multi-panel compositions, drawing on a wealth of European visual conventions. Their works often weave complex narratives with imagery of epic scale. In my panels, elegant form is sometimes subverted through dissonant imagery and surreal juxtapositions, opening up new associative spaces.

The leftmost panel Veils Over Inland gave me the greatest trouble. After many false starts, inspiration struck when I discovered antique uranium-glass at the History Hill Museum just outside the Hill End township. Tracking down my own uranium glass oil lamp was challenging, but this mesmerising object is a beautiful vessel in the painting for themes of mining, scarcity, and energy. The spiral of the UV bulb illuminates the foreground scene, boring-in from the center panel’s golden slopes. Visual themes of arches and coiling are repeated across the four panels, such as in the shape of bones, fences and shadows. A foil to that theme are many angular sections and flat surfaces, such as in the left panel where my sketchbooks act as a platform for objects. The dramatic hill formation thrusts upward, counterbalancing the elliptical orange void of the far right panel. These formal echoes of shapes, colours, and directions, create a visual dialogue across the piece.

The right panel Riverbed. Iron Vortex is the most turbulent-a storm of shards twist around a dry riverbed. Grasses flutter atop a restless ground plane, and fragments of rusted objects and quartz stone glint under a molten light. This chaos is unmistakably Australian in its texture and disorder. Its burning colour scheme is ignited by a molten filament at the top right of the middle panel, which spills its warmth into its neighbor. In the bottom left are the local Cornish Quartz Roasting Pits where stone was cooked to assist breaking open. The rare beauty of a purple lily plant bears witness to this furnace-like scene, plucked from Donald Friend's garden.

Beneath the triptych lies the 'Predella' panel, a tradition in religious painting used to depict Christ after the Crucifixion or lives of the saints. My version, Chthonic Wandering, is a Memento Mori (another tradition in the visual arts), a meditation on mortality and our place in the world. This work was also shaped by my return to Australia after Europe— a jarring encounter with the rawness and violence of the landscape.

In the Otto Dix polyptych Der Krieg (1929-32) the lower panel offers a sequence of dead soldiers, set one behind another and going back into the claustrophobic space of a coffin. The format of his image, being wide and narrow is much like the proportions of a coffin itself, perhaps already buried underground. While my composition is similarly contained, I instead wanted an expansive sense of space, flooded with moonlight and mystery. This panel ‘reaches up’ from below as its composition carries a deep U-shape that bridges to the other panels (similarly in the Dix composition, where a stretched piece of drapery spans its width) to act as a kind of connecting yoke, or cradle for the other panels.

The bones I painted were collected on long walks in Hill End. In one poignant gesture, a pair of hands cups the delicate skeleton of a bird, an image of both tenderness and responsibility. The quartz stone, balanced carefully along the fallen tree trunks, refers to ancient offerings. In particular, it echoes the so called "Chalk Lady", a British Neolithic sculpture discovered in a mine and possibly left as a sacred gift. In my painting, her form placed on the right trunk is eroded, an almost recognisable human torso, a remnant of reverence.

A dear person once reminded me of these lines from Homer’s The Odyssey, which stayed with me through the painting’s final stages:

“But it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals. The sinews no longer hold the bones together, and once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury, but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.”

Ryan William Daffurn
2025

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