A new gothic cosmogony may be discerned in Burton’s elemental compositions that describe a natural world full of exuberance and a man-made world in decay. Her practice is characterised by an earthiness from which a languid sexuality pulsates. In scenes bereft of figures even the gnarled foliage breathes a lurid eroticism. The key to Burton’s unique appeal lies in her balance of these overcharged atmospherics with a fairy tale innocence. Her gothic eccentricity is never allowed to dissolve the dreamlike ambience; in fact the two cajole in a potent and hallucinogenic melange. 

Burton transcends the commonplace and invites us into a surreal twilight zone. The mirror she holds to our world is cracked and warped, tarnished and clouded with mists of nostalgia. There is nothing loud or abrasive here; we are cocooned in a velvety embrace of familiarity and comfort. And yet, we sense the edge of a precipice. Burton nullifies our senses in mute languor, and leads us quietly to our peril. We submit, willingly, to this rapturous decline with our mind in a hazy delirium.

This sense of old-world meets otherworld is particularly potent in the series In the blood (2010), where the rampant foliage that consumes a medieval cemetery is itself threatened by an encroaching darkness. We are led through a litany of metaphysical signposts. We observe, en route to an unknowable destination, an eye from a peephole (mascara bleeding through the flesh), fragments of stricken timber, the reclamation of ruins by nature, twisted and gnarled tree roots, weathered skin, exotic decay, and the heady breath of centuries. 

The cemetery becomes the stage where we mutely watch the onset of entropy. As the signs of life are extinguished we become paralysed by the spectacle of its dissolution. Stone figurines with surfaces like bones submit to eternity, their ruination becoming an agent of silent horror. True horror is born of psychological revulsion, which is manifest here in bucolic marble and stone. But if ever horror conspired with the Picturesque it is here, in this visual compound of blood, stone and death.

There is little in the way of the explicit or the documentary in these strangely compelling works. Their arresting power is born of what we bring to it, and they participate in a fantastical monologue whose narrative arc we cannot discern. We observe fragments of something much larger than our scope to comprehend, and so it becomes mysterious, unknowable, and sublime. We are, nevertheless, inextricably caught in this narrative web, not knowing what is real or what we have invented, and quite unable to fathom either a pathway forward or back.

Jane Burton taps into the mysterious language of eternity. Often a certain image or a certain atmosphere feels instinctively familiar, as though we had seen it not merely recently, but have always known it. Known it, perhaps, even before we came into existence; she amplifies things unseen but that have nevertheless always been. Burton’s compelling personal vision is nowhere more evident than in her series Cul-de-Sac (2000). Here, she expresses a frisson of immeasurable isolation and desolation. The Australian gothic is manifest in black and white images of rocky shores battered by a treacherous ocean, windswept houses and women in front of windows. They recall the cinematic in their tonally rich patinas and dramatic, frontal compositions. 

There is an unnatural, narcotic allure at work here. Burton could easily be claimed by the Neo-Goth genre that has captured the early twenty-first century imagination, but in reality she belongs not to this age or any other. Burton’s imagery is in no way literal, and yet it resonates with literature; in fact her images are often used to illustrate texts. However there is something powerfully visual in the way she sees the world, and allows us to see with her, that transcends what words alone can communicate. Burton gives form and colour to pure feelings and expressions that have no other outlet.

In conversation with Brett Ballard in 2007, Jane Burton said:

I like to create a world and a mood. In some ways this is my real drive: to bring a feeling and a vision to life in a series of photographs. The mood created is more important to me than implied narrative. A series allows me to construct a landscape and a world beyond a single frame. This also helps to build and reinforce the mood of the work, as well as recurring elements within the ‘narrative’ ¹.

And so we move through these panoramas – sometimes keyhole views, sometimes boundless vistas. Sometimes invoking surface and substance, and other times inferring absence and the ethereal. As an artist who employs outward forms to speak of interiority and interior states, it is not uncommon for Jane Burton’s pallid landscapes and bloated atmospherics to recall female forms, charged with a primitive sexuality. Even where the figure is materially absent, much is inferred through the suggestive folds of sedimentary filament. 

While Burton frames our approach to the sublime within the mutable folds of the feminine, her destination is no less fearsome. From the seeds of a commonplace domesticity, she nurtures a dizzying new form of the unknowable. There are familiar signs along the way, but at the core of Burton’s project is a seismic shift, issued as an intimate whisper, that irrefutably alters the world we know and understand. The uncanniness of her sanguine clouds and twisted architectures is spawned by an innate ability to yield fantastical properties from almost any subject she encounters. We think we know the pathway through but the route is thwarted at every turn.

NOTES

1. Jane Burton, in conversation with Brett Ballard, 2007.