Ceridwen Dovey, essayist and author, 2022
Creation Myths and other Tall Tales
When I first visited the studio where Giles works, by coincidence I’d been reading on the train the nature writer Annie Dillard’s description of entering the shadow of totality – darkness – caused by a total eclipse of the sun. I arrived still unsettled by Dillard’s eerie words, and there on the wall of Giles’s studio I encountered a solar eclipse.
The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover, Dillard writes. The hatch in the brain slammed.
The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.
There are legends of people dying in fright on seeing a total solar eclipse. Dillard says people screamed around her – that she may herself even have screamed – when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun.
Giles told me later that morning that we live in a brief temporal window with special portent in the history of our solar system: it just so happens that the moon appears to us to be the same size as the sun. The two circular disks we see from Earth can sometimes cancel each other out, slide over each other into perfectly matched oblivion. This fact is both stupendous with meaning and also meaningless – nothing but a trick of space and time. It will not last forever, this illusion.
Eclipse comes from the root failing to appear, leaving. Being left behind by the moon or the sun is Earth’s great terror.
Every artwork in this exhibition will destabilize your perspective.
You will be asked not only to stare back at the abyss of an eclipse but to peer down from space at Earth via the mechanical gaze of a satellite. Your brain will make a gorgeous abstract pattern out of horror – the smoke from the Black Summer bushfires spiralling into the sheer, flat blackness of outer space in ways that please the eye but trouble the soul. Satellite comes from the root attendant, servant. These all-seeing machines are under our command but still manage to look at our planet with inhuman indifference.
Elsewhere, you will be taken above the clouds, which were once thought by some to be made of rock – not so different to the moon. The moon and the clouds, hanging right above us, so close and yet so foreign, gave us the original perspective on ourselves as Earth-bound. No wonder Giles returns to them often in his work.
He has been working this rich outer space seam for years, each time coming up with new responses to the challenges posed by art and life. He told me he will always be drawn to all that is off-Earth in his work. It lets him resolve the tension between realism and abstraction that hovers always at the painter’s shoulder. An image made of the Earth from space, or an eclipse, is both hyper-real and unreal: it can seem impossible that planets and moons and suns exist at all, let alone that they can overlap and send a wave of shadow – the totality – hurtling towards us, signifying what Dillard describes as the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. We toggle between faith and disbelief.
Giles’s paternal grandfather was a fighter pilot in World War II (as all of the first astronauts were too, those men who went into space as humans and returned as gods). He was shot down from the air in a training exercise when Giles’s father was still a baby. When Giles was a child, his dad taught him to build model planes and airbrush them. It was with his dad that Giles later learned to look at art, standing side by side in galleries contemplating the work by Old Masters. There is a deeply personal throughline here, one that becomes clear when these artworks – whether off-Earth or of Earth – are put into conversation with one another, as is the magic of two bodies of work shown together. Soaring and falling, looking and feeling, distance and intimacy. “When you get up close to my photorealist works of Earth from space, of the eclipses, the clouds,” Giles said to me, “they fall apart.” The mark-making transforms them back into human artefacts: imperfect and suffused with wistfulness and longing.
Mastery is not the point, no matter how masterful his work may be. His Old Masters blurred into airbrushed fuzzy beauty are another way Giles is playfully wondering on the paper about the ways in which our minds are trained to make sense of images – and by framing them twice, in the painting and again on the wall, he puts us into the sensory position of the museum-goer, standing before these masterpieces like so many who have come before.
When does our vision blur in real life? In dreams, where we try to see clearly and cannot. As we age and accept our mortal fate. When we are too far away from something (or someone) and cannot behold them in sharp focus no matter how much we long to feast our gaze on them. And when our eyes fill with tears. Think of the child airbrushing model planes with his father, the same father who will teach him how to look at art, whose own father fell from the sky from a great height.
We look up at the sky not only in wonder; we look up too in times of despair, imagining that in the pure vacuum of space we might find relief from our longing for things we both know how to name and can never properly name. But as Dillard writes, before the solar eclipse was even fully over, everybody who’d been watching with her on the hill turned away and hurried back to their cars, back to their normal lives:
One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
That’s what seeing the blurred Old Masters felt like to me: heading for the latitudes of home. They ground us, keep our feet on the ground. All of Giles’s work, taken together, is a collective witnessing, inviting us as viewers to change perspective – to catch glimpses of the whole mystery – but also to remain attuned to the emotional ties that always tether us to Earth. He takes us all the way out there, but makes sure to bring us down from the otherworldly heights and back into the realm of human feeling.