Simone Eisler

Atlas of the Human Heart

Noosa Regional Gallery

Noosa

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Atlas of the Human Heart is a revelatory mini retrospective of themes, materials and motifs sited in a large room at Noosa Regional Gallery. Looking into the floral forms which contain pearls, glass beads, fish scales constructed like petals, the masts of ships, a doll’s face that sits within a ‘flower’, fish skin, tiny skulls lovingly attached, phallic forms constructed from horns, and vertebrae strung together lying across some of these blooms, Simone Eisler appears to be drawing together the threads of her practice to date. Its expression in a garden of ‘flowers’ is both internally referential and reaches outward to the tendrils of so many current debates—the urgency of climate change, the casual disregard of the current wave of global refugees, the environmental crises of extinction, evolution and generational transience. More personal allusions evoke the fragile mystery of conception, the delicacy of natural forms and organic materials, the ephemeral nature of human existence, the right to belong, and the insistent individual drive for sexual expression and love. That these themes and concepts are captured using the organic remains of animals, sequins and beads, photographs and images from Eisler’s past, painstakingly constructed, accelerates the works’ emotional trajectory.

Much of Eisler’s previous work has been sited within a darkly magical space where we watch (with a sense of voyeurism) a woman (Eisler herself) captured in a paganistic ritual using sculptural artefacts made with animal-derived materials. Other works have constructed fictional species, like goat skulls encrusted with sea shells in The Armoured Forest (2009), or Plumed Ram-Slug (2010) that recreated animal horns with snake skin, shells and scales to become an alien familiar. In 2007 she installed Anima Requiem – A Funerary

Simone Eisler, Atlas of the Human Heart, 2019. Installation view. Mixed media sculpture, dimensions variable within 30x35x40cm. Photograph Louis Lim.

Atlas of the Human Heart (detail) Fish Flower, 2019. Barramundi scales, glass beads, sea snake skin, varnish, 60x20x5cm. Photograph Louis Lim. Courtesy the artist.