Moving away from oil painting into the creation of mixed media works on paper and 'trash' sculptures – composed of natural materials, paints, and studio debris – Golland accepts the transformative possibility of play and the active denial of the deliberate creation of an image. Instead, his environments exist without a center of gravity, collapsing in on themselves or erupting outwards like dying stars in a mash of sickly seductive rose pinks, pastel blues, acidic and marshy greens, yellow-browns, and lashings of black India ink and charcoal.

Works on paper, pinned in groupings of twos and threes around the outer gallery walls culminate in a massive grid covering the entirety of the back wall. Pairings between pieces communicate in networks across the space, pushing against one another or taking on new readings through their interactions.

Golland’s desire to unlearn Western academic notions of image building, and his acceptance of the relational rather than the stand-alone artwork, has led him to a generative studio method; mulching materials and processes through layers of stencils, spray paint, oil and water-based media. He continually defaces or destroys his images and found objects through material and physical interventions of sprays, bleeds, scrapes, and cuts until they ferment into forms and spaces that breathe life of their own. These shared origins of cross-pollination allow them to refuse compartmentalization.

Loosely representational flora and fauna disperse across his environments but never fully come into being. Instead, when forms begin to reveal themselves, Golland pushes them back again, holding them on a precipice of growth and decay. In King Spider Protector, a work on paper, black silhouettes of leaves sprout from a central focal point drifting into the foreground before being enveloped again into negative space by charcoal rubbings. What grows from the stem of this plant is obscured by overlays of grays and earthy maroons. Underneath lies a white ground whose presence remains only in fine white lines and undulations peeking through the upper layers. These wisps of white, at times as delicate as a spider’s web, force their way to the foreground. Across these works are fluctuations between form and environment, positive and negative space, which open holes within the images for other forms to emerge and transition through.

Martin Golland, King Spider Protector, mixed media on paper, 2023

Golland also collapses time through his colour palettes. Like seeing the blooming and rotting of a flower’s petals simultaneously. We don’t distinctly see a bloom in King Spider Protector, rather Golland draws us through the life cycle of a bloom, visible only as a churning mass of violet, brown, gray, black, and hints of tangerine orange; notes of life among the colours of decay. He detaches colour from form, expanding it into descriptors of atmosphere and markers of life cycles.

These works feel deeply rooted in sensation, so I was not surprised when Golland mentioned walking through the garden barefoot, or sitting in the hollows of tree trunks to trigger body-memory while working on this show. This intimate physical engagement and proximity appears in the further fracturing of his usual fragmented planes, and the inclusion of drastically shifting perspectives within one piece; the result of painting from life observed lying down, up close, and from distances. Throughout this exhibition, Golland’s grip on grounded space loosens to the point of almost letting go. We are pulled into the spectral space of memory while the presence of material claws us back to the construction of the image itself - the painted and assembled object.

Golland has long been interested in the remediation of the image as a representation of its own limits in presenting subjective reality. Introducing sculpture and painting from life has expanded Golland’s lexicon for challenging the boundaries of representing reality, or experience itself. Rather than simply addressing embodiment through the illusion and suspension of reality that painting affords, he confronts us with the physicality of real objects sharing our space, introduced in wood, cardboard, acetate, dried plants, crumpled paper, plaster and screws. Between the sculptures and the works on paper, we have to contend with the physical and the visual simultaneously to navigate the conflation of organic ‘fact’ with the artificial – mental visualizations or conceptions.

The sculptures act as transmitting devices between the transient energy of studio creation and the regulated space of the gallery. Even the sprays of colour coating them in lurching unevenness seem like the residue of being caught in the crossfire of peripheral processes of making; their colour doesn’t belong to them but defines them nonetheless. The aura of the studio clings to them, turning the sterile gallery walls into a temporary container for transition.

There is a strong sense of temporality and transformational change even amidst Golland’s use of materials associated with rigidity and stability. As in Lily, boasting a central flower-like form in a spiked cardboard cut-out atop a straight branch. Surrounding it are three pieces of wood, affixed to stand vertically, that create a continuous loop in a circular motion around its central form.

These three sticks are caught in various stages of ‘being wood’; the stick on the right is straight, milled, and knotched like a stretcher crossbar, next to it is a milled stick bent at an almost 45 degree angle formed from two pieces cut and attached with screws. The final stick is a found branch, organically knotted with protruding nubs. The three sticks read in a circular motion, transitioning from organic natural form, to milled, to a space in-between. It is in the in-between space that Golland collapses our illusion of the distance between its natural form and its polished ‘functional’ form. Not only are we confronted with an art object but the origins and life cycle of the materials that preceded it. 

Amongst deep personal reflections on grieving, Earth’s cyclical renewal through death and decay, and corporeal experience, I built this garden for us brings up important sentiments around the vestiges of Enlightenment conceptions that humans are separate from the re-creative destruction process of chaos within the natural world. Golland reminds us that even our death will feed back into life, a reverse memento mori. He side-steps the Western academicization of the process of art-making, releasing the constraints of how an image should be made in favour of deskilling to get back to the heart of expression and generative energy. He brings us face to face with his process, in which physical destruction and play are interchangeable, and boldly shows us what can be built from the accumulation of decay.

- Tiffany April