Helen Geier By Peter Haynes

HELEN GEIER Peter Haynes

Cover: Meridian, 2012 acrylic on canvas 150.0 x 250.0 cm Artist’s Collection

HELEN GEIER Peter Haynes

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HELEN GEIER Peter Haynes

HELEN GEIER

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Table of contents Foreword 2 Introduction 6 The 1960s and 1970s

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The 1980s

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The 1990s

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The 2000s

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The 2010s

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CV 136 Dedication

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Acknowledgments

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Author’s acknowledgements

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HELEN GEIER

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Foreword Helen Geier has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for more than four decades and continues to work with unabated energy. To write of a living artist, it is always a case of work in progress and this monograph, devoted to her art by Peter Haynes, is an empathetic, insightful and well informed statement concerning her progress to date, rather than a summation of her art.

Helen Geier is a unique phenomenon in Australian art – she is of her time and place, yet does not belong to any identifiable grouping or movement – she possesses her own artistic vision and has devised her own pictorial language.

She was born in Sydney and trained at the National Art School and the Alexander Mackie Teachers’ College, before travelling to England to study at the St Martin’s School of Art. In her early work in London she developed a mastery of photolithography and commenced her life-long exploration of various visual schema as applied to slices of reality. In London she was in the midst of the Pop Art revolution, where the object was dematerialised and placed into a new context, rich in unexpected associations. Many of these ideas became incorporated in her method of art making.

When Geier returned to Australia in 1974 and settled in Melbourne, she was probably the most accomplished photolithographer in the country. Much of her imagery at the time dealt with the Botanical Gardens and suburban settings and ideas of entrapment and containment. In the Melbourne of Bea Maddock, George Baldessin and Roger Kemp, Geier’s imagery found a receptive audience and critical acclaim.

In 1981 she shifted to rural New South Wales, settling on a property outside Braidwood and commenced a period of exploration of different systems of visualisation. While never a gutsy romantic, in Geier’s work of the late 1980s and the 1990s there is an apparent seduction by the strange beauty of the surrounding landscape. Even in her most cerebral investigations of the theory of linear perspective, there is an awareness of the sensual qualities of nature.

Much of her art is built around the idea of seamlessly uniting opposites. She attempts to reconcile the cerebral and the sensuous. She employs Western European spatial constructions built through linear perspective and those of Asian art, where space is perceived more as an intuitive form of aerial perspective. She also attempts to unite that which is a product of an abstract intellectual construct – an artificial visual code – with that which is observed through primary natural observation.

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An inveterate traveller and serial collaborator, a central artistic strategy for Geier, especially in her art over the past couple of decades, has been to absorb the challenge of the new and of chance encounters. Her discovery of an eighteenth century handbook on perspective, the finding of a fallen feather, an illusionistic garden fixture or the accidental spread of ink on the surface of the paper, become as legitimate as any other art making strategy devised by theoreticians. She also finds collaboration as a catalyst for creativity, whether this is with the poet Rhyll McMaster or the Indian artist Kanchan Chander. The challenge of place, chance encounter and collaboration guarantees that her art constantly reinvents itself.

As a general observation, there is a cerebral toughness that characterises her art – the ability to focus on a particular idea and to strip it down to its essence – but this is always linked with the need to make aesthetically pleasing objects. It is this combination of intellectual rigour and a sense of beauty that gives Geier’s art its special quality of magic.

Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA Australian National University

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8645 Helen Geier 152pp catalogue_June 2016_FA.indd 3

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Plate 1 Two worlds, 1997 oil, mixed media on canvas 210.0 x 300.0 cm (diptych) Collection: National Gallery of Australia

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Introduction This book is a critical examination of the oeuvre of Helen Geier. It is about pictures and particularly about graphic and painted works made by the artist from 1968 to 2016. Its textual emphasis lies in discussions of a selection of Geier’s works produced over more than four decades. It is not a biography and the details of the artist’s life remain essentially vestigial unless there are demonstrated connections or relevance on works discussed throughout the text.

Helen Geier’s initial tertiary training in art and art education (1) took place during a period that heralded the beginnings of a rich and diverse Australian art world that while not eschewing its past history would in the 1970s openly embrace a pluralistic (and international) view of art practice, art education, art criticism, art exhibitions, art scholarship and art marketing.

Stylistically Australian art in the 1960s was dominated by painting in a manner that derived much from European abstraction (in a number of guises) and Modernism generally (2). The broadening of art practice was accompanied by a range of related phenomena that would prove integral to the burgeoning art scene. These included a more mobile population than previously; visits by renowned artists and critics whose lectures and related activities stimulated local discourse and critical thinking; exhibitions of contemporary art from Europe and America (3); and the opening of a number of commercial galleries in Sydney and Melbourne (4). Perhaps the most significant event for Australian art history was the exhibition that opened the new premises for the National Gallery of Victoria in August 1968 – The Field. The exhibition featured the work of thirty-eight stylistically disparate artists (including David Aspden, Syd Ball, Peter Booth, Ian Burn, Janet Dawson, Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks, Michael Johnson, Clement Meadmore, Ron Robertson-Swann and Robert Rooney) and in the words of its two chief organisers (Brian Finemore and John Stringer) was: …not impartial and comprehensive. It is biassed (sic) to define one particular direction in contemporary Australian art. It concentrates on the abstractionists…and further restricts itself to…hard edge, unit pattern, colour field, flat abstraction, conceptual and minimal (5).

The art showcased in The Field heralded not only a new turning in Australian art…but also presaged a new relationship between the public gallery and the living artist (6). It was the first exhibition of contemporary Australian art by living Australian artists held in a State gallery and foreshadowed (some years later) the introduction of curatorships of contemporary art and the establishment of departments of contemporary art across Australian State galleries. The exhibition’s clear avoidance of any art that adhered to the vague nationalist ethos of (much of) the art of the 1950s and early 1960s and its equally clear celebration of art (albeit art whose variety of stylistic and conceptual languages perhaps already signified its future diasporic spread) that held relevance to the artists themselves marked both an end of one era and the beginning of another; a cultural shift whose reverberations continue to this day (7).

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Helen Geier began her professional art studies at Sydney’s National Art School in 1964.

Art was however an integral part of her life from childhood. Her mother, Matt Wigg was a fine painter who was also art teacher at Gosford High School on the New South Wales Central Coast. An only child, Geier grew up near the Hawkesbury River where her father, Reg, also a teacher, took her fishing and where a lifelong connection with landscape was instilled. Her mother was particularly encouraging of her early artistic efforts (an encouragement shared with her father) that continued through her schooling and later professional life. Geier took art at high school (Monte St Angelo convent in North Sydney) and as someone not interested in sport or group activities generally she demonstrated a spirited independent individualism (a quality that remains with her) that saw the nuns giving her the keys to the school art room so she could get on with it (8).

Geier’s childhood and the integration of art as part of her everyday world imbued in her a sense that art and life are enmeshed and art is as much a personal expression of her life as is life lived. A career in art was a natural choice and Sydney’s National Art School (NAS) the logical institution to begin professional studies. Her period at the NAS (1964–1968) coincided with a number of new initiatives. Most important for her own practice was the introduction of printmaking (etching) by Earle Backen (9), a medium that instilled in Geier what she refers to as the printmaking mentality (10). By this she is referring to processes that involve layering and elimination, processes that continue to inform her way of making art. While printmaking was part of her course at the NAS it was one of a number of subjects with a range of teachers.

Among the latter were John Henshaw (art history), Lyndon Dadswell (sculpture), John Coburn (design), Strom Gould (portraiture), Earle Backen and Rose Vickers (printmaking), Jean Isherwood (life drawing), Bernard Sahm (ceramics) and Tom Gleghorn (painting). (11).

In terms of Geier’s later career the artist cites Gleghorn as being an encouraging influence whose technical expertise was much appreciated but whose own art played no part in her subsequent development. However Bernard Sahm’s interest in the ceramics of Papua New Guinea opened new horizons for Geier and saw results particularly in her work of the 1980s (12). An interest in other cultures has remained a rich source for not only imagery but for different ways of articulating aesthetic language.

Geier’s comments on her teachers and years at the NAS (1964–1968) and Alexander Mackie College (1969) speak of the searcher, the individual exploring and discovering that inner something that she believed was ingrained in her from early childhood and was integral to the journey that the rest of her life would take (13). This juvenile Weltanschauung was intimated by the artist’s intellectual rather than expressive approach to her art and in many ways accounts for ways of making that still hold today. The deductive reasoning behind her dealings with the motif does not ever deny the physical qualities of paint, ink or whatever medium is at play.

Rather it will allow her to establish a dialogue within each work between the metaphysical and the physical and thus create networks of references and cross-references that imbue her work

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with an incisive aesthetic and intellectual tension. Her period of art education was for her a time of distillation and compilation of technical information that would give her the tools to follow the path already set, namely to be an artist. This uncompromising position has informed her artistic strategies throughout her career and has served her well in her continuing exploration of the celebration of beauty and search for a pathway to (her) inner self (14).

Helen Geier’s art speaks of a finely honed and constantly enquiring aesthetic intellect. The intensity of her search has led her to examine ways of seeing and ways of looking. She understands Western notions of single-point perspective and the spatial structure of paintings, notions that have been inculcated into artists since the Renaissance. They dictate how views should be framed and how the artist organises the pictorial and structural devices available to produce an effective transposition of three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image.

Geier does not deny the value of the preceding. Rather she overtly challenges presuppositions by offering other possibilities in which the interface between subject and object, between artist and image, is loaded with contiguous readings and meanings. This challenge will be realised throughout her oeuvre through a range of pictorial, formal and aesthetic challenges.

The incorporation of, for example, non-Western views of pictorial space, simultaneously instils not only cultural re-location but also cultural dislocation and elision. This clear articulation of possibilities for felicitous coexistence of Western and non-Western traditions will add layerings that are not only related to the artist’s formal concerns about the structure of images but also to the layerings of meaning able to be conveyed within a single work of art. For Geier the means will reinforce the multiple and coexistent layering of experience that characterises her search for meanings and beauty.

The complexities innate in the artist’s intellectual approach will be given formal equivalents in how she will elect to visualise her concepts. For her there is a very real relationship between how a work is made and how it will be received. Form and content are involved in a conspiracy to evoke simultaneity of concept, the collision of opposites, the hierarchies of consciousness and associated multivalent tiers of meaning with the artist will imbue her works. The processes she will use are as varied as the questions she poses for herself. Painting, drawing (…the basis of all her work. (15)), printmaking, sewing, folding, collaging and appropriation will all be fair game. Their selected combinations will infuse her art with a remarkable formal complexity aligned with an astute intellectual incisiveness, conceptual and philosophical depth, aesthetic dexterity and a determined beauty. The following chapters deal with Geier’s work through more than four decades. As stated in the beginning of this Introduction discussion will be centred on specific works and should be seen as a series of responses to works that have opened dialogue and that provide further layers in the web of relationships established by the artist (16).

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Notes 1. Geier undertook a Diploma of Art (Education) at the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College from 1964 to 1968; and a Teacher’s Certificate at the (then) Alexander Mackie Teachers’ College, Sydney in 1969.

2. There are a number of detailed discussions in histories of Australian art that deal with the 1960s that are relevant here. These include Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–1990 (1991); Sasha Grishin Australian Art: A History (2013); Patrick McCaughey Strange Country. Why Australian Painting Matters (2014). Gary Catalano’s The Years of Hope. Australian Art and Criticism 1959–1968 (1981) deals specifically with the 1960s and is a useful if single-minded point of view.

3. In Chapter 10 (The Art Scene in the 1960s) of Australian Painting 1788–1990 Smith provides a useful summary with numerous examples of the areas cited.

4. Among the commercial galleries established during the 1960s in (mostly) Sydney and Melbourne key examples include the Bonython Gallery (1967), Central Street Gallery (1966), Gallery A, Sydney (1964), Leveson Gallery (1962), Pinacotheca Galley (1967), South Yarra Galleries (1961), Tolarno Galleries (1967) and Watters Gallery (1964). For a comprehensive list of commercial galleries in Australia see Alan McCulloch et al The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (2006) pp 1129–1152.

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The Field, National Gallery of Victoria (1968), p.3.

6. Patrick McCaughey in Robert Lindsay Field to Figuration. Australian Art 1960–1986, National Gallery of Victoria (1986), p.8 7. An interesting look at Australian art post-The Field that examines that exhibition’s ongoing impact is Fieldwork. Australian Art 1968–2002, National Gallery of Victoria (2002).

8. All personal biographical material is taken from the artist’s responses to a set of questions from the author 22 July 2015.

9. The best discussion of the beginnings of the tertiary teaching of printmaking as an art form in Sydney in the general context of a history of contemporary printmaking remains Sasha Grishin’s Contemporary Ausatralian Printmaking (1994). This publication also examines the role of artists/ teachers (Earle Backen, Rose Vickers, Strom Gould) who taught Geier at the National Art School.

10. op.cit.8 11. For brief biographies of most of these see Alan McCulloch et al The New Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (2006).

12. op.cit.8 13. ibid 14. ibid 15. The final two paragraphs of the Introduction owe much to my essay published in the catalogue accompanying the survey exhibition Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier, held at the Canberra Museum and Gallery over the summer of 2000 and 2001.

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The 1960s and 1970s Helen Geier’s artistic output in the 1960s involved works made for secondary and tertiary studies. A single work from 1968 will serve as exemplar for this decade. Moria (Plate 2) was made towards the end of the artist’s tertiary studies (1968). It is a small work (47.0 x 46.0 cm) of mixed media on paper. Visually it is dense and layered and arguably tentative in its accumulation of motifs. However this accumulation of culturally disparate elements is an incipient example of Geier’s robust questioning (of herself and her viewers) of the correctness or otherwise of the cultural collisions she pictorializes. The work is invested with a strong kinetic sense, an almost centrifugal concentration of energies set in motion by the dark circular form towards the left-hand edge of the paper. This form alludes to African sculpture (1), but it is a light reference used for both its formal appropriateness and for references to the importance of so-called primitive, tribal art for Western art at the turn of the twentieth‑century (I am thinking of course of Picasso’s and Braque’s use of tribal forms on their journeys towards Cubism. Other tribal citations include dance masks from New Guinea and New Ireland (art opened to the artist by her ceramics teacher at NAS, Bernard Sahm). Art historical references from the Modernist Western canon abound and include Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro and Paul Klee. Of these certainly Kandinsky’s and Klee’s highly cerebral approaches to pictorial language would have had, along with their extensive writings, great appeal to Geier’s intellectual bent. The overall composition also holds echoes of the 16th-century Milanese artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c.1527–1593) whose clever visual puns using fruits and vegetables to form human faces held much appeal for the later Surrealists. The reference to Surrealism is moot because there is an overall Surrealist character to Geier’s piece not least because of the exotic combination of artistic expressions that span temporal and cultural differences.

The composition has a head-like appearance, an icon-like presence whose layered confections offer important precedents for the artist’s future pictorial investigations. The layering is a device that while allowing individual aspects of the work to hold a certain degree of autonomy also simultaneously blurs boundaries and subsumes different expressive entities into the totality of the work. That said, individual identity is never lost and the variety of cultural sources remains pointedly clear. The artist’s controlling mind and eye mean that any insinuation of one element into or over another is a means of asserting her control, of articulating her burgeoning idiosyncratic pictorial and conceptual vocabulary. The repetition of line, the encapsulation of sets of lines within (often) architectonic frameworks, the inclusion of strong tonal and formal contrasts preview devices that will be further explored when Geier embarks on the next phase of her work – a prolonged (and continuing) exploration of print media.

Following her tertiary training and a brief period of secondary teaching in Sydney, Geier left Australia in 1970 to live and work in London. In this move she was accompanied by her first husband, Patrick Geier, a fellow student at the NAS whom she had married in 1966. Patrick’s European heritage (he was Swiss-French) offered alternatives or additions to her Anglo‑centric upbringing and opened new worlds in literature and particularly French literature – the realist

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Gustave Flaubert and the existentialist Albert Camus were favourites. Patrick took up postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art while Helen initially taught for a year at the roughest school in the East End (2). In 1972 she accepted an offer of a place at St Martin’s School of Art in London where she completed a Certificate of Post Graduate Studies in 1973. As well as studying the Geiers travelled extensively in Europe and as Geier states immersing themselves in the art, everything, we were very focused. She speaks especially of the impact of the absolute perfection of Greek sculpture and the works of Botticelli (3). Other lasting cultural impressions were the Romanesque churches on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The totality of these was part of Geier’s active program of self-education and a reinforcement that for her the artist requires constant visual refreshment and revitalising to maintain a relevant and informed practice.

The art world in London that Geier encountered in 1970 was one still redolent of the imbrications of Pop Art, a movement that had its beginnings in Great Britain in 1956 and was roughly coexistent with American Pop (4). Artists that were part of this stylistically disparate but philosophically like-minded movement included Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney and Ron Kitaj. Unlike its American counterpart that appeared to be uncritically celebratory of contemporary American culture, British Pop questioned the nature of the political validity of the visualisation of contemporary popular culture while simultaneously critiquing the modes of that visualisation. This is an uncanny presupposition of one of the primary conditions of the Postmodern and its espousal of the critique of culture through the presentation of culture within critically active works of art. Given the direction Geier’s later work would take with its profound questioning of the nature of making art within confined cultural parameters, one would be hard-pressed to imagine a more appropriate atmosphere in which the intellectually energetic and aesthetically adventurous artist could find herself.

At St Martin’s Geier’s first year was devoted to painting. In her second year she returned to printmaking where she was introduced to photo-lithography by Anthony Deigan, the printmaking technician (5). Geier found the medium suited her immensely and would spend the entire day working on prints. Photolithography provided many opportunities. Her works from this time in England demonstrate the value to her aesthetic maturing of both the experience of being in England (and variously elsewhere in Europe) and her introduction to a medium whose compatibility with her ways of seeing and thinking came along at the right place and the right time.

Suffolk House – figure and vanishing point, 1972 (Plate 3) is an intriguingly captivating image.

The duplication of the main image; the insertion of an open linear square in the top image paired with the same form in the lower image, this time as a square full of filtered colour (notably a subtle tonal variation of the colour used to outline the upper square); and the demarcating central band of black, attest to the artist’s use of the camera (Geier was an avid photographer) and to her controlling eye and mind. Framing in various guises as a means to place the viewer in relation to the image will remain a potent pictorial and spatial device throughout Geier’s work.

The complexity of the image is reinforced by the subtle layerings of motifs and equally subtle interrupted spatial expectations. Viewers are introduced into the artist’s mise-en-scène through the device of the open gate that sits at the left-hand front of the image. It is partially depicted so that the pictorial configuration of the print falls into the viewer’s space, a clever device that

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is about ways of looking and how the artist can direct these through subtle and insinuative insertions. The figure that appears to be disappearing in the top image is no longer present in the lower one, a visual game that has Surrealist overtones. The use of duplication is a tool seen in the often used serial imagery of contemporary Pop. Formally the steeply angled horizontals and linear geometries of the avenue of trees reinforce the reference to Renaissance singlepoint perspective. The insertion of a tree towards the left-hand edge of the avenue pointedly interrupts the latter’s centralising inward thrust. The solid rectangular form of the façade of the house at the back of the overall image is highlighted by the squares referred to above, these again clearly referencing the camera that recorded the image but also announcing the insistent presence of the artist. Colour is not used in a sensuous way but rather as a formal means of reinforcing the artist’s structural program for the work.

Cage 1 – Figure and Caged bird also from 1973 (Plate 4) is a striking and disquieting picture with again an imposition of the Surreal in the cinematic juxtapositions of motifs and formal devices. The image is divided into two rectangles. The upper is a streetscape filled with menace but portrayed with beautifully nuanced tonal areas and contrasts of green and blue. The use of stark verticals (a tree trunk to the left-hand edge and a dark shrub at the right‑hand edge) breaks the horizontals of the street and the vaporous green background and continues the patterns of making established so clearly in the artist’s career. The upper image is separated from the lower by a declarative horizontal red line. The lower consists of a set of steps on which the lies the figure of the artist. Again, the use of horizontals is extremely effective as is the repeated insertion of tonal contrasts. The figure lies in profile arms akimbo with light directed onto her face. The natural curves of the body provide visual relief from the strident horizontals of the layered steps. The formal simplicity underscores an implied psychological intensity. The artist as victim in some unstated drama is difficult to avoid. This mood is reinforced by the comparative nature of the two parts of this forensic narrative: the upper the scene of the crime; the lower the victim of the crime. Pictorially associations redolent of film noir are difficult to avoid. Possibilities of more personal dramas are also present (6).

Geier and her husband returned to Australia in 1974 and decided to live and work in Melbourne with very part-time teaching jobs at Prahran College of Advanced Education, and building up the hours gradually to full time (7). Geier’s time in London enabled her to strengthen her artistic philosophy and repertoire of techniques and formal strategies. She found the medium of photolithography especially relevant to her modes of thinking and making and as Melbourne was the centre of printmaking in Australia it was for her at that time the place to be.

Her dedication, application and carpe diem attitude to everything that she could experience in terms of her broader art education and practice during her almost four years in London were such that according to Sasha Grishin she arrived in Melbourne as possibly the most accomplished photo‑lithographer in the country (8).

Moving to Melbourne was pivotal for Geier’s subsequent development. Among her fellow teachers were Fred Cress, Jeff Makin, Vic Majzner and Roger Kemp. Kemp was of particular importance and influential in the way she would view art as part of a wider cultural amalgam.

Kemp’s holistic views embraced music, poetry, literature, philosophy, religion and science as well

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as art. The latter was for him something that not only illuminated human experience but that also gave coherent form to the universe. Painting was a means to grasp a hidden, spiritual order that lay beyond normal human interactions with the world. Like artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian Kemp believed that art was revelatory of the whole world and offered an epiphany to anyone willing to believe in its possibilities (9). Geier’s teaching with Kemp opened to her the relevance to her own practice of the internal and external connections held within each work of art, of the layered networks that transcend subject-matter and assert the philosophies innate in ways of making. These were notions that were already present in her work (arguably from her student days). They were given articulate expression through the conversations that she (and others) had with Kemp and that were made visible through his art (10).

While Kemp and others (11) offered welcome and intellectual comfort, Geier was aware of the essential dichotomies in the ways Australian artists (at least those in Melbourne) viewed their world. She speaks of the division as being characterised by landscape/regionalism versus abstraction/internationalism (12). Her time at Prahran (1974–1980) coincided with the results of events in the Australian art world begun in the late 1960s that saw the melting of that divide. For Geier the possibilities for the celebration of individual expression without (real or imagined) stylistic or thematic constraints were already with her following her London years. As always with this artist she was ready to get on with it in her own determined way.

While she taught painting and colour theory she was able to concentrate on printmaking and photolithography in particular.

A series of works based on Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens produced in 1976 introduce the landscape into her work. This is not the nationalist landscape of Drysdale, Pugh, Olsen and others but landscape approached from a cerebral viewpoint. Her landscape although based in a real place was a landscape constructed, a place not necessarily of solace but of alienation and displacement. While there may be a thematic dark place in these works, aesthetically it is a rich place and is integral to the artist’s concepts and for the opening of the possibilities for a wide-ranging variety of pictorial and formal expressions (13). Botanical Gardens, Gates 1, 1976 (Plate 5) presents a view of a path and gardens in the Melbourne Gardens viewed through the frame of (part) of a gate. This motif of the gate was seen previously in Suffolk House – figure and vanishing point but there it was a device to introduce the viewer into the image. Here it is a barrier, a visual and physical stopping point that keeps the viewer from moving beyond its decorative serpentine bars. It is also a framing device that directs what and how we see the other world of the garden that we cannot enter. There is a pathetic sense of something lost, of a place once known but no longer accessible. The very graphic coiled bars of the gate are almost silhouetted against the autumnal hues of the shrubs and bushes that constitute the garden. Geier’s use of colour is thematic as opposed to decorative. Colours perform like adjectives underscoring the thematic impulse of alienation. This image of non-entry is beautifully aligned with its formal components. The semblance of a hand-coloured photograph harks back to early twentieth-century images of places visited and remembered. Geier creates a unified compilation of visual framing, a real image allied with an abstracted formal structure and the human implications of the theme of isolation. She achieves this through

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complex layering whose imbrications hold equally layered and complex meanings. The idea of connectedness is pertinent to her way of making. For her this involves all facets embraced in the making of an art work – concept, theme, form, structure, technical means, aesthetics, internal and external synergies – those shifting constructions that are given clear and persuasive iteration in this work.

The notion of the implications of framing and the use of dual imagery continues in Geier’s later Melbourne prints. Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, 1977 (Plate 6) is essentially two pictures arranged as almost positive and negative states of the same image. Layering here is both physically part of and apart from the main motif. Geier uses internal layering to imply depth and indicate various spatial configurations and adopts the strategy of placing an overlay of paper over the surface of the work to make the metaphorical literal. The top image is dark with sets of fine black lines arranged in geometrically defined shapes outlined in thick black. The blackness and striated surface is broken by two diamonds through whose transparent surfaces glimpses of an almost imperceptible garden can be detected. The space is complex and dynamic with strong verticals allied to subtle diagonals that push back into the picture plane creating an architectonic framework in which the space is a formidable presence. Notions of single point perspective are effectively dismissed in the manner that the artist places the viewer. Are we looking up towards the ceiling of the building or are we looking through windowed walls. Geier knows that we bring to the picture ideas of what constitutes a summer house in a garden setting. Our perceptions are therefore already working as we read the title interestingly placed under the top image (the signature and date sit to the right-hand edge of the lower image). We expect glass walls and therefore some degree of transparency and consequently areas of diffused light but Geier subverts this by playing with the light source.

The lower image is not quite a mirror image of the upper. The starkness of the contrasts of its light-filled surface with the darkness of the other is overt and declarative. Light swamps the architectonic framework and while it imbues a sense of the dissimulation of the various verticals and diagonals it simultaneously drains the colour from these elements and further distances the viewer. The spaces in this work are alienating despite the openness of their presentation.

The visually dark presence of the top image is separated by a clear dividing horizontal from its pale and ostensibly fading partner. Geier posits contrasting views of the same image but then separates them in a pictorial action that gives each pictorial autonomy yet retains familial taxonomic structures to create an aesthetic and philosophical push-pull that makes meaning purposefully fugitive.

Geier is an artist for whom confrontations with history, places, objects and people from all manner of cultures become parts of a store of referential and experiential visual and symbolic data that speaks of private memory and universal consciousness. For her the past and the present exist and inform one another simultaneously. These data will appear in various guises ranging from direct citation to abstracted allusion and each will be invested with a meaning relevant to its contextual placement(s) and relevant to the artist’s philosophical and aesthetical concerns. Adam and Eve (Plate 7) a work from 1978 exemplifies the preceding in a number of ways. The main image is derived from the sculptural reliefs of 12th-century Wells Cathedral in

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England, a place visited by the artist during the early seventies. The cathedral is a beautiful example of the English Gothic and its relief sculptural decoration remains one of its glories.

Geier has chosen a panel illustrating the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Its architectural source is clearly evident and the framing of the central image surrounded by smaller versions of the same is visibly celebrated. The combination and repetition of imagery results in an overall denseness and visual complexity that allied with the activated texture of the surface reflecting the complex and complicated deep carving of the original relief give this work an unusually (for the artist) decorative quality. The insertion of a paper overlay acting as a curtain to the activity underneath is a theatrical mannerism at once witty and revelatory.

While Adam and Eve holds a certain attraction it also signals that the artist’s formal strategies so powerfully invested in her printmaking (and particularly in photolithography) over the decade of the 1970s perhaps needed new directions (14). What will remain and be substantially developed in the following decade is the tension between the figurative and the abstract and the formal and conceptual implications that arise from this.

Notes 1. I am thinking specifically of West African artefacts such as that made by the Baga, Fang and Senufo peoples. For copious examples of the forms to which I am referring see, for example, Jean-Baptiste Bacquart The Tribal Arts of Africa (London, 1998).

2. All biographical material is taken from the artist’s response to a set of questions from the author 22 July 2015.

3. ibid 4. There are a number of excellent studies of British Pop Art. I found the following particularly elucidating: Christopher Finch Image as Language. Aspects of British Art 1950–1968 (Harmondsworth, 1969); Mark Francis (ed.) and Hal Foster (survey) Themes and Movements. Pop (London, 2005) and Marco Livingstone and Walter Guadagnini (ed’s) Pop Art UK. British Pop Art 1956–1972 (Milan, 2004).

5. Sasha Grishin’s Different Fields of Vision (Canberra, 1999) provides a thorough examination of Geier’s English period and indeed of her total print oeuvre to 1999.

6. ibid.p.8 where Grishin speaks of a possible reference to a darker psychological state and feelings of confinement in the image of the artist lying prone on the steps. The artist herself suggested this interpretation in an interview with that author on 20 February 1999.

7. op.cit.2 8.

op.cit 5 p.12

9. For an excellent study of Kemp’s art and philosophy see Christopher Heathcote’s A Quest for Enlightenment. The Art of Roger Kemp (Melbourne, 2007).

10. op.cit 2 11. Grishin cites the example of Bea Maddock as being of importance op.cit.5 pp14–16.

12. op.cit.2 13. ibid. Geier speaks of the presence of an undertow in (her) work.

14. op.cit.8

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Plate 2 Moria, 1969 mixed media on paper 47.0 x 46.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 3 Suffolk House – figure and vanishing point, 1972 lithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper A/P Edition 10 60.0 x 46.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 4 Cage I – Figure and Caged bird, 1973 photolithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper 63.0 x 58.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 5 Botanical Gardens, Gates I, 1976 photolithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper Edition: 20 76.0 x 53.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 6 Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, 1977 photo-lithograph, multicolour, paper overlay on watercolour paper Edition 13/20 30.0 x 60.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 7 Adam and Eve, 1978 photolithograph, multicolour, paper overlay, thread 100.0 x 70.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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The 1980s The late 1970s was a disruptive period in Helen Geier’s personal life and culminated in the breakdown of her marriage to Patrick and her leaving Melbourne. She moved to Braidwood outside Canberra to live with her new husband Jeremy Campbell-Davys who she married in 1981. Professionally she took up a position as Lecturer in the Painting and Foundation Workshops at the (then) Canberra School of Art (1). The 1980s was a period in Australian art generally when the impact of a revival of expressionist painting (particularly in Europe) had world-wide repercussions that included Australia. Painting was no longer dead and individual subjectivity and the celebration of idiosyncratically original art was lauded. Landscape as part of a national identity was revived but it was landscape figured in an international mode of expression that still allowed for individual voices (2).

Geier was fully aware of what was happening. She is never a passive observer but through voracious reading and visits to exhibitions is always au fait with developments in the Australian art world as well as elsewhere. Her move precipitated a change in the focus of her art that was as much informed by the preceding as it was by personal and geographic changes. The lack of a printing press at her Braidwood studio saw her redirect her artistic energies to painting on canvas and paper. Her experience of living in a rural environment surrounded by the Australian bush landscape was a revealing opposite to the urban environments of Melbourne and London that had been her recent homes. It is important to note that landscape was not new to Geier.

My father was also encouraging…He had a boat and jetty and he was a keen fisherman.

He taught me to row out on Brisbane Waters on the Hawkesbury River and we’d go fishing. I always used to notice how the roots of the trees would grow over the rocks on the riverbanks. We’d set fishing traps and we’d use the visual keys of the buoys to line them up. At Terrigal Beach we had nets for catching crabs and prawns. This all gave me a strong connection with landscape. (3).

Her childhood imbued in her connections with place that while not overtly expressed in the preceding decades would emerge as aspects of her thematic and aesthetic language during the 1980s. Landscape however is not explicitly articulated. Geier prefers to infer its actuality in her life through subtle pictorial and spatial infusions into the amalgam of devices and aesthetic strategies that constitute her art. The exploration and re-use of a range of motifs and pictorial devices continues. Imagery is gathered and gleaned from multiple sources including Etruscan sculpture, Gothic architecture, Baroque church furniture, Renaissance painting, tribal carvings and contemporary European and American art (especially the layered veils of colour seen in the works of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler). While the preceding may be present in Geier’s work their presence is always subtle and filtered through the artist’s aesthetic intelligence. The strategy of filtering relates to the conspicuous continuation of the use of framing as a means of directing the viewer and concurrently controlling ways of seeing. Formally the 1980s saw colour taking a predominant role along with a rhythmically structured spatial delineation. Intellectually

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Geier consciously creates complex dialogues between the viewer and the work and the viewer and the artist clothing these in a newly vibrant and energetic pictorial language. It should be noted however that much that characterises her work of the 1980s was incipient in earlier work. The aesthetic stratagem of continual self‑exploration provides a rich conceptual, formal and visual vocabulary that Geier will resort to throughout her career.

Burning bush (Plate 8) from 1980 demonstrates the markedly different approach to her practice that resulted from her move from the urban to the rural. It is a large (180.0 x 240.0 cm) picture and announces an early move to making works on a scale that would continue in the artist’s oeuvre. Framing is explicit and commanding. Its theatrical character is overt and assertive – the similarities of the whole to a presentation on a proscenium arch stage are clear and deliberate.

The reference to the artifice of theatre underscores much of Geier’s art and her intentionally cerebral strategies in the formulation of her practice. The titular motif (the burning bush) is pushed into a central position at the back of the picture plane. It stands at the end of corridor of richly coloured verticals configured on both sides of a recessive spatial configuration that creates a deep and constricted tunnel. The spatial constriction is played off against the vigorous bands of gestural colour that visually create it and in the doing conversely make the corridor a space of varied yet directed movement. Geier’s skill at creating space with colour is powerfully evinced in this work. The bush is presented iconically like some form of religious vessel placed so all are able to view it. Its strident golds and reds are partially reflected at various intervals along the corridor, devices to activate the spatial journey. Their shocking brilliance stands in strong contrast to the more sombre greens, burgundies and browns of the corridor walls. The combination of light and dark, movement and stillness, and spatial centralising versus lateral spatial spread produces a remarkable instance of the artist’s controlling eye. The theatrical framing recalls similar ploys utilised by Geier in earlier prints. Colour and scale separate this work from those however. The play with the elision of the real and the abstract is cleverly exploited in this powerful and persuasive work.

Along with large works on canvas Geier produced a substantial number of small works on paper during the early 1980s. Landscape notation. Red earth, 1982 (Plate 9) exemplifies the characteristics of this series. The incipient references to landscape seen above are given clear articulation. In earlier work landscape references are often opaque or subsumed into formal issues around abstraction and spatial structure. In Landscape notation. Red earth the artist creates through a set of overlaid painterly gestures a dynamic image of an unnamed topography. The initial presentation is abstract – a compilation of expressive painterly gestures anchored in an open spatial configuration. This reading is quietly subverted through the insertion of subtle structural devices that allow for the possibilities of a landscape reading. The spatial configuration is delimited by the centralising of the image. The overall openness reflects the space that surrounds the artist’s rural Braidwood studio. It is a reflection of the freedom of both vision and movement offered by her home/studio and an articulation in their combination of the physical and intellectual worlds in which the artist operates. The painterly gestures are fluid and assured and imbue a sense of concomitant solidity and growth that is redolent of

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the implicit geometries and cyclical movements that are integral components of the natural world. The artist’s statement is a subtle one. Intimation of topographical form is sufficient and succinctly expressed in this seductive work. Geier’s landscape generates affinities with the architecture of Gothic churches that form part of her accumulated repository of images, motifs and devices. The analogy is as much to do with structure as it is with spiritual and philosophical connections. The Gothic church is a complex and multilayered building, a place for spiritual contemplation and meditation. The space though architecturally confined and enclosed, is a space full of the possibilities for implicit expansion. For Geier the landscape inspires direct response but its appeal is mysterious, yet simultaneously universal and continuous. The contrasts and dualities in her pictorialized responses are those same qualities that are manifest in man’s relationship with nature. The mystery of the landscape demands abstract expression and Geier’s vigorous new explorations ably fulfil this demand. It is important to note that the social implications of her graphic work of the 1970s have diminished in favour of her new relationship with her immediate environment.

As we proceed further into the 1980s Geier’s imagery becomes more visually adventurous.

Between 1983 and 1986 a primitivising element intimates itself more frequently into her work.

This element is not necessarily singularly apparent. It is not dominant. It is rather part of the artist’s repertoire of pictorial and thematic devices and will be another player in Geier’s creative tableaux. She continues the dense and tightly massed spatial structure seen in for example Burning bush in Vertical invader (Plate 10). This is one of a number of powerfully expressive works from the mid-1980s characterised by thick paint applied in broad gestural swathes contained within Geier’s dominant centralising spatial construction. The primitive is one ingredient of many used by the artist to impart an anxious mood, a sense of confronting the unknown. The central red mass of flames (?) is striking in the vivid richness of its colour.

Its sits surrounded by narrow vertical forms decorated with horizontal bands of colour. These take on an almost totemic appearance and are the most legible primitivising devices absorbed into this expressively charged work.

Another of the ways of seeing that Geier places before her viewers is the highly ritualistic arrangement of the formal structures within the painting. The central form rises upward into the space but its upward thrust is nicely counterbalanced by the horizontal base from which it emanates. Behind it there is a darker space intimated rather than articulated but nevertheless visibly there. The concept of intimation is one often embraced by the artist. It is an essential aspect of the inclusive ambiguity that she employs so often and with such deft eloquence throughout her oeuvre. The tantalising citations of primitive tribal art (and ritual) are seen by her through the eyes of someone trained in the Western tradition. In this work and others she is exploring, determining the appropriate means for her of eliding different cultural expressions into her very individual pictorial vocabulary. For Geier partial inclusion or quiet intimation of traditions other than her own is sufficient. The impact of Western art history on her practice is always acknowledged. In Vertical invader the impact of primitive art on the art of the German Expressionists (and I am thinking of Emil Nolde and Erich Heckel in particular (4)) is clearly

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alluded to and adds a further interwoven layer into the artist’s aesthetically and culturally referential complex. It is interesting to note that while the German Expressionists were (often) preoccupied with figurative presence in their art Geier prefers to allow her viewers (and herself) to vicariously place themselves as protagonists in her visual performances. Vertical invader is a tonally and structurally dense and interpretatively fecund work in which the artist skilfully combines concerns that have preoccupied her from the beginnings of her professional career. Its layered eloquence and inclusive ambiguity exemplify her continuing intellectual interrogation of herself as an artist and those themes and formal means that will best allow her to articulate those interrogations in the most apposite visual language.

The continuing exploration and subsequent addition of new motifs, themes and concepts result in the later 1980s, in a number of significant works, significant because of their aesthetic resolution but also because of their place in Geier’s total oeuvre. Armature (Plate 11) presents the viewer with a skeletal framework (the armature) of a human torso. This image owes much to the artist’s interest in Etruscan culture (5). I am thinking particularly of Etruscan tomb sculpture that she would have seen at the museum in Volterra, Italy that has substantial holdings of this material. These works are characterised by an enigmatic quality and a timeless plastic beauty that speaks as much of the present as it does of its own time. The elision of past and present remains a recurrent motif in Geier’s art. I would also like to raise the exemplar of D.H.Lawrence’s Etruscan Places, a series of essays covering his visits to Tuscany in the 1920s and published posthumously in 1932 (6). What is moot in relation to Geier’s art is the notion of travelling through an ancient culture in a modern world and the ongoing relevance of the former to the latter. Geier’s Etruscan places are cerebral products as much as they are visual ones. They display once again the pertinence and all-embracing inclusiveness of the essentially intellectual propositions she sets for herself to decipher and articulate through her powerfully idiosyncratic visual language.

In Armature the figurative is present in the main image. However it is a disembodied figuration in that there is no corporeal presence only the graphically delineated inner shell of a figure.

Despite this there is imbued in this open construction a defiant stance simultaneously defensive and aggressive. This is given distinctive utterance through the barely discernible intimations of eyes that stare out from the skeletal helmet. Geier uses her considerable formal battery to make a marvellously effective divergence between stasis and kinesis, between passivity and activity that is invested within the coevally existing centripetal and centrifugal spatial configurations placed within the shell of the torso. The enigma of Armature is underpinned by the darkly mysterious background through which a range of perspectival and lateral spatial, tonal, structural and cultural collisions are placed together in a commanding image of movement and recalled memory.

Fragments in time another work from 1986 (Plate 12) is a pictorially densely packed work.

Layering and ambiguity as visual strategies are overtly celebrated. Geier’s inclusions give this work a pictorial extravagance that is reminiscent of the richness of Baroque flower

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pieces or perhaps more pointedly of that same era’s memento mori. In these purposefully lavish confections dark undertones of the intimations of mortality are submerged but always present and able to be read by the visually and culturally literate viewer. There is a sense of that what is happening on the canvas is moving across the surface with a strong lateral pull to the right‑hand edge of the work. The collection of motifs across the front of the picture plane includes both overt and covert allusions to primitive art (totems and shields) as well as less legible but discernibly present topographical suggestions. These are seemingly paraded across the frontal plane in an energetically rich celebration. The frontal push is beautifully circumscribed by the strength of the lateral pull. Behind the frontal screen the space, once again dark, is activated through linear and graphic insertions and sombre tonal area that imply a deep and recessive space. The surreal implications of some of the frontal elements recall some of the artist’s earliest pictorial essays and hint at a sense of urgency in her mining of her visual repository. The multiple relationships between the Gestalt of the whole image and the various other entities that comprise the whole, will occupy the artist as a major aesthetic concern for some time. Geier involves her viewers in this process by making them aware of the autonomy of the component parts and each’s role in constructing the entirety of the work.

That these two perceptual and conceptual phenomena occur simultaneously and on a number of levels make Fragments in time not just a complicated and demanding work but also a complexly beautiful one.

In the latter part of the 1980s a return to earlier ways of thinking and making sees Geier (re-)utilising images and structural devices from the late 1970s (7). Ten years apart (Plate 13) from 1988 owes clear debts to its printed progenitor Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne (Plate 6). Technically this work combines several media – printed collage, chalk pastel on watercolour paper. The image is divided into three vertical bands spread across the paper. The striated background of the earlier work punctuated by the sharply outlined diamond-shaped windows recurs. The panel to the far left is defaced by vigorous scribblings that as often are both revelatory and concealing. A flap of (graphic) fabric pushes through the scribble and adds a geometric strictness to the freeform scribbles. Centrally placed is a faceless head, helmeted and voiceless, enigmatic in its prison and redolent concurrently of Etruscan sculpture and the Surrealism of René Magritte. The artist has inscribed across the middle ground of the frontal plane 10 years apart perhaps a reference to the time passed between making Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne and the present work Ten Years Apart.

It was also the title of a survey exhibition held at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in September 1988 (8). It would be fair to say that this is not an easy work. Its meaning allows for a number of readings each of which holds some validity. I see it as an appropriate end point for the 1980s, a decade of exploration, discovery and interpretation and a decade rich in expressive complexity and aesthetic interrogation. It was also as Sasha Grishin reminds us a time when: Perhaps what was also significant but unknown to her at the time, was that she was suffering from a brain tumour which was progressively affecting not only her sense of balance but also her sight and aesthetic sensibilities (9).

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Notes 1.

All personal biographical material is taken from the artist’s responses to a set of questions from the author 22 July 2015.

2.

There are a number of authoritative texts that examine the 1980s in an Australian context. These include Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–1990 (1991); Charles Green Peripheral Vision. Contemporary Australian Art 1970–1994 (1995); Sasha Grishin Australian Art: A History (2013); and Patrick McCaughey Strange Country. Why Australian Painting Matters (2014).

3.

op.cit. 1

4.

There are numerous publications dealing with German Expressionism. Stephanie Barron and Wolf‑Dieter Dube’s German Expressionism: Art and Society (London, 1997) is an excellent overview.

5.

For images of the types of sculpture Geier (loosely) references see Otto Brendl Etruscan Art (Harmondsworth, 1978) and Nigel Spivey Etruscan Art (London, 1997).

6.

I used the Cambridge University Press publication of 2001 edited by Simonetta De Filippis Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays.

7.

I am thinking specifically of Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne., 1977 (Plate 6)

8.

This was a small exhibition consisting nineteen paintings, prints and works on paper from 1979 to 1988 curated by the author and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essay by the author.

9.

Sasha Grishin Different Fields of Vision (Canberra,1999). The brain tumour was successfully operated on in February 1991.

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Plate 8 Burning bush, 1980 oil on canvas 180.0 x 240.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 9 Landscape notation. Red earth, 1982 acrylic, pastel, watercolour on paper 48.5 x 72.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 10 Vertical invader, 1984 oil on canvas 180.0 x 240.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 11 Armature, 1986 oil on canvas 154.0 x 154.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 12 Fragments in time, 1986 oil on canvas 120.0 x 180.0 cm Private Collection, Brisbane

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Plate 13 10 years apart, 1988 printed collage, chalk pastel on watercolour paper 59.0 x 81.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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The 1990s If the 1980s was a time for experimentation the 1990s begin with reflection and consolidation.

This decade heralds for Geier a markedly sophisticated and mature approach to her practice.

The cerebral stance that surfaced earlier in her work was invested with a new precision of thought that would result in some immaculate, carefully structured and intimate pieces (1). These are not so much changes but responses to internal and external sources that demanded considered examination (2). In Australia painting had emerged from the 1980s into an art world that reaffirmed subjectivity as integral to creative expression and celebrated the individual artistic imagination. That this meant that painting became a medium among many added to the varieties and diversity of art practices (3). While Geier was fully aware of developments in both practice and theory she was also fully committed to finding her way through the maze of ways of seeing and thinking that gave the 1990s its vitality and energy (and its sometimes confusion). This singular determination to maintain her vision and follow through her own aesthetic and intellectual paths has been demonstrated from the beginnings of her practice and continues today.

Two works from 1991 exemplify the direct impact the successful surgery on her brain tumour had on her spatial perceptions in particular. Raft (Plate 14) is an extraordinary image in the artist’s response to space and in the directness of her landscape quotations. Geier places an intricate web of white lines that recede with a dramatic almost violent thrust into the back of the picture plane. The landscape is spare and desolate and gives the lines the look of bleached tree trunks scattered randomly through the barren topography. However the scattering is not random and the formal concentration of the lines in the centralised triangle that cuts deep into limitless horizon intimates control and order. Triangular forms have been used by the artist from the early 1980s to imbue her pictorial constructions with compositional unity. Geier’s aesthetic warehouse continues to be raided. Space is a potent and palpable force and is powerfully almost threateningly delineated by the artist. The formal sparseness and ostensible simplicity of Raft belie its conceptual and thematic profundity and emotional depth. What is most striking in this work is the complete disappearance of the constricted spatial structures of the 1980s seen in works discussed above. The break is visually and conceptually cathartic and spells a new beginning in the way Geier will look at, analyse and synthesise her use of space (4).

Via Regia II (Plate 15) also from 1991, continues the exploitation of the triangle as a device to visually control the composition and to metaphorically indicate the artist’s controlling mind.

The red triangle is aligned off centre and as in Raft pushes back through the pictorial space with a determined rigour. The landscape is ominous and empty. A band of interspersed white lines (bleached tree trunks) across the front of the painting offers a number of readings. The landscape element is clear as is the concomitant reference to the cycles of nature. Less overt but nevertheless present is an intimation that the white lines carry a subtle verisimilitude to

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stitching, to the repairing of the land in a crude but effective way. The link to the artist’s recent medical experiences is relevant as is the association with domestic work usually associated with women, the latter a reference that will continue to figure in Geier’s art.

Another defining device used by the artist is the circle. Formally it centres the composition and provides visual focus. The free form rendering of the circle ensures that it can be read in a number of ways. It is the brain, the container of memories and the fuse for present thought.

It is a symbol for the coalescence of history and contemporaneity, of the coexistence of the past with the present, and as such a powerful aesthetic and conceptual tool in Geier’s work.

It is also the palette, the holder of the artist’s physical means of expression.

The way of looking in Raft and Via Regia II heralds new directions and asserts the importance of memory and the cerebral processes that trigger memory as key ingredients in Geier’s art.

This does not deny the role that memory plays earlier in the artist’s oeuvre. Rather it points to a consciously active and analytical approach to cerebral and physiological processes.

In 1992 Geier created a large (153.0 x 488.0 cm) painting that in many ways can be read as a sort of visual manifesto of the approaches she uses in the making of her art. Plato’s Cave (Plate 16) is a philosophically evocative and visually exciting painting. Its sensuous appeal is generated through the astute use of the opposition and duality of light and dark, visual metaphors for the philosophical arguments that Plato offered in Books VII and VIII of The Republic (5). Conceptually the artist is concerned with the contrast then gradual elision of the world of the senses into the world of reason. Her take on Plato’s work of c.520 BC embraces his description of the human condition and the need for individuals to discover themselves through experiencing not only the sensual but more importantly the ideational, the cerebral. The essential dualities of the inner and outer worlds are expressed in a powerful visual articulation where meditative and sombre beauty confronts the viewer inviting exploration, discovery and understanding. Geier divides her work into four rectangular panels of alternatively light and dark tones. The viewer travels through each panel perspectivally but this is played off against the lateral pull of the whole towards the left-hand edge of the picture.

The dense tonalities of the two dark panels powerfully capture the state of unknowing that is the fate of those unable to escape the cave of the title. The darkness is both formal and metaphorical and its overt contrasts with the brilliant white of the corresponding panels makes palpable the beautiful coupling of process and concept that gives this work its power.

Geier’s experimenting with varieties of spatial constructions, with space as cultural expression was given fortuitous impetus by her obtaining a copy of an eighteenth-century manual on perspective. The copy she had access to was handed down through her husband’s family and was the sixth edition of Bowles’s Practice of Perspective on an Easy Method of Representing Natural Objects According to the Rules of Art published in 1782 (6). This has proved an invaluable source and remains central to her practice not only in the 1990s but continuing to today. It promulgated new explorations whose end products spoke as much of their source as of the contemporary world they so eloquently reflect. The images in this book provide

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a base into which the artist’s multilayered and highly complex aesthetic and conceptual investigations are framed. The base is not simply a formal device nor an appropriative conceit.

It is a key with which the artist is able to confront new possibilities for the expansion, alteration and exploitation of pictorial form. It begins a process of pictorial and spatial investigations imbued with notions of historical precedent and contemporary practice and theory. These are combined with the simultaneous apposition of the real with the abstract, the organic and the geometric, the felt and the perceived – the Dionysian and the Apollonian. That this multiplicity of opposites can occur within the constraints of the imposed grid of eighteenthcentury perspective (constraints knowingly and deliberately imposed by the artist) makes for a rewarding intellectual and aesthetic journey. The irony of using an eighteenth-century model as source material for works made in contemporary Australia is not lost on the artist. Its use also highlights the movement of cultural ideas temporally and geographically and how their relevance in varying circumstances depends not on the ideas but rather on how they are used in their new contexts. Geier of course begins from an interrogative position and her source becomes the basis for questions about the very nature of art and thinking about art and its materials.

Discussions of a selection of work from the early 1990s exemplify the results of the artist’s programmed investigations. In Part III Perspective p.61, 1994 (Plate 19) the rich textures of the painted surface provide sensuous relief to the rigid geometries of the grid and the centralising square, also gridded. In this work the logic of the theories of single point perspective and its imposed way of seeing is elegantly subverted by the emphases placed on the surface through such devices as extensive (and overlaid) gridding, repeated patterning and expressively applied paint. Colour is richly elegant and is used as both structure and decoration. The brilliant whiteness of the cage-like central motif is both visual and philosophical ploy to the density of the background spatial configuration. Visually the contrast is clearly evinced.

Philosophically the contrast is more complex. The background can be seen as the source of knowledge, as the place the artist (philosopher) paradoxically must be simultaneously a part of and apart from. It is both enclosure and disclosure. Without experience of this place knowledge of the next (the gridded cage) is denied. Geier purposefully elides the dualities of light and dark to express the movement from experience to knowledge, from sensibility to thought. The intricate visual structuring and eloquent contrasting act as metaphors for the cerebral complexities so skilfully at play in this work. The abundance of formal ambiguities reiterates the layered nuances of time, place and (implied) person that populate the entire artist’s work.

Part III Perspective p.94, also from 1994 (Plate 20) has an overall brightness to it reinforced by the blues, whites and creams that dominate the palette but also by the insertion of the frame of black diamonds that surround the central motif. The page reference in the title of this (and other) works in the series as well as the portrait (page-like) format of the whole work is a direct reference and subsequent visual quotation of the illustration that appears on the here, ninety-first page of Bowles’s manual of perspective. That illustration is discernible behind

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another diamond this time decorated with a number of graphically delineated motifs. The diamond presents as a shield and as well as referencing the primitive shields of earlier work is a layered cultural insertion onto the linear geometrically defined perspectival space behind. The outer frame is a repeated pattern of blue rectangles with pale white diagonals activating the surface. The internal frame of black diamonds has each incised with thin red lines, redolent of the components of a perspectival design.

Part III Perspective p.110 (Plate 21) is another elegant visual thesis. It consists of an array of motifs whose source goes beyond the eighteenth-century and speaks of the Renaissance and the rediscovery of pictorial space and the repercussions of this for artists (7). Across the front of the picture plane a trio of arched arcades describe pictorially the notion of liner single-point perspective. They are beautifully drawn, detailed and realistic, and placed within a horizontal rectangle that repeats the arches and other architectural elements provided by the artist.

Above this trio, also placed within its own horizontal rectangle, sits a more recent building, perhaps Georgian in the symmetry of its façade. Both illustrated bands sit in a field made up of nine triangular shapes that imbue a strong sense of immanent movement into this work.

The field is activated by much linear and graphic patterning some of this alluding to incipient landscape elements. Its soft ochre ground is a pliant contrast to the insistent greyness of the built forms that sit in it. Contrasts abound as does Geier’s use of multiple and layered framing. Ambiguity is rife and expressed through multifocused combinations. This work (and others) may be visually complicated but it is also a complex, a microcosm, layered laterally and perspectivally, metaphorically asserting the intricacies of cultural accumulations that have contributed to its making. This work is a paean to the validity of Geier’s searching.

As well as large exercises in paint (and other media), in the 1990s Geier returned to printmaking. In these the conjunction of the artifice of creating pictorial spatial structure through a system of applied theories and the actualities of real landscapes is questioned.

There are gaps in the conjunctions that speak of aesthetic and intellectual disparities but it is the posing of questions about these that concerns Geier. Rather than simple and singular use of print media in the Perspective series the artist will adopt a layered approach incorporating for example etching with silkscreen and sewn and folded 3-d. prints. Perspective and Chance Connections 4A, 1994 (Plate 22) uses the cited combination. It is a crisp almost clinical combination of theoretical concepts, contrived landscapes and geometric structures. Its simple black and white presentation contributes to its didactic stance but the clever use of shading and implied spatial constructs removes it from the definitive to the interrogative.

The over-riding visual character is historical. Its overwhelming message is can the pairing of the past with the present, the real with the artificial, the intellectual with the sensuous, maintain its relevance in contemporary practice and particularly in Geier’s practice? The work does not provide a resolution. That is for the viewer to discover. Geier will continue to explore and in that exploring produce an idiosyncratic beauty that is more about the question than the answer.

In a review of Geier’s 1995 Beaver Galleries exhibition Experiments and games of chance: Paintings and prints, Sasha Grishin wrote:

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Perhaps the most interesting thing is not that Helen Geier disregards the traditional medium distinctions in art and here combines with authority oil painting, prints, constructions, artists’ books and mixed-media works, but that she questions the traditional methods of thought about art, about surfaces, perspective, pattern and illusion (8).

This is a succinct appraisal of Geier’s early years of the 1990s. The combinations that she so vigorously makes celebrate the coexistence of the cerebral with the sensuous, the thoughtful with the beautiful. The validity of Geier’s methods and approaches is strongly expressed in the enormous variety of highly individualised works made through the impetus of Bowles’s book.

Despite the repetition, recycling and reorganisation of motifs throughout these works there is never any feeling of aesthetic tiredness. Each work is imbued with an integrity resulting from the coalescence, interspersion and interlocking of the artist’s vision with her method. The indivisibility of the physical with the mental creates seamless dualities of form and content.

Geier’s consummately refined distillations of her own experiences onto the canvas become part of the viewers’ experience of her work. The remorseless ability of her art to simultaneously sustain inclusivity and exclusivity, to speak of and to the one and the many, clearly places it on an aesthetic cutting edge.

In the late 1990s Geier produced a stunning and finely tuned series of works the genesis of which lay in her continuing meditations on culturally conditioned perception. These works encompass the individual’s collective cultural memory and consciousness and allude to the artist’s experience of Asian cultures, the Australian landscape and the expectation of how one reacts to that landscape in both a physical and intellectual way. This is further complicated by the infusion of an acute and finely honed visual intellect, well read and sophisticated, innately critical and questioning. The works are again complex and assert the intricacies of the cultural accumulations of which they are the result. The complexity is analogous to a spider web – a beautifully modulated structure in which everything has a meaning and a place appropriate to its role and to the defining mind of its maker.

Dissolving view (Plate 25) from 1997 is beautifully resolved work playing with substance and ethereality, reality and imagination, through the imposition of slow, rhythmic movement and layering of a very subtle type. East and West do not absorb one another but operate within the same pictorial and spatial construct. Individual identity and autonomous activity are not denied. Geier never permits closure. Visually the metaphor of the screen is exploited.

Oriental motifs float over the grouped avenue of trees, the latter enclosed in a V-shaped form that could implode within itself or conversely push out of the picture plane. This imparts an exquisite tension that is played off against the diaphanous veil (the screen) that gently wafts across the top half of the painting. The sharp geometries of the trees contrasted with the softness of the veil add another layer of aesthetic tension layer to this subtle and insinuative work.

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Two worlds, 1996 (Plate 1) is a marvellous visual and philosophical amalgam. The composition is carefully gridded, laid out like a map or a garden plan. A rhythmic pattern moves the viewer across and through the tightly balanced work. The central image places eighteenth-century trees in a twentieth-century Australian/Asian context. The two worlds are those of the Orient and the Occident. Geier is concerned not so much with issues of Australianness but rather with wider cultural notions including the collisions and elisions of culture and how these questions can be visualised. Here the intimations of the coexistence of different cultures are displayed to the viewer within the confines of a very Western aesthetic mode – single-point perspective.

The display also simultaneously subverts this tradition by suspending the pictorial motifs on a screen (the grid) that symbolises the artist’s cultural perceptions.

The screen has obvious connections with Asian cultures. It is also an important metaphor in the Western philosophical canon. It figures for example in Jacques Lacan’s writings where it refers to the networks of meanings through which we must sift in order to find meanings appropriate to ourselves (9). It is also found in Schopenhauer’s reference to the veils of Maya that can only be negotiated by the abandonment of empirical consciousness (10). Maya it should be noted belongs to the Sanskrit tradition. The concept of movement is integral to Geier’s art. It is particularly relevant for her visualisation of crossing through cultures. Physical movement gives individual movement to place and simultaneously impels intellectual activity.

In terms of the artist’s practice process involves concurrent physical and mental activity in an intimate and intense bond. The suspended screen is replete with kinetic possibilities.

Geier will exploit these possibilities to the fullest in a series of works whose generic titular identity – Screens – signals this exploitation.

Geier’s graphic investigations continue through the late 1990s. In the eight etchings that comprise the Expanded field folio of 1998 two will serve to exemplify the aesthetic and intellectual underpinning of the series. Expanded field (Text) - Plate 28, and Expanded field (Scroll) - Plate 27, are both defiantly vertical, their verticality repeated in the imposition (layering) of a smaller vertical panel both into and onto its larger mate. Both use texts and numbers written in regular lines all over the surface, a regularity broken only by the interspersion of small panel on larger. These impositions act like palimpsests with their insistent layering and essentially legible but meaningless inclusion of text and numbers. There is a quasi-documentary character in these works as they stand as manifestoes of Geier’s modes of making. Allusions both overt and subtle to Asian ways of visualising the world are again combined with critically placed quotations from Western pictorial constructs that also infer a range of possibilities perhaps not even located within the visual parameters of each work. The influence of Aboriginal ways of depicting country also becomes part of the artist’s repertoire and reinforces the validity of the inclusion of a complex web of viewpoints in arriving at the multivalent cultural expression that underpins Geier’s layered and conjoined world view.

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Screening as a formal device or screens per se have been part of the artist’s morphological vocabulary since the 1970s. Their expressive importance increased exponentially during the 1990s and they achieved a paramount position in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Fire screen, 1999 (Plate 30) Geier capitalises on the physical presentation of the screen. The work hangs out from the wall increasing the power of the total spatial configuration and giving that element an especially active role. The combination of the Western and the Eastern is magnificently visualised in this work. The screen is overlaid with a series of pictorial devices that play with modes of perception. The background image is of a red landscape with a river of black snaking its way vertically through the space. One would think an archetypically Australian landscape – sparse, bare, unpopulated. Geier though has figured the spatial perception as a Chinese scholar would paint a landscape. Chinese perspective meanders through the painting in an organic way.

The viewer begins the journey at the bottom of the scroll and then proceeds up and through the (generally mountainous) landscape in a zigzagged recessional pattern. For the Chinese artist/scholar painting is an exercise in contemplation. To realise this in the painting the figures pause at various points to meditate. This internal meditation is also experienced vicariously by the viewer whose eyes are led through the landscape by the painted protagonist and the viewer must stop to undergo a process of meditation when directed to do so (11). But the viewer is not in a Chinese landscape, painted or otherwise. Geier has fused the reality of the Australian landscape, a reality that is part of her daily experience, with the aesthetics of contemplation of the Chinese artist/scholar. The red land is patterned with lines and shading that give form to and visually enliven the two-dimensional surface. It is though a subdued vitality and an intimatory form. The artist’s purpose is cultural fusion. Another layer reinforces the preceding.

This time Geier employs the stencilled outline of a trompe l’oeil arched garden pergola. The image is absolutely of the Western canon and loudly asserts the ongoing pertinence of that tradition for the artist. Single-point perspective is overlaid onto a Chinese multi-directional perspective. But is it? At first sight, yes. Geier however always avoids the obvious. The reality is a fusion of all the elements in which no single element controls neither does it subvert.

The artist has used a limited repertoire of colour, form and other pictorial devices to express a complex idea. That she has achieved this and endowed the result with a conceptual boldness and accessible aesthetic beauty speaks of the underlying validity and strength of concept and expressive means.

The 1990s was a rich and fecund time for Geier and culminated in two large survey exhibitions (11) that pointed to an intrinsic unity in Geier’s work and…invited a reassessment of her standing as an artist (12).

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Notes 1.

Sasha Grishin “Helen Geier” in Art and Australia, Vol. 39, No.2, p.268 (Sydney, 2001)

2. The brain tumour and its consequences referred to in the previous chapter were at least for the early phase of the 1990s paramount.

3. The 1990s is discussed in a number of publications. Charles Green’s Peripheral Vision. Contemporary Australian Art 1970–1994 (1995) deals with the early 1990s while Sasha Grishin’s Australian Art: A History (2013) gives an overview of the entire decade and Patrick McCaughey’s Strange Country.

Why Australian Painting Matters (2014) deals specifically with (some) painting.

4. The discussions of Geier’s works from the 1990s draws much from my catalogue essay for Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier (2000) pp.21–32.

5. Through the form of a dialogue led by Socrates Plato posits that the highest and most fundamental kind of reality is that found in forms by which he meant ideas and not in the material world that is known only through the senses. An excellent discussion of Plato’s ideas is seen in Stephen Watt’s Introduction in Plato: Republic (London, 1997).

6. The National Library of Australia has a copy of the third edition of this book published in 1743. The original of the book was written (in French) by a Jesuit priest Jean Dubreuil (1602–1670) and translated

by E. Chambers. See http:trove.nla.gov.au/work/16780376.

7.

Sasha Grishin provides a concise discussion of this in his Different Fields of Vision (1999) pp.29–30.

8.

“Provocative and rich in beauty” The Canberra Times, 18/03/1995.

9. For a range of discussions on Lacan psycho-philosophy see Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (2003).

10. See for example Peter Laptson’s “Willing and Unwilling. A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer”, Dialogue (1990).

11. For an overview of Chinese painting see Osvald Sirén’s The Chinese on the Art of Painting (2005) although originally written and compiled in the late nineteenth-century the inclusion of Chinese texts and the author’s deep scholarship still make this publication worthwhile.

12. These were Different Fields of Vision a survey of the artist’s printed work from 1972 to 1999 curated

by Sasha Grishin; and Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier curated by Peter Haynes for Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2000 that looked at paintings and works on paper from 1969 to 2000.

13. Sasha Grishin “Helen Geier”, Art and Australia, Vol.39, No.2, 2001,p.268.

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Plate 14 Raft, 1991 oil on paper 80.0 x 120.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 15 Via Regia II, 1991 oil on canvas 150.0 x 210.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 16 Plato’s Cave, 1992 oil on canvas 153.0 x 488.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 17 Part III Perspective p.58, 1993 oil on canvas 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: Australian National University, Canberra

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Plate 18 Perspective Cube and Games of Chance, 1994 oil on canvas 210.0 x 300.0 cm Collection: LaTrobe Regional Gallery

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Plate 19 Part III Perspective p.61, 1994 oil on canvas 210.0 x 152.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale

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Plate 20 Part III Perspective p.94, 1994 oil on canvas 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale

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Plate 21 Part III Perspective p.110, 1994 oil on canvas 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: Australians National University

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Plate 22 Perspective and Chance Connections 4A, 1994 photoetching and silkscreen, sewn and folded 3D print 78.0 x 58.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 23 Interlocking Spaces, 1996 oil, mixed media, paper on canvas 150.0 x 105.0 cm Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

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Plate 24 Intersection I, 1996 oil, mixed media on canvas 105.0 x 75.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 25 Dissolving view, 1997 oil, mixed media on canvas 150.0 x 210.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne

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Plate 26 Perpetual dialogue, 1997 oil, wax on canvas 210.0 x 150.0 cm (diptych) Collection: The Artist

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Plate 27 Expanded Field (Scroll), 1998 photoetching, drypoint, aquatint 72.0 x 42.0 cm Private Collection, Sydney

Plate 28 Expanded Field (Text), 1998 photoetching, drypoint, aquatint 72.0 x 42.0 cm Private Collection, Sydney

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Plate 29 Fire screen, 1999 acrylic, flywire, stencil, spraypaint on paper with sewn thread & beads 300.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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The 2000s The diversity that is integral to Helen Geier’s practice is part of the general tendency in contemporary Australian art to revel in diversity, hybridity, cross-cultural and transnational tendencies (1). There is a range of manifestations within the preceding and I agree with Sasha Grishin when he makes a distinction between that hybrid art that explores interactions between visual arts practice and, for example, biology, artificial intelligence, computer technologies and body manipulation and the broader mainstream Australian art practice… where there is a general preparedness to cross media as well as national and conceptual boundaries as part of a quest for genuine hybrid creations (2). Geier’s art is a comfortable fit with the latter.

The artist’s interests in the motif of the screen that was renewed with such powerful results in the1990s, continue into the 2000s. An impressive example is Shoalhaven Archway. Archaic Threads, 2000, (Plate 31). This is an important work for many reasons. It sums up much of what has concerned the artist over the previous decade (and earlier), and points to future directions. It is a beautifully resolved work and as well as carrying intellectual import it is simply visually stunning. Formal layering as a means for expounding concept is again present.

Despite the continuing use of the same formal devices and pictorial motifs Geier is able to instil individual identity to this work. Subtle interpolations such as the references to Australian flora (and thus reference to the wider landscape) assist in defining individual character. Ultimately it is the overwhelming largeness of the artist’s thematic interests and the openness and elasticity of her own thought processes and researches that preclude the possibilities of boring repetition as ever being present in her work. Her art as exemplified in Shoalhaven Archway.

Archaic Threads carries the impressive crescendo of a fugue where all the notes contribute to éclat of the whole.

Ever the explorer Geier’s continuing interests in historical ways of thinking about how to make art saw her examining William Hogarth’s classic aesthetic treatise of 1753 The Analysis of Beauty (3). Like Bowles’s book on perspective, Geier sees relevance in applying Hogarth’s theories to her contemporary cultural perceptions. In Analysis of Beauty: Rococo gold (Plate 32) and Analysis of Beauty: Classical silver (Plate 33) both from 2000 the artist integrates seemingly disparate cultural references to create a rich and densely populated visual amalgam.

Travel often informs what will be included in her art and in these works citations from the bazaars of New Delhi coexist happily with aspects of the Australian landscape and other devices from her stored memories. That she includes the title of her chief source – viz. The Analysis of Beauty – cues her viewers into a starting-point, an overriding intellectual startingpoint that is expressed in beautifully composed visual structures. Framing, grids, layering and ambiguous contrasts are combined in these works to imbue them with pictorial energy and aesthetic resolution. There is a lot of surface activity and deliberate cultural clashes are configured throughout. The opposition of the figurative with the abstract and here, the

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decorative speaks of her multiple sources. The vigour of the inclusivity of Geier’s pictorial language combined with the penetrating insightfulness and intellectual precision indicate the appropriateness of her exotic combinations. While motifs and devices have a familial identity there is never in the artist’s work any implication of sameness. Geier understands the expressive and conceptual potential of sameness in diversity and each re-use instils a further layer of meaning into the already rich store of continuing quotations.

The continued use of the screen results in some exciting pictures. Pathway to the Orient (Plate 34) from 2001 is a beautifully complicated composition. Its visual richness is articulated by the closely set patterning that supplies both depth and moves the viewer into and through the floating leaves and hints of landscape that wander into the trellised pathway that is the central motif. Geier’s palette is soft and eighteenth-century perspective theory is subsumed (but never entirely) by the chance realities of the Australian landscape. Geier’s path to the culture of the Orient is filtered by her real experience of her immediate landscape and the intellectual overlay of past ways of making art.

Survey I (Plate 37) and Survey II (Plate 38) from 2004 see the artist engaging with the Australian landscape and with Australian Aborigine art. Dialogues with Indigenous art have become a staple of contemporary practice. For Geier it is not just a further cultural layering or source for additions to her aesthetic repository but a sincere acknowledgement of the ancient traditions of Aboriginal people and their deep attachment to country. Geier’s own experience of outback Australia includes a 2002 trip to the Pilbara region of Western Australia when she was undertaking a residency at the Church Gallery and Curtin University in Perth. This was the first time she was confronted with the alienating harshness of the desert landscape and she was overwhelmed by its harshness, hard surfaces, the intensity of the light, the elements, the climate and the vast expanses in sharp contrast to the intensity of the intricate details of the landscape (4). The topographical ambiguities and contradictions of the PiIbara ignited her imaginative impulses and a number of works resulted from the original journey and the consequent aesthetic and intellectual musings that accompanied it.

Survey I speaks of the infinite, endless horizons of the outback. It also speaks of different ways of encompassing landscapes so different to those familiar to her within a visual construct.

The viewpoints she adopts accept the coexistence of different perspectives emanating from different cultural perceptions of space. The rectangular format of the work is divided into two tonally separated areas. The front is filled with scalloped banks of reds and dark browns that fall back into the picture plane to be stopped by a horizon line that intimates a deep space behind it. The upper area of essentially ochres and lighter browns is populated with the same scalloped forms as the lower area. Space here pushes up from the horizon and gives prominence to the frontal block. A rectangle of veiled white sits to the left-hand edge of the front of the picture plane and while visually intrusive it symbolises an alien presence, something not in tune with the landscape it veils. The combination of differing spatial formats within the total spatial configuration instils a beautifully controlled aesthetic tension. This

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speaks of the artist seeking to reconcile her experience of a cultural other in a language redolent of an already hybridised vocabulary that will nevertheless allow for the contiguous existence of each of these.

Geier’s distillations are given further unique expression in Survey II. Here a red page of white text sits on gridded ground (as above of scalloped forms). The text is clear but unintelligible.

On top of it two strange ideograms with primitive overtones are given visual prominence.

Similar marks sit on either side of the text, their presence in a lateral spread across the front of the picture plane, a strong graphic reference to an (unnamed) but implied cultural source.

Geier may have visited the Pilbara in 2002 but the reverberations of that trip stay with her and she continued her imaginative researches with powerful expressive results over the next few years. Geier does not discard but maintains filtered relics of experiential adventures in her expansive aesthetic repository. In her 2006 Elements exhibition a suite of landscape images that traverses distance, time and cultures (5) is a persuasive iteration of the potency of Geier’s expressive and intellectual message. Each image is concerned with the relationships between the land and the people who inhabit it, either the original Indigenous owners or those that came in the waves of European settlement post-1788. The narratives are of course multi-layered and triggered by the insertion of or quiet allusion to, a range of motifs and pictorial devices. The trigger for this particular series is convict love tokens given to loved ones by prisoners being sent to the colonies. These poignant mementoes speak of dislocation, displacement and alienation, properties that Geier will use to highlight the different narratives that emanate from those relating to the relationship of man to the landscape. The preceding is of course simplistic and Geier’s imaginative responses offer much more than this. In A World Away, 2006 (Plate 40) similar spatial devices used in Survey I and Survey II are combined with a panoramically sweeping aerial viewpoint which embraces tracts of land traced with sets of graphic contour lines that intimate the swelling contours of the topography depicted.

The palette is light, the lightness only partially relieved by the mid-ground arcs of brown hills.

The intense graphic activity enlivens the overall image but there remains a general feeling of desolation. While suggestions of Indigenous ways of representation are present (the graphic lines’ resemblance to the myriads of white lines used in Arnhem Land bark painting is relevant) Geier also infuses Australian art history in a clear acknowledgement of Margaret Preston and her 1942 painting held in the National Gallery of Australia, Flying over the Shoalhaven River.

This is one of Geier’s favourite artworks and its influence is clearly present in A World Away.

The aerial viewpoint used by Preston allied with the predominance of ochres and browns in her palette and the dynamic curve of the serpentine river pushing through the landscape (a landscape very familiar to Geier) are arguably transposed into Geier’s canvas. If Preston’s pictorial strategies are transposed they are done so through the filter of Geier’s developed and mature control of her aesthetic intellect. The inclusion of references to Margaret Preston has added impetus in her early championing of the aesthetic value of Aboriginal art and its contribution to Australian culture (6).

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Ties that bind (Plate 41) bears strong familial similarities to the previous work. Its spatial structure is perhaps less complicated and the more singular focus of the viewpoint somewhat different but the overall character is very alike. The undulating contours of the landscape and the rhythmical formal relationships inspired by these are carefully delineated in the black lines that simultaneously outline and highlight the topographical details of the landscape depicted.

Cultural infusions abound. As well as the quiet acknowledgement of Indigenous presence there is the nod to the august example of Margaret Preston, a double layer that absorbs Preston’s strong affection for Indigenous art. The admixture of spatial configurations asserts the existence of a non-hierarchical way of making pictures that subscribes to the notion of the coexistence of numerous ways of seeing and of a similarly coexisting interwoven fabric of cultural reference and quotation.

The works in Elements are about place and how that is configured through memory, sensations and culturally engendered approaches. They are also about making an artificial construct that is able to evoke all those in a single image. Geier’s landscape is at once externalised and internalised, subjective and objective, material and spiritual. For her the journeys (and there are many) and the movement through cultures provide impetus to her creativity. Her interests in notions of culture – the collisions and elisions of cultures and their visualisations – will continue to inform her work. Landscape in a physical sense is not a singular experience for her. Her experience is concurrently natural and cultural. Both are clothed in a complex amalgam that asserts the coexistence of different ways of seeing and reading those experiences. Physical movement in and through a space gives meaning to a place, and for Geier impels simultaneous intellectual activity. Her visual fusions of the reality of the Australian landscape with her deeply meditative aesthetic strike responsive chords in her viewers. Her ability to confront new possibilities in new ways has always been a characteristic of her art.

The pictorial results of these confrontations are thematically exciting and visually challenging.

Notes 1.

Sasha Grishin Australian Art. A History (2013) p.470

2. ibid 3. For an excellent discussion of Hogarth’s work in the context of eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory see Walter John Hipple Jr’s The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth‑Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 1957).

4. Quoted in Katherine Wilkinson’s catalogue essay for Elements. New Works by Helen Geier an exhibition held at the Catherine Asquith Galley in Melbourne in 2006.

5. ibid.

6. The best discussion of Margaret Preston and her art is Deborah Edwards’s essay in the catalogue for the 2005 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition Margaret Preston.

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Plate 30 Shoalhaven Archway, Archaic threads, 2000 acrylic, flywire on canvas sewn with thread 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: Canberra Museum and Gallery

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Plate 31 Analysis of Beauty: Rococo gold, 2000 oil, wax, mixed media on canvas 76.0 x 106.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Plate 32 Analysis of Beauty: Classical silver, 2000 oil, wax, mixed media on canvas 76.0 x 106.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 33 Pathway to the Orient, 2001 oil, wax on linen 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 34 Dissolving View II, 2002 oil, wax, acrylic on linen 150.0 x 210.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 35 Time and Again, 2002 collage, watercolour, acrylic on paper 75.0 x 120.0 cm Collection: Murray Art Museum, Albury

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Plate 36 Survey I, 2004 acrylic on canvas 75.0 x 105.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Plate 37 Survey II, 2004 acrylic on canvas 75.0 x 105.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 38 Perspective Views, 2004 joss paper, acrylic on linen 420.0 x 150.0 cm (diptych) Collection: The Artist

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Plate 39 A World Away, 2006 acrylic on canvas 41.0 x 50.0 x 8.0 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Plate 40 Ties that bond, 2006 acrylic on canvas 31.0 x 41.0 x 8.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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The 2010s The conditions and concerns in the Australian art world that were in play during the 2000s remain little altered through the years since 2010 to today (1). Helen Geier continues to be conspicuously productive and the last few years witness new explorations, investigations and expressions that result not only from the mining of her personal archive but also from cultural associations that continue to give her art an incisive edge. While printmaking may have been secondary to painting in her recent practice it was never forgotten and its persistent presence contributed to some of the artist’s most accomplished and polished works.

In 2010 she exhibited The Fold, a portfolio of six etchings with silk screen overlay based on images made from her journeys to Central and Northern Australia in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

The portfolio was shown at Catherine Asquith Gallery in Melbourne and Wilson Street Gallery in Sydney. The processes that contributed to the development and completion of the folio are exemplary of the artist’s finely-tuned working methods. While the starting‑point may be landscape terrains visited, viewed and memorised; it also embraces earlier topographic encounters and the minutiae that give each encounter individual remembered identity. The chance encounters of Geier’s 1990s graphic work are given new significance in The Fold. This does not in any way diminish earlier iterations. It speaks of altered significance while simultaneously acknowledging and celebrating that layered elisions reflective of real and new experiences when enmeshed with memories (actual, imagined and intellectualised) assert the complexities of visualisation that so concern the artist. Geier continues to adopt a process of programmed infiltration in this series, a process that reaffirms the continuing validity of past experience for present practice.

Lengthening Shadows (Plate 42) encapsulates within a single compelling image the notions of journey, place(s), memory and landscape. The horizontally layered images (six of them) sit beneath a neatly configured geometric and mathematical overlay: an open, linear structure that refers to what is seen, what lies beneath the surface, and what is imagined. The real landscape underneath these structures is the source for an imaginative escapade carefully circumscribed

by Geier’s trenchant intellectual rigour and aesthetic precision. The artist’s palette is decidedly objective. It imprints on each image in the portfolio a cool, cerebral distance that is a strategy to create an atmosphere conducive to meditative response to each of the six prints. While coolness in terms of philosophical interrogation may be present, that presence never denies direct and seductive aesthetic attraction. Viewers are reminded of the passages of time that insinuate themselves into one’s recollections of place. The six layered images present as temporal and experiential episodes of Geier’s journeys. Each informs the other and adds to the cumulative experience of the whole.

In From the Fold (Plate 43) the artist’s signature layering is articulated through an unravelling scroll, the latter’s three-dimensional volume simultaneously announced and flattened in mysteriously nuanced folds that exponentially increase as one moves from top to bottom.

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The horizontality of the sequentially increasing folds is played off against the insistent lateral pull imbued in each of the layers; a contrast that exudes a wonderfully apparent spatial tension that speaks of infinite space and intimate acquaintance with that space. Intimacy is further articulated through the (deliberately) random placement of carefully delineated leaves (a literal restating of figurative elements of earlier chance connections that speaks so eloquently of memory and its active and regular rehabilitation) that float in and out of the dynamically configured spatial folds. The Fold is a special body of work. It avers the rightness of the artist’s ongoing aesthetic impulses and beautifully encompasses an intellectual and aesthetic process that allows ‘controlled accidents’, schematic drawing, occasional text and changes in scale and perspective within a single frame (2).

In late 2011 Geier began a series of works exhibited at the Beaver Galleries in Canberra in 2012 under the title Meridian. The works displayed exemplify the artist’s characteristic aesthetic arsenal. This has been discussed at length throughout this book and its constant reassertion remains a major strength of Geier’s pictorial strategies. In Meridian one particular strategy is integral, namely exploration. For her exploration encompasses the macrocosm of the external world and the intimacy of the microcosm that is her immediate environment. It includes the continuum of her art and a reassessment of past practice to determine relevance (or otherwise) of present practice. Her explorations are often physical but these are layered with a complex of cultural, intellectual and aesthetic interjections. Her works from the late 1990s onwards result from ongoing meditations on culturally conditioned perception. They embrace individual collective cultural memory and consciousness, and allude to Geier’s experience of Asian culture, the land and landscape of Australia and in its broadest sense the cultural history of the Western world. They also speak of her incisive visual intellect informed by deep and wide-ranging reading of (art) history and of contemporary manifestations of a range of visual arts practices. Her absorption of history and contemporaneity across a variety of cultural expressions is inclusive, but hers is an inclusivity marked by a sharply critical and questioning approach. These qualities are evinced in her own practice not only through imagery and form, but in the conceptual and imaginative processes that precede creative expression.

The works in Meridian are richly allusive and continue the concerns referred to above but, as always, in new and highly inventive combinations and elisions. Moments (Plate 46), 2011–12, is a beautifully insinuative work into which Geier has embedded an intricate and subtle web of cultural layers. For her, the coexistence of different cultural entities is a given, and their conjunctions and confrontations are quietly celebrated. The rectangular format has overtones of Chinese scroll paintings. The intimatory but nevertheless visible traces of a Chinese landscape subvert normal notions of Western perspective. Conversely the simultaneous presence of both speaks of the distillation of cultural differences in our contemporary world.

The scroll format is underscored by the left- and right-hand edges of the painting. These are populated with a series of lozenges depicting trees sitting in highly activated landscapes delineated by sets of parallel horizontal marks. While a sense of movement is instilled, this

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is neatly contained by the serrated blue triangles abutting the central rectangle. Movement is a device that infiltrates all of Geier’s work and is an (unstated) formal equivalent of the cyclical character of the natural world.

The central area is covered in a grid of patterned joss paper. The presence of the latter is not hidden but instead exquisitely subsumed into the visual persona of the total work. This is again the artist asserting the validity of coeval cultural entities through painterly means. The grid is broken by a number of postcard-like images of trees dispersed in seemingly random fashion across the pictorial surface. I say seemingly because there is an order to their placement that follows the ambling organic climb of the barely discernible Chinese landscape. The bright palette of the postcards moves the eye through the tonal modulations of this inventive and complexly beautiful work.

Meridian, 2012 (Plate 46) is a visual tour de force. It is a dense, active and lavishly patterned work extolling the richness of the natural wold and the concomitant power of the creative imagination. The picture is constructed with a series of perspectivally recessive rectangles that visually and spatially interact with one another and in these interactions imbue the work with an eloquently articulated spatial configuration. The overwhelming presence of the sinuous branches of the trees produces an intricate web across and through the pictorial surface. The ostensible tangle of foliage/branches is in fact a realistic interpretation of the condition of trees during winter in the artist’s expansive garden. The trees are aligned to reinforce the single-point perspective that is interrogatively signature in much of the artist’s work. The rectangle at the front of the picture plane contains a row of barely visible triangular forms, a device ubiquitous in the artist’s oeuvre over many years. Each time they appear the specificity of use and rightness of placement stresses Geier’s innate understanding of the ability of the old to inform the new in exciting and fresh ways. Vivid splashes of red and white dart across the foreground surface generating a flickering kinetic energy that is repeated in the top panel among the intertwined leafless branches. Formally the combination of rectangles and the frenetic concatenation of the branches are played off against the central triangular configuration formed by the recessional rows of trees. The brilliance of the patterned white ground and its enclosure within the triangle give prominence to the depiction of the natural order through the applied aesthetic device of Western single-point perspective.

Momentum (Plate 49) from 2012 is a delightful pictorial vignette. Geier capitalises on the patterns and forms of nature and elements of Western aesthetic theory so elegantly portrayed in Meridian. The allées of trees is again present, here sprouting from a richly interwoven ground and framed by darkly expressive gestural blocks whose ethereal character adds notions of the ongoing flux that is endemic in nature,. The organicism of the natural world is superimposed by the geometries of the motif that floats across the mid-ground. The elision of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the imagination and the intellect, nature and culture, are arrestingly conveyed in this brooding and captivating work. Geier’s works from this series clearly assert the complex sophistication of the manner in which she continues to visualise her world. Her meditative vision constantly explores and uncovers fresh ways to challenge herself and her viewers (3).

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In 2014 Geier exhibited a set of twenty works on paper entitled Merging Visions in Shanghai at the Yiyouzhai Art Museum. The exhibition exemplifies the artist’s internationalism and actualisation of her deep attraction and analysis of cultural others. A reading of her curriculum vitae reveals that over the years she has showcased her art in Vienna, Paris, Belgrade, London, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing and Auckland. She and her work are inveterate travellers. The exhibition is both an aesthetic highlight and a consolidation of pictorial concerns pursued by Geier since the late 1990s. These incorporate her experiences of Asian culture, the land and landscape of Australia and Western cultural history embracing its broad range but in particular visual arts, literature, music and philosophy. Her absorption and understanding of the historical past and of present contemporaneity across a plethora of cultural expressions is inclusive and always informed by a sharply critical and interrogative intellectual stance.

The works in Merging Visions (a title that underscores aspects of Geier’s cross-cultural conceptual and philosophical approach) were made in her studio outside Braidwood on the edges of the New South Wales Southern Highlands. The property is idyllic and provides an ideal place for contemplation and consequent creative manufacture. I use manufacture deliberately. Its etymological root lies in the Latin word for hand, and is particularly relevant for Geier’s mode of making the Shanghai works. A nasty accident in late 2013 precluded the artist’s using her normal modes of painting and she had to adapt to a (temporary) different means of achieving her painterly ends. The means required substantially more time than normally required. This temporal imposition is marked by the inclusion of not only the title of each work on the paper but also the date of its making, a documentary inclusion that spoke of the physical effort demanded of the artist. The results are a visually rich and conceptually rewarding body of work. While the Australian landscape is clearly referenced it is a landscape overlaid and interspersed with allusive connotations to the artist’s concerns as adumbrated throughout the discussions in this book. The often intimatory but nevertheless visible presence of traces of Chinese ways of depicting landscape may subvert normal notions of Western perspective. However the insistent presence of both in Geier’s idiosyncratically personal pictorial language speaks of the distillation and elision of cultural differences in the world of contemporary visual art. Abstract elements are also combined with aspects of the natural world, thus delineating the artist’s play with philosophical and psychological opposites. The Apollonian and the Dionysian nature and culture are inferred, but again contained within a whole replete with the assertion of the validity of coeval cultural entities.

Geier’s most recent works shown at Canberra’s Beaver Galleries in 2016 under the title Forecasts see her pictorial energies directed into further explorations of the landscape allied with the resurgence of various motifs that have been used by the artist as visual pointers to memory, place and imagination. Hilltop Town, 2016 (Plate 57) is one of a number of small mixed media works on paper (50.0 x 55.0 cm) that beautifully illustrate Geier’s incredibly fertile creative vision. The stock of aesthetic motifs and devices is obviously always available and the artist’s astute selections from this make for a deliciously allusive pictorial statement. The overt references to earlier work aligned with the continuing appropriateness of their inclusion in this

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piece exhort the sustaining depth of meaning and suggestion that Geier is able to invest in her chosen details. Space in this work is a clever combination of density and openness. The overall composition is divided loosely into layered horizontal bands. Each layer is pictorially autonomous and presented variously as tonally dark and light. These contrasts imbue a liveliness and light sense of movement throughout the work that directs the viewer through the work. The upper area holds a pale ochre sky dominated by a very geometric hilltop town whose linear construction is balanced by the serried organicism of a line of trees. Within the contours of the hill Geier amasses sets of rectangular forms that speak of the topographies of the landscape. As the viewer proceeds down the picture towards the front of the picture plane the hill continues, expanding to embrace more of the pictorial space and to include further topographical elements. The natural identity of the landscape is never explicitly configured by the artist but rather suggested. It is vehemently an imaginative construction with which we are presented but the totality of the elements makes the suggestion of reality a strong one.

While movement is decidedly a major part of Geier’s aesthetic artillery it is one of a number of strategies that contributes to the power of this work. The centralising of the hill reinforced by the linearity of its contours, its open structure and the upward-pointing apex is beautifully counterbalanced by flowing bands of black and dense areas of red ochre. The floating leaves dispersed in both linear and random sequence across the surface adds a sense of atmospheric lightness as well as shifting the eye through this uniquely pictured imaginative fusion of memory, place and artifice.

Another of the small mixed media works – Red Tears (Plate 58), 2016 – offers a totally different presentation than the previous work. It is essentially an image dominated by a dark, black palette. This is broken by areas of white and vivid insertions of red disporting themselves across the paper. The horizontally layered spatial schema is enlivened by batches of horizontal lines that quietly allude to natural forms or elements of the landscape. The layers have a lateral flow that subtly indicates the cyclical character of the natural world. The strong directional thrusts of black (variously solid or massed sets of linear marks) stand in contrast to the floating layer of red leaves. The latter is almost a veil over the black surface and the lightness of their appearance adds to the suggestion of something hovering over that surface. Geier’s characteristic filtering is here personified in the dancing red splashes whose floating presence is a powerful kinetic contrast to the solidity of the black ground. Landscape references are clear. Their black personae are dramatic and compelling. Geier is picturing here aspects of the darker side of the natural world. While Red Tears may hold intimations of menace or possibilities of future threat it is still a powerful and gripping image revelatory of the depth and range of the artist’s creative imagination and aesthetic intelligence.

Forecasts (Plate 60) also from 2016 is an extraordinary visual statement. It is panoramic in its physical scale (it measures 94.0 x 450.0 cm); and magnificent in the breadth of its imaginative vision. There is an almost apocalyptic beauty in the artist’s created landscape that speaks of the sublime productions of especially nineteenth-century English Romanticism. But Geier’s

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landscape is vehemently Australian. It might be a product of the artist’s imagination but it is predicated on her experiences of a number of Australian topographies ranging across a number of places that might also embrace topographies produced through the creative endeavours of other artists. The expansive yet wild and unpeopled vista incorporates a seductive embrace that captures both imagination and intellect. The vista is broken by the insertion of two vertical panels whose earth tones speak of other topographies and whose presence provides visual stops, places for contemplation and renewal. Formally their insistent verticality and geometric strictness contrasts sharply with the enthralling mysteries of the rest of the picture. Their marked tonal difference contributes to the pervasive interrogative tone that characterises Forecasts.

My journey through Helen Geier’s art has traversed more than forty years. I am never disappointed when confronted with the products of her creative imagination. She remains an artist whose undeviating exploration of herself and her world continues to provide images of intellectual rigour, formal adventure and aesthetic beauty. The exploration of the self for her fully embraces her own art history as well as placing herself within those other art histories and cultural expressions that hold meaning for her. Her assertively interrogative approach imbues an incisive edge to her work that combined with her highly tuned understanding and grasp of the rightness of her aesthetic language results in an art that continues to be an important ingredient in Australia’s contemporary visual culture.

When asked by the author why she makes art Geier responded: To celebrate beauty. And to affect other people by the things I’ve created…I’m so pleased when I’ve made something. It wouldn’t exist otherwise…My work gives me a pathway to my inner, intuitive self, and fully occupies me…Paintings are worlds in themselves (4).

The pictures in this book bear testament to the validity of the artist’s words and her uncompromising commitment to her art.

Notes 1.

Sasha Grishin’s Australian Art: A History (2013) and Patrick McCaughey’s Strange Country.

Why Australian Painting Matters (2014) remain the most useful texts dealing with the immediate past of Australian art.

2.

Laura Murray Cree “The Fold: A folio of six photo-etchings” in The Fold (2010).

3.

The discussions of the works from the Meridian series are taken from my Helen Geier. Meridian (Canberra, 2012).

4.

Artist’s responses to questions set by the author 22 July 2015.

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Plate 41 Lengthening Shadows, 2010 colour etching with silkscreen overlay 79.0 x 55.0 cm Private Collection, Sydney

Plate 42 From the Fold, 2010 colour etching with silkscreen overlay 70.0 x 55.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 43 Timeless, 2011–12 acrylic on canvas 150.0 x 105.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 44 Moments, 2011–12 joss paper, collage and acrylic on canvas 210.0 x 150.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 45 Meridian, 2012 acrylic on canvas 150.0 x 250.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 46 Midway, 2012 acrylic on canvas 150.0 x 90.0 cm Collection: The Artist

118

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Plate 47 Tempo, 2012 mixed media, acrylic on canvas 150.0 x 250.0 cm Collection: The Artist

120

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Plate 48 Momentum, 2012 ink, watercolour, gouache on watercolour paper 56.0 x 76.0 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Plate 49 Steps, 2013 acrylic, ink on paper 30.0 x 30.0 cm Private Collection, Sydney

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Plate 50 Magnolia Tree, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 76.0 x 56.0 cm Private Collection, Shanghai

Plate 51 Panelled Space, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 76.0 x 56.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Plate 52 Sculpture, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 76.0 x 56.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 53 Banksia, 2014

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Plate 55

watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 56.0 x 76.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Shanghai, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 56.0 x 76.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Plate 54

Plate 56

Strange Light, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 56.0 x 76.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Braidwood Landscape, 2014 watercolour, gouache, ink on paper 56.0 x 76.0 cm Private Collection, Braidwood N.S.W

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Plate 57

Plate 58

Hilltop Town, 2016 watercolour, gouache, ink on double Arches watercolour paper 50.0 x 55.0 cm Collection: The Artist

Red Tears, 2016 watercolour, gouache, ink on double Arches watercolour paper 59.0 x 57.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 59 Coming Storm II, 2016 watercolour, gouache, ink on double Arches watercolour paper 57.0 x 50.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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Plate 60 Forecasts, 2016 acrylic, watercolour on canvas 94.0 x 450.0 cm Collection: The Artist

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CV Helen Geier 50 Wallace Street Braidwood NSW 2622 Australia

1974

Bonython Gallery, Sydney

1976

Rex Irwin Gallery, Sydney

1977

Huntly Gallery, Canberra

1978

Powell Street, Melbourne

1980

Axiom Gallery, Melbourne

Biography

1981

Huntly Gallery, Canberra

Born

1982

Axiom Gallery, Melbourne

1984

Solander Gallery, Canberra

1985

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

1985

1972–73 Certificate of Post Graduate Studies, St Martin’s School of Art, London.

Michael Milburn Gallery, Brisbane

1986

Coventry Gallery, Sydney

1987

Anima Gallery, Adelaide

1996-98 Master of Arts (Fine Art) by Research, RMIT, Melbourne.

1988

10 Year Survey, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Teaching

1990

Robert Steele Gallery, Adelaide

1968–69 Kingsgrove High School, Sydney.

1991

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

1970–71 Pretoria Boys’ School, London.

1992

Ph no: 612 48422526 Fax no: 612 48422306 Email: helenmgeier@gmail.com

1946, Sydney, Australia.

1964–68 Diploma of Art (Education), National Art School, Sydney.

1969

1971–72

Teacher’s Certificate, Alexander Mackie Teachers College, Sydney.

Adult Education classes, London.

1972–73 Brooking School of Ballet, London.

1974–80 Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne.

1979

Gloucestershire School of Art & Design, UK.

1981–94 Canberra Institute of the Arts, ANU, Senior Lecturer, Foundation (87–91).

136

Solo exhibitions

Helen aged 6 with mother, on their regular visit to N.S.W Art Gallery.

1995

Experiments & Games of Chance, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

1996

Space & Structure, Survey Exhibition, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

Perspective & Chance Connections, The Substation Gallery, Singapore

1997

1992

The Crawford Gallery, Sydney

Two Worlds, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

1997

1993

Perspectives, Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra

Perspective & Chance Connections, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria

1994

Perspective... The Very Soul of Painting, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

1997

Helen Geier - Paintings & Works on Paper, Bega Valley Regional Art Gallery, NSW

1994

Parallel Perceptions, William Heinemann book launch with Rhyll McMaster, Fire Station Gallery, Sydney

1998

Expanded Field, Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland, NZ

1998

Vital Line, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

1999

Different Fields of Vision, 30 Year Survey of Graphic Works, Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA, Singapore

2008

Meander II: A Reflective Path, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

2000

Different Fields of Vision, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India

2008

Strange Plants, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2009

Meander II: A Reflective Path, Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery

2010

Currents of Connection and Change, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

2010

The Fold, Wilson Street Gallery, Sydney

2012

Meridian, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2013

Tree of Life, Langford 120, Melbourne

Matt and Reg Wigg in Sydney during leave.

2013

Tempo, Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney

2002

2014

Shadow Screens, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Reinventing the Screen, The Church Gallery, Perth, WA

2002

Reinventing the Screen 2, Access Gallery, Curtin University, Perth, WA

Merging Visions, Yiyouzhai Art Museum, Shanghai, China

2015

Tree of Life, Langford 120, Melbourne

2001

Thought Patterns, Mary Place Gallery, ng Art, Sydney

2005

Distinguishing Features, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2016

Coming Storm, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2001

Different Fields of Vision, Goulburn Regional Gallery

2005

Matter and Memory, Michael Nagy Fine Art, Sydney

2001

Helen Geier – Paintings, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2006

Elements, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

1972

St Martin’s School of Art, London

2001

Dissolving View, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

2006

1973

St Martin’s Post‑Graduate Exhibition, Staff & Students, Sussex University, UK

2002

‘Different Fields of Vision,’ Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

Prime Numbers, Print Portfolio, launched by Peter Haynes, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

1974

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney

1975

Australian Graphics, Huntly Gallery, Canberra

1975

Twelve Lithographers, National Gallery of Victoria

2000

2000

2001

2001

2001

2002

Different Fields of Vision, Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai (Madras), India Different Fields of Vision, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta, India Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier, 30 Year Survey of Paintings and Works on Paper, Canberra Museum & Gallery, ACT Different Fields of Vision, Karl Strobl Gallery, Vienna, Austria

Different Fields of Vision, Albury Regional Art Gallery

2007 Meander, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne 2008

Meander II: A Reflective Path, Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs, NT

Group exhibitions

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1975

Prahran Painters, University Art Gallery, Uni. of Melbourne

1983

Modern Exhibition, Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Victoria

1976

Recent Work, Huntly Gallery, Canberra

1984

Staff Exhibition, Canberra School of Art, ACT

Print Council Travelling Exhibition, Melbourne

1986

1976 1976

Print Council of Australia, Western Pacific Print Biennale

Bathurst Purchase Prize Exhibition, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

1993

Muswellbrook Prize Exhibition, NSW

1993

Alice Springs Art Prize Exhibition, NT

1986

Time & Place, Canberra School of Art, ACT

1993

City of Richmond Acquisitive Prize, Melbourne

1986

Faber-Castell Prize for Drawing Exhibition, Rex Irwin Gallery, Sydney

1993

Ratio (with Judy Holding & Wendy Teakel), Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria

1993

Heinemann’s Australian Poetry Cover Exhibition, Writers’ Centre, Sydney

1976

Tokyo Print Exhibition (Travelling)

1977

Aspects of Love, Realities Galleries, Melbourne

1987

Five Melbourne Artists, Coventry Gallery, Sydney

Age of Collage, Perspecta, Sydney

1988

New Generation, Australian National Gallery

1993

Staff Exhibition, Canberra School of Art, ACT

Art Fair, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

1993

ANU Collection, Drill Hall Gallery, ACT

1994

Ratio (with Judy Holding & Wendy Teakel), Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, NSW

1994

Salon des Refusés, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

1994

Kedumba Drawing Prize, Leura, NSW

1994

Obsession. Chandler Coventry Drawing Collection, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW

1994

Art Fair, Melbourne

1994

Point & Marge à Paris, 10 Années’, Fiap Jean Monnet, Paris, France

1995

Australia Felix, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria

1995

Ratio (with Judy Holding & Wendy Teakel), Australian Embassy, Paris, France

1978 1980 1981

Works on Paper, Art Gallery of South Australia John McCaughey Memorial Prize, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

1988 1990

Art Fair, Melbourne

1991

Muswellbrook Art Prize Exhibition, Muswellbrook, NSW Between the Covers, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

1981

Paintings on Paper, Coventry Gallery, Sydney

1982

Ansett Works on Paper Exhibition, Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria

1992

Canberra School of Art Staff Exhibition, Canberra School of Art Gallery

1992

1982

Reg Wigg during war with ground crew, Casino air field.

138

The Braidwood Show, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

1993

Artists from Canberra and District in the Parliament House Art Collection, Parliament House, Canberra

1992

Mosman Art Prize, Sydney

1992

Critics’ Choice, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney

1992

Drawing ‘92, Canberra School of Art, ACT

1992

The Blake Prize Touring Exhibition

1992

CD Show, Ben Grady Gallery, ACT

1993

The Dobell Prize Exhibition, Art Gallery of NSW

1995

Bathurst Purchase Prize, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW

1998

National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria

1995

‘Point & Marge à Paris, 10 Années’, Galerie Patrice Rostain, Paris, France

1998

1995

Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of NSW

Decade of Contemporary Australian Printmaking, Metropolitan Museum of Seoul, South Korea

1999

1995

International Works on Paper Fair, Mitchell Galleries, State Library, NSW

Continuing the Vision, touring exhibition (Bundanon Residency), Swan Hill & Shepparton Regional Galleries, Victoria & Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery, NSW

1995

Ironsides, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale Art Auction, The Power House Museum, NSW

Tristan aged 6 and Pascal aged 3½ off to school & pre school in Braidwood 2002

Karol-Bagh to Tascott.

A collaborative exhibition by Kanchan Chander and Helen Geier, Art Folio, Chandigarh, India

2002

Karol-Bagh to Tascott.

A collaborative exhibition by Kanchan Chander and Helen Geier, Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, India

1999

Picture Disc Exhibition, Illawarra TAFE, Goulburn

1999

Looking at the Landscape, Nolan Gallery, ACT

1999

The Prime Painting Prize, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, NSW

We Are Australian, George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne (touring nationally 1999–2001)

1999

30th Alice Prize, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT

2002

1996

Art Gallery Ballarat, Victoria

2000

1996

Nolan Gallery, ACT

2003

1996

Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Qld

Swan Hill National Print & Drawing Acquisitive Awards, Swan Hill Regional Gallery, Victoria

Borderless Terrain, The Habitat Centre Gallery, New Delhi, India Essential Space,( with Brenda Ridgewell), Beaver Galleries, Canberra

2003

Catalyst: Beach Scene by Roy de Maistre’, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

2003

Art Show, SCEGGS, Sydney

2003

Recent Acquisitions, Canberra Museum & Gallery

2003

The artist’s studio, Cairns Regional Art Gallery

2003

Canberra Art Prize, Italo‑Australian Club, Canberra

2003

An Affair with the Arts, CAPO 1983–2003, National Museum of Australia, Canberra

1995

Fremantle Print Award, WA

1995

12th Biennial Spring Festival of Drawing, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria

1995

1996

Kedumba Drawing Prize, Leura, NSW

1997

13th Biennial Spring Festival of Drawing, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

1997

1997

1998

Women’s Work in the Parliament House Collection, Recent Acquisitions, Parliament House, Canberra Canberra Contemporary Art Fair, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra 5th Biennale of Graphic Art, Belgrade, Rumania

2000

Print Collection Exhibition, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

2001

Karol-Bagh to Tascott.

A collaborative exhibition

by Kanchan Chander and Helen Geier, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, ACT

2001 Summer, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney 2002

Karol-Bagh to Tascott.

A collaborative exhibition by Kanchan Chander and Helen Geier, The Queen’s Gallery, The British Council, New Delhi, India

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2003 Jillamatong, BRAG 2003

The Postcard Show, Cairns Regional Art Gallery

2003

Hidden treasures’, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW

2004

Precious Platters, Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne

2004

The CMAG Collection Studio One Prints, Canberra Museum & Gallery

2004

Canberra Art Prize, Italo‑Australian Club, Canberra

2004

Blood Ties. Works by Helen Geier & Kanchan Chander, Fremantle Arts Centre, WA

2004

The White Show, Church Gallery, WA

2005

2005 Summer School Tutors, The Quay Gallery, UCOL, Wanganui, NZ

140

2006

2006

National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery Country Energy Landscape Painting Prize, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

2006

Country Energy Landscape Painting Prize, The Gunnery – Art Space, Woolloomooloo, Sydney

2007

Blood Ties. Works by Helen Geier & Kanchan Chander, Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery

Contemporaries and Collectables, Michael Nagy Fine Art Gallery, Sydney

2005

Weereewa, A Festival of Lake George,

2007

Festivité 2007, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

2005

Canberra Art Prize, Italo‑Australian Club, Canberra

2008

Works on Paper. Selected Artists, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

ANL Maritime Art Prize Collectors Exhibition, The Mission to Seafarers, Melbourne

2008

Melbourne Art Fair, Beaver Galleries, Melbourne

2008

The First Decade, Canberra Museum & Gallery

2008

Crossfire. Print & Glass, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

2008

Capital Arts Patron Organisation Auction & Exhibition, National Archives of Australia, Canberra

2005

Blood Ties. Works by Helen Geier & Kanchan Chander, Canberra Museum & Gallery

2005

Stock Show 2005, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

2005

Prints in Place, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW

International Art Fair, Exhibition Building, Melbourne

2011

Viewpoints – Approach to Landscape, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

2012

Contemporary Australian Drawing 2: Drawing as notation, text and discovery, University of the Arts, London, and R.M.I.T. University, Melbourne

2012

From Paper, Beijing Art Space, Beijing, China

2013

Fourteen Trajectories, Langford 120, Melbourne

2013

From scrolls to ‘zines, Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney

2013

90’s Hits, Yarra City Council Art & Heritage Collection, Melbourne

2014

Reading the Space: Contemporary Australian Drawing # 4, Langford 120, Melbourne

2015

Draw the line, Spot 81, Sydney

2015

Spot 81 Contemporary, Spot 81, Sydney

2015

Small works 2015, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

Patrick Geier, 1970

2005

2005

2010

Print editions 1994

Experiments & Games of Chance, Ed 10, Artist Book, Helen Geier etching, Rhyll McMaster poems, Master Printer Basil Hall, Studio One, Raft Press ACT

1994

1997

1998

2008

2010

Perspectives & Chance Connections, Ed 10, Suite of ten folded, sewn, photo etching/silkscreen prints, Master Printer Basil Hall, Studio One, ACT Two Worlds, Editions I & II, Ed 10, hand-tinted and stamped lithographs, Master Printer Martin King, Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne Expanded Field, Ed 15, Folio of eight etchings, Preface poem Rhyll McMaster, Master Printer Dianne Fogwell, Artist‑in-Residence, Canberra School of Art Book & Editioning Workshop, ANU Prime Numbers, Ed 20, Folio set of 11 multi-media Prints, Master Printer Dianne Fogwell, Artist‑in-Residence Canberra School of Art Book & Editioning Workshop, ANU The Fold, Ed 10, Folio of six etchings from Central Australian images, printed Darwin Basil Hall Editions

1995

Cultural Council of the ACT Govt, Joint Grant with Judy Holding & Wendy Teakel

National Gallery of Victoria

1995

Art Gallery Ballarat, Victoria

1996

Prime Painting Prize, Highly Commended Newcastle Regional Art Gallery Cultural Council of the ACT Government, Artist’s Project Grant

1997

The Canberra Times Artist of the Year

1997

Sydney Myer Foundation, Perspective & Chance Connections, installation workshop grant, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Victoria

1999

1999 1999

Australia Day Inaugural Cultural Achievement Award, Tallaganda Shire, NSW Australia-India Council, Cultural Relations Grant Cultural Council of the ACT Government, Artist’s Project Grant

2002

Australian High Commission, New Delhi, Cultural Affairs funding

1982

National Art Award, Canberra Times, ACT

2002

Creative Arts Fellowship, artsACT

1986

Matarra Festival of Newcastle, Peter Sparks Memorial Prize, NSW

2002

Fleming Muntz Albury Art Prize

1993 1993

Capital Arts Patron Organisation Fellowship Canberra Critics’ Circle Award City of Richmond Acquisitive Prize, Melbourne

National Gallery of Australia

1995 Nomination The Canberra Times Artist of the Year

Awards & grants

1993

Collections

Latrobe Regional Gallery, Victoria

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University Collection, Victoria Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, NSW Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, NSW Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW Canberra Museum and Gallery Artbank New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale, NSW University of Canberra St Edmund’s College Art Collection, ACT Parliament House Art Collection, ACT Holmes-à-Court Art Collection Bank of Melbourne National Library of Australia Australian National University Art Collection Griffith University Art Collection, Brisbane Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria Macquarie Group Collection

2003

Art Spectrum Mixed Media Prize, Canberra Art Prize

Yarra City Council Art & Heritage Collection, Richmond, Victoria

2006

Country Energy Landscape Painting Prize finalist

Clark Hummerston Collection, Singapore LaSalle College of the Arts Collection, Singapore Hugh Young Collection, Singapore

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Roger Kemp & Helen, Canberra 1988

1990

Arthur McIntyre, Australian Contemporary Drawing and its Origins’, Craftsman House, Sydney

1992

Julie Ewington, Drawing 92, Canberra School of Art, ANU

1992

Peter Haynes Artists from Canberra and District in the Parliament House Art Collection, Parliament House, Canberra

1992

Jennifer Lamb, Space & Structure, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

1992

Alan McCulloch, revised Susan McCulloch, The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, Allen & Unwin

The Norman Mitchell Collection, USA The British Council Collection, India Australian High Commission, New Delhi, India New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale, NSW Curtin University Art Collection, Perth, WA Yiyouzhai Art Museum, Shanghai, China

Peter Haynes “Helen Geier”, Canberra School of Art Staff Exhibition

1985

Heather Kennedy, ‘Artist Taught in a Hard School’, The Age

1986

1986

Rhyll McMaster, ‘Helen Geier’, Art-Network, Winter/ Spring issue David Dolan, Time & Space

1988 Peter Haynes “Helen Geier. Ten Years Apart”, Canberra Contemporary Art Space 1989

142

Peter Haynes, ‘Helen Geier’, Art & Australia, Spring Issue

1997

Louise Dauth, Women’s Work in the Parliament House Art Collection. Recent Acquisitions, Parliament House, Canberra,

1997

Sasha Grishin, ‘Outstanding Artist to be Named’, The Canberra Times, 11/10/97

1997

Helen Musa, ‘Geier Hails Diverse and Growing ACT Scene’, The Canberra Times, 14/10/97

1997

Peter Haynes, Exhibition commentary, Art & Australia vol 35, no 2

1993

Peter Haynes, ‘Capital Art’, Art & Australia, Spring Issue

1998

‘Studio Expands its Field’, ANU Reporter, 17/06/98

1993

Peter Haynes, Ratio exhibition catalogue

1998

1993

Robert Macklin, ‘$28 000 in Fellowships to Four ACT Artists’, The Canberra Times

Ruth Johnstone A Decade of Contemporary Australian Printmaking. Thirty Years Of Korean Contemporary Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Seoul, South Korea

1993

Rhyll McMaster, Perspectives exhibition catalogue

1998

1994

David Dolan, Perspective - the very soul of painting exhibition catalogue

Sasha Grishin, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s – Artist Printmakers, Craftsman House, Sydney

1999

Canberra Arts Anthology 1999’, National Library of Australia

1999

Sasha Grishin, Helen Geier.

Different Fields of Vision, Braidwood

1999

Peter Haynes, Looking at the Landscape, Nolan Gallery, Canberra

2000

Sasha Grishin, ‘Helen Geier – Expanded Field’, Imprint Autumn 2000 vol 35 no 1

Selected publications & articles 1982

(discussion) Chance Connections – Cultural Space and Perspective

1995

Helen Musa, ‘Looking for Contrast in Sense and Sensibility’, Arts Feature article, The Canberra Times

1995

Sasha Grishin, ‘Artist of the Year 1995’, Nominations’ The Canberra Times

1995

Art & Australia, Winter issue

1996

Anthony Milner (intro.); Peter Haynes (essay); Helen Geier & Binghui Huangfu

2000

Peter Haynes, ‘Museum with a Mission’, Muse, No.199, Canberra

2000

Peter Haynes, Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier, Canberra Museum & Gallery, Cultural Facilities Corporation, Canberra

2000

2000

2001

“Alice. It’s so Inspiring”, Centralian Advocate, 26/6/07

Sasha Grishin, ‘Australian Contemporary Printmaking Scene’, Grapheion

2008

Crossfire Print & Glass, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

Sasha Grishin, Australian Identities in Printmaking. The Australian Print Collection of Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

2008

Sasha Grishin, “Chance and Other Games”, Art and Australia, Summer Issue Leigh Summers, “Helen Geier. A Discussion”, Art Insight, No. 56, Dec issue

2002

Alka Pande, ‘Collaborative Works of Kanchan Chander & Helen Geier’, Imprint, March issue

2002

2003

2003 2004

Peter Haynes, Blood Ties.

Works by Helen Geier & Kanchan Chander, Canberra Museum & Gallery, Cultural Facilities Corporation, Canberra

2007

2001

2002

2005

Alka Pande & Helen Geier, Borderless Terrain, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi Lyn DiCiero, “Reinventing the Image’, The Artist’s Chronicle, Issue No. 87, November.

2009

2010 2011

Peter Haynes Helen Geier.

A Context, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs; Kieren Sanderson, Meander II, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs; Kate Podger, A Reflective Path, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs Janet McKenzie “Artists in the Bush: Land Issues in the Art of G.W.Bot, Wendy Stavrianos and Helen Geier”, Studio International, June 2009 Laura Murray Cree, The Fold, Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney Laura Murray Cree, Viewpoints – Approach to Landscape, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne

Ron McBurnie, The artist’s studio, Cairns Regional Art Gallery Andrew Nicholls, ”Art Angels”, Imprint, Winter Mark Van Veen, The CMAG Collection Studio One Prints, Canberra Museum & Gallery, Cultural Facilities Corporation, Canberra

2011

Janet McKenzie, Contemporary Australian Drawing Vol 1, Metasenta/ Macmillan Australia, Melbourne

2012

Peter Haynes, Helen Geier: Meridian, Beaver Galleries, Canberra

Selected reviews 1974

John Williams, ‘Images in Human Landscape, Bonython Gallery, Sydney’, The Australian, May

1975

Geoffrey de Groen, ‘Good Selection of Prints, Australian Graphics at Huntly Gallery’, The Canberra Times, Sept

1976

Nancy Borlase, ‘At the Rex Irwin Gallery, Botanical Garden’s Gates & Gardens’, The Sydney Morning Herald, December

1976

Geoffrey de Groen, ‘Good Mixture of Prints’, The Canberra Times, December

1980

Jeffrey Makin, ‘Geier Bursts into New Style’, The Sun, September

1980

Robert Rooney, ‘Helen Geier Enters the 80s with Tough Images’, The Age Sept

1980

Memory Holloway, ‘Titles Hint at Erotic Passion’, The Australian Sept

1981

Sasha Grishin,’Colour is the Crucial Element’, The Canberra Times June

1982

Memory Holloway, ‘Helen Geier Has Made Some Vigorous Pictures in the Past ...’, The Australian October

Helen & Jeremy’s wedding with Nona Field HELEN GEIER

143

1994

1994

1994

Sasha Grishin, ‘Colour Handling More Sophisticated’, The Canberra Times, October

1985

Gary Catalano, ‘Classical Antiquity is Strong in the Antipodes’, The Age May

1985

Phyllis Woodcock, ‘Geier Here with Past Echoes’, Brisbane Courier Mail, September

1986

John McDonald, The Sydney Morning Herald April

1986

Jill Stowell, ‘Pastel Shows Great Versatility and Mattara Art Winners Announced’, Newcastle Herald, June

Marie Sierra-Hughes, ‘Fresh Perspective’, The Sun-Herald November

2000

Lakshmi Venkatraman, ‘Exploring Various Texture’, The Hindu, 31/3/00

2000

‘A Holistic Vision’, Indian Express, 01/4/00

2000

Farah Choudhary, ‘Designs from Down Under’, Indian Age, 28/5/00

2001

M. H. McGowran, ‘Interpreting Space’, Austria oday, 10–16/4/01

2001

Sasha Grishin, ‘Creative Affinity Unites Artists’, The Canberra Times, 29/5/01

Peter Haynes, ‘In Top Geier’, Artnotes ACT, Art Monthly March

1995

Sasha Grishin, ‘Provocative and Rich in Beauty’, The Canberra Times March

1996

Peter Haynes, ‘Canberra Art – The Prime Painting Prize’

2001

1997

Sasha Grishin, ‘Obsessions - the Coventry Collection at The Drill Hall, ANU’, The Canberra Times Feb

Kanchan Chander, ‘Helen Geier, India’, Art Asia Pacific, Art & Language, Issue 29

2001

Robert Nelson, ‘A Promise of Sublimity in this Abstract Work’, The Age, 23/6/01

2001

Victoria Hynes, ‘Patterns of the Mind’, Sydney Morning Herald, 04/7/01

2002

Gayatri Sinha, ‘Kanchan Chander and the Australian graphic artist, Helen Geier‘,The Hindu, New Delhi, 11/1/02

1998

Sasha Grishin, ‘Inspiring Journey of Exploration’, The Canberra Times, 11/10/98

1998

T S McNamara, ‘Australian Artist Helen Geier at Oedipus Rex Gallery, Weekend Herald, Auckland NZ, 11/12/98

1988

Sonia Barron, ‘Vexing Images Reflection of Life’s Puzzles’, The Canberra Times September

1999

Kate Civil, ‘Helen Geier: Inside Space and Structure, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery’, Muse September

Siane Jay, ‘This Artist Has a Thing for Space and Timelessness’, The Straits Times, 26/8/99

1999

Sasha Grishin, ‘Geier’s Singapore Vision’, The Canberra Times, 03/9/99

1999

Ian Findlay-Brown, ‘Helen Geier at the Earl Lu Gallery’, Asian Art News Sept/Oct

Sonia Barron, ‘Showing Great Power and Confidence’, The Canberra Times May

Menaka Jayasankar, ‘Layered Vision’, Artbeat 5, The Indian Express February

1995

Lyn Collins, Adelaide Advertiser July

1993

2000

John Neylon, ‘Taking Stock’, The Adelaide Advertiser December

1987

1992

144

Robert Rooney, ‘Helen Geier’s Recent Work’, The Australian November

2000 ‘Graffiti’, Asian Age, 2/2/00

1994 Helen in new studio 1995 1984

Sonia Barron, ‘Personal and Philosophical Views’, The CanberraTimes

Helen in old studio 1988

2002

‘Karol Bagh to Tascott’, Outlook, New Delhi, 21/1/02

2002

Hoihnu Hauzel, ‘The Canvas Route From Karol Bagh to Tascott’, Hindustan Times New Delhi, 19/1/02

2005

Lyn Mills, ‘Desert Landscapes on Show’, Canberra Times, 03/4/05

2005

Sonia Barron, ‘Dynamic Works of Distinction’, The Canberra Times, 13/4/05

2002

Vandana Shukla, ‘Projecting India beyond Cricket, Curry & Religion’, Chandigarh Times, India, 23/2/02

2005

Sonia Barron, ‘Helen Geier.

Distinguishing Features’, Australian Art Collector, Issue 32, April – June

2002

Raman Bhardwaj, ‘(Un) Conventional Fusion, Indian Express, Chandigarh Newsline, India, 23/2/02

2005

Sasha Grishin, ‘Show clever enough for two imaginations’, Canberra Times, 18/12/05

2002 ‘The Art of Friendship’, Chandigarh Tribune, India 2002

2002

2002

2003

2004

2008

Josephine Allison, ‘Screen Magic’, The West Australian, 11/10/02

Sasha Grishin, ‘Works rich in ambiguity’, Canberra Times, 12/9/08

2009

Neville Weston, ‘In the Picture’,The West Australian, 19/10/02

Jeff Makin, ‘Works on paper, Catherine Asquith Gallery’, Herald Sun Extra, 09/2/09

2014

Peter Haynes ‘Canberra artist Helen Geier flies our cultural flag’, Canberra Times, 03/10/14

Sasha Grishin, ‘Unfolding a Fabulous Festival of Works on Paper’, The Canberra Times, 02/11/02 Sonia Barron, ‘Response to the WA Landscape’, The Canberra Times, 20/6/03 Simon Blond, ‘Artists Travel Across the Cultures’, The West Australian, Weekend Extra, 18/12/04

2004

Annie English, “WA Artnotes”, Art Monthly, Nov

2005

Sanhita Gupta Bhowal, ‘Blood Ties’, Art & Deal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Issue 17, Jan–March

2005

Seema Bawa, ‘Inherit the World’, Art India, Vol. x, No.1

Artist- in -residence programs 1997

Bundanon, Arthur Boyd property, Shoalhaven River, NSW. H. Geier, J. Holding, W. Teakel, Continuing The Vision

Helen & Jeremy at home 2015 2002

Joint artist residency, The Church Gallery and Curtin University, Perth, WA. Aug–Oct

2007

‘Meander: Shadow Screens and Scrolls’, Watch This Space, Alice Springs, June

Boards & committees 1994–97 Capital Arts Patrons Organisation 1998–02 ACT Historic Places Advisory Committee 2002–

Tallaganda Shire Heritage Advisory Committee

2002–12 Canberra Museum & Gallery Advisory Committee

1998–99 Artist- in- residence, Artist’s Books & Editioning Workshop, School of Art, ANU 2002

Artist- in- residence, Artist’s Books & Editioning Workshop, School of Art ANU/Trendsetting, Fyshwick, ACT

HELEN GEIER

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Dedication This book is for Jeremy Campbell-Davys, in gratitude for your love and continuing support. I’m sure it is quite testing being married to an artist at times.

Acknowledgments There are so many people to thank over the years. Firstly my family – my husband Jeremy and my sons Tristan and Pascal, and now Leah, Pascal’s wife who is also an artist. They are my best critics and encouragers.

My late mother, Matt Wigg, who was an art teacher and artist, passed on to me the most valuable gift – a passion for art, and my late father fostered in me a love of open spaces and classical music. The art teachers at Monte Sant’ Angelo Ladies College saw that I left school with a clear path ahead, not only as a lady but certainly as an artist.

My most important mentor was the late Melbourne artist, Roger Kemp. He was an inspiration for young artists in Melbourne, demonstrating that a life long career is rewarding.

Finally I would like to thank the expert individuals who have made this book possible.

My special thanks goes to Peter Haynes, whose understanding and appreciation of my work has been invaluable for the works’ development, and for the writing and compiling of this book.

My gratitude goes to Tim Böhm for his very fine book design and production, and David Paterson for his wonderful photography which makes this production so pleasing to the eye.

Thanks to all the galleries, collectors, and wonderful supporters – particularly my dear friends Di Porritt and Eileen Jones and the Beaver Galleries in Canberra – Spot81 Sydney, Langford 120 Melbourne, Canberra Museum and Gallery, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale which hold a large archive of my work 1970s–2000.

Thank you particularly to master printers Basil Hall and Di Fogwell for their expertise and inspired production of print portfolios over the years.

Helen Geier

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Author’s acknowledgements Peter Haynes would like to thank the artist, Helen Geier, whose work is the subject of this book, and her husband Jeremy Campbell-Davys who first approached him about writing and managing its publication.

To Tim Böhm and his staff many thanks for the beautiful design and for their patience in seeing this project through to completion.

To Sasha Grishin for his Foreword and for his ongoing support and friendship of the artist and the author.

This book is for my parents and for my partner in life John Lewis.

HELEN GEIER

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First Published in Australia in 2016 Helen Geier 50 Wallace Street Braidwood, NSW 2622 www.helengeier.com ISBN: 978-0-646-96134-7 Photography by David Paterson DORIAN Photographics, unless otherwise noted Printing: CanPrint Design: 2B.com.au Š HELEN GEIER, PETER HAYNES (Text) All works are the collection of the artist unless otherwise noted Measurements in centimetres height x width x depth

8645 Helen Geier 152pp catalogue_June 2016_FA.indd 148

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8645 Helen Geier 152pp catalogue_June 2016_FA.indd 148

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Peter Haynes is an established curator, writer and visual arts historian. Since 1978 he has worked in the art museum/gallery sector firstly in Sydney (the Art Gallery of New South Wales) and more extensively since 1981 in Canberra. There he worked as Curator at the (then) Canberra School of Art Gallery (and also acted as Head of the Art History and Theory Workshop); as Curator of the Parliament House Art Collection; as Director/Curator of the Nolan Gallery; Director of ACT Museums and Galleries and as Curator at the University of Canberra. He has lectured on the visual arts and heritage, curated over 250 exhibitions, and is widely published, nationally and internationally. Currently he is a Consultant Curator, Writer, Art Historian and Heritage Advisor. He is also art critic for The Canberra Times. Recent major projects include Janet DeBoos.

AÂ Survey, CraftACT (2015); Kensuke Todo.

Sculpture and Drawings, ANU Drill Hall Gallery (2014); and Land, Landscape, Identity, 25th Anniversary Exhibition for Parliament House, Canberra (2013).

H E L E N G E I E R . C O M