BYRON SCHOOL OF ART: 'DANCE THIS MESS AROUND' 2019 GRADUATE YEARBOOK by Byron School of Art

DANCE THIS MESS AROUND BYRON SCHOOL OF ART GRADUATE YEAR BOOK 2019

DANCE THIS MESS AROUND Welcome to the Byron School of Art Graduate Show and 2019 Yearbook. The title, Dance This Mess Around, manages to convey something about the complex, sometimes joyful and frequently difficult process of learning how to become an artist and how to create a sustained body of work for exhibition. Haley Calderon, Rebecca Cook, Jane Couttie, Teresa Ebenstreit, Sandra McKenny, Rachel Pierssene, Lizzie Turnbull and Christina Waterson – the eight artists whose works and ideas feature in these pages – have mostly studied together for the past three years at the BSA. A few joined the group this year, but they have all, collectively and individually, greatly challenged themselves in both investigating materials and techniques as well as developing the capacity to think creatively and critically. And, perhaps more importantly, they have all been willing to peer squarely into their own psyches; asking difficult questions, examining beliefs, and unearthing the motifs of their own personal experiences and histories. At times, a very messy dance indeed. The results of this dance are works of great depth that are rich with meaning and demonstrate each artist’s commitment and their ability to push, explore and persevere. The written pieces in this publication are a pairing of individual artist statements with interviews that were conducted by yearbook editor Steve Bush. The conversations are rewarding and revelatory, and we hope that you will enjoy reading the abridged versions herein. The BSA directors, teachers and staff would like to congratulate our 2019 graduating students. It has been an absolute privilege to work with you, and to witness your development. We hope that your practice will continue to grow and expand from all that you have discovered and learnt with us here at BSA. Byron School of Art would like to pay our respects to the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation, the traditional custodians of the land in which we work and meet. We honour their elders and their abiding connection to land, waters, place and community.

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2019 BSA YEARBOOK

LIZZIE TURNBULL A seed memory from a long time ago: a young sow locked in a pen at the Sydney Royal Easter show leapt onto the barricade, looked me directly in the eye and screamed her distress. This brief and piercing moment has stayed with me as a constant reminder. As humans lost in a self-enclosed, commodified world (an alienated narcissism of privilege and domination) we can forget that we too are animals, in and of nature, and that sentience extends beyond us. The Last Green Night is informed by an ongoing inquiry into an intimacy with all beings: the lived experience of interconnectedness and impermanence. The 12th Century Chan Master Hongzhi said: “All beings are your ancestors”. He includes the sentient and non-sentient. All ancestors include animals, grasses, rocks, and wind; the elements are ancestors, this earth is an ancestor. Ancestors are of the past, present and future, and so we enter into the deep, timeless nature of the endless circularity of being and becoming. Trying to evoke the “felt sense” of this has led to a practice of painting in oil and wax on board, in a relatively small scale. The Last Green Night has developed into a short narrative featuring, as both motif and protagonist, the form of a hare on a rock. The hare is itself, but it is also each of us facing the contingencies of our lives. What will happen now? The hare is an ancient mythological symbol laden with meanings of regeneration and the sacred. She can be a portal to another world. In appearing and disappearing, the hare has a fleeting existence; the visible and invisible depths of becoming. There’s always an opportunity for wonder and a sense of opening to the sacred, even with animals that may sometimes be regarded as pests or degraded like the pig from the showground. Like many of us, faced with the climate crisis I find my mind turning to the last of things – the last ice, the last bee, the last hare, the last human, the last green night. Everything ends. Perhaps. When I was about six years old I had a dream where I dreamt a complete life and ‘died’ as I woke up, or at least that’s how it felt. I sat up in bed looking at my hands, perplexed about what had just happened. There’s that old question: did I wake up from the dream I just had, or have I woken up into a new life? That stayed with me and fed into my spiritual enquiry and development, and my interest in philosophy. When I was 13 my father died. I hadn’t lived with him, so it was a distant death but still a very meaningful death of course. But it wasn’t really explained or processed, and I didn’t go to the funeral – there wasn’t room in my family for a child’s experience of what a death meant. Grieving wasn’t handled very well, which is very common, so I just shut things down. It was like my father was a ghost, and there’s a wonderful line from a book I read last year: we need to turn our ghosts into ancestors. But there wasn’t the ritual process to enable me to turn him into an ancestor, and that led to a need in me to understand more about death and dying. In my early 20s I took refuge in the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana tradition and it really shaped my life. Around the same time I was wondering whether I should go to art school or do something sensible. As a child I’d always 1 The Last Green Night No. 5 (oil and wax on board)

@lizziemturnbull

wanted to learn how to draw and paint, but from a Buddhist perspective making art felt a bit indulgent when I could be benefitting people, so I decided to take the academic path. Originally I’d considered studying psychology, but I hated it and ended up doing sociology and philosophy. I became an academic more by default because I didn’t know what else to do. I started researching in the area of death and dying, tracking how people were dying in modern society. I was interested in the conditions of dying with so much medical technology and the medical imperative to prolong life. There’s so much fear around dying – it’s become a taboo subject in our society. The rituals that help in that transition have been lost. My mother died at the end of last year and I was able to accompany her in her aging and dying; it was a profound experience to support her to have a good death, which she did. This year I began painting in green – and I’ve never really liked green – and the hare emerged on the rock. It’s really strange because green was my mother’s favourite colour, and it never suited me as a colour to wear. It was her colour, not mine. But since her death I think I’ve absorbed some of her qualities. And now I love green, I absolutely love it. Green is life.

2 The Last Green Night No.6 (oil and wax on board); 3 The Last Green Night No.1 (oil and wax on board) 4 The Last Green Night No.4 (oil and wax on board)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

REBECCA COOK “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out.”

– From Mending Wall by Robert Frost I find comfort and quiet in repetition Throwing myself into what the materials ask of me is enough Repetition is a practice of discipline and there is freedom to be found in all good discipline The ink sits dense and opaque on paper that is fine and transparent Each print an individual, corporeal skin like the imprint of a person’s story upon their body (in this way I see them as portraits) and in turn that body’s imprint upon the earth (in this way I see them as landscapes) I might be sewing things together but maybe I am looking for a safe place to unpick things such as ideas and beliefs (in this way I see them as still lifes) The process leaves its mark Sewing is an action of redefining The grid is obvious, but the intention is that of a rhizomatic web a mesh that runs in, around and through At first I thought this was an allusion to amputated parts (separation) but the process has revealed itself to be inclusive (sameness) It seems there is no independence without interdependence I find comfort and quiet in repetition

I love the work of Agnes Martin. She introduced me to something that made sense. It was the first time I’d seen an artwork that expressed a kind of spaciousness. I thought: ‘I know that place’. Something in her work really resonated with me – there’s a gentle hum that goes on. Last year I was experimenting with printmaking and I was simply looking for a type of paper that pleased me texturally, and somehow I thought of using teabags. When I started printing on them I began to appreciate their robustness as well as their beauty – they sit in hot water, but they stay strong and hold their integrity. It led me to think about the currency of tea – it’s been a currency in the world throughout history. It’s something we share with family and friends, and it’s something we have when we’re quietly contemplating life alone. A lot of cultures have tea ceremonies. My parents are both English, and every time I go back to the UK I travel from place to place and drink tea, I stop along the highway and drink tea, I arrive at someone’s house and there’s tea. Then I began thinking about the currency of memories and how they get passed along as

1 Untitled 1, work in progress (paper, thread and ink)

@rebeccamaggiecookartist

stories and narratives. And I realised at one point that, because of the way a lot of people live their lives on social media and brand themselves and self-market themselves, a lot of our life exists on a grid. When you look at Instagram, it’s square after square after square. People’s most personal moments are put together as a grid. We live our lives on rectangular screens. When these rectangles are all stitched together, there’s something there in how people consider their own identity. Sometimes I hang my work up and it takes me a while to understand exactly what the dialogue is that I’ve been having with myself. People have said they can see backyards, rice fields, maps or film running through a projector, but I don’t want to spell it out. I was taught as a child to show up clean, to keep up appearances. I was brought up having to hold a lot of family secrets, so there’s a real part of me that has always kept things in a box. It always felt like I shouldn’t tell the true story about how I feel. So, going forward with my work, I just think that I want to stay comfortable with being exposed.

2 Untitled 2 (detail), work in progress (paper, thread and ink); 3 Untitled 3, work in progress (paper, thread and ink); 4 Untitled 4, work in progress (paper, thread and ink); 5 Untitled 5, work in progress (paper, thread and ink); 6 Untitled 6, work in progress (paper, thread and ink)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

SANDRA MCKENNY I am not the person I was yesterday, and I will be different again tomorrow. As well as the physical changes that occur with the passing of time, we are all complex collections of dynamic thoughts and emotions. My work explores the transient nature of time, a continuum of fleeting moments. As soon as we recognise the present, it has become the past. I use familiar images from portrait paintings by 15th and 16th century masters such as Da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt. These images are rephotographed, reshaped, modified and enlarged in such a way that the information in the portraits is no longer very specific. These reinvented images become complex abstract forms inviting deep contemplation and reflection by the viewer. Venerated oil portraits on canvas have been transformed into ephemeral projections of light onto paper. Portraits from the distant past have been recreated in the present day.

1 Protective Avoidance (digital photograph, collage & sunlight); 2 Future Self Portrait (photographic projection into the landscape); 3 Baldassare Past and Present (projection of a photographic image onto wall with a reflection into a mirror)

I’m interested in time and how to represent the present when it so quickly becomes the past. I started making portraits as a representation of time; a self portrait is a very clear indication of time passing – with our wrinkles and lines and how we age – and our image in the mirror is very much a reflection of time. The work is about the past, present and future and how they all collide and how portraiture was at one time reserved for just the rich and famous. Now anyone with a camera or a smart phone can make a portrait or self portrait. Anyone can take your image. And do you actually own your own face any more? Originally I was making erased self portraits but I got bored with those, so I started to look at portraits by Da Vinci, Rubens and Rembrandt. I took sections of their paintings from art books and photographed the image, printed it out and scrunched it up, then photographed it again, scrunched it up, and so on. I’ve always taken a lot of photographs and I’ve usually used my own images in my work, but when I started using images from other artists’ work I had a bit of a battle around the idea of appropriation. I eventually had the idea of projecting these portraits onto a surface so that I could end up with a work comprised just of light. And then I started projecting the images into the landscape where they became almost like the landscape itself, and really quite grotesque. Someone commented that the faces looked like the subjects were in the process of going back to the earth, turning back into dust. So, there’s a real element of decay, but that wasn’t a conscious thing – it just came about in the process of making. It’s about change. As beings we’re all in a constant state of change.

@sandramckenny

I made some interesting works based on Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine but then playing with the scale. And I made the decision to work with black and white rather than colour because, with the projection and the element of light, the work becomes very contemplative, and the viewer has to spend time with them to actually work out what they are. If you sit with the works they begin to lose their grotesqueness and they become images that you can wander through. I’d like the viewer to reflect on what it’s like to be human and to perhaps look at people from a different perspective. Generally, people can be difficult to know, so I wanted to present work that’s difficult to know. And I’m planning to incorporate a lighting system in the installation that obscures the work a little more. I also began to look at portraiture in other cultures and to ask if sometimes portraiture is even appropriate. In Aboriginal culture for example there are avoidance customs, so I made a whole series of Aboriginal portraits, which everyone found a bit confronting. I started to redact the images and then one day I had this happy, serendipitous moment where the works were laid on my back verandah and, at a certain time of the afternoon, the sun hit a mirror and cast a ‘rainbow’ across the works. So I rephotographed some of them with the rainbow across the surface and suddenly they became more acceptable. I went to art school in the ‘70s when I left high school, then decided for one reason or another to go into nursing. I ended up having a long and successful career in nursing, so I’ve had a lifetime of dealing with people. I find it difficult to take the figure out of my work. Everything I create has a human being in it.

1 Timeline (installation of digital and eucalyptus prints on rag paper with light balls)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

JANE COUTTIE Each day I take a walk in our garden. It was once a bare paddock, but now Tuckeroo, Paperbark, Sandpaper Fig, Bangalow Palm and Lilly Pilly form a canopy over the land. Meditations in the natural world and an exploration of spirituality inspire my work and my process. For me it is vital to feel part of nature, not separate, and I use this interconnectedness as my guide. My paintings respond to the immediate environment, as well as memories of landscapes that I have experienced. The work evolves intuitively through the use of vivid colour and the referencing of place and personal narratives.

1 Dance (acrylic on paper); 2 Blue Mane (oil on canvas); 3 Wild Fire (mixed media on paper)

I really wanted to be an artist from the time I was young – I drew and took photos – but it was squashed out of me at school. I was brought up a Catholic – we were expected to go to church every Sunday – and I was sent to a primary school where nuns taught. One of my paintings is about a nun who would hit me with a big wooden ruler for drawing. Her name was Sister Mercer, but we called her Sister Murder. There was a lot of blood and guts growing up. My father was a country vet, and myself and my four sisters were exposed to a lot of injury and death. I remember helping him stitch up a horse that had run through a barbed wire fence, and digging holes to bury dogs and cats. One night I was riding my bike and I opened up my leg on the bike chain. There was a huge gash… I could see the bone. My dad said: ‘Right, we’ve got to stitch it up quickly! You won’t feel any pain because you’re still in shock’. He put me on the kitchen table and stitched up my leg with a big needle – the sort he used on animals – with no anaesthetic. And he was right, I felt no pain. We lived on a cattle farm in the bush in South West Victoria. We had a full orchard, a vegetable garden and my father butchered his own meat. He loved building and built four family homes, the second of which burnt down in the middle of the night. We ran out in our pyjamas and stood on the lawn and watched our home go up in flames. When I was about three years old I fell in to our swimming pool, and I remember seeing these gigantic bubbles of air floating up from my lungs as I sunk to the bottom. It was actually a beautiful experience. I was always in the art room at boarding school. By the time I got to years 11 and 12 there were three of us ‘artists’ left. Our peers called us ‘veggies’ because we were the losers making art. I went straight from high school to university

@janemoragcouttie

where I studied earth sciences – geology, biology, outdoor education – but I also studied photography. About six months into the course I realised I was only studying science for my parents; they were not keen for me to be an artist ¬– there was no money in it and they’d encouraged me to get a university degree. So I quit and worked as a photographer for a few years. I’d spend three days a week in the darkroom, but after a few years I started suffering with headaches from the chemicals. I left and travelled for a while, then decided I needed to go back to university, but this time to study art. After that I spent time in Darwin, where I had an exhibition of paintings and met some incredible Warlpiri people from Willowra, a small community in the Tanami Desert about four hours north west of Alice Springs. I’d studied Australian history but Indigenous culture was completely glossed over – it was all very colonial. My father emigrated from Scotland and we were brought up in a very Scottish culture, but I wanted to find out how I could belong to this land. So I camped in the desert for a month, sleeping in dry creek beds, and was offered the job of co-ordinator of the Women’s Centre. I went with the women and children out to their hunting grounds, and in certain parts of the country the older women would stop, get out of the car and sing to the spirits. Their land is their ancestors and their spirits, and it’s so precious, sacred and well cared for. This instilled in me how important it is to nurture and look after the land because it gives so much back. All of these experiences have fed back into my work, and after years of being dissuaded from making art I’m finally giving myself permission to be the artist I’ve wanted to be from the time I was young.

5 Bushfire (mixed media on paper); 6 Drowning (mixed media on paper); 7 Egress (mixed media on paper); 8 Exit (mixed media on paper)

9 9 Egress II (oil on canvas)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

HALEY CALDERON The notion of being a silent carrier of meaning enables further appreciation of a world without words; a form of communication, which goes beyond the ability to speak. My works on paper trace a map of experience, through an introspective studio-based arts practice and immersion of the quiet self. Printmaking techniques and gestural drawing are combined with serendipitous occurrences of studio practice, which allows for unfolding questions about space, surface and form. The work is revealed through process. With imagery being intimate to quite remote and offering evidence of the human hand. The architectural elements of paper, mixing of ink, wiping the plate and pulling the press allow a conversation of layered ambiguity between materiality and mark making to emerge. The work investigates non-representational imagery and making art as a meditative practice. Creating a visual language of the unseeable signs of life. An enquiry that contemplates a sense of the body’s intuitive nature of breathing, tacit or felt knowledge, spaces of silence and quiet moments of inner dialogue. A poetic meandering between consciousness and memory that invites a transportable experience, both ‘understandable in one way, whilst indecipherable in another’”.1 1

Glenn Barkley, G.W. Bot: Paddock Glyphs, Imprint, Vol. 43 No. 3, Spring 2008, p. 20

1 work in progress (detail), drawing on Hahnemühle paper

I fell into printmaking quite by chance. I have been interested in art since I was a child and always found myself making something. When I applied to study painting at RMIT in Melbourne, the course was full, so I opted for printmaking as my major. The day I walked into my first class, I knew I was a printmaker. And then went on to dedicate the next five years of study to this medium. That first day I was handed a piece of copper… it’s such a beautiful material, such a beautiful object; the way it changes, the way it oxidises, the way it scratches and etches. I really got to play with printmaking in the first year of my diploma, and I loved every second of it. I lived and breathed it all – the presses, the ink, and especially the architectural quality of paper and how it changes the print itself. After my diploma at RMIT, my partner and I moved to Lismore, where I completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours at Southern Cross University. I took a break from making artwork directly after my post graduate studies. But this time allowed me to dive into other practices, such as yoga. First as a student, then as a teacher after studying in Los Angeles, Melbourne and Byron Bay. Whenever I am not making artwork though, it is like an itch, constantly unscratched, and the stagnant nature of not making feels unnatural. I also missed the community side of the art world, so I signed up for the Byron School of Art last year. I realised during my honours degree that I was moving around the printmaking studio as though @haley.calderon

it was a performative practice, and perhaps now with more knowledge behind me it feels very much like a moving meditation. These monoprints came out of a space of non-thought and a sense of play in a new studio environment. There’s always intention in the making. But initially I was simply enjoying forming a friendship with a printing press I had never used before and seeing what came from that. As well as printing, I started to draw on the paper with my etching needle. Using the same sort of movement, the same repetitive nature of mark-making. The work is often revealed to me through process and a direct response to material. I have a deep love affair with paper and how it holds this quiet world of having been made by someone else’s hands. The structure of particular paper has very much informed my drawings in how the surface and fibre receives particular mark-making. I hope to create a contemplative space for the viewer to be with the works, rather than offering a lot of information. For me the whole thing feels like a map of my personal experience, and my intention is not to give all the answers. I was on a plane recently in the late afternoon, and it was overcast and the sun was setting. There was a gap between the clouds and the landscape, and for a second it looked like my prints right there – the space in between, that little moment. Sometimes my works feel to me like wisps of air, or like the breath. It feels very much like breathing when I am making.

2 map of experience (detail) (monoprint on Stonehenge paper)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

TERESA EBENSTREIT My interest in art has been with me since I was very young, but it’s only recently that I have begun to practice. I am essentially an abstract painter with a leaning towards geometric abstraction. At the core of my practice is an investigation into the use of colour and form as a means of expressing intangible emotional complexities, half-remembered personal histories, and ideas unspoken. Childhood sexual abuse and its resultant trauma strongly influence my work, usually on an unconscious level. Making these abstract images is a means of expressing the most deeply felt of my emotions and passions, the ones that I would otherwise find it impossible to access. I don’t have a logical or linear method by which I select the themes of my work. The decisions I arrive at during the making process are often made unconsciously or intuitively but become more considered as the piece progresses. The meaning of the work usually becomes clearer as it nears completion and my subconscious has finally had a means by which to express itself. I’d been working predominately in oils for two years, but this year I’ve also been experimenting with other mediums such as collage, and assemblage with found objects. I feel ready to go into the mysterious unknown searching to give voice to those parts of myself that still remain untapped and unspoken.

1 The Innocence and Beauty of Children(Lily and Rose) (acrylic and paper collage on wood panel); 2 Forgotten Railways (acrylic and paper collage on wood panel); 2 Self Love (oil on canvas)

I don’t make quiet work. I consider myself to be a quiet kind of person who stays in the background and doesn’t put themselves out there very much, but my paintings aren’t like that. They’re quite passionate. They’re quite bold. But it takes a long time for me to understand what the work is about. A teacher at the BSA will ask: ‘Why that shape?’ or ‘Why that colour?’ and initially I have no idea. But eventually the meaning of the painting will make itself clear. The thing about child sexual abuse is that the victim is always silenced. The people around you silence you. You’re not allowed to talk, and you’re ashamed to talk. Speaking out is so important but you rarely get the opportunity to speak to anyone about it. I hardly ever had the opportunity to speak to anyone about it, especially about the complexity and the depth and the extent of it. I can’t verbalise it because it’s too powerful, and I can’t remember much about those traumatic events. What I do remember is that there were a group of powerful people involved; they were very strong and frightening people and I was scared. And I’ve maintained that fear in me all my life… I still feel it. There’s a fear of saying things. So these paintings are my way of trying to speak out, to finally say something, albeit in an awkward or difficult manner. They’re a sort of secret code. The good thing is that I can express myself calmly when I’m making work, with my feelings coming out slowly in a measured way. But if I delve into the really deep stuff then all that happens is that I end up with a canvas covered

@teresaebenstreit

in black and red splashes. The anger comes out. Painting is a way of expressing these feelings without freaking myself out, or freaking out other people. You can could look at the straight lines and the geometric elements of the paintings as representing the masculine, while the curves could be said to represent the feminine. When the work features curves, it starts getting messy and too emotional, and then I can’t paint. There’s something rational and safe about straight lines. There’s a precision and a logic… you know where you are with them. Curves are too emotional. I like logic – it’s safe. And I’ve always had a tendency towards a more masculine frame of mind, I’ve always been logical and scientific. I feel safer with the masculine. I used to see being feminine as dangerous; I didn’t go in for makeup or nail polish or that sort of thing, and when I did express my femininity it attracted the wrong sort of attention and I always tried to avoid that. I am trying to explore the feminine and the emotional in my work, but I’m finding it a bit of a challenge. If I introduce curves or circles to the paintings I find that I always end up painting them out. Because the straight lines and the geometric elements are also about control, and I feel a real need to have some sort of control in my life… to be in control. Something else that struck me recently about my work is the idea of taking a really frightening and traumatic experience and turning it into something beautiful. I want things to be beautiful, I don’t want things to be ugly.

4 Last Week’s Nightmare (acrylic and paper collage on wood panel); 5 Strange Yellow Thought (oil on wood panel) 6 Occasional Peace (acrylic paper collage on wood panel)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

CHRISTINA WATERSON I fell in love. And, strangely and unexpectedly, this led to an opening up of my creative practice, and the rediscovery of the love I’d once had for the process of making work. Byron School of Art supported this quest for love, and it shifted my understanding of what my art actually is. Gone is a focus on the precision and certainty of geometry, and the exacting nature of largescale sculptural works. Instead I share my private drawings, and the usually unseen photographs and collages that are part of my process. Masks, templates and discarded elements used in the making of the work have become the work itself. With them are my attempts, and failures, to achieve perfection. I enjoy the directness of drawing. Whatever is going on for me in my inner world appears on the page. Hand-drawn grids form unique recordings of the imperfections of my hands and my breath, and the limits of my attention span. They are responsive and uncertain. The photographs of everyday moments bear witness to the strangeness and ambiguity of reality, and the uncertainty of our times. They trace my personal transformation. If I’m moved to pick up a camera and take a photo, then the image contains something inherent for me to look at more deeply. Collage supports this playful discovery. It helps me to see with fresh eyes and to find a work’s essence, its balance and its transition points. By their nature, the works are all portraits. My vulnerability, struggles and joys gather quietly out in the open. The work is a way to accept my past lives and histories and connect with my newly rediscovered physical body and my innate sensuality. I am relieved to glimpse my own humanity and my flaws as I step into the present and into love.

1 Deflect (digital print on Hahnemuhle paper); 2 Broken (digital print on Hahnemuhle paper); 3 Inflect (digital print on Hahnemuhle paper); 4 Headlong (digital print on Hahnemuhle paper)

I always drew and painted from a very young age, and I felt really happy when I was making art. And if I wasn’t doing that I’d be out in the bush building something. I grew up in a small country town. My father was a land surveyor, so the family spent a lot of time in nature while he was working. I’d also spend hours looking at maps with dad in his office, and I developed a real sense of technical drawing and mapping. I was very aware of measuring the landscape because that’s what dad was interested in, but I enjoyed drawing from nature, and drawing things that can’t necessarily be explained, so that was at odds with the precision and closure of surveying. Art wasn’t seen by my family as a profession. It’s quite a different thing. It’s hard to understand and measure, there’s no right or wrong. So I was encouraged by them to study engineering. I had to give up my art practice, which was a huge part of my life; it was everything to me, it was my safe place, it was my oxygen. And engineering was terrible… it was all mathematics and had nothing to do with people. I felt quite lost so after a year I withdrew from engineering and enrolled in architecture, which was much closer to what I wanted to be doing creatively. But I eventually realised after working in architecture that you could go much deeper with creativity. Making architectural @christinamarywaterson

drawings is different to just drawing because the plan is left behind, and the final result is the experience of the building itself. I felt as though architecture took away my passion for drawing, and my fluidity and connection to the self. It had introduced this orthogonal element that went through my whole practice. So I studied visual arts at QUT for two years but was then offered a job at the State Gallery in Brisbane. I really loved it. Most of all I enjoyed working with installation artists to realise their work. For the last ten years I’ve run my own creative business, predominantly in public art. While it’s very satisfying to realise an artwork on that scale, it takes so many people to work on the project, it’s highly controlled and it can take years. It’s creatively exhausting, and I found that I really needed to reconnect with myself and the source of my practice. Enrolling in BSA was a way for me to acknowledge that I wanted to start again and make art for me. I found that a lot of the new works were portraits of me trying to understand how my relationships have changed, and my understanding of my family and of myself. In the past I’d felt that it wasn’t acceptable to include those elements of myself in the work. And it was maybe something I didn’t want to share with people; how vulnerable I was. But now there’s a lot more of me in there.

5 Give – Part 1 (pencil on Arches); 6 Bad Grid (detail) (pencil on Arches); 7 Turn Together (pencil on Arches); 8 Chain of Interstices (pen on graph paper); 9 Interstices (pencil on Arches; 10 Give – Part 2 (pencil on Arches); 11 Give – Part 3 (pencil on Arches); 12 Recording (detail) (pencil on Arches)

2019 BSA YEARBOOK

RACHEL PIERSSENE Bicycles, black cockatoos and soft visions of damaged geometry; daily stories of devotion, betrayal, negotiation and renewal (observed in the discomfort of my rainforest home) inform my work. The result is not so much a representation of dystopia, but rather a reflection upon our current position in the eternal cycle of birth and destruction: our place in the deep structure of everything and no-thing. With a background in representational painting, I am now bringing elements of experimental abstraction into my practice. I am intrigued by the grids, rhythms and fractals that are embedded all around us in layers of history, and I wonder how these subliminal triggers may awaken some innate recognition or sense of déjà vu within us. In addition to painting I have recently been making paper sculptures, some mounted on kinetic assemblages of found objects. With many of these the viewer is invited to activate elements of light, sound and movement. The viewers’ participation allows them to become an integral part of the work and engage with its underlying intention. As we are moved, intuitively, by patterns in nature, music, mathematics or the micro/macro axis of the cosmos, so we may feel ourselves drawn (or painted) into the “bigger picture”. The rotation of these kinetic works suggests the passage of deep, cyclical time.

1 Kinetic assemblage component of Bicycles and Black Cockatoos; 2 Wollumbin Black Cockatoos (acrylic, pastel and oil on canvas); 3 Sculpture component of Bicycles and Black Cockatoos (ink, graphite and wax on paper)

One sees incredible things in the constant observation of nature, but I find it an issue to reconcile all the scars and the spill over of humanity into the natural world, the damage to the planet that we have done and choose to continue to do. We’re all complicit in this on a daily basis just with the lives we’ve become used to. I find it quite confronting. Where I live is magical – I see creatures and plants and birds that all seem abundant, and you can imagine the whole earth is like this and there’s no problem anywhere, but we’re right on the edge. There is some undisturbed forest at my place, but around the world it’s diminishing so quickly. I don’t know if I’m engaged enough in giving back to the land. I do a lot of things which aren’t helpful, but it’s hard to live as a human being these days with everything we have – our phones and computers and cars. We know that it’s not sustainable. I’m interested to see where we are on this cycle of booming humanity and rampant success that’s ultimately going to be our nemesis. There’s going to be a cycle of extinction, some sort of turning of the wheel, but something will carry on even if we disappear altogether. I’ve been painting a lot of black cockatoos recently. I have quite a lot of them at my place and they’re delightful to watch. They have this evocative call and there’s something primeval and geometric about them. I see them gather up their tribe, swooping around and calling each other, then off they go, great swirling groups of

@racheomorph

them. To me they’re an emblem or mascot that I can care about. When I introduced them into the paintings and drawings I somehow started to care more about my work because things can all get very abstract. Early this year I did a weekend workshop at the BSA with Michael Cusack, and he gave us lots of cardboard to make assemblages with. I folded paper in a grid and then I squished them, and I ended up putting them on a kinetic assemblage of found objects such as parts of a bicycle. I wanted to create the sense of a terrain that goes through cycles of seasons and ages, and cycles of extinction and creation. I also wanted to make things that infer some kind of functionality, which is why I find using bicycles so interesting. I have this feeling that bicycles might have been the pinnacle of human achievement. I do feel in these confusing times that there is comfort to be found in feeling like we’re part of something way bigger than we are, we’re in some stage of a cycle. And I don’t mean that as a platitude, on the contrary, I think if we understood that, and felt more a part of something bigger, then we might be less anxious to acquire and less greedy and more caring. If people can recognise where real joy comes from, in seeing something or hearing something, then they can be moved by a sense of beauty or recognition. I think it does register as a sense of recognition – something that’s already known inside. To me that’s what I look for in art.

4 Cockatoo Valley (acrylic, pastel and oil on canvas)

5 Damaged Geometry 1; 6 Damaged Geometry 2; 7 Damaged Geometry 3; 8 Damaged Geometry 4 (all encaustic and print on mulberry paper)

ROCK OF AGES TATTOO PARLOUR

60 Ballina Street LENNOX HEAD @rockofageslennoxhead

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Byron School of Art gratefully acknowledges all of our sponsors for their generous support of the BSA Graduate Program, including this yearbook. Thank you to Langridge, Brookie’s Gin, Punch and Daisy, Baker and Daughters, Still at the Centre, The Bucha of Byron, Archer Industrial, Creative Road, Esja Women, James Hardware, Rock of Ages, Tinker Tailor Dancer Trader. And thank you to M-Arts for their partnership. Byron School of Art gratefully acknowledges and thanks Steve Bush for editing and designing this publication, Diana Miller for graphic design, Christina Waterson for co-ordinating sponsorship, Michelle Eabry for photographing the students’ work, and Emma Walker for co-ordinating the publication and photographing the students. BSA DIRECTORS AND TEACHERS Christine Willcocks Michael Cusack Emma Walker James Guppy Sarah Harvey Meredith Crowe BSA Project Space Co-ordinator Travis Paterson Graphic Design and Acting BSA Project Space Co-ordinator Joanna Petrou Administration and Enrolments Michelle Eabry Admin assistant and Ralph Woodford Residency Co-ordinator TEACHERS AND GUEST LECTURERS OF VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH AND PORTFOLIO (3RD YEAR) Chris Bennie Amber Wallis Travis Paterson Emma Walker Michael Cusack Christine Willcocks Murray Paterson History and Theory Lecturer Sharne Wolff Guest Lecturer Judith Eisner Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient Sam Shmith Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient Yvette Coppersmith Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient Marie Hagerty Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient Peter Vandermark Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient Laura Jones Guest Lecturer and RW Residency Recipient

ISBN 978-0-646-81207-6

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