BYRON SCHOOL OF ART: 'UNTITLED' 2018 GRADUATE YEARBOOK

BYRON SCHOOL OF ART GRADUATE YEAR BOOK 2018

INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Byron School of Art Graduate Yearbook and Interview Project magazine. Within these pages we acknowledge the work and ideas of our 2018 graduating third year students.

Also included within this publication is a series of interviews that students have conducted, as part of their course work, with an artist of their choosing. We hope that you’ll enjoy reading these interviews, which provide insights into the practices of artists Lindy Lee, James Guppy, Emma Walker, David Quinn, Catherine Cassidy, Anton Reijnders, Dr. Ella Dreyfus and Mesha Sendyk.

The BSA, now in its sixth year, has established itself as an important and much loved educational facility in the Northern Rivers. The school’s success is driven by the unique interactions between our artist teachers, dedicated staff and the student body.

Shared between all is a commitment towards deep artistic enquiry and a passion for both the conceptual and the technical. The school offers its attendees a rich experience of studio-based learning that values experimentation, creative and critical thinking and an expansive mindset that will lead to a lifetime of artistic exploration.

It’s a great privilege to witness the evolution of students as they grapple with the difficulties of developing an artistic practice and the formation of their own visual language. The graduating students of 2018 have been an extraordinary group who have challenged themselves and inspired each other. We are enormously proud of their achievements and applaud their dedication and commitment.

We hope that what they have received at the BSA will continue to inspire and inform them in the years to come.

We wish them every success.

1 Supersymmetry (installation) 2 Supersymmetry (detail) 3 Dragicia 4 Mira 5 Ivica 6 Visnja

KATH EGAN I have childhood memories of painting life-sized murals for my birthday party on metres of paper that wrapped around the kitchen and lounge room walls and almost reached the ceiling. The paper and paint had been a gift from our neighbour Margo, an art teacher at the time who is now head curator of Aboriginal Art at The National Museum of Australia. (I’m sure Margo Neale never realised what a positive impact she’d made on our large family by the simple act of suppling art materials.)

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I also recall stripping my bed bare and dragging the sheets over the freshly-mowed lawn and pegging them onto the silvered timber of the backyard fence. During the long, hot summer days in suburban Canberra my six sisters and I would create tent-like shelters, domestic spaces of play and imagination. Meanwhile my mother spent hours at her sewing machine making floral dresses — it was a respite from the housework, the chaos and noise of everyday life. Her patience and generosity of spirit allowed our creativity to thrive.

Today my studio is a place to play and a respite from my own domestic duties. I engage in the creative process intuitively, and the materials choose me — discarded domestic vessels, furniture and a deconstructed piano are arranged and rearranged while I explore composition, balance, tension, form and line.

In the installation An Inherited Narrative I was recontextualising found objects in an exploration of social and personal connection. The work began by questioning notions of identity in response to being the youngest daughter of migrants from post war Communist Croatia. Yet it became about memory and time, a memorial to my mother who passed away this year and the commemoration of my young sister who we lost in a tragic accident at home in 1969. In this ongoing construction and reconstruction of identity, I consider the gravity of the stories we inherit and in turn consider what stories our children will inherit from us.

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ANTON REIJNDERS INTERVIEWED BY KATH EGAN So, it’s more an experience of wonderment?

An experience, yes. Something that happens to you if you are open to it.

Anton Reijnders is a ceramic artist who played a key role in setting up the material and process research program at the European Ceramic Work Centre in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. Seventeen years of experience and knowledge in this role led to the publication of his book The Ceramic Process, an extensive manual and resource for ceramic artists. Anton was a lecturer at the Australian National University in 2011 and is currently teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam while he continues to research ceramic glazes for an upcoming book.

Apart from teaching and researching glazes for your next book, what are you currently working on? Are you working towards a show?

Ideally, I don’t work towards shows – I like to just make, and out of this making comes an exhibition and not the other way around.

I prefer to be in a process which is not about outcome. Making work for an exhibition is inevitably outcome-driven, and I’m not against that, I just don’t want to make it my main focus.

I’m curious to know why you use fabrics in combination with ceramics in your work...

It’s linked to the realisation that materials have meaning or are meaning. It’s not just material. It’s not just pure subservience to what I want. In Japan I was confronted with little granite sculptures that were wearing red skirts which were deteriorating and fading. This combination of granite, which is sort of forever, and a textile, which is temporary, within one sculpture really struck me.

Are there any books that have inspired you and fed into your work?

There are a few books which have been very important for me.

The first was only in Dutch, but in English it means Introduction to Wonderment. It’s by Dutch philosopher Cornelius Verhoeven.

Verwondering is Dutch for wondering, although it can’t easily be translated into wonder or wonderment. It’s not something you can ask for or determine or force, it just happens to you. I think that’s a very, very important distinction. I can be wondrous.

Let’s wonder about this…

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What is it that makes a work of art move you, and how does an artist create that experience for the viewer?

I think by not trying too hard. Because then it becomes about wonder. It’s like trying to give meaning and trying to do this and trying to do that. It’s something that happens, it’s not about you wanting it. I have this inclination and this need to be in control but it is not helping in making my work. That’s why I steered this inclination more towards understanding how processes work and how materials work. As a result of that I went very heavily into research while being involved in the European Ceramic Work Centre to better understand the processes, and how to advise an artist who has no clue what to do. Then, finally, I ended up writing a process book. Sometimes people who’ve read the book are amazed when they see my work because my work is not technical at all. It’s not showing the mastery of the technique. When I was a student I already steered my need to be in control into making thrown pieces and to distance myself from the production of sculptures. This allowed me to stay within the dynamic of the medium. I decided to throw objects and it took a long time to make them. At some point these works became way more successful than my “core” work, my sculptures. Museums and collectors started buying them. I remember a conversation with someone at an exhibition of those thrown objects and my sculptures. This person raved about the thrown pieces, and I asked him: “But did you see the other sculptures?” I realised then that I had to choose and I stopped making pots altogether. Then I got involved with photographing my work and I went very deep into that, really understanding and trying to create photographs that carried this three-dimensional quality as strongly as possible in two dimensions. Also, how I perceive things and how I perceive things through the camera is fascinating..

You’ve worked with quite a few very established artists such as Anish Kapoor and Mark Manders. Can you talk a little about those experiences?

Anish had this idea to have more than 1000 kilos of clay falling down and shaping itself so the that the sculpture would arise as such. Of course, that’s a lot of weight, so before he arrived we were already thinking about constructions and mechanisms to make that work. But what we always saw with good artists is that once they were at the European Ceramic Work Centre, walking around and being told about all kinds of options and possibilities, they very often changed their minds. As a result of actually being there they started to realise that they could do something that they weren’t able to think of before. So what Anish ended up doing was taking a lot of clay and just smashing it into a pile – not dropping it but creating this pile by throwing the clay and using a huge pestle he’d found at the Centre. He pounded the clay and kept on pounding it up to the point that there was a hole created in this huge pile of clay, a void in the volume. But the most problematic artists were the ones who had very fixed

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ideas. Whatever happened, they stuck to these ideas and then they ended up with a technical fight. Very often the fight was lost because what they wanted and what actually happened were two different things. If what you want is the major focus, you aren’t able to deal with what’s actually happening. Therefore, what’s actually happening is a problem, a failure.

aside from the very powerful were allowed to experiment with this idea, and artists were among those few. They started to consider themselves to be individuals and not just anonymous craftsman.

They were allowed to “play” and investigate what it meant to be an individual, as long as they followed the given meaning of power and the Church. Religion was the core existing power, so as long as they didn’t interfere with that they were able to be individuals.

It took about 400 years, and now we are all individuals. But there was one little problem – things started to become more complicated because on one hand there is the logic of the individual, and on the other hand the inclination of the people to become self-centred and egocentric. In the previous century artists became the front-runners and role models for behaving in an egocentric way, and it peaked between the ‘60s and the ‘80s. The logic of the artist was embraced and exploited by commercialism. Commercialisation of the egocentric. Social media is the consequence of this, and now everyone is an artist.

So, for me the role of an artist is to somehow question economic exploitation and the egocentric and somehow create an alternative.

What do you think is the role of the artist in society today?

It’s a question I’ve been trying to answer for quite a few years, a very important question, and like all important questions there’s no simple answer. To answer, I have to dive into history. I think one of the rules of artists over the centuries, specifically starting at the early Renaissance, is to be agents of emancipation for people to become aware of themselves and to align themselves. Before the early Renaissance, to keep it simple, the individual’s visions, thoughts or wishes were in principal not taken seriously. Whatever you thought, it was always part of something way, way bigger.

Of course, people had all kinds of wishes, but it was actually considered dangerous to have your own ideas, it was considered “bad” according to Christianity at the time. It was dangerous for those without power. And then as a result of deferment in the early Renaissance, the notion was for humans to take responsibility for their personal actions, to be individuals. It happened on a small scale during the Middle Ages – there were a few people who were able to think independently – but it became much more mainstream in the early Renaissance. As a result, a few people

Yes, with social media everyone today is able to curate their profile…

Exactly, so the question now is: “What is the role of the artist today when everyone is an artist?”

1 Comp 04 N 2 Landscape Still Life 12 II

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RENÉE GORDOS Take me back Take me back to the beginning Take me back to ash on wood Take me back to the unseen The unlost The unfound Take me back

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To the beginning We all come from the past, and our connections to the people who brought our lives into being may be cherished, lost or forgotten.

I have been compiling an oral history of my ancestors with my last remaining grandparent, along the way unearthing photographs and reigniting memories. Reaching back into the void is time travelling through narrative.

Wading through these remnant memories, I cause them to ripple across the surface of time.

This rippling is the core of immortality.

I play the editor, the memory maker, and with each viewing I am changing the past for the future.

Welcome to my Memory Palace.

1 I Can’t Speak My Own Name 2 Potential Father II 3 Potential Father 4 Convict Roots 5 Eidolon 6 Stumpy the Memorious 7 Shorthorn

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CATHERINE CASSIDY INTERVIEWED BY RENÉE GORDOS Whereabouts in Australia has your work drawn its inspiration from?

I’ve spent a lot of time around the Larapinta on the Finke River, and at Gosse’s Bluff/Tnorala. The Finke River is an ancient, ephemeral, strange watercourse. It will disappear for miles, then become a billabong, transform into a sandy river bed, then disappear again, only to reappear as a torrent in flood. It’s said to be the oldest river in the world, with some sections following the same course for over 300 million years. Tnorala is an asteroid crater, filled with shatter cones and eroded down over 140 million years. I like to imagine it at night when the ground becomes horizonless and swallows you up in a thick bluey black mass all around you. It’s the light and the air and the big nebulous things that most capture my attention.

Night Turpentine Road took my breath away when I first saw it as one of the winners of the Paddington Art Prize in 2017. It was earthy, full of novel mark-making and spoke of the essence of the Australian landscape.

With a Masters from the Sydney National Art School in Re-Appraisal of Metonymy in Contemporary Landscape Response, Catherine Cassidy has spent a lot of time considering the conundrum of the plein air painter. How do you bring back the sense of being in the landscape without relying on re-creating it realistically?

Plein air is at the core of Catherine’s practice but her approach to it is dynamic. The goal is to capture what she calls the “bigger things” of light and air with a freshness as though they are being seen for the first time.

Our interview travels with Song Dynasty Chinese painters through Deep Time, down the oldest river in the world.

Then we will finish in her latest series “Zoom”, covered in space dust standing on the brink of a meteor crater.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Australian deserts. How do you approach your plein air practice, and what results once you return to the studio?

When I return to the Finke River it takes me about three days to quieten down. Then everything starts to come to you and crowds around, you’re a part of it, you’re not a stranger, it’s a quiet union. The landscape has already been abstracted for you in the desert and arid environments. The light and air are what pull them together. The Song Dynasty painters under stood Ma, which is kind of like the negative space having as much energy and power as the subject it envelopes. In contrast, my plein air work is fairly spontaneous, it’s not just look-and-put. It’s bits of abstraction, it’s bits of ideas I’ve still got in my head, also what’s in front of me, and I stitch all sorts of things together to make it work. When I come back to the studio the plein air work often sits there independently. They will often have nothing to do visually with the body of work that results from going out there. When you come back into the studio you find it’s another world of images, imagination and inspiration that’s attached to where you have been. The creative process happens because you have been there, but it’s not a direct result of being there. I just let it run. I think my brain and imagination know what they are doing, and I just have to put the radar out then go for it.

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Your paintings have been described as “bold, dense and delicious”. What is it about the Australian landscape that has kept you revisiting it throughout your career?

Stephen Jay Gould was an evolutionary philosopher. He wrote a lot about Deep Time and the formation of the earth. Time has always struck me as a powerful force, particularly in Australia.

We are currently living on the oldest part of the Earth’s crust amongst the remnants of an ancient world. Time has had its way with this place for ever. It’s as if this land connects us to everything we were once part of. It’s seems impossible to me to not find this endlessly fascinating.

You gained a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School. How has that experience fed into your practice?

I did my masters on Metonymy in Contemporary Landscape Painting. A metonymic way of thinking is how do you return what you have seen full of feeling and full of connection without

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recreating the object or place itself? How do you bring it back?

Matisse touched on it. The feeling is the key to everything. It’s like Howard Hodgkin’s work, the feeling of being there. Totally metonymic work. Personal and yet fully translatable at the same time. He could bring little intimate things in his life back to his satisfaction. He would say that’s when the work would leave him and have a life of its own.

What is it about the 10th Century Chinese painters that excites you?

They called themselves The Literati and they worked Metonymically. There’s purity to their work and they’ve been a powerhouse of inspiration for me. They relished that they were amateur painters and not beholden to any master, because it gave them freedom. They would say things like: “The great square has no corners”. It would keep me up at night thinking about it! They walked a lot and observed, gathering up in their mind, contemplating as they moved through the countryside for days.

Then they would return and sit in front of an enormous piece of paper on the wall and unleash themselves of all that energy they had collected. They believed that the energy had to be in the mark from the moment the brush touches the paper until you lift your brush off at the end. It was about not closing marks off. That is where the speed was important, and you can only indulge in speed when you have collected all the information in your mind. I similarly love working with recall. The idea that we are knitted into everything all around us, it’s all energy. The tree is not separate from the earth or the air around it. Emily Kame Kngwarreye said the same thing. Nothing is separate, including yourself. To feel physically part of what’s around you... “The Great image has no form” is another Taoist idea I really respond to.

That one form can represent all forms, meaning they have the same potential within them. This is what I strive for in my work, for it to be just arriving all the time. Not finished off. Not complete. It must maintain potential. Often the more you ruin it the better, because you lose all preciousness. Fail, fail, fail, but keep listening to the painting. You are working just ahead of the brush the whole time. It’s exhausting, your mind is saying “what if?”, and you’re making the judgement yes or no, and you are quickly responding to all those signals one after another. I believe you have to respond quite quickly for the energy to stay in the work. Slowness can create a look of effort, and I am not interested in that for my own work. I want the painting to look like it’s just landed there from the moon.

Your new series Zoom is moving away from the specifics of place. Where is that urge coming from?

I don’t want to reference a specific place or object anymore as it doesn’t connect with enough people. It’s not universal enough.

I want a bigger image that people can fill in their own gaps.

It’s like all good paintings, they aren’t specifically that place, they have become an entity in their own right as a painting.

There needs to be a sense of discovery – to make a really interesting image you can find it through mark, through form or through colour.

What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learnt in all the years of your practice?

Stop trying and stop doubting. You need a lot of physical energy to be a painter. Painting is a greedy beast, and you have to be willing to let it swallow you up.

1 Oort Cloud 2 2 The Four Comets of Tnorala Uplift

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MARITA KOHL I read a novel in which the female protagonist asks: “Were hands by nature more honest than heads?”1 To find out I crocheted, knitted, made numerous tracings into carbon paper, tore fabric and placed threads one at a time. Using my hands in these repetitive activities allowed my mind to relax.

I forgot about ideas and lost sight of the outcome and instead focused on process alone.

Over time I saw that this making was about time itself. Not in the usual way of either wanting more time or mourning its passing, but rather the point where time and being merge.

The works that have grown out of this inquiry are, in the words of Antony Gormley, “reflexive instruments rather than representational narrative… about being rather than doing.”2 1

Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days 2 Gay Watson, Attention: Beyond Mindfulness

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2 1 Fields of Memory I, II, III, IV 2 Enfolding 3 Uncertain Construction (work in progress)

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LINDY LEE INTERVIEWED BY MARITA KOHL

Lindy Lee’s artistic career spans over three decades. She has a well-established reputation in Australia and exhibits internationally. In 1984 she graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma in painting from Sydney College of the Arts, and in 2001 she received her PhD in Fine Art from the University of New South Wales. She taught for many years at Sydney College of the Arts. Lee’s early works make reference to the Western canon of portraiture and question the notion of authenticity in artistic practice. She has used imagery from her family photo albums to explore the experiences of loss and transition of five generations from China to Australia.

In recent years she has worked on large scale public art commissions in Australia, China and the USA. An important part of Lee’s life and art is the practice of meditation and exploring the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism. Three years ago she moved with her husband and their three Scottish terriers to the Northern Rivers. We spent an hour sitting and talking on a daybed looking out onto their subtropical garden.

What drives your art practice?

The overriding principle, in terms of my art, is about connection and to heal the sense of division from the world, or at least to examine that division.

In one interview an interviewer asked you about the two words “longing” and “belonging”, and your answer was that we all have a longing for wholeness. Were you aware of that longing when you started making art, and did art-making help you to heal?

I don’t think that I understood it. Longing is a really interesting experience, it propels you to go and meet something that you don’t know yet… and you don’t know it until you meet it. The interviewer who posed that question was Sri Lankan-Australian.

You are from Germany, my parents are from China. In our contemporary world our human population has been very migratory, and that sets up all sorts of dissonances of belonging and connection. It seems to me that all human life is this journey towards completion or wholeness.

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How has your motivation or discourse around your art changed over the years?

For the first three decades of my art practice it was all about pain, about this sense of disconnection. Initially I think that art starts from some wound that we feel. When we are young that wound is usually about our sense of difference in the world. As human beings we long to be the same as everybody else and simultaneously we long to be unique. It is that space between what we really are and the ideals imposed on us that actually provides a lot of the fodder for art. There are a number of personal strands in my work. Some of them are directly related to the fact that I was Chinese growing up in a very white culture.

I was born here in the ‘50s and grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s when there was still this thing called the White Australia Policy. I didn’t fit into that paradigm, and what you internalise is that there is something wrong with you. There is also trans-generational pain through my family. My parents were married during the Japanese occupation of China, otherwise known as the Second World War. My grandparents had been landowners, so when communism came to China that made them pariahs. In all that tumult of war and revolution there was an extreme amount of pain experienced by everybody. My parents are of a generation that preferred not to talk about it, not ever. But in the not-talking something is transmitted nonetheless. As a child I spent my life thinking about, figuring out, what that is.

There is a quote by the poet Rumi – “The wound is the place where the light enters you” – and I’m wondering whether art can be that light?

There is a point at a very young and impressionable age where something happens… it could be one’s sexuality, it could be one’s race, ethnicity, it could be anything. This pokes a hole into any ideal or perfection and that becomes a wound. You’ve got only two options. Either you seek to understand and heal it or bury it. I’m 64 and I’d say until about five years ago all of my work was about finding some solace for this wound, some way of allowing this existence to actually be. My work was not so much about identify, although that is part of it, but rather this ongoing question of being in the world. The most pertinent part of that question is “What is this that exists?” What is this that functions in so many different ways. What is it?

Did you have a plan or clear idea about the kind of art you wanted to make?

No. It’s really important not to have any ideas at all, just curiosity. When I was teaching I was always asking my students what materials make you curious? Materials in themselves and our own lived experience form strong associations. For the first 25 years of my career, every four or five years I’d be obsessed with a colour. For the first 10 years or so I’d always fight that intuition.

But I’ve learned now that each new materiality that I am drawn to, whether it’s colour, metal or fire, is always the right material.

All I know is this strong sense, which I’ve cultivated over 35 years.

You seem to explore the materiality very deeply.

You go really deep by using it over and over again and seeing what resonates and works, even if you don’t understand why it does that. Maybe the question is only half-formed. The poet Rilke, in letters to a young poet, said something like: “Don’t be concerned with the answer to your question, just love the question itself”.

The answer is just a momentary thing whereas the question is a perpetual engagement with the world. It’s much more interesting to feel the pull of something and be inquiring why it is pulling you.

When you say that the question is more important than the answer, that reminds me of Koan study (Zen riddles) in Zen Buddhism, which is another big part of your life.

Koans are beautiful but incredibly frustrating and confronting at the beginning because you’d feel bad about not knowing the answer. That is exactly the first hurdle to get over. You enter that space of not-knowing and allow the answer to come in periods of meditation or thinking or working in the everyday, to float up and see how they rub against each other. You don’t will anything… and that’s also the creative process.

What advice would you give an emerging artist moving into self-directed practice?

Somebody asked me a similar question a while ago. It was framed: “Now that you are an artist of many years’ experience, what would you tell your younger self?” As simplistic as it sounds, I said something like this: “There is this thing called the true north, and your responsibility is to find what that true north is.

And no matter what, it will guide you, and sometimes you feel stuck, extremely concerned and full of anxiety. Nonetheless, that true north is your best friend”.

I read in an essay by Damian Smith that “serious engagement with your art practice is not about looking at pictures, but rather about changing our relationship with the world”. What do you think about that? Whether that is really possible?

I find looking at art a really curious thing. I found it very inspiring and perplexing when I was younger and there are still favourite paintings, favourite works of art that I will go to and I still have that moment of awe, this deep feeling. There is a Michelangelo Pieta in Florence. It is not the most famous one, it is roughly hewn. I’ve seen it about half a dozen times in my life and each time it made me cry. It is a meditation. A lot has to quieten down to really stay and be with something, then the totality of what you are meets the totality of that piece. When I’m at a Biennale or a huge art event I end up saying to myself: “Compel me, make me care”.

The one requirement that I have is that this work has to make me care, but then it’s not going to make me care unless I’m willing to spend some time with it. In the activity of truly engaging with a work of art is when the work of art actually exists. It doesn’t really exist before that moment.

Exactly what your true north is might be rather elusive and hidden at first…

Yes, because it’s the hardest thing, because you’ve got so many conflicting things that get shoved at you – what you should and shouldn’t be. Where is the time to actually encounter what you are? That true north is just encountering what you are. You know when you are a young artist you are always comparing yourself to the next person… even when you are not such a young artist!

It sets up a domino effect of anxieties. The answer comes in the willingness to encounter and meet yourself at every turn. That is what meditation practice is about as well. It’s not about achieving an ideal state, because if you want that, I’m sorry, but you are going to fail, cause there ain’t none… this is it. Meditation practice and art practice are about a genuine relationship to your own life. It’s not something superficial like looking good. Yes, that’s part of it but it’s much more. Whatever gives you pleasure, sets up anxieties, touches you, these are first indications that there is a true north. Remember, you wouldn’t feel all these conflicting states unless there was something at stake here.

Lindy Lee with her work Being Swallowed by the Milky Way

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SPIDER McKEY My work this year harks back to a time when art was made with intent and purpose, usually of a political or social-change bent. It purposely avoids the making of art as a cathartic exercise and aims for an intellectual, or even visceral, response from the viewer.

The combined use of sight, sound and space allows immersion into the work to enhance the subject and response, and forces an extra level of engagement beyond that of voyeur.

Tough subject matter abounds in contemporary society – from eternal themes such as war and famine, love and hate to more topical issues such as the environment, refugees and the abuse of children in our schools and homes. To that end the works are painted on cardboard to reflect the inherit need of our society to quickly package, cover and dissolve uncomfortable or inconvenient “truths”. Yet some things just never go away…

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1, 2, 3 Preparatory sketches for Hypocrisy is Not a Sin 4 I Think It’s Time We Moved On 5 Revivification I 6 Revivification II 7 Revivification III

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EMMA WALKER INTERVIEWED BY SPIDER McKEY In her recent show at Sydney Contemporary, Emma Walker extended her practice beyond the adventures that began in previous series such as Sediment Songs (2016) and Intimate Immensity (2015) which both explore the patterns and rhythms that recur in nature. Yet this is what we have come to expect from an artist who Sebastian Smee, Australian author and art critic with the Boston Globe, describes as “one of Australia’s most convincing and original painters. Her work is as audacious as it is poetic; the one quality leavens the other, so that just as delicate reverie sets in, you’re pulled up by a less immediately seductive note, an act of painterly boldness or some other form of tough, enlivening aesthetic decision... these are intelligent paintings – intelligent in their understanding of ambiguities, of space, and of colour”. The new series, Surface Immersions, continues this combination of audacity and intelligence. It consists of works on board accompanied by a multitude of smaller studies and vignettes that reflect themes apparent in the larger works. Their forms are irregular yet not erratic, and they are further amplified by an interplay of structural surfaces and exquisite colour that entice the viewer’s gaze to slowly wander over and through the atmospheric “don’t call them landscapes” and abstractions.

Why do you paint?

Because I always have. I ask that of myself: “Why do I do this because it is so hard?”. You’re asking at a good time because I’ve come through the other side of the difficulty with these paintings, and when I come through difficulty that’s when it becomes clear why I paint. To me it’s something to do with exploring the self and how this very mysterious process echoes and reflects parts of me and parts of the way I think... the whole gamut of being a human gets played out in making these paintings. Though why paint, and not gardening or carpentry? I love the substance, I love the things it can do, I love the fact that I’m continually finding new things to do with it. Obviously colour is a big thing for me, but I don’t pick it apart. You know that expression about dissecting the butterfly?

Butterflies are these beautiful things – to then go and find out how they work, and why they’re like this, takes away something of the magic of them. And I’m learning new things every bloody time I pick up a paint brush, and every painting that I make is another learning curve for me. But at the same time I don’t want to understand it fully, there’s a part of me that doesn’t really want to know the full answer to that question because it’s a continuous uncovering, a continuous search.

Over the years you’ve slowly transitioned from using a flat surface for your paintings to one that is becoming much more sculptural. Where did that begin?

The sculptural part of things started with our collage group – Michael Cusack, Chris Willcocks, Meredith Cusack, James Guppy and myself. Going to those dinners and playing with bits... I’d always played with paper sculpturally, but there was something about this night where we’d sit there, get pissed and make stuff with paper – I was one of the few who would make mine a bit three dimensional. I just wouldn’t have had time to do that in my studio as I was busy working on a show or whatever. So we had this lovely opportunity to just play with stuff, and I just kept making these little discoveries with paper. There was nothing amazing about it but because I wasn’t thinking too much about it, it was all about play. I reckon that really started there for me – playing with paper more sculpturally, and then I started bringing that play into the studio. I can’t remember how I started carving. I bought a Dremel [a multipurpose engraving tool] and just started playing.

I used to do a lot of etching, so I’ve always stuck the back of my paintbrush and made marks into paint. The carving was just an extension of that. It’s been a very gradual transition; I really like sculpture… I do have that in me but I don’t have time to push it as much as I’d like. I do want to get “properly” three dimensional at some point. But for me these are sculptural propositions as well as paintings. I’ve done that intentionally, I’ve made the edges rounded or misshapen, plus they’re sitting proud from the wall so that they cast a shadow – they really are becoming more of an object that stands proud of the wall.

Do you start with the sculptural elements or do you come to that later?

It’s all over the place – sometimes I start in the middle of the painting. Usually I’ll sand the edges in response to something that happened with the first few layers of paint. They go from paint into the sanding bay, back out here for more paint and then I’ll start routing in responses to drip marks or some of those forms that are starting to happen randomly.

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1 Surface Immersion 13 2 Surface Immersion 11 3 Surface Immersion 15

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So they’re not pre-destined from prior sketches or drawings?

Oh god, no. Never! With the works from Surface Emersion I began thinking about the surface of the painting, the psychological surface, the formal notion of painting and the tricking of the eye that we do as painters. So partially playing with that, to be able to pull the eye in or create a sense of depth, illusory depth, because it’s in essence a flat surface. I’m playing with those ambiguities and I like the idea that, from a distance, you can’t actually tell what’s going on and then you get in close and realise “Ahh, that’s actually a painted line”. I’m doing that intentionally… setting the spell then breaking it. The title of the show came first, so I knew it was something to do with this business of carving into a flat surface. The idea of immersion – going in, going under, beyond the surface – it had a poetic resonance. It’s almost a weird contradiction, surface and immersion. Sticking [the works] side by side seemed relevant. I was letting that be the guide as to where these paintings went in terms of subject… if you want to call it subject. To me they’re abstract paintings. They are still playing with landscape connotations – there’s the odd cloud that appears, or a spiral. A lot of them have an underwater feeling to them. And there are all these little memory triggers that pop up when I’m working from various places I’ve been, or experiences I’ve had in the landscape that find their way in. But it’s never literal, it just kind of happens through the process.

How does colour inform your work?

I don’t know about colour, it’s very instinctive. I don’t plan that either. It’s more intuitive than thought out. I don’t think much about colour…

But that green in Surface Immersion 13 (left) is a winner!

It’s a good green, isn’t it? But I had to find it. Every single one of

those paintings was an absolute battle... I mean, they always are with me, but these ones in particular. I could have kept working on them indefinitely. It’s like they didn’t want to actually be finished.

But I think the ongoing relationship I had with these guys, as annoying and punishing as it could be, is what makes them quite powerful. It’s like a relationship, it’s like a mystery that plays out between me and these materials and these surfaces.

Do you work sequentially or in parallel?

They all evolve simultaneously, but I work simultaneously on as many as I can get on the walls. Some will start to take precedence and start to pull me in more, so I might focus on one or two and leave a few to languish. Sometimes they get put in the naughty corner.

Tell me about the smaller works They were made intentionally, however a couple came from a big mistake which then got chopped up into smaller pieces and reworked. It can just start on the floor, pouring paint, moving it around, letting it dry onto another layer on top, until something starts to present itself to me.

How important is the titling of your work?

The works in the show were all titled, but I’m getting less inclined to title my works. I don’t want to dictate anyone’s perception of them, I don’t want to say this is a landscape or whatever. I’d like the viewer to have their own experience, so the titles I’m giving them are open to interpretation. I want people to see them in whatever way they want to. People always want to see something in something, it seems to be a very human thing to do, but I want to make them a little bit vague or mysterious so they could be numerous things or nothing. I’d like people to feel something when they look at my work, but I don’t want to say what that feeling is or what it should be. I’d like it be a collaboration.

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STEVE BUSH I’ve never been particularly interested in portraiture, but at the beginning of this year the BSA third year students spent a term with artist and teacher Travis Paterson, who encouraged us to explore the idea of abstract or psychological portraits. I was so inspired by Travis’ insights on the subject that I made a group of portraits using photography, drawing, painting and sculpture. At the same time I set myself the task of trying to produce works that fell somewhere between photography, painting and sculpture in an attempt to add another layer of ambiguity. The subjects of the portraits were mainly fellow students, along with teachers and artists – people I knew reasonably well, and who I liked and respected (with the exception of Donald Trump).

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1 Tracey Emin 2 Untitled Portrait 3 Portrait of Toni 4 The Mother and the Father 5 Portrait of Donald Trump as an Empty Vending Machine 6 David (1976)

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HELEN FARLEY I observe and then interpret my surrounding world with paint. Sometimes the work of other artists seeps into the paintings, either consciously or accidentally, and I push these shapes and colours around to arrive at a completely new work. I search for that inexplicable and mysterious element that, by its absence, draws the audience into the painting.

1 Bits and Pieces I 2 Bits and Pieces II 3 Bits and Pieces III 4 Bits and Pieces IV

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LAURA TATE You seem so familiar.

Sometimes I bump into people who seem familiar, but I just can’t place them.

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It often happens when people with whom I’m familiar in one context appear in an entirely different one; it’s like a kind of knowing yet not knowing at the same time. It’s this unsettling feeling that became the subject of my work during 2018.

I pair ordinary, familiar objects in unlikely combinations and arrangements that I usually stumble on by chance as though the objects are making themselves.

Seeing ordinary objects recontextualised, along with the irreverence of making useful things useless, drives my choice of materials.

If I respond to them (usually with laughter), then they become a work.

1 Mattie 2 Table Comb 3 Comb 4 French Roll 5 Cuppa 6 Juice 7 Baby Puff 8 Atlas 9 Runny 10 Goose 11 Vacuum

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DR ELLA DREYFUS INTERVIEWED BY LAURA TATE Dr. Ella Dreyfus is a Senior Lecturer in Photography and Head of Public Programs at the National Art School.

Ella won the Inaugural Olive Cotton Award for photographic portraiture and has had numerous exhibitions including The Body Pregnant, Age and Consent, Transman and Under Twelve. Her residencies at the Cite Internationale des Artes in Paris and Kunsthaus in Wiesbaden, Germany were an opportunity to explore her Jewish European family history.

Did you see your subject matter as something that wasn’t attractive when you were photographing it?

Well, you can say the pregnant body’s beautiful, but when I photographed them I was waiting until the end when they were the most extreme. While it is beauty – in as much as it’s new life and “look at the lovely round shapes” – it was often distended, with stretch marks, funny freckles, strange skin colouring. The women were really uncomfortable. I was quite interested in that side of things. And the old people… I’m sorry but old bodies are not particularly beautiful, young bodies are. There’s sagging skin, stretch marks, scarring from operations, people struggling to stand up straight, using walking sticks. I don’t see there’s a lot of beauty in that, but the images I made are, I feel, very poignant.

They’re touching images. However, I could talk about the boys.

I photographed my son and his soccer team when they were 11 or 12, then again at 18. When I lined the two pictures up together, it made my heart leap because I did see absolutely stunning beauty in those boys. It was probably just youth, and the fact that I was the mother of one of them. I’ve just started the third series and I’ve just photographed two of the children so far at 24.

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1 The Body Pregnant: Self Portrait of Ella Dreyfus 2 Under Twenty-Seven: SB 2005, 2012, 2019

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You explored the nude in early works such as The Body Pregnant, Age and Consent and Transman series. Though your images are not idealistic or beautified, they are beautiful images. How important is the gaze of your audience to the making of your work, especially in relationship to its beauty?

There’s an assumption that I’m concerned about beauty because sometimes the images appear, in some peoples’ minds, like you say they are, to be beautiful. I don’t actually think about beauty, and I don’t care about beauty. In my early work I was looking at the body in what I consider to be states of transition, on the verge of something – of becoming a mother, of dying, or entering old age or illness, on the verge of transgender. Well, that’s a big verge. When I was making that work I probably photographed them using conventions of black and white photography that were traditionally beautiful, but I was more concerned about the subject matter, and actually being quite ugly and distorted. The kind of things that people shy away from and turn away from and don’t really want to look at, but I did want to look at it. When someone says to me: “That picture of that ageing body, oh it’s so beautiful”, I just want to shoot them because, honestly, I don’t want people to say that. I don’t care about that side, I have no intention ever to set out and take something that appears to be unattractive and make it attractive. It’s not my interest.

What’s the motivation for bringing these subjects into the public domain?

Certainly my feminist intentions and education has been very important in my life. From the ‘60s and ‘70s feminism made huge leaps in allowing things that were personal and domestic out into the public arena as acceptable subject matter and conversation.

When you think back to the ‘60s when women in America formed those consciousness-raising groups – it was the first time they’d spoken in groups together about their bodies, about their relationships, about sexuality. This was ground breaking.

We take it for granted today that we have this freedom. In the

last 30 to 40 years there’s been an explosion of the personal, too much information. Who wants to hear all the gory details? In the ‘60s and ‘70s it was scary and radical for people to speak about the personal. When I did my research about the pregnant body in the history of art I found that male artists, for example, had done drawings, paintings, photographs or sculptures of their pregnant partners but never exhibited them. It wasn’t supposed to be a subject matter that could be seen. When I was in my twenties in the ‘80s, bringing the personal out and making it political was in full flight. I was really influenced by that in a good way. I think it was that thing of, well, why shouldn’t we look at it? Even when I did the Pregnancy series back in the late ‘80s it was like “Fuck it, let’s look at it, don’t hide it”. I remember when I was pregnant in 1987 I went into some maternity clothing shop in Pitt Street Centrepoint Shopping Centre and tried on a frilly dress with a frilly white collar. It was unbelievingly ugly and girly. Pregnancy

When I started changing away from the body it was very much to reveal and talk about making work that spoke to ordinary, everyday occurrences that might happen in family homes in any place. I started to use language and text in my work and create phrases that were perhaps slightly uncomfortable, like maybe there might be a dispute going on, little phrases that belong to interactions in families in difficulty. I placed them in environments that looked like ordinary places and made photographs that were kind of disturbing in a very banal way. The pictures are ordinary and banal and there are no people in them at all. I took those words with me overseas to France for another project. I went into Europe to have a bit of a look at the history of my family name Dreyfus because it’s a very historic name in the history of France with a very famous story about antisemitism in the military in the late 1800s – The Dreyfus Affair, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. I started to investigate something that I had avoided… I started to look at

clothes were designed to minimise the look, hide the belly, hide the body, infantilise you, take away the fact that you were a woman and turn you into a little girl. And let’s pretend you never had sex because you don’t really have a body anyway, it was just this immaculate conception birth. It sounds so stupid now but, honestly, even in ‘80s you could buy stupid dresses like that.

And I don’t know if you can still get them. I did it just for fun, for a laugh. I never would have bought one or worn one. It was actually important at the time to say those things and speak out loud those real experiences that women go through.

what was a huge part of my life, which was being a Jewish woman with a Jewish history in Europe. I dipped my toe into France and made a work about French Jewish history in Paris. Then only last year I went to Germany, which was a massive personal journey for me, it’s where Dad was born and his family all come from. I feel as an artist I come up against personal challenges and jump in and see how much courage I’ve got to go to places that I know are going to be confronting and difficult for myself, and allow some artwork to come out. I did that last year in Germany and I did something that for me is radical. I went into the city that my great grandparents had lived in and wrote their names up all over the city. With these same letters I declared “I am Jewish, We are Jewish, she is a Jew, he is a Jew” and I kind of grabbed back some territory from a country that had annihilated the majority of its Jews. And I know this is a while ago now but to me, at age 56-57, it was the right time to go back and see what would happen creatively in a place where terrible, terrible tragedies had occurred that I’d personally never faced, a place I hadn’t been willing to go to. So I went.

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Has your motivation for making work changed? It is still very personal?

Yes, it’s changed a lot. I’m not interested in the human body anymore. I had about a 20-year cycle of looking at the human body in various forms and states of transition, and now I’m more interested in revealing an internal nature. I still have quite a drive to delve into things that are hard to talk about. There was a period in my life where I went through a lot of personal hardship and I started to make artwork, through that period, that spoke of difficult emotions, difficult language, family disruptions of an ordinary nature. A lot of my work on the body – apart from TransGender because that’s not a universal experience – are all very common, ordinary things like aging, because we all age, or becoming pregnant, because a lot of women become pregnant.

Under Twenty-Seven will be exhibited at Watt Space, Newcastle, May 2019 as a featured exhibition of the Head On Photo Festival, and at Bondi Pavilion Gallery in October, 2019.

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TERESA EBENSTREIT I came to painting from a scientific background that dovetailed into a comfortable relationship with hard-edged, geometric abstraction. As this series has progressed it has transitioned into less rigid compositions as my visual language develops and becomes more complex.

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An investigation into the use of colour and form as a means for expressing intangible emotional complexities, ideas unspoken and half-remembered histories is at the core of my current practice.

We all share a common experience of difficult and unarticulated emotions, and it’s these shared and individual experiences that I want to express through my paintings.

I don’t have a logical or linear method by which I select my themes – decisions about my work are often made unconsciously or intuitively, and become more fine-tuned as they progress. The “why” of the piece usually becomes clearer as it nears completion and when my subconscious has finally had a means to express itself.

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1 Complexity 2 Citric Space 3 Untitled 4 Untitled

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ANNA HONEYCHURCH The impetus for my creative expression lies in my passion for researching, analysing and understanding human social relationships, our societal institutions and the interplay of these at the level of personal experience and outcome.

My current work takes a look at the role of culture in its pivotal role in the subordination of women, and the implications of the power and control mechanisms embedded within society that have promoted gender inequality and inequity throughout history to the current day. I’m interested in highlighting the pressing issue of our still-evident patriarchal society and the resulting abuse of women in its various forms today, as well as honouring the strength and resilience of women who have been deeply affected by abuse.

My work is conceptual and sculptural with an intention of inviting the viewer into a space that’s not always immediately obvious or comfortable.

It’s in my own exploration of what it means to be a woman in our current societal context that I’ve come to develop an understanding of the forces shaping my own experiences and outcomes in life.

I see and feel the beauty in humanity and honour this, but I also feel and see the shadows, and I aim to create work that’s not only relevant to me, but also to others.

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1 Lilli 2 Held 3 Safety Outside 4 Glorious River 5 Bonfire 6 Caged Crinoline 2

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MESHA SENDYK INTERVIEWED BY ANNA HONEYCHURCH

Mesha Sendyk is an artist who, if you asked about origins, would say simply that being human is enough. Unwilling to acknowledge divisions of nationality, she does however acknowledge the great value of cultural diversity. Having attended the National Art School in Sydney, Mesha went on to study Psychology at the University of Southern Queensland. After moving to Byron Bay she created the radio show “Iconoclam” on Bay FM, going on to win two national awards through the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

Not interested in rendering copies of the external world, Mesha’s work “involuted” (her word); meditation and the wordless language of the space between the obvious – the “supra-connective” – led to her developing new techniques of painting which finally evolved into the Visual Koan series.

Mesha uses metal powder and crystal materials, minutely applied to create layered holographic surfaces that organically shift in nature. Both The Visual Koans series and her latest BWG series play with principles of light. Using light-sensitive materials, they aim to speak to the viewer’s gnostic consciousness, breaking free of any expectation that “form” demands of us through the habitual patterns of mind, joining the artist in a universal, fundamental play of light, space and vibrance.

Can you talk a little about your evolution as an artist from your early days to the present day?

Art for me has always been an entry, a key into a sacred still state of “mind”. Actually, it’s more a state of “no mind”. It’s true that technical capacity with materials is vital, but in the real execution of art I sense that I’m simply a scribe for a greater conscious source that connects us all, albeit viewed from the diversity of perspectives which make up our incredible variety of being.

I remember as a child seeing the world in its particulate sense, i.e., as a conglomerate of moving particles. I studied what existed in the centre of my mind until I am now capable (in some small part) of rendering it for others to share.

You’ve studied psychology, criminology and art. Why have you chosen to follow through with your career as an artist as opposed to your other vocations?

I studied art first but found my work immature and bound by the commonality of an imposed world view. At that time I didn’t realise that my dissatisfaction stemmed from the copyist perspective of what is considered generally as “judgeably good art”. I could draw to perspective, paint an accurate portrait and mix colours to reflect reality, but I didn’t find this satisfying. The magical qualities which imbibe the structure of existence were not powerfully being expressed as I sensed they could be. My studies in criminology to some extent revealed to me the distortion that perspectives can introduce, perspectives which allow inauthenticity to be expressed and even defended. In order to crack open the shell of habitual mind, which include in large part our variously learned ways of seeing the world, it became clear that without access to our essential clarity we really don’t see much more than we expect.

Indeed, if we do see something out of the ordinary and societally“verified” reality, we immediately try to fit it into a known category, or we discount it as fictive. Subjective, gnostic, wisdom intuited, resonant knowing is something we all have, but it’s not a quality enhanced by our fixed and rather perpendicular learned frame of reference. It also became clear to me that in order to have an inclusive and wholistic “mind” – an unpeeled essential space of awareness – one must live within society but not be dictated to by it. I sought to find an avenue of expression that could harm none, inspire some and harmoniously express this viewpoint. Later, as a psychologist, I found it inadmissible to encourage others to express their expanded vision if I didn’t do it completely myself.

Making existential abstractionist artwork, using techniques beyond those I was taught, is my small way of honouring the essential as I experience it. Taking a wider view meant moving out of the comfort zone. The Australian contemporary art “world” grasped what was being expressed easily, so I decided to see where what I was creating would fit into the wider context. Little did I know at the time the mountains in myself I would have to move to take such a step. The last 12 years showing outside Australia really has been an expanded experience!

There is such a vibrancy, energy and spirituality in all of your work. How do you prepare yourself mentally before you start the creative process?

1 Modifier 2 Mesha Sendyk in the studio

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Given that I’ve been painting for a very long time now, painting practice is a continuation of my daily practices. It’s certain that meditation, and certain Kriya exercises especially, have progressively made my focus stronger and also more flexible.

Whilst in Australia my painting studio was in the garden and I needed space to be alone to paint. Now my atelier is in Saint Paul de Vence in France and, being open to the western ramparts of

this iconic perched 11th century village, it’s “open” to the public.

I have learned to stop and start painting without a shift in my focus. I can even talk whilst I paint, but this is not my ideal!

Progressively I notice that the “state of mind” I use to walk down the street is less distinct from the one I am in when I paint. Life is becoming a seamless flow of simply being, rather than separate states of activity-driven mental frames.

As an artist how do you go about seeking out new opportunities?

Opportunities for artists come as a result of having work seen and recognised for its quality and uniqueness. It’s important to be seen by selection committees in art prizes of note, and also be highly selective about what is accepted as an “opportunity”. There are many publications that select work for their global art books, some more significant in their reach than others. Vanity galleries diminish the value of an artist’s work and unfortunately even socalled “reputable” galleries steal work from their artists by selling and not paying the artist. So lengthy court and legal proceedings result. Not all compliments and offers lead to the desired result, which is to place work before the public and speak through the language-less connectivity of art! It’s imperative to overcome egocentric desires by which you can be manipulated, and learn the practical sides of the many facets of the art world – an art fair’s standing and objectives, a museum’s objectives and constraints, a gallery’s business models, a publication’s distribution reach, a critic’s relevance… Over the years it becomes easier to discern which options to take and which to leave. Having said that,

fundamental to good relations with all people in this sphere is a relinquishing of the ego around image, and a singular perspective is vital! Regarding the actual creation of artworks, there comes a point where whether people like or dislike or understand or dismiss works becomes immaterial. We are scribes of a source which does not judge our creations. If we produce our work with devotion and dedication to the expression of being authentic, and aware, it is more than satisfying. There are global mindsets of the star artist, the egocentric artist, the loopy artist, the artist apart, and all the other stereotypes that can dog ones use of the term “artist”, but this is all part of the “inner” way, which eventually doesn’t stick labels on anything and simply creates, like a cherry tree making leaves, blossoms and cherries! If the cherry tree doesn’t “compare” itself to a lemon tree, it will not lament being the producer of cherries nor try to make lemon juice!

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Who have been your most significant influences as an artist and why?

It’s been of significance to trust the way and not lament climbing the mountain and all the pitfalls and crevices on that way. The inner view of being an independent viewer amongst a greater view is truly satisfying. I respect the artists before and those now in the contemporary scene who state and express their perspective uniquely. There was a luminous work by Rothko I saw in the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum some years ago that struck me so much I had to be reminded that hours had passed whilst I stood before it. I was simply staring and being in appreciation of its gloriousness. The people I was with were getting hungry, but I had just partaken of a banquet of vibrancy and resonant energetic ecstasy that physical hunger was far from my experience. As Einstein said: “Time is an illusion, however significant”… especially before great works of wondrousness.

There are places in nature that fill me with awe also so mother nature is a confirmed favourite artist. The significance of the interior space located between my eyebrows and inside my head is also of major influence to my art practice, but that artist has no name that I know of. Being aware of the multi-faceted jewel of conscious experience inspires one to deeply appreciate the force of so many forms of creation, yes?! As an artist we do say yes and then learn how to make our art as an expression of that YES!!!

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What would be your top tip be for those embarking on a professional career as an artist?

Reach in and find your unique expression, then don’t judge and compare… simply allow the discovery of yourself as an existential being to inform your practice. It’s not always the correct answer that counts, but often the correct question. What can’t I see can be more vital than that which I can see!!

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TONI CLARKE The question of what is art and what constitutes an artist has intrigued me for a long time. I’ve always been surrounded by paint and have always painted, but does that make me an artist? I’m also a believer that you should never stop learning about the things you love, so I decided to go back to art school. Byron School of Art has really forced me to put this central question to the forefront of my mind. I’m thrilled that the course has pushed me to question what I’m doing, to strip back my practice and then rebuild it.

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I love being surrounded by the colourful words of the teachers, the encouragement of my peers, and the general push we all have to be critical thinkers about art. I cannot thank them enough for their input into my work.

At the moment my practice is immersed in the figure... what wonderful shapes we are! We can be dark, beautiful, elongated, mysterious and open, just to name a few. I’m full of this endless fascination for humans in all their forms and I’m certain it can keep me going for some time yet.

I begin with my composition and I let the paint and figure direct me. Painting “abstract” figures is exciting! You never know where you’re going to end up, and I love that! Even those days when a painting doesn’t work, I still learn something. It’s quite funny, I so love the solitude in my practice, the long lonely hours in the studio. I guess for me the joy that painting figures brings is I’m never really alone – as I look around me in my studio, there are friends everywhere.

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1 Date Night 2 Ginger 3 Woman Dressing 4 Where Did Everybody Go? 5 Woman With Stockings 6 Untitled

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JAMES GUPPY INTERVIEWED BY TONI CLARKE Good afternoon, Mr. Guppy! The studio is full of new paintings! What’s your latest body of work?

It was for an exhibition titled The Venal Garden which showed at Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane.

James Guppy started his art career by painting murals in England in the late ‘70s, but after displaying his work publicly for everyone to see he soon found himself downsizing onto canvas. He was craving a more “personal” experience and wanted to show his work in the intimate space of a gallery.

Since then James has exhibited in New York, Texas and throughout Australia. His seductive, powerful and thoughtprovoking paintings are surreal, figurative, about life and mortality, and are populated with flowers, fairies, animals and men in suits. James himself describes his work as realistic and illusionistic. He is also a director and teacher at the BSA. One Sunday afternoon I find myself with the good fortune of entering the magical world of Mr. James Guppy…

How did these paintings come to be? And where did you find your inspiration?

I quite often get ideas from what I see around me. When my wife and I first moved to Myocum we had to dig up and remove some rather large Camphor Laurel stumps to build my studio. We had a big bonfire on the property and we took photos of the event.

I was looking at the photos of the large charred tree stumps and they seemed like alien landscapes, hence a new body of work came from that. I invited Jan Murphy down to view the paintings and she didn’t really respond to them, only saying that they would be hard to “move”. I realised I didn’t want her to take paintings she wasn’t into, so I had to produce another body of work quickly.

I decided I wanted to revisit the Baroque-style flowers and I came up with the idea of men in suits morphing out of them. There was a connection between the style of the flowers that I paint, which are the ones from the old Dutch paintings, and modern capitalism.

The very first economic boom and bust was the “tulip fever” in Holland. As you can see, these paintings are filled with tulips, and my process was to take details from these Baroque paintings and blow them up, then place these men in suits into this other world.

I liked the idea of putting them into this strange alien garden… it created an odd tension between the men in suits and the “old” flowers. That oddness lies in the fact that the men in suits are not interacting – they’re either on their phones or having a fag.

It’s the big business that rules us, a testosterone drive where there’s a disconnection between us and them, the uniform of power. The men in suits could be seen discussing the value of the work, putting a monetary value on it before a visual value.

A bit like the world we live in. I guess they’re like little actors, and I like to put them in different situations.

What do you do if self-doubt creeps in?

I find it always best to push on pushing on. It’s important to keep working at it – sometimes the struggles can give you the answers you’ve been looking for. But the reality is that the life of a painter can be stressful…

Are you thinking about the title of the works as you’re painting them? Are titles important to you?

Words will always come up as I look more deeply into the works, but it can be difficult as a painter. I’m dealing more with the visual, so I often find myself wanting to title them Bloom 1, Bloom 2 and so on to avoid the problem.

What palette best describes your work?

I love earthy colours. My palette feels more European.

How do you prepare for a day in the studio?

It varies, but normally I tuck my rags into my belt, make a cuppa, and open my palette!

1 Gain 2 Digesting the Options

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Who are you most inspired by?

My mother was a big influence and inspiration. She believed in

fairies, she was a wonderful storyteller, enchanted by classical music that filled our house. I found her mesmerising – she had this wonderful book of Richard Wagner’s Ring illustrated by Arthur Rackham. It was full of beautiful illustrations that have never left me. I still have it, it’s quite old. Although she did cut out a lot of the pictures in it… I may have to get myself another copy.

I love all sorts of filmmakers like David Lynch, Peter Greenway and Alfred Hitchcock. Writers, visual abstract artists..

I read recently that Goya has been a massive inspiration to you?

I’m fascinated by him – he was one of the first modern artists and I find him highly cynical and out there in his etchings and black paintings. He’s surreal, gothic and political, he’s a fascinating enigma.

Who are some of the characters you like to paint?

I like to paint what I see, warts and all. Not necessarily a realistic person, but a specific person. A weird mixture of fantasy and hyperrealism.

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What was the most memorable response you’ve had to your work?

I’ve had a couple of times when people have told me they burst into tears when they saw my work. I found that very humbling.

And a man said he took up painting as a result of seeing my work.

What do you like about teaching?

It forces me to think about what I do, and then to try and communicate that.

What advice do you give to artists who are starting out?

Practise and produce a good body of work. Think about the composition, what it is that you want to communicate, look for depth, try to seduce your audience, question the subject matter, do the research. The work should be engaging… I like intelligence in a work.

So what would you say ultimately makes a good painting?

A good painting should be like herpes – it stays with you for life.

It should affect the way you see art and realty forever more.

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DIANA MILLER

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The basis of my practice revolves around making, breaking and reconstructing. The use of forms that are dislodged, shifted or removed echo life’s knocks, and emphasise that nothing is ever perfect.

Working as a metaphor for the contradictions and ups and downs of life after having children, my process imitates the way we sometimes need to break down in order to be put back together.

Essentially process-driven, my works are a deconstruction and re-assemblage of images – with a strong focus on shape-making – founded in collage and realised in paint. Disrupting the unity of the picture plane, they dip between abstraction and formalism, bringing together elements both real and intangible.

Experimentation and play have become my most vital allies as I accidentally discover and stumble upon new ideas and ways of working, continually pushing my work into new terrain.

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1 Compartmentalise II 2 Internal External II 3 Internal External I 4 Push Pull 5 Embarkation 6 Quiver, Behind in Front, Belief System II, Fault Lines, Masked, Piece me Together, Belief System I 6

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DAVID QUINN INTERVIEWED BY DIANA MILLER David Quinn is a Dublin-born artist now living in the village of Shillelagh, an hour and a half from Dublin. I first came across David’s work on Instagram and was taken with its humble and minimalist charm, reduced palette and the freshness of the brush marks. David’s works are small, considered and pared back (in stark contrast to my own at the time) and they inspired me to pare back my own paintings as a creative challenge.

David shows his work at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, Purdey Hicks Gallery in London and this year has had exhibitions in Istanbul and Tokyo. He has also shown in a group exhibition at the Byron School of Art Project Space.

My talk with David was conducted over a Skype call where I was able to take in his modest, brightly lit attic studio at his home. He showed me the view from the large window over the surrounding trees, nearby river and church spire in the distance.

A peaceful place from which to make his work, David spoke fondly about his move to the countryside and his love of this uncluttered studio space. During our chat it was very obvious that his paintings, humble and quiet in their nature, were a reflection of the man who made them.

Do you have any other artists in your family?

No, all my family worked in factories. My father was a leather tailor, my mother worked in an office and all my uncles worked with their hands. But my mother was always making stuff at home, knitting etc. My wife and I met in art college, though.

I was studying design. My wife Sarah is very supportive – it’s a hard road being an artist. Sarah works as a teacher now, which is a steady income because as a painter you never know when the money is going to come in. If you want to have a family, it’s very difficult…

Because your studio is at home, do you keep your painting and family time separate?

I work all the time, you know. Sundays I try to keep relatively free… I don’t do much work on Sundays. But the rest of the time I like to keep busy. I don’t have set hours, but when the kids go to bed I come up here and I work till late. I work all hours, but I’m a night owl so often that’s the best time. It’s quiet, there are no distractions.

What did you get up to in the 10 years between studying and starting to show your work at galleries?

I didn’t graduate, I just wanted to mess around, and I didn’t want to write a thesis. I wasn’t interested. I got to the end of the course, but I didn’t care about getting a diploma. It made it difficult afterwards… I thought it wouldn’t matter, but a lot of people in the art world look at qualifications. Especially if you want to teach, you need a degree. Initially I started to get work as a commercial illustrator. It was more along the lines of editorial illustration, but it was quite abstract. I wasn’t good at sticking to a brief, but I made a lot of money doing a series of ads for a cigarette company. It was very lucrative, and I could do it in an afternoon. I thought: “This is great! This is where the money is, in advertising!” I travelled around a bit on the back of that but I’m not really a commercial illustrator. It involves a lot of discipline and there wasn’t much room for creativity, so it wasn’t for me. Someone suggested doing an exhibition, and I’d kept notebooks from when I was working in a design studio, and from college I’d kept notebooks of rough ideas and doodles and text… I liked the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat that used text. Someone suggested I have an exhibition of the notebooks, so I did. There was this edgy space in the city centre that had been taken over and sort of squatted in, and I put the show on there and got the cigarette company to sponsor it.

There were free cigarettes on the tables, and they paid for the wine. I showed some of the notebooks open in a display case but then you couldn’t see the individual pages, so I took the pages out and stuck them to panels and displayed them. That’s how I started the work that I still do today.

Who would you say were the three artists who most influenced your work?

Agnes Martin, obviously. Kurt Schwitters, he was a really interesting guy. German, supposed to be associated with Dada but he made these beautiful tiny collages from stubs of bus tickets and bits of rubbish he found on the street. I really love his work… there’s a joy to it. And then Jan Schoonhoven, who I only discovered about a year ago. He was a Dutch artist in the ‘50s and ‘60s who became successful well into his forties, but he kept up his day job as a postal worker. Every day after he came home on the train he would sit at his kitchen table and make these pieces from cardboard and papier mache. Beautiful things.

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1 Skein Painting 2 Veil

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If you could summarise what your work is about in a few words, what would they be?

I don’t know! Small? I don’t know if they’re about anything else but what they are. There’s an essential mystery to art that cannot be explained away… a lot of work goes into people making artist’s statements, but you can’t pin it down. I mean, you can ask questions about what you do, and you have a thought about what it is and you write it down, but it’s like catching water. It makes sense for five minutes but then it doesn’t capture the essence of what it is. You can limit it to the material and the process, and then something magic happens when you’re working as well.

You can’t have it all figured out beforehand, and that’s what brings the work to life.

What are your favourite materials to work with?

I use paper a lot on plywood. I prime with gesso and use an oil bar and coloured pencils, and I build the layers up and scrape it back again. The reason I do that – and I tortured myself saying I should use canvas because I’m an artist, but the truth is I don’t like to use canvas – is that I love paper. You get a clean line.

The only time I have a brush in my hand is when I’m gluing the paper to the board.

Are you good at letting artworks “go” when you’re struggling to resolve them, or does the struggle keep you engaged with them?

I move on to something else. I try to always keep working, even if it’s just cleaning the studio, even if it’s just sitting looking at the

work, that’s working. They made this famous film about Jackson Pollock – he grabs a tin of paint, pours the paint, grabs another tub and pours that on, and after 20 minutes he’s done. The film maker says: “That’s great, we have enough”. So Pollock rolls up the canvas, and puts it in the stove. The filmmaker says: “What are you doing?” and Pollock says: “I don’t work like that… I pick up one tin of paint, pour it on and I look at it for about eight hours, and then I pick up another one and there’s huge gaps of inactivity in between”. He just didn’t want the filmmaker hanging around for days!

In 2014 you made some works with the reference #dunkelbunt. Can you explain what this word means?

It’s a German word that translates to me as “darkly colourful”.

It was just a word I had in my head when I was making those works, they were dark but they had colour in them like the work of Ed Reinhardt. He made a series of essentially black paintings, but if you look at them there’s a hell of a lot going on – there are two blacks up against each other, but they’re not the same.

One’s black, so what’s the other one?

Do you have a favourite painting of your own?

Yes, at the moment, it’s called Veil [pictured above]. It’s landscape in format, an all-over painting. There’s no centre focus so your eyes are constantly focusing from front to back, it plays tricks with you. The quality of the line actually isn’t entirely smooth – it catches the light, so you have to stand in front of it. It sold, an art critic bought it. Which is always a compliment…

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Byron School of Art gratefully acknowledges the following sponsors for their generous support of this yearbook

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The BSA would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank Steve Bush and Diana Miller for editing and designing this Yearbook, Anna Honeychurch for co-ordinating sponsorship and Emma Walker for photographing the students.

BSA DIRECTORS AND TEACHERS Christine Willcocks Director and Teacher Michael Cusack Director and Teacher Emma Walker Director and Teacher James Guppy Director and Teacher Sarah Harvey Director Meredith Crowe BSA Project Space Co-ordinator Joanna Petrou Administration and Enrolments Travis Paterson Teacher and Marketing Michelle Eabry Administration Assistant CASUAL STAFF AND GUEST LECTURERS Kat Shapiro Wood Teacher Amber Wallis Teacher Rene Bolten Teacher Raimond de Weerdt Guest Lecturer Murray Paterson Guest Lecturer Mostyn Bramley-Moore Guest Lecturer Brent Harris Guest Lecturer Andrew Browne Guest Lecturer Edwina Corlette Guest Lecturer Mirjam Wendt Guest Lecturer