CAMPUS COLLECTION

The Campus Collection consists of works across a wide range of media that includes painting, printmaking, drawing, ceramics and photography. This collection contains examples of artworks by former student and staff alumni and celebrates the achievements and artistic endeavours of the University community.

first saw Boneta-Marie Mabo’s work at Deakin’s Institute of Koorie Education in 2014. Whilst there visiting one day, Professor Brian Martin took me to view her work in a studio as she was then one of their students. The sophistication of the work and the strong sense of design was impressive for someone so young. It could have been that the subject matter of these works, to honour her grandfather Eddie ‘Koiki’ Mabo, combined with the close personal impact of such an important figure in Australian history inspired such a powerful piece, but I had no hesitation in recommending its acquisition for the University’s art collection. So I was excited to once again reconnect with her work when these two pieces were displayed at IKE in a solo exhibition in 2016.

Coming from her first solo exhibition at the State Library of Queensland in June 2016 they resulted from her being the inaugural artist-in-residence for the State Library of Queensland’s kuril dhagun Indigenous centre in 2015. Whilst undertaking the residency she found portraits of Indigenous women without any name, or with labels such as “black velvet” or “gin”, as Mabo said they were considered to be objects rather than women. Rarely were these ancestors afforded any respect so she created the soft sculptures to “encourage viewers to acknowledge all women that are passed who didn’t have the ability to have control of their image or of their identity”.

Also as part of that exhibition she created a contrasting series of portraits presenting four women of today as full and unique human beings, celebrating women at different stages of their lives who chose their own poses and were labelled exactly as they wanted to be seen. This stunning portrait of her grandmother was completed after many conversations with her grandmother to choose the right time to paint her…“young, hard at work and powerful”. We are privileged to be the caretakers of these powerful and important works which have quickly become significant pieces in the University’ art collection.

Leanne Willis

Dreaming stories from the Creation times hold significance to Aboriginal peoples as they are reminders of our past, create meaning of our present and direct our future. Whilst many traditional Creational stories contain elements of lore and aspects of cultural sacredness, contemporary transformations are other expressions of meaning. In describing Emu Dreaming – Feathers, one immediately notices the bold richness of colour that emphasises energy, motion, and inner form. Each vibrant stroke provokes emotion through an interplay of colour, light and texture. It speaks about Country (land).

Liz Cameron Director, Institute of Koorie Education

Ewen Coates

Fountain of Youth 2010

There is something very nostalgic in Ewen Coates’ Fountain of Youth sculpture. It evokes memories of my youth, the styles, the fashion, even the somewhat cocky angle of stance of the hips and bent knee portrayed in the sculpture, depicting how my peers and I all embraced life as younger people. The sculpture itself represents not only reminiscence, but perhaps more excitingly, it is an experimental take on an earlier work, Disgrace. In the true spirit of youth, their capacity and desire for risk taking and their ability to face the world in their tight jeans, with a slight slouch of posture, this work is very appropriately named.

While Coates is an Alumnus I am quite confident, this work completed many years after he graduated, is more appropriately, aligned with his thought processes and experiences post-Deakin as well. Nevertheless, it is a connector at the University. Situated in a prominent public space, have been privileged to meet many visitors to Deakin and to be able to make a connection with them through our shared engagement with and in discussion of this particular sculpture. It is almost as though the Fountain of Youth is one of our group, contributing to and exuding a personality of its own.

Professor Brenda Cherednichenko Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts and Education

Allison Bennett is undertaking Creative Practice by Research PhD 2017, Deakin University Motion Lab.

Untitled (birds and butterflies) 2013 was acquired for the Collection from Bennett’s exhibition Shifting Skin held at the Deakin University Art Gallery 2013, curated by Leanne Willis. The exhibition went on to tour, the Kingston Arts Centre, Cork Film Centre, Ireland, the Wyndham Cultural Centre, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, 10x 8 Gallery, Sydney and Theorizign the Web Gallery, New York. The exhibition of giclee prints with augmented reality overlay attracted worldwide attention in various media outlets including ABC TV news, and outlets in USA, Mexico, Italy, Indonesia, France, Spain, India and South Africa just to name a few.

John

recall as a new migrant to Australia being awestruck by the vast mysterious land that was Australia. Then I discovered John Olsen. am transfixed by the way Olsen’s work takes us on a journey through the varied landscapes of Australia, highlighting the changeability of seasons, the stark colours and, always, the energy of the people. And, then there is his approach to the unique Australian fauna and flora. He challenges us to think differently about what we see.

Big sky, the vast spaces and inserted deftly, the Emu. This work, Emus captures the Olsen genius of minimalism and sparse colour to show the vitality of this wonderful animal. With its wavy lines and colourful splashes and dots it is instantly recognisable as an Olsen –a joyous depiction of sheer delight in the wonderful Australian landscape.

Olsen is one of Australia’s greatest living artists and I am sure our namesake Alfred Deakin would be delighted by the synergy between his own love of country, as expressed through his writing, and Olsen’s unique perspective of the Australian landscape. It’s a grand connection of our University history connecting to the current day.

Professor Jane den Hollander AO Vice-Chancellor, Deakin University

Geelong

“One of the rarest qualities in contemporary painting is wit. When we do encounter it, we are surprised, almost ambushed by its presence, and then find ourselves immediately engaged. Jan Senbergs’ Geelong Capriccio is in every way a painting of wit with its single absurd proposition as to what the world would look like if Geelong had become the capital and the site of Melbourne remained open paddocks...

T.S. Eliot once shrewdly remarked that wit was the ‘alliance of levity and seriousness’. What makes Senbergs’ Geelong Capriccio a work of real substance along with a certain sweeping grandeur to it, is that it points to one of the most serious and enduring qualities of the Australian experience. Australians and the cities they inhabit are caught between two extreme conditions; a vast and thinly populated inland and an equally vast, uninhabited space, the oceans of the world. There is something precarious about this clinging to the littoral – a condition shared by no other country in the world. By moving the centre from Hobson’s Bay to Corio Bay, Senbergs takes us one large step closer to ‘the deserts of ocean’. It seems to me to be a very Antipodean painting: the upside down world, which Europe imagined Australia to be, a place where anything might happen. Eliot went on to say that by the ‘alliance of levity and seriousness … the seriousness is intensified’ and so it is in Jan Senbergs’ masterpiece, Geelong Capriccio.”

Patrick McCaughey, 2010

Reproduced with author’s permission from the catalogue Geelong Re-imagined and Observed Works from the West Coast by Jan Senbergs, Deakin University Art Gallery, 2011

Leonard French’s The Four Seasons of Life 1987 was commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of Deakin University. Although now 30 years old the work glows as if produced only yesterday. Perhaps best known as the artist who produced the ceiling in the Great Hall at the National Gallery of Victoria, French’s stained glass work adorns many Australian public institutions such as the Australian National University and the National Library of Australia in Canberra. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 1968, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his service to painting, being considered an accomplished painter, printmaker and stained glass artist. Although his profile faded in the later years of his life and career it is fitting that we now pay homage to the extraordinary nature of his work that still retains its impact some 30 years on.

According to the records kept with this work, The Four Seasons of Life synthesizes the universal insignia of the cross, circle, dome, serpent, and bird to create a rich yet spiritual visual impact. These designs are created on a layered enamelled surface, which give the piece a shimmering luminosity.

David Harley File_49& 2011-2014

David Harley is a contemporary, Melbourne-based artist who integrates the technology of computing and printing into his practice as a painter. Harley’s paintings draw from an understanding of European, Australian and American abstraction, while also being strongly influenced by the artist’s philosophical and musical interests. As a great grandson of Alfred Deakin, Harley has a close connection with the University.

“The files names often represent the initials that the computer file gathers in its development. Sometimes it is hard to work out where it started, although the file, File_49&, name refers to the 49th Symphony of Haydn in F minor. The listening of music is often used as a trigger or stimulus. There is a fusion reached between the mood experienced by listening to particular music and then being able to convey that within the pictorial work.”

Artist’s statement 2014

One of the most intriguing aspects of Wall Mural 1975, is what it reveals to us about the artist, George Baldessin’s (19391978), dual practice as a sculptor and printmaker. Not only did Baldessin move freely between the two disciplines, exploiting the unique properties of each; he often combined elements of both in a single work.

This was certainly the case with Wall Mural. The mural is reminiscent of a worked etching plate. The female form, one of Baldessin’s favoured recurring motifs, is depicted in low relief, accentuating his sensitive use of line. As fellow printmaker and sculptor Jock Clutterbuck observed, Baldessin was ‘very comfortable with the practicalities of drawing on a soft clay slab, like it was an etching plate’. The mural, freed from the constraints of traditional sculpture, offered Baldessin a way to capture the nuances of a shallow printing plate etched with line. Baldessin’s experiments with cutting and shaping plates is also echoed in this piece in the abstracted fragments that unfold like a concertina across the wall, revealing body parts and architectural elements. Our eyes are drawn up and across with the thrust of the mural, encouraged by the movement of the bodies.

The clarity and resolution of this piece can, in many ways, be attributed to a pair of ambitious works Baldessin was working on earlier in the same year. Baldessin had been selected, along with Imants Tillers, to represent Australia at the São Paulo Biennial in 1975. It was here he exhibited two large-scale works alongside each other; the fourteen-metre, multi-panel etching Occasional images from a city chamber 1975; and the cast aluminum sculpture Occasional screens with seating arrangement 1975. The pair demonstrate a rigorous testing and exploration of scale, composition, and the interaction of two and three dimensional space. In both the prints and the seven-metre free-standing sculpture, the female figure is the central focus which, along with architectural elements such as doorways and furniture, dictate the movement and tempo of the works.

Wall Mural is a refined synthesis of Baldessin’s printmaking and sculptural practice, revealing his command and fascination with both disciplines, as well as his proficiency as a draftsman.

Curator and Ursula Hoff Art History Scholarship recipient 2015, University of Melbourne

Sisters Tjungkara Ken, Yaritji Young, Maringka Tunkin, Freda Brady and Sandra Ken are part of the large but tight knit Ken family. Distinguished artists and daughters of senior artist Mick Wikilyiri, they are custodians of the honey ant story cycle. Together the Ken family are a dynasty of artists, painters and story tellers of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands located at Amata in the far northwest corner of South Australia.

The Seven Sisters is a Tjukurpa or creation story about the constellations of Pleiades and Orion. The story describes Orion as Nyiru traditionally known as a lusty or bad man. Nyiru is forever chasing Pleiades or the seven sisters of the painting’s title, as it is said he wants to marry the eldest sister. The seven sisters travel again and again from the sky to the earth to escape Nyiru’s unwanted attentions. They turn into their human form to escape but he always finds them and they flee back to the sky. As Nyiru is chasing the sisters he tries to catch them by using magic to turn himself into the most tempting kampurarpra (bush tomatoes) for the sisters to eat and the most beautiful Ili (fig) tree for them to camp under. However, the sisters are too clever for Nyiru and outwit him as they are knowledgeable about his magic. They go hungry and run through the night rather than be caught, but every now and again one of the women falls victim to his ways. It is said that he eventually captures the youngest sister, but with the help of the oldest, she escapes back to her sisters who are waiting for her. Eventually they fly back into the sky to escape, reforming the constellation.

In 2016 The Ken Sisters were commissioned by Deakin University to produce this unique and profound painting. The work describes a story that is ancient, yet it is also contemporary, as it is a story of powerful women who work together to overcome adversity to sustain culture and community.

James Lynch

The Ken Sisters

Freda Brady

Sandra Ken

Tjungkara Ken

Maringka Tunkin

Yaritji Young

Seven Sisters 2016

John Wolseley

South flank of the dune 1993

“I have been trying to understand sand dunes their layering, their rhythms and movements and their cyclic developments which have the structure and elegance of a complex mathematical theory. Often I have been camped in the swale of some huge longitudinal dune and during the night, the wind from some unusual quarter has quarried down through several strata of sand and revealed hidden layers of great antiquity say a thousand year old camp of the Wanganuru people. Or revealed the geography of an older dune system which in turn may cover the fossilized remains of a Pleistocene forest. I have been looking upon these layered ‘archaeologies’, these gold and red piles of different histories and systems as a metaphor for the human psyche; the way each of us could be seen as walking a many-layered world of passions, ancestral memories, neuroses, genetic patterns and ancient archetypes.”

Dale Cox

Usurper – High tension 2015

As someone who didn’t grow up in this country there are certain images that make an impression on me as being classic Australian. When first saw this work it immediately drew me in and captured my imagination. It is one of my favourite pieces in our Collection. I find that it conjures up a natural tie to our Waterfront campus. The stunning building that now stands as the centrepiece of the campus was once a cornerstone of primary business for Geelong as the wool store. First built in 1934, the building was renovated by the University in 2009.

On first viewing this piece from a distance, the shimmering gold background appears to elevate the status of the sheep. On further inspection you notice the power lines on the back of the sheep. The artist explains that the work is called Usurper which is someone (or something) that wrongfully takes someone else’s place. The power lines scar across the sheep as a reminder that sheep themselves are foreign to the natural bush land as we are to this beautiful landscape.

More than ever, we must be mindful of the effect we have on the natural environment.

Ron Fairchild Vice-President and Chief Advancement Officer

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda

Sally Gabori

Dibirdibi Country 2011

Deakin is privileged to be able to share Dibirdibi Country by Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori with its community. This work is at once confusing, disturbing and exhilarating. It is representative of so many aspects of life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. At Deakin we share this work in the hope that others will engage with the artist’s experience too. For me, Gabori has been able to reveal the many stages of Aboriginal experience in Australia as her work takes us from brightness and colour, to the reflective depths of introspection and to the strength and explicit honesty of People and Country.

This large work can probably be responded to in many ways, but I choose to be convinced that the artist wanted to describe the contradictions of Aboriginality and their connection and need for Country, land and sea, as equally the beauty and severity, sadness and happiness, oppression and expression. Despite these challenges and complexities, I find this work uplifting and hopeful. For me, it inspires my greater commitment to know, respect and understand the connection to Country of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and to learn from them.

Professor Brenda Cherednichenko Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts and Education

from left:

James Tylor

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #2 2015

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #3 2015

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #5 2015

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #7 2015

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #9 2015

Aotearoa my Hawaiki #10 2015

Lisa Uhl lives and works in the remote Fitzroy Crossing in the West Kimberley. Uhl represents her unique connection to place through abstracted paintings of her Country, culture and community. Uhl paints with a joyous energy: layering highly keyed colours to create an atmosphere which speaks of the humidity and expanse of the Kimberley landscape.

The basic form of the Kurrkapi tree provides the underlying structure for Uhl’s painting. She begins each canvas by repeatedly painting the form followed by contours and filling in of the negative spaces. In doing so, the work pulses with vibrant brush marks and colours that convey the intensity of the desert heat. In Uhl’s more recent work, such as this, the negative spaces of her paintings take on a life of their own, connecting all. In doing so, Uhl gently refutes our often binary representations of nature.

Lisa Uhl is a committed and leading artist of her community, she creates work with gusto and a joie de vivre, despite living with the difficulties of a physical disability. Thus her work and life are greatly inspiring to all.

In her most recent exhibition contemporary artist Anne Zahalka returned to representations of the Australian landscape and imagery that recalls the canon of Australian painting. The Landscape Revisited 2017 is the development of an earlier series of collages from the 1980s where Zahalka questioned national identity by altering commercial reproductions of Australian Impressionist paintings. In 2017, Zahalka has opted for a more straight forward photographic restaging of the original paintings, setting her new works in the surrounding landscapes of Beechworth in North Western Victoria.

Outlawed! 2017 is an ambiguous image. Nolan’s Ned Kelly series is reimagined as a masked, black clad, female. The figure is both a would-be terrorist and freedom fighter and is mounted on horseback, back to front – not knowing where she is heading. This antihero is also brandishing a prop like a rifle and is wearing a large blocked logo emblazoned across her chest. Zahalka is working with an image deeply embedded to the national psyche which resonates in our consciousness. Outlawed! 2017 triggers something anew in how we see this iconic image. The artist leads us through a chain of references to further question our notions of home: ideas about access and belonging, displacement and exile.

James Lynch

Jim Pavlidis Champions 2008

Opposite:

Boundary Umpire is a symbolic piece that depicts a football umpire surrounded by fog on a cold winter’s day. Melbournian, Jim Pavlidis, painted this oil on canvas in 2002 and yet it is expressive of days gone by. The artist is renowned for his focus on urban life and its people, of which football has been intrinsic to his city, and mine, since the mid-1850s. am drawn to this piece as it conjures memories of my youth, growing up in Melbourne where local and VFL football were an integral part of my weekend. I have fond memories of barracking for my favourite team on a cold, frosty winter’s day where the football ground was heavily shrouded in fog and it was difficult to see the players and umpire at the other end of the field.

Today, children and adults still gather in great numbers to support their football team. When a game has been won, the victors pose for the team picture. This image becomes a fundamental record of the club’s history, and it is the second piece Champions that evokes this familiar scene. The lithograph portrays the traditional and typical image of team spirit and solidarity. The team members, their faces blurred, pose in the traditional stance: arms and legs crossed, standing in rows, ball in the middle. It could be any one of us, or any one of our relatives. Deakin is privileged to share these two wonderful pieces that are part of the University’s collection.

Kean Selway Chief Operating Officer

Aunty Marlene Gilson was born in Warrnambool and is a proud Wadawurrung traditional owner and Elder. After her father returned from service in WWII her family moved to Melbourne for work. As a young person Marlene Gilson had an aptitude for drawing and painting, attending Footscray technical school and excelling in the visual arts. Gilson held a wish to attend art school but instead entered the workforce to help support her family. She married and with her husband and young family settled in Gordon near Ballarat. Some four decades later in 2007 after a period of illness, Aunty Marlene Gilson recaptured her artistic ambition. Beginning with a series of hand painted wooden toys for her grandchildren, Gilson rediscovered her love of painting and story-telling.

Over the last 10 years Gilson has developed her artistic practice significantly using painting as an important visual link in the continuation of Wadawurrung history and culture. Cultural knowledge and the stories that have been passed down to her are woven through her elaborately detailed figurative painted scenes. Central to her work are the histories of the goldfields, the settlement of Ballarat and the cultural links to the Kulin Nation of Melbourne. Gilson’s painting style is direct and self-taught. What initially appears to be naïve renderings are revealed to be highly detailed narratives, often telling complex histories. Marngrook

2017 is a wonderful example of her varied interests, depicting an infamous historical football match between the Ballarat Miners and the Geelong Mariners. Gilson celebrates times of great social occasion, ceremony and cultural practices that have dramatically affected her Country and People. Gilson presents these with pride and a loving memory in recalling the daily lives, rituals and the stories of the Wadawurrung.

James Lynch

After establishing the Mildura Aboriginal Cooperative, Clarke moved to Melbourne in 1988, she has become a hugely respected community and cultural leader working seamlessly across the roles of artist, curator and academic. Her research reflects on traditions, histories and the material cultures of her ancestors all of which are expressed via an especially rich engagement with both traditional and new media forms.

“It’s about regenerating cultural practices… making people aware of, you know, our culture, and that we are a really strong culture, and that we haven’t lost anything; think they’ve just been, some of these practises have been laying dormant for a while.”

Maree Clarke in conversation with ABC local radio Mildura, 12 September 2011.

After viewing nineteenth-century examples of Indigenous necklaces in the collection of Museum Victoria, Clarke rediscovered her interests in body adornment and jewellery making. Working closely with family members Len Tregonning and Rocky Tregonning they have revived a long forgotten cultural tradition. Spending a great deal of time on country collecting feathers, seeds, ochres, wattle resin and other items such as emu oil and leather. This time spent together sourcing and preparing traditional materials combines both men’s and women’s business in traditional lore. Hanging proudly at Deakin Downtown, these two magnificent works imbue the spaces with an aura of ceremony and power.

Dr David Cross Professor of Visual Arts Faculty of Arts and Education

Nusra Latif Qureshi

Substantial Reflections II 2013

Substantial Reflections III 2013

Opposite: Gordon Bennett Abstraction (Indigene) 2011

Ricky Maynard from the series: Saddened were the Hearts of Many Men 2015

Left to right:

Gig 2015, Kerry 2015, Leigh 2015, Jamie 2015, Mick 2015, Sean 2015.

Maynard is a major figure in Australian photography. His silver gelatin portraits of these Indigenous men calmly demonstrate their dignity and power as they wear the weight of history with strength and courage while clearly; proudly and defiantly standing for their communities and themselves. Indeed, these are exemplary photographs. They put the camera, and the medium to work in the best way possible. These photographs are beautiful records of humanity, of time, of place, of character, and of the complex and problematic histories of dispossession and intergenerational trauma that we all must face up to.

Like their subjects, these photographs are as potent and positive as they are melancholy. It is left to the viewer to take their paths on board. Maynard’s work does not shout at us. It does not preach to the converted. Instead it resounds with a clarity of content and intent that, like the medium of photography, speaks easily and readily of what is before the camera and the viewer.

Maynard’s photographs are always saturated with history and meaning and these important works are highlights of the Deakin collection.

Dr Patrick Pound Senior Lecturer in Art and Performance, Faculty of Arts and Education

Esther Stewart

Ornamentation is a surface gesture 2016

Emerging Melbourne and Daylesford based artist Esther Stewart, first studied sculpture but the basis of her practice springs from a love of hard-edged and geometric abstraction. The subjects of her paintings include a combination of patterns, tessellations, shapes and forms inspired by interior designs from the past and referencing the domestic spaces in which we live.

Ornamentation is a surface gesture hangs proudly at Deakin Downtown. Its warmth and vibrant colour providing a point of difference to the subtle veneers, surface palette and textures of the contemporary architectural interiors.

Recently Stewart’s practice has left the confines of a single canvas. Her bold compositions now encapsulate a full spectrum of installation, sculpture, design and high fashion (in 2011-2014 Stewart worked as design consultant for fashion house Valentino). In a further twist, Stewart has transformed her paintings into unique handwoven woollen rugs. Taking the lofty symbol of high art she has turned it back again into an interior embellishment for the home. Beyond a discussion of high and low, Stewart’s significance lies in her ability to take the languages of fine art and translate these to other contexts. Stewart has moved far beyond the usual opportunities afforded by traditional artist’s networks in Melbourne, onto a truly international stage and hence she speaks to a global audience.

James Lynch

Ian Milliss Judgement 1999

Ian Milliss began exhibiting in 1967 as the youngest member of Central Street Gallery Sydney. His early formal abstract works led to becoming one of Australia’s first conceptual artists in the late 1960s. After featuring in high profile exhibitions such as the John Kaldor Art Project 2 and Object or Idea at the National Gallery of Victoria, by the mid-1970s Milliss moved away from the conventional confines of the art world towards cultural activism. With artist Vivienne Binns, Milliss worked on a campaign for equal representation of Australian and women artists in the Sydney Biennale. Further work on urban issues and resident action movements led Milliss to form the first Art Workers Union in Australia and with artist Ian Burn he formed the Media Action Group and Union Media Services.

Completed while undertaking a residency and exhibition at Florida Atlantic University in 1999 Judgement is a grand painting, representing the scales of judgement inspired by the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Negative Confession. In the Egyptian underworld, the hearts of the deceased were said to be weighed against a single feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and balance, law and order. If the heart was found to be lighter or equal in weight to the feather, the deceased was said to have led a virtuous life and would go on to next. Borrowing the visual languages of graphic design, advertising and Pop, Judgement retells an ancient mythological story to question the ideologies of contemporary life. As an alternative to the accelerated, consumer and quantitative driven life we now inhabit, Milliss suggests a move away from the burden of possessions to a lightness of being and spirit.

James Lynch

Rose Farrell and George Parkin

Owl Man 2008-2011

Owl Pair 2008-2011

Rose Farrell and George Parkin were at the forefront of Australian photography for over thirty years. Working collaboratively throughout this time their highly staged narrative tableaux considered archaic medical knowledge and historical treatments for illness. In this digital print and the accompanying papier-mâché busts, Farrell and Parkin shift focus to the intangible elements of character. These works, from the last series they created together, in many respects represent a culmination of their practice. Whereas earlier photographs involved either themselves or friends acting out scenarios in front of the camera lens, the print does not capture live action but instead a proxy of the body. Parkin’s face is photographed and printed onto cotton fabric which is subsequently sliced into fragments that are delicately pinned onto a papier-mâché bust. This creates a photographic surrogate which, together with a bust of an owl, is placed before an elaborately painted backdrop and rephotographed.

In the sixteenth century claims were made for the correspondences between human personality traits and animal characteristics. It was argued that by pairing animals with human types physiognomic resemblances between the two could provide insights into different human temperaments. This history underpins the emplacement of the busts before a landscape vista.

The backdrop is based on an illustrated edition of sixteenth century Italian poet and iconographer Cesare Ripa’s publication, Iconologia Ripa’s mythical landscapes set the scene for personifications of natural phenomenon and human behaviour. However instead of a direct copy, Farrell and Parkin cut and paste, assembling the landscape from segments of the original engravings. This is completed by conjoining a mirror reverse of the scene. Gnarled trees bend and twist to lock branches enclosing the space in a cavernous embrace. In Carl Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious the forest was an archetypal landscape imbued with latent memories from an ancestral past. In Farrell and Parkin’s depiction a sense of foreboding in the forest ribcage speaks of the primal fears and desires that characterise many wilderness narratives. It also recalls the Rorschach ink blot, a twentieth century test used to assess personality disorders. By linking ancient personality profiling with twentieth century diagnostic tools, Farrell and Parkin draw attention to the ongoing quest to find knowledge and the curious attempts to render visible human nature and the inner workings of the mind.

Wendy Garden

Curator of Australian Art Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory Graduate Museum Studies, Deakin

A new area of speciality for the Deakin University Art Collection, the Centre for Abstract and Non-Objective Art is a timely focus on an important field of the visual arts that is currently not well represented in Australian collections. Artists have worked with ideas of abstraction for over a century. As a truly international art movement, local developments are often overlooked yet they possess unique regional characteristics and breakthroughs and represent a very significant part of Australian art history. As a visual language and as a form of artmaking, the nature of abstraction and non-objective practice is perhaps best placed to inspire openness, foster new readings and diverse understandings.

Artist Stephen Wickham has been instrumental in working with me in the development of this new collection focus and it gives me great pleasure to share some his very particular reflections.

Leanne Willis

Modernity is equated with the secularization of Western culture, the dominance of the scientific method, and the endings of European empires. The late Professor Bernard Smith argued that Modernism is a “cultural expression of modernity” and suggests Paul Gauguin was the first European artist to take the path “away from Classical Naturalism”

Smith, the contrarian, presents a complex story of European Arts’ encounters with the ‘primitive’ that informed early Symbolists and later the Cubism of Pablo Picasso. His critique of abstraction weaves a labyrinthine journey that includes every sort of mysticism, myth, arts & crafts, and ideas of a mesmerising array of cultures, continents and eras.

A common story of abstraction suggests a paring away of external dross to expose some essential reality. Beginning with the heavy lifting by Cézanne, then major interventions by Picasso and Braque, and later, flourishes from Matisse, followed by the colourful chaos of the universe envisioned by Kandinsky, next was the orderly geometry achieved by Mondrian. In turn it is Malevich, who takes European Art over the brink, and into the black void.

Abstraction has been presented as a way towards some fundamental mystery that will be revealed by the application of wisdom or subconscious-abandon. Smith views abstraction as a reconciliation and examination of ideas and theories ranging from the fraudulent ideas of Madame Blavatsky, the pseudoscience of the Fourth Dimension, to the appropriation of signs and symbols, forms and structures.

In Petrograd 1915, Malevich exhibits his Black Square. This radical work ensured Non-Objective Arts’ standing in history. The foundations of further counterparty abstraction are planted in Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Rayonism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus, Formalism, Minimalism; myriad schools and schisms.

The end of the Second World War saw the cultural dominance of America, and Abstract Art was promoted as an emblem of freedom and liberty. Yet it was European emigres and refugees who transformed American Art from parochial cosmopolitan.

Now, Abstract and Non-Objective Art is international and ubiquitous. Contemporary practitioners are engaged in all manner of critiques, innovations, theoretical discourses, scientific innovations and stylistic tremors. It is here to stay.

Stephen Wickham

1. Smith, Bernard The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and Its History MacMillan Art Pub., 2007

Stephen Wickham

Homage to Mr Balson No.12 2010

Donated by though the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Evan Lowenstein, 2012

Theo Strasser

Pool of Thought 2010

Theo Strasser was born in Holland. He came to Australia as a child but returned to Holland in the 1970’s where he became enamoured with Mondrian and Van Gogh at the Kröller-Müller Museum in The Netherlands. Returning to Melbourne he studied at Prahran College in Melbourne under Roger Kemp and has been exhibiting since 1982. Perhaps a legacy of Kemp’s instruction, his work has been described as ‘transcendental abstraction’. This particular piece has taken months to create with the paper being dipped multiple times in a water based medium with re-staining, soaking, repainting, drying, tearing and scratching to ultimately create a fluid work of sophisticated beauty.

When describing a similar piece, Strasser stated, “I feel involved with the turmoil of the expanding world but at the same time detached. In my studio at Box Hill there is a silence that grips the suburban streets. Painting is a product of this environment, it somehow deals with landscape and rejuvenation. Connecting and questioning. Also necessity” 1