Hazelhurst art on paper award 2017

Introduction The works in the 2017 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award demonstrate the materiality of paper, its versatility and the possibilities of paper as a medium. Aside from being a support for photography, printmaking, drawing and painting, paper – from the thinnest of drafting films to heavy weight card – can be cut, torn, folded, layered, scratched, scrunched, shredded, knitted, animated, wrapped, found and re-purposed, pasted on to a wall, punctured, rolled or burned.

Held every two years since 2001, the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award is a significant national exhibition that aims to elevate the status of works on paper while supporting and promoting artists working with this medium.

In 2017 entries were received by over 850 artists, the largest number of artists to have entered Art on Paper in what is now its ninth exhibition.

The final selection of 76 artists works include painting, drawing, collage, photography, printmaking, papercuts, sculpture, video and installation.

The works are exhibited throughout Hazelhurst, in the Regional Gallery, the foyer and the Broadhurst Gallery.

Thank you to Grahame Kime, Art Centre Coordinator at Hazelhurst, Louisa Chircop, winner of the Local Artist Award 2015, and Rochelle Haley, artist and lecturer UNSW Art & Design who along with myself formed the selection panel and went through an enjoyable yet challenging and lengthy process to select for the 76 finalists.

Thank you to Denise Mimmocchi, Senior Curator, Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales for undertaking the difficult task of selecting the award recipients.

Hazelhurst would like to acknowledge the generous support of Tradies who sponsor the major award and the Young & Early Career Artist Award, and the Friends of Hazelhurst who sponsor the Local Artist Award. In addition, thank you to the Sutherland Shire Council and Arts NSW. Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre also acknowledges the Dharawal people, traditional custodians of the land on which it is situated, and pays respect to elders past and present.

Carrie Kibbler Curator

Judge’s Comments The 2017 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award was judged by Denise Mimmocchi, Senior Curator, Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

‘It may sound like a cliché to say, but I can declare with great sincerity that the judging process was an incredibly difficult one. The standard of the works in the exhibition were exceptionally high, making the selection of one work as winner a challenging task.

‘It was however a great pleasure to spend time in this exhibition, carefully considering each of the works. I both thank and congratulate all artists selected as finalists as you have all contributed to a wonderfully diverse exhibition that highlights many varied and inventive approaches to working with the paper medium.

‘I also congratulate Carrie Kibbler for her role in curating this exhibition of finalists and also to Grahame Kime, artists Louisa Chircop and Rochelle Haley, for this amazing selection.’

Due to exceptional standard of work and the difficulty of pinpointing one single work in each of the prize categories, in each instance three artists were commended by the judge.

The Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award of $15,000 was award to Brian Robinson for Land Sea Sky, Charting our place in the universe.

‘A work of remarkable technical accomplishment, the composition which incorporates the movements of land, sea, sky and the wider cosmos is superbly seamless. It is an epic vision of the universe where the heavenly mingle with the everyday. The work is complex as well as comical (space invader figures inhabit the sky in battle with celestial He-men) but ultimately the work tells in of a highly personalised and poetic mapping of the world that is imbued and entwined with the artist’s ancestral ties and heritage.’

The judge commented that she ‘found truly exceptional the commended works of Sarah Mudford for Biomorphic, Liz Shreeve for Deep Blue and Amanda Williams for Untitled 1-4 (From the Book of Shapes).

Young and Early Career Art Award of $5,000 was awarded to Harriet Body for Wet Season, Dry Season.

‘An incredible and very sensitive approach in her use of the medium, the work has a lovely lyrical and almost immersive feel to it. I got swept up in the movements of marks and pigment.’

The judge noted how ‘encouraging it was to see this pool of talent look forward to seeing more of your work and the varied directions it will take’ and commended Nicole Kelly for To the wind, Ally Mckay for Futile attempts at happiness and Indigo O’Rourke for Thirty minutes.

Local Artist Award of $5,000 was awarded to Michelle Cawthorn for Daughter.

‘A beautiful portrait of entwining, enigmatic forms suggesting the interconnecting lives of family across generation.’

The judge made particular comment that the 16 local entries reinforced the very vibrant artistic culture that is alive and well in Hazelhurst’s local area. It was a difficult decision but she particularly commended Betty Bird for Knitting the Miles Away, Marinka Bozzec for Faceless Men and Paul Williams for The Painter’s Studio.

In addition to the three main awards, Hazelhurst’s preparators select an artist to receive a four week residency at Hazelhurst. The team of eight preparators, Gilbert Grace, Alex Clapham, Chris Zanko, Tom Hungerford, Marc Etherington, Paul Williams, Alex Kiers and Aaron Fell-Fracasso, who have so skilfully installed this exhibition, selected Andy Quilty for Self Portrait Studies #10.

Abdul Abdullah Wedding (conspiracy to commit) 2015 digital print, edition 5/5 100 x 190 cm In this work I used the wedding as a platform to speak about the dehumanising projection of criminality on marginalised groups. This body of work was conceived after reading a newspaper article that reported the killing of a group of children in a drone strike in Pakistan. Further reading online justified the killing by saying the children would grow up to become terrorists anyway. These conscious efforts used to undermine the humanity of who would otherwise be understood as absolutely and wholly innocent children who happen to live in warzone was appalling to me. It seemed they were being preemptively punished and erased for crimes they had the potential to commit.

Rather than explicitly portray children in my work I used the almost universally and cross-culturally understood ritual of the wedding as a motif to challenge common perceptions of marginalised people. In these specific cases I inserted common signifiers of Islamic weddings including hijabs and Malay wedding stages, and subverted them by masking my subjects in balaclavas. These balaclavas refer to the dehumanising projection of criminality and terrorism on Muslims globally by the dominant narratives of the ‘War on Terror’.

Belinda Allen Sacred/Profane triptych 2016 archival pigment print, edition 2/10 60 x 135 cm

The project Palimpsest: Sacred and Profane draws on imagery and texts from the ‘old world’, drawing out synergies and contradictions that illustrate the complex impact of history and culture on contemporary sense of ‘place’. Travelling in the old world, one is seduced by the ancient artefacts and architecture, some of which seem to languish almost disregarded in the landscape. Modern life goes on, and new ways of doing co-exist with the traditional. It is interesting to consider how the past is continually absorbed into contemporary culture, and how the contemporary becomes history.

In this series, photographs of ‘sacred’ images of history, culture and landscape taken in the south of France and central Italy are layered with the quotidian and ‘profane’ - street scenes, newspaper clippings, found texts and accidental ‘art’.

Tim Andrew Infinite Kittens, Black with Gloss Black 2017 screenprint: ink on Lanaquarelle cold press cotton stock, edition 1/1 85 x 128 cm

I like repeating patterns. There’s something very satisfying about the challenge of making them. I enjoy the way tiling patterns make me consider the formal qualities of variation, repetition, and rhythm all at once. This kitten work is comprised of 24 unique kittens. All different, but all pretty similar - They tile nicely because of their similarity, but I think are interesting enough because of their difference.

I also like the metaphorical infinite-ness of tiled patterns. Each block is a sort of window onto a plane that continues to repeat endlessly in all directions. For me, this infinite plane on paper feels like a thing so basically profound, that it inverts and become banal again and you don’t even think about it - but it’s all there – in it, embedded. That’s nice too. Like patterns are a sort of stealth way to access that kind of wonder.

Suzanne Archer Installation of Four Found Cabinets inhabited by Skeletons 2016 paper, acrylic paint, paper collage, foamcore, found timber cabinets 98 x 88 x 5 cm

From 2003-2005 I drew at the Veterinary Science Laboratory at the University of Sydney during the students’ horse dissection sessions which resulted in several exhibitions. Over the years, I have filled my studio with cabinets of animal skulls and skeletons and dehydrated specimens collected when walking in the bush or given to me by friends.

After fracturing my pelvis in 2013 it is not surprising that I then began to use the human skeleton as my subject, purchasing a replica of a human skeleton. This compliant model was strung-up in complex poses providing endless subject matter!

Ageing as a subject has been part of my ongoing series about my Self. As one ages one is more aware of death and dying, of loss. The skeleton plays a large part in that story but for me it is about lightening the subject sometimes and looking at the reality of the personality of the human skeleton standing in my studio and laughing at it as I am sure it is amused by me and my studio obsessions as it watches grinning in the corner.

Gemma Avery Ancient Jeans 2015 archival pigment print, edition 1/3 (+2AP) 135 x 110 x 5 cm

My work explores the role of images and objects within the development of both personal and cultural memory and identity. The acts of looking and collecting are central to my practice. Ancient Jeans highlights my interest in printed material and the now ubiquitous experience of learning about art primarily through photographic reproductions. The foundational image of the ancient statue fixed to the concrete plinth, is obscured by a more modern image of a clothed figure in motion. Collage allows me to both interrupt the act of looking and create a new space where two moments in time can coexist. I hope to compel the viewer to see dialectically and consider alternative points of view.

Kirstin Berg Cathedral 2016 fire ash, pigment, graphite, India ink, spray paint and steel pins on Arches 300gsm paper 220 x 230 x 4.5 cm

We are living in an era of collapsing monuments and nature is a mirror.

When I think of landscape I am thinking about a universal field that transcends all limitations of place and time. I am driven by the tension between oblivion and commemoration and the vast potential that can be gleaned from the ruin.

I am concerned with the creation of immersive environments in which I combine large scale works on paper and unconventional materials such as fire ash, bush debris and hard rubbish. All my work is a redemptive process of bringing attention to what are considered the leftovers of our lives and transforming them into something new.

My work may also act as a wakeup call to the environmental tipping point we are currently facing; it is both a confrontation and a reflection.

Lee Bethel Fortresses for Trees 2016 watercolour, twigs and gold leaf on hand cut and folded paper 60 x 50 x 60 cm each, variable

Fortresses for Trees are references to a folly. In architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly for aesthetic pleasure. Follies are decoration, they have no function; they are a building of eccentric or over-elaborate design. They were first constructed to put accents into parks and estates. In colonial Australia, gardens were constructed to support a European feel and follies were part of this aesthetic termed ‘after Nature’.

In Fortresses for Trees the cut paper forms references the architecture, scaffolding and boundaries of the folly. The placement of the sticks jutting from, but contained within, the constructions reflects the imposed ‘after Nature’ order.

The materiality of this work has moved past the architectural materials of stone and metal into that of the commonplace of paper. Paper is a strong, durable and flexible material with a luscious surface. In this piece it is used as a support for other mediums and as the actual artefact.

Drew Bickford KAPU / TIKI 2016 ink and graphite on paper 56 x 79 cm

KAPU / TIKI acknowledges faith as a slippery, foreign and ultimately unknowable dichotomy. Sometimes a trap and sometimes a liberty, our quest for something more is an equally alluring and terrifying gamble.

Using the Polynesian language Ŏlelo Hawai’l as a conceptual and typographical framework, KAPU / TIKI draws upon ideas of deification and idolatry to question how we model and manipulate our own unique systems of faith via personal fears.

Translated as forbidden or taboo, the word KAPU speaks to themes of danger or prohibition; how the longings of our curious and sometimes prurient nature, urge us to explore beyond the boundaries of acceptable belief. Contrastingly, the word TIKI suggests the kind of talismans that, through faith and credence, provide an edifying balance to our darker desires.

Exploring these concepts of spirituality and mythology, the artwork constructs aggressive living entities, behemoths or hellions, which supplant the more traditional icons of faith.

Betty Bird Knitting the Miles Away 2017 knitted paper 21 x 600 x 3.2 cm approximate

I bought an old 1980s ‘Reader’s Digest Motoring Guide to Australia’ for $2 at a Brisbane market, attracted by the fine quality of the paper and soft green and pink illustrations.

Knitting up the book was a slow and labour intensive process.

I tore up the pages, shredded them, and glued them end to end to produce the yarn.

With number 10 needles I cast on 30 stitches and began to knit. That was in early January 2017.

I’ve since processed and knitted over 300 pages. Each page produced 17 strips of paper, which, when glued end to end, created 6 rows of knitting (about 6 cm) taking 40 minutes. The length of this work is over 6 metres.

Harriet Body Wet Season, Dry Season 2017 smoke and indigo dye on handmade paper 156 x 113 cm

I am interested in how mark-making can construct history and believe that marks exist in the present but imbue a very specific action that occurred in the past. I believe that repetitive mark-making allows an artist to document their lived experience within a moment of creative action.

Wet Season/Dry Season examines my ideas of mark-making as 'the document of a moment’, however, as a moment is nothing without a series of preluding moments, the artwork also seeks to convey my broader personal history. My childhood in the Top End of Northern Territory holds significance to my personal identity, and with this work I aim to draw upon the two predominant seasons of the tropics; wet and dry. I wet and burned paper that I hand-made from kozo bark fibres during a masterclass and residency in Tokushima, Japan, creating marks from indigo dye and smoke.

The handmade aspect of the artwork, down to the wheatpaste used to fix it to the gallery wall, is significant: it places my body into every facet of the art artefact.

This artwork was created during a studio tenancy at Parramatta Artist Studios.

Marinka Bozzec Faceless men 2016 coloured pencil on paper 104.3 x 189 cm

Faceless Men presents a sardonic roll call of masculine clichĂŠs. In a monochromatic, silent action movie of empty ciphers, silhouettes of soldiers, dictators, gunmen, heroes on horseback, military aircraft, rock stars, battleships, and monolithic architecture parade before us like solemn, yet tragically absurd, shadow puppets. Far from being a condemnation, the work reframes these mythical figures with dark humour and ironic pathos. It is a comic tragedy that speaks of the social pressures and cultural expectations which shape ideas of masculinity.

Word and image are key elements in my artistic practice. My drawings create a visual and conceptual tension between the meaning of words and idioms, as well as the way we interpret images. The drawing technique makes meticulous use of coloured pencil (building up layers of tone) and rulers (to measure up the text areas and ensure clean edges to the drawings). The text in each drawing is negative space – a vestige of the white of the paper. What looks like a printed image has actually been carefully handmade, yet the hand of the artist has been rendered all but invisible.

Leah Bullen The present is the key to the past is the key to the future 2015 watercolour, gouache and monotype on paper 56 x 80 cm

The present is the key to the past is the key to the future continues an investigation into locations that recreate the natural world, such as museum dioramas. The diorama also acts as a kind of ‘theatre of the real’ where we experience a re-enactment of nature. In this way these spaces are conceptually and metaphorically linked to the act of representational painting itself, which reimagines the world through illusion.

Penelope Cain Peak 2017 photocopy paste-up, fabric, cord, mesh, feathers, wood 249 x 180 x 15 cm

This work takes as its pivot point a 19th century lithograph of the Blue Mountains by landscape painter Eugene von Guerard. It asks questions around forms of economics and power in the city, through the lens of the European history of landscape art, notions and values of the sublime in art and British colonisation.

Collaging the shadow of a scaffolded high-rise onto the top of the Blue Mountains panorama recontextualises and potentially updates the depicted landscape with its outsized gesturing male figure, as does the use of lowvalue paste-up materials. The quasi-symbolic banner in mesh and fabric ambiguously conflates references to marches and parades or even more darkly, rituals and rites, with the actions of commerce and urban development.

This work is, to a degree, a small act of resistance and is part of an ongoing interest in slippages, power and performance of commerce within the city.

Michelle Cawthorn Daughter 2017 pen, graphite, watercolour and gouache on HahnemĂźhle paper 216 x 158 cm

For some years now my work has been concerned with memory and its mutability. Have you ever tried hard not to forget someone’s face, or an important moment or tender embrace, only to find that each time you draw on that memory it changes shape, or becomes a little hazier, or darts at the periphery of your consciousness?

Daughter 2017 represents a tripartite relationship between my mother, my daughter and myself. The long hair and the pink ribbons are emblematic of girlhood and of my remembering of it; a time more poignant now that my daughter has become an adult and my mother has passed away. However, in the same way that memories are mercurial, the forms are suggestive rather than prescribed. The keyhole shape evokes the dual notion of things locked away but also of peering through to a partial scene beyond.

In some sections of the drawing the negative spaces are deliberately deployed to suggest the inevitability of the gaps in our memories.

Terrence Combos bad move 2017 paint marker on paper 66 x 102 cm

bad move adopts the grid as a tool to mediate interactions between abstraction and language. It makes use of pattern, colour and typography to test the limits of language comprehension. The phrase ‘bad move’ is repeated throughout the work’s surface, but its ability to be digested is near impossible.

In this work, colour groupings and pattern shifts deny a clear separation of text and non-text, which is typically an imperative of symbol-based communication. What results is a work that requires lengthy decoding to consume its hidden text, complicated by tensions between the processes of looking and reading.

Timothy Cook Kulama 2016 natural ochres and black gesso on paper 56 x 76 cm

Kulama is the ceremony for coming of age for young Tiwi men, the cycle of life, initiation into Tiwi kinship.

Timothy holds a deep connection to culture and country; his paintings depict traditions felt through true inhibited expression. The black backgrounds with small dots conjure up images of the night sky, the stars revolving around us, the universe moving into the unknown. The way Timothy uses ochre without hesitation, composing his paintings with pure instinct, masses of flat coloured spaces, and the ability to shift perspective and translate his ‘kulama’ to new levels is ongoing.

Timothy’s identity as an artist is based on a spirit of unpredictability; his art is imbued with a sense of purity and evokes the divine. His entry for the 2017 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) reflects the seasons in the climate that revolve around the Tiwi Islands: Jamutakari – the Wet Season, Kumunupunari - the dry season and Tiyari the build-up. The Kulama, Timothy’s signature motif in this work, underpins the seasons.

Sam Cranstoun Picture Elements 2016/2017 watercolour on graph paper 195 x 295 cm

Picture Elements is an ongoing series of watercolour on grid paper, in which each square depicts a single pixel of an image. The imagery for the series is drawn from Cranstoun’s personal archive of more than 10,000 images, collected and sourced from Google searches. Cranstoun utilises the archive as raw material for his diverse practice in order to interrogate power structures and the role of images in shaping historical narratives. While seemingly disparate in their subject matter, the reference images for the work reflect a number of Cranstoun’s ongoing interests including the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, the Cold War-era ‘space race’ between the United States and the Soviet Union, modernist architecture and art history.

By choosing to recreate images that are familiar, even when they are pixelated, Cranstoun highlights how images are consumed in the digital age.

The dissemination and proliferation of images through the internet and social media means that experience of images in the 21st century is almost always mediated by technology. With Picture Elements, Cranstoun renders the digital in analogue form, isolating and rescuing these images from the 24-hour news and online media cycle.

Shoufay Derz Unnamed landscape poems 2016 pigment print on archival paper 226 x 212 cm

‘…Heart-polishers have escaped colour and scent They behold beauty without fail each instant They’ve set aside knowledge’s formality They’ve raised the flag of the eye of certainty Thought is gone and they’ve found luminosity They’ve found the core and source of intimacy.’

- Excerpt from ‘Chinese Art and Greek Art’ by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī in The Masnavi (1898), Translator: Victoria Holbrook

‘Once upon a time there was an art contest between the Chinese and the Greeks over who were the better artists. To settle this, the King allotted to each a room to be painted by them. The rooms were facing yet divided by a thick curtain. The Chinese, having procured many colours, worked tirelessly to paint the world in elaborate and stunning detail. The Greeks asked for no materials, no colours, and instead worked tirelessly to burnish and brighten the surface of their given wall so that it became clear as an open sky. The Chinese finished first, and the King was awed by the beauty of their painting. And yet when the Greeks withdrew the curtain between the rooms, there was reflected all the colours of the Chinese art, illuminated even more beautiful in the mirror-like walls and always changing in the light. The Greeks win the prize, a large pile of gold given to the Chinese, so all the Greeks are awarded is the reflection of money!’

- Adaptation of ‘Chinese Art and Greek Art’, by Rumi

Chris Dolman The 19th Hole has a Slippery Green 2017 mixed media on paper mounted on marine ply, Tasmanian Oak frame 150 x 112 cm The 19th Hole has a Slippery Green is part of a series of paintings navigating a tragicomedy search for self. It uses the fragmented body with selfdeprecating and incongruent humour as a motif to disguise meaning, taking a light-hearted look at anxiety and accidents, and the general mayhem life throws at us all when we least expect it.

Christine Druitt-Preston Open House 2017 lino block print sewn collage 32 x 152 cm

My recent artmaking has been focused on making works in series that are in response to personal environments. Open House is a sewn composite image made from proofs of a series of five lino block prints on rice paper made in 2015 and 2016. These prints were translations of drawings made on visits to Rosebank, a small community in the Byron hinterland on the north coast of NSW – a place I return to annually. It is lush landscape, with wonderful foliage, semi tropical climate and interesting architecture, known for its environmental politics and relaxed life style founded on the 1970’s hippie culture.

In cutting and sewing the pieces of print together, in a manner similar to the making of a pieced quilt, I hope to continue a dialogue with earlier women artists and artisans by acknowledging their themes and incorporating some of their practices. The contemporary meaning of the title has real estate references but the house in Emerson Road is truly an ‘open house’, where garden and friends are lovingly nurtured.

detail

John Edwards On the trail of Captain Thunderbolt 2017 watercolour on paper 154 x 100 cm

Narratives sourced in Australian bushranger images are integral to a colonised sense of place. Lauded for escaping from Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, a harsh place of punishment for re-offending convicts, Thunderbolt, the longest roaming fugitive in Australian history, was affectionately known as “the gentleman bushranger.”

In On the trail of Captain Thunderbolt I wanted to capture something of the bushranger’s life, the resilience and the day-to-day duties of keeping up appearances in less than salubrious circumstances. It suggests something of the grit of an Australian ethos of making do, of being a bricoleur and thriving.

By painting Thunderbolt’s adventures in a collage of vignettes, his life becomes something of an 1800’s ‘road trip’. Each picture traces a moment of his life: hunter and skilled horseman; bachelor wooing wife-to-be, Indigenous bushranger Mary Ann Bugg; wanted man skirting the law in mask and bandana; surveyor of the Hunter Region’s landscape or finally, free man having escaped the law!

On the trail of Captain Thunderbolt strives to work as homage to all bushrangers and settlers that took pride in colluding, conspiring and connecting in order to survive.

Robert Fielding Ngura nyangatja wanka ngaranyi (This country is alive) 2016 inkjet print on burnt and pierced paper 180 x 270 cm

Nineteen years ago, when I first came to live in Mimili, I had the privilege of being shown the beauty of the country, the culture, the story, song and dance. I was shown this by senior elders, great custodians of culture and country, champion artists who are sadly no longer with us.

With this work I pay tribute to them and their country by adapting a technique that was mastered by a great artist and matriarch of Mimili, who was famous for burning intricate designs onto wooden artefacts with a hot wire.

This work is a tribute to the great Aboriginal artists and innovators who've come before me. Although they've passed on now, this country is still alive.

Simon Finn Rotation CW 2016 charcoal on paper 85 x 152 cm

Rotation CW forms part of a new body of work by Simon Finn. The works include drawing, animation and sculpture and continue explorations into the variable syntheses between artist, environment and technology. Finn utilises the spatial and temporal capabilities of virtual representations as subject matter that comes into being somewhere between experimental verification and poetic speculation.

The presented motif is an observation tower emitting a simulated liquid force from its core. The observation tower is intended to have dual symbolism: power, oppression and its structural fragility, and that of our ability to witness future natural events through our vision and data interpretation. The violent toxic vortex flow being discharged from the center is emblematic of a deluge of tarnishing indoctrination.

The range of static imagery generated through computation is staged and then re-imagined with the hand, using traditional drawing processes, and advanced machinery. This process allows Finn to observe an otherwise unattainable rupturing of time and facilitate a faceted network of production.

Jen Fullerton Darknet 2016 sewn, folded paper with inkjet printing 120 cm wide variable

Jen Fullerton’s work is a result of her ongoing enquiry into the social impacts of the digital revolution.

Darknet is based on the online darknet – a restricted part of the internet used primarily for illegal activities. This work is a series of books printed (black ink on black paper) with the Google search results for ‘what is the darknet?’ Each piece has been sewn into traditional book form and, finally, folded in such a way that they now bear very little resemblance to books.

The resulting objects are alluring – their matt surfaces catch the light to impart an almost velvet quality. The apparent tactility of these objects may entice the viewer. Yet as soon as they are drawn in to Darknet, they are rejected, as the text is almost illegible and becomes practically invisible through the tight folding of the pages. One may still recognise the forms as books but feel spurned, unsure how to interact, just as most people do not know how to enter the darknet and find what is within.

Ashleigh Garwood Under Erasure #3 (diptych) 2016 inkjet on HahnemĂźhle watercolour paper, edition 1/3 (+ 1AP) 101 x 152 cm

Under Erasure #3 is from a series of photographic work that explores the artifice of landscape imagery. The series looks at how an experience of a place is always preceded by the image. The photographic work becomes a referential site that encompasses both the lived experience and the information and images that accompany and preface that experience.

Utilising large format negatives, phone photos, Xerox prints and screen prints, the surface of the work reflects this and shows film grain, pixels, bitmap and toner streaks.

The title also suggests erosion: the appearance of erosion through the loss of visual data, the erosion of context as the photograph is taken away from its source, and the erosion of place that will continually occur at the physical site.

Becky Gibson Studies for the Summer Moon 2017 oil on paper 42 x 29 cm each

This triptych is an homage to the moon in the Southern Sky and attempts to draw attention to the way it is experienced in three different Australian landscapes: suburban, industrial and the bush.

In this series I have attempted to document the moon and my distinct encounters with it in the Southern Sky. Recently I have become increasingly drawn to exploring how the Australian sky is refracted through different lights and how it sits over and interacts with different landscapes.

In late 2016, I began painting the moon’s distinct phases – as it faded in the morning, or became virtually invisible through the day, and sometimes depicting it rising just before dusk and how it transforms alongside the sunset. I would try to capture the vast expanse and exact hue of the sky and couple this with the intensity of light thrown off by the moon. It became a sort of game to catch the moon in the sky or guess when and where it would rise. I would wait and observe how it would rise: would it resemble the end of a pair of parentheses? Or appear more like a cradle rising from the horizon?

Michaela Gleave with Warren Armstrong 1961.04.12 45.9650ºN, 63.3050ºE (Gagarin), 1977.09.05 28.2920ºN, 80.3440Wº (Voyager 1) 2015 Lambda print on photographic rag paper, edition 1/5 (+1 A/P) 117 x 61 cm each

1961.04.12 45.9650ºN, 63.3050ºE (Gagarin) maps the stars for 24 hours as they rose over the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 12 1961, the time and place from which Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to enter outer space. 1977.09.05 28.2920ºN, 80.3440Wº (Voyager 1) documents rising stars over Cape Canaveral Airforce Station on 5 September 1977, the day the Voyager 1 space probe was launched, the first human-made object to leave the solar system. Both graphs mark two moments in history that changed humanity's relationship to our surroundings forever.

A diagram of space and time, these images were produced using a custom computer program that maps position on the eastern horizon along the Y axis, and time along the X axis, with the relative star sizes and colours accurate to data from the Hipparchos catalogue. All stars rendered in these images are of magnitude 8 and less, which is the extreme naked eye limit of visibility in very dark skies. This work continues artist Michaela Gleave’s interest in astronomy and connecting audiences with the larger forces at play in the universe.

Joanne Handley Untitled (Orange) 2016 pigment print on photo rag paper, edition 1/3 (+2AP) 60 x 90 cm

A recent three month residency in downtown Los Angeles, USA gave me the opportunity to explore unused high-rise rooftops, gaining access to remote advertising signage and billboards. Elevated above the hypnotic pace of city life below, these surreal landscapes revealed themselves as sites of social transcription, abandoned yet protected, monitored under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras and roving drones.

Untitled (Orange) is part of a 2016 photographic series When people build fences, which borrows its name from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reference to civilisation as a fenced-in lack of freedom. This photograph and its series reflect upon the provisions of being human in a civilised society – the collective determination to claim, conquer and construct and its accompanying illusions of freedom.

Virginia Hilyard & Sue Pedley Lacuna (series – Hearth) 2016 rubbing (graphite and paper) 350 x 150cm and 300 x 100 cm

Lacuna (series - Hearth) is one of ten graphite rubbings made during the artists’ 2016 residency at the Bundanon Trust, on the Shoalhaven River, NSW. Hilyard and Pedley were drawn to man-made structures on the Bundanon property associated with fire and water, elemental forces that have significantly shaped the property, and indeed the Shoalhaven landscape, for centuries.

The containers for water and the structures relating to fire presented a lacuna for Hilyard and Pedley. The origins of the word lacuna trace back to the mid-seventeenth century from the Latin word lacus meaning lake, pond, lagoon, ditch and hole. Today, the word lacuna carries meaning across many disciplines of enquiry, for example an unstudied area of science, amnesia in psychology, a silence in music and a cavity in anatomy.

The artists were drawn to the functional objects scattered throughout the gardens and paddocks around the sandstone homestead. It was through the act of making the full-size impressions – or rubbings - of these objects that unseen textures, spaces and cavities, dips and holes were revealed.

Nicola Hooper The Giant Flea 2017 digital print of hand coloured lithograph, foam board, fishing line and pine frame, edition of 3 140 x 130 cm variable

There are many animals, who far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror they become without comparison greater. – Edmund Burke 1757

Philosopher Edmund Burke’s quote provided the inspiration for The Giant Flea. The work explores zoonotic concepts associated with the scale of host versus size of risk. The method of lithography and use of puppets has long been used in storytelling. This work references Giambattista Basile’s 1634 fairy tale The Flea and combines both traditional and modern techniques and in doing so makes associations with both historical and modern zoonotic diseases.

(Zoonoses: animal diseases that can cross over to humans)

David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton Downfall #5 from the Open Sky series 2016 c-type metallic print, edition 1/5 48 x 126 x 6 cm

Our practice draws inspiration from the themes and aesthetics of popular forms of entertainment both past and present. We are especially interested in pre-cinematic optical illusions, traditional museum displays, miniature models and theatrical magic; and the way these mediums have been used to explore existential questions and supernatural possibilities.

Central to our work is a preoccupation with an in-between state: the twilight space between seeing and knowing, natural and supernatural, existence and absence, aspiration and action. Downfall #5 is a photograph from a body of work titled Open Sky. The series is inspired by the story of John Henry Pepper, a 19th Century English scientist who spectacularly failed to conjure rain in his 1882 ‘cloud compelling’ experiment at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm racecourse.

At first glance, Downfall #5 appears to be a generic scene of rolling, grey storm clouds. It is quickly apparent, however, that the clouds consist of a completely different substance: spun sugar crystals, or fairy floss, delicately arranged in lines against a backdrop of reflecting mirrors. The sugar clouds are mid-disintegration, dripping with moisture and falling into forms that only vaguely resemble rain.

Philjames A Forbidden Understanding 2016 oil on vintage offset lithograph 59 x 99 cm

Philjames casts a cool eye over the cultural detritus of our Disney-fied culture and remakes it with an unnerving new power. Old school cultural icons tool up to take on the complacent certainties of the sanitised world with extra powers to tear and rip their old certitudes. Whilst cartoon time favourites time-shift themselves, faded bucolic landscapes find re-energised meanings in their new deployment.

Winsome Jobling Granular Universe 2017 drypoint on handmade, watermarked and pulp-sprayed cotton paper 62 x 56 cm

Granular Universe references the notion of the universe as made of particles rather than a solid substance, first proposed by Democritus in c.450BC and subsequently explored as atomic theory. He conceived of an elementary grain that was indivisible, moving freely in space, and of which everything was made. ….And yet it is hard to believe that anything in nature could stand revealed as solid matter.

The lightning of heaven goes through the walls of houses, like shouts and speech; iron glows white in fire; red-hot rocks are shattered by savage steam…

– De Rerum Natura, Lucretius (c.99 BC – c.55 BC)

Over 2,000 years later Albert Einstein’s atomic theory provided the proof for Democritus’s insight: matter is granular. Dust motes en masse. On September 14, 2016 these granules moved, ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arrived at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the southern hemisphere 1.3 billion years ago!

Jennifer Keeler-Milne Oval portraits 2016/2017 charcoal on paper 80 x 285 x 4 cm

Curious people have always fathomed the intricacies and workings of the natural world. The culture of collecting, classifying and drawing natural specimens predates the naming of disciplines such as biology, science or art.

Since 1999 I have drawn natural objects and recently created my own cabinet of curiosities. It is a two dimensional cabinet consisting of more than a hundred charcoal drawings of natural specimens.

The drawings fall into three subject categories: specimens from the ground, the sea and the air. These five oval portrait drawings continue this theme.

The format of the oval has been used to suggest that these objects could be viewed like a Victorian silhouette portrait. In a climate of threat and change when the natural world is under stress, should these natural forms of a sea sponge, urchin, feather, moth and nest be viewed with the same status as a valued portrait?

These drawings are created using the sparest of materials: black willow charcoal on textured French paper. The white areas seen in the drawing are the white of the paper. Creating and exhibiting drawings of organic forms not only documents and celebrates them as part of our natural world but also inherently brings awareness to their fragility and vulnerability in a climate of threat and change.

Deborah Kelly LYING WOMEN 2016 two channel HD video 3:05; 0:35 edition of 8

LYING WOMEN is an animated collage, made of images Kelly has cut from discarded art history books. She has collated hundreds of printed paintings of the recurring reclining female nudes that represent high culture and its pinnacle moments in western art.

The original paintings depict inviting, receptive images of feminine sexual passivity, as idealised by male artists across five centuries. In gathering multiple reproductions of the same artworks from many publications, the differing colour tones, print and paper qualities of the same paintings amusingly undo the authority of the original. Kelly's stop-motion animation suggests other lives for these figures as they move and gather across the screen, one in which they perhaps have more agency over their bodies, desires and representation. Manet's famous and at the time controversially 'real' Olympia 1863 has a starring role. As she both asserts her presence and yet flies off the screen we can now chuckle at the thought that the artists may have felt their paintings gave them power over the bodies they depicted.

Madeleine Kelly Leipzig birds 2016/2017 encaustic on cardboard with painted paper mounted on aluminium sheet 176 x 116 cm

In Leipzig birds abstract images of birds spotted in Leipzig, Germany are squeezed or trapped into the rectilinear architecture of empty Tetra Paks.

The resulting expressionist distortions – angular in shape as determined by the cartons – are half bird, half cultural object suggesting the continual commodification of nature, a world gradually destroying itself, and the transformation of rubbish.

In capitulating to the cartons’ open spouts, the birds embody the phantasmatic property of everyday materials replete with associative meanings of myth and consumerism. Two modes of identity birds/ cartons and art/consumer material are sustained simultaneously in a single object.

Nicole Kelly To the wind 2017 gouache on paper scrolls 300 x 200 x 10 cm variable

My artistic practice examines observation, memory and relationship to place. Filtering impressions, colours and moods of the environment through memory, I want to draw upon and reflect a highly personal experience of the landscape.

Each paper scroll depicts a series of gouache paintings that respond intimately to landscape I have travelled. My desire is to walk a line between a literal reality and a poetic interpretation.

The work has ties to a negative strip found in film photography and the traditional Japanese kakejiku (hung scroll). I aim to fuse painting, drawing, decorative art objects and traditional scrolls into a gently shifting form, allowed to pulse and flutter as a living thing rather than being fixed behind glass. This more fluid presentation allows the fall of the paper to influence the final composition of the work.

Waratah Lahy Three hundred and sixty six 2016 pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper 154 x 397 cm

Three hundred and sixty six is a project that started as a new year’s resolution on 1 January 2016 with no pre planning – I woke up and started. The first aim of the project was to make a drawing a day no matter what. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad, I just needed to do something. Another aim was to try and stretch my approach to making.

Usually very representational, this project allowed me to play with abstraction or make pictures that articulated a thought or mood.

I expected I would draw for about 10 minutes a day. The reality was each work usually took between 1 – 4 hours to complete. I didn’t miss a single day of the project and somehow managed to find enough determination to keep going even on the days that I was sick, exhausted from work or barely able to open my eyes from a migraine (thankfully there weren’t too many of those!).

With hindsight (and perhaps without intending it), Three hundred and sixty six was a yearlong project which explored the everyday and overlooked on a personal daily basis. It instilled in me a completely new way of working, and reminded me how rich and satisfying every day can be.

detail

Kasane Low lotus lotus (red) 2017 Joss paper, red thread, one sheet of beeswax 100 x 250 x 250 cm variable

‘Long life’ the paper reads...a long journey I think.

My work often deals with ideas of identity and being Asian-Australian.

Throughout my work I use the symbol of the lotus flower to represent self and because my name ‘kasane’ means many folds of a lotus flower. Here I have used the lotus flower to be a symbol of birth and have folded these with 'death paper,' joss paper, used traditionally in Chinese culture as offerings to burn for the dead. Therefore within the making of the origami flowers are folded symbols of birth and death.

The lotus lotus installation aims to reveal the interconnection we share with the world. Too often in this modern world we see ourselves as separate entities and we forget that we are part of a much greater reality. It is a matter of perception. It's physics: you, me, we are all part of the same quantum field, and the universe is just one Big field of molecules bumping up against one another, interacting, connecting, exchanging. In this work with one simple movement of our body we can see how the effect of this movement ripples through a field of origami flowers. And so we can understand how our movements in the world are part of a much greater web of interconnections that always have a cause and reaction.

Joanne Makas I Will Be 2017 polished graphite on paper, folded onto canvas 62 x 48 x 5 cm

A primary focus in Joanne Makas’ painting practice is searching for the zone of indeterminacy between painting and object. This oscillation between object and painting places her work in the field of ‘expanded painting’ allowing a freedom to explore and question what painting is or isn’t, can or can’t be. Underpinning her practice is an interest in the intermingling of consciousness and subjectivity – how thinking, perceiving, acting and feeling are experienced. It is an entanglement of the subject and the object: the event, the action ‘between us’ that she is concerned with.

I Will Be is part of her Fold series, an ongoing exploration into the physical, gestural and tactile qualities of making art in a digital world. Inspired by beauty in the everyday and the constant contradictions on what we see she engages with the transformative potential of material here. The reflective surface in this work resembles metal or has an amour like appearance but is handmade and fragile. The illusion of strength and permanence is challenged by the remnant workings of human hands or impression of the body. I Will Be highlights the fragility of drawing and its lasting significance in relation to the rise of digital technologies.

Ally McKay Futile Attempts at Happiness 2017 string, staples on system card 22 x 13 x 1.5 cm variable

Material poetics is at the core of my practice for conveying the subtleties of the lived experience.

With a minimalistic approach, I use familiar and accessible materials to draw attention to individual material qualities, layering these qualities to express feeling. Subverting their usual function, I have turned staples on their side to act as a metal staircase. Within my work there is an insoluble tension, evident in the relationships between material parts. No longer holding and trapping, these staples now facilitate the path of a cotton thread rainbow, rising and sinking on the backdrop of a common place system card.

I aim to create works which express a form of gentle resilience, walking the line between holding and falling. With this piece, I am translating a feeling of uselessness. Bringing to the fore the constant battle of trying and failing, rising and falling as we all must do. The shadow of the string forms an elusive black rainbow which reflects my futile attempt for happiness after a period of great loss.

Kevin McKay Oak Park Pavilion 2017 ink wash on drawing 21 x 29.7 cm each

These ink wash studies explore a small beachside pavilion in a park on the south side of Cronulla. This structure, like many others that dot Australia’s coastline, houses a public toilet and change room that also serves as an orientating landmark, demarking the space between suburbia and the foreshore. Despite its utilitarian function the pavilion represents a place of transition, and like a classical temple, provides a sense of the metaphysical in its engagement with light and space as its architectonic form frames and obstructs the expansive space of sky and sea.

Fiona McMonagle Sangeeta 2016 watercolour, ink and gouache on paper 185 x 115 cm

Sangeeta is a portrait of fellow artist and long-time friend Sangeeta Sandrasegar. Although slight in stature, I have purposefully painted her larger than life to portray her character, bold and uncompromising in the pursuit of her art.

Tonee Messiah Slow Steady 2017 gouache, ink, watercolour, pencil, crayon on cotton rag 76 x 56 cm

Slow Steady is part of a series that explores the visual mapping of intuitive responses in drawing verses painting. Through self-observation certain habits are identified that examine marks made with conscious choice and marks made with intuitive impulse that are indelible on the paper surface.

The combination of materials, some comfortably matched and others less so, contribute to the rhythmic discussion pictured on the surface. A process of intentional interruption to flow is created via the changing pace between marks that are slow and considered and others that are impulsive and executed with speed. Space is similarly disrupted with the physical tear through the paper’s centre, causing a stutter in the smooth transition between top and bottom. Visual dialogues are initiated through this process and are brought into suspended resolution on the picture plane.

Paniny Mick Mamu 2017 acrylic and ink on archival paper 124 x 153 cm

Paniny Mick is a senior Pitjantjatjara woman from Amata Community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands in central Australia. Paniny paints many different stories, including Mamu Tjukurpa.

In Pitjantjara culture Mamu are mainly harmful, dangerous spirit forces, monsters or an illness. They come in different forms and with varying powers. They can also be 'good' sprits helping and looking after people and children. Mamu is also the general term for monsters and other horrible or dangerous creatures such as insects. The bad mamu are known to bite people and suck out their blood. Tjukurpa is the term for overarching laws or stories.

Ngangkari (traditional healers) are trained to release the mamu from sick people and help people find their spirit taken by the mamu. They are careful when working with a mamu illness. When the measles infected the Anangu in the 1970s it was considered a mamu. The mamu spirit is a night-dwelling demon attacking at night.

Paniny’s work also features rockholes and different land forms where her story takes place.

Jennifer Mills In the echo chamber (red/yellow palette) 2016 watercolour and mixed drawing media on paper 70 x 180 cm

There are certain points in my personal history that draw me back and reverberate into the present. Whether I look at myself in an old photograph or, in this instance, at someone else in a photograph taken on a school trip to the beach on a hot windy day. I connect with the person I was then, and the one I am now, and my memories flood over the image. In this work the reverberating memories are those of people lost.

Stephanie Monteith Dinner Time 2017 watercolour on paper 100 x 73 cm

My work is a comic reaction to the observation of people, both in life and through assorted media. It is also a response to past art and a fascination with art history. Dinner Time is part of a line of inquiry within my work where the skeleton stands in for a living human. These works are developed in the manner of a ‘still life’ and also relate to the painting tradition of the ‘tronie’ (16-17th century Dutch/Flemish).

The event depicted in Dinner Time includes a skeleton happily frying an egg in a wok, wooden spoon in hand. The apparent scenario is a construction, an unlikely arrangement of inanimate objects resulting in a reflection upon existence. In such a way, the portrayal of a possibly mundane activity (like cooking) is transformed into a ridiculous moment of focus.

Reality television also plays with the close observation of staged everyday activities, but the end result is dramatically different and a much more transient product. By painting from direct observation of objects (rather than via photographs), I like to solidify the experience and seek a compelling image.

Joel Moore Mulga the Gorilla 2017 Posca paint markers on 640gsm Arches watercolour paper and digital video 90 x 70 cm

This painting is a self-portrait of how I believe others perceive me.

People often ask if the artworks I make are self-portraits and a lot of them are to a degree but this one actually is. Here is an ode about the piece.

An Ode to Mulga the Gorilla Mulga was a gorilla the colour of aqua blue He painted at day and at night he ate mung bean stew He enjoyed a bread roll with his nightly stew Lightly toasted with lots of butter oozing like goo He cultivated his beard like a garden so green T'was a magnificent thing with a glisten and gleam Some said it was magical others said it was gross But no-one denied it was hairier than most But the truth of the matter is that it was a special beard It had magical arty abilities, I know it sounds weird Once he fell asleep while making a sketch And when he awoke his beard had painted the rest From that day on that's how he made all of his art The beard would finish the piece of which he would start The End

Damian Moss Celestial Cartography 4 2016 ink on torn Hahnemühle paper 81 x 67.5 cm

In the studio I explore the possibilities of materials and processes used in art making. Celestial Cartography 4 is evidence of this – a response to the physicality of Hahnemühle paper, the ink’s intense colouration, and a grid system that simultaneously allows for structure and endless variation. Each mark is added by removing the layer of ink with a pin, a process that reveals the materiality of the paper.

This addition through removal is one of the contradictions in the work.

The thousands of tiny tears, each one different, are individual gestures defined by geometry, creating a tension between the mechanics of the grid and the individuality of the mark. Celestial Cartography 4 is part of a series in which each image shares a common structure but reveals its own, unique cartography.

Sarah Mufford Biomorphic 2017 pigmented ink, graphite and acrylic gesso on Fabriano paper 160 x 141 cm

I recently spent three months in Iran, Southern Spain and India exploring Islamic and pre-Islamic art and architecture concentrating on systems of geometric and biomorphic patterns developed in the regions.

Biomorphic forms part of a series of works on paper completed on my return that continues my interest in pattern systems juxtaposing intuitive processes of staining and mark making in ink with hard edge geometry using the grid and circle as a basic unit of pattern construction.

The underlying arabesque- like pattern is derived from a small collage constructed some years back. With reflected and repeated eternal spirals it is pushed back into the picture plane by the hand drawn and inked grid of black and white half circles. The composition tessellates across the surface with an even rhythm and texture with the aim to have no part of the work take precedence or push to the foreground.

Paula Ngu Transience and Impermanence I 2016/2017 watercolour on cotton paper

Paula Ngu’s work draws from: landscapes in Malaysia and Australia, her previous computer science career, and research at Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research station on the edge of Strzelecki Desert, located 112km north of Broken Hill.

Metaphors for fragility appear in Ngu’s use of cotton paper, wet ink washes and soft-haired brushes and in the action of painting each layer delicately to minimise agitation of previous layers (sometimes over twenty), pushing paper to its limits. Whilst Ngu finds making her work meditative and selfreflective, she also strives to present viewers with a contemplative viewing experience and at the same time leaving some room for interpretation and connection with her work by making their own meanings.

Ngu’s work references Wabi Sabi and Mono No Aware, which are related to Japanese aesthetic philosophy and one of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay and death. It also refers to Chinese ‘Xie Yi’ abstract painting of nature which uses expressive brushstrokes and many shades of black ink.

Catherine O’Donnell Urban Perspective 2017 charcoal on paper and wall 300 x 350 cm

My drawings are an exploration of the architecture, culture and history of the urban environment, with a current focus on post-war housing estates, which are still in use across Australia. At first glance the qualities of these utilitarian dwellings may not be evident as all too often these houses are not given the same value as other housing and have become a cultural signifier of lower socioeconomic communities, particularly in western Sydney.

My interests in minimalist structures of architecture, the pictorial power of illusion, scale and perspective and the pursuit of a shared narrative are at the heart of my artistic practice. Through my drawings, I aim to extract both the sense of humanity that comes with the knowledge that people live in these buildings and the more formal aesthetics of these places. I employ realism as a catalyst to ignite the imagination of the viewer and invite them to look beyond the mundane and banal. To revisit these spaces imaginatively and find the aesthetic poetry embedded within in the suburban landscape, while at the same time disrupting cultural prejudices which prevent people from seeing the underlying elegance of these simple buildings.

Indigo O’Rourke Thirty Minutes 2017 biro on Stonehenge paper 55 x 55 cm

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

- Alan Watts 2014

Becc Ország Forsaken Monuments 2016 graphite pencil and 24kt gold leaf on paper 35 x 25 cm each

Forsaken Monuments is from an ongoing series of drawings exploring the practice of idolatry, and the relationships between the manmade monument and concepts of the holy, sacred and divine. Ország’s practice is primarily an investigation into the sacred space and religious experience, grounded in the psychological phenomenon of paramnesia: the distortion of memory or the confusion of fantasy and reality.

Ország’s drawings are meticulously rendered, yet remain obscure and confounding in their unresolved narratives, presenting an idyllic yet perplexing world in which the profound coexists with the perturbed.

Working intuitively, she begins by sourcing found imagery from archives, books, manuals and religious texts to create digital collages. These collages act as a sketch for her finished drawings that further interpret and manipulate the imagery. By removing figures and landscapes from the safety of their original contexts she creates dissected, re-imagined, illusionary realms that teeter on the edge of reality, an act of manipulation and appropriation commenting on the fallibility and malleability of our memories and questioning the validity of official histories and widely accepted truths.

Emily Portmann Phallic Gestures I 2017 human hair (artist's own) stitched into Archers paper 66 x 95 cm

The Phallic Gestures series reinterprets and cheekily challenges the ‘La Toilette’ artworks of women bathing, dressing and grooming themselves made famous through artists such as Degas, Manet and Bonnard. In these toilette artworks, women are seen readying themselves in private, submissively posed to favour a viewer. And yet as viewer, we are voyeurs, spying on them for our own pleasure – for what has often been perceived to be a male gaze.

Phallic Gestures re-envisions the complexity of a modern day toilette, one in which the figure (myself) is aware of the viewer, challenging the power of the gaze and reasserting sexual identity and power of the gaze away from the viewer, as the figure dominates the space in an uneasy awareness of the other. It nods to feministic ideals and contemporary realities; there are aspects that are humorous and aspects that are concerning, uneasy.

Hair, a by-product of grooming and a source of our genetics and DNA, is cross-stitched into the artwork, cross-stitch being a feminine craft and hair idolised on the female form, pierces the paper, and through built up layering of a repeated stitch adds tone and form to the image within.

Andy Quilty Self-portrait studies #10 2017 graphite and aerosol on Arches paper 29.7 x 21 cm each

Operating on a small-scale over multiple studies, I am interested in the immediacy of drawing as an instant, economic means to interrogate ideas in a candid and exploratory manner. Limiting the works in colour, mark making tools and disallowing the ability to erase, are conscious decisions to engender some sense of truth in examining oneself - what goes on stays on, everything sticks.

Working primarily in drawing and painting, my practice explores notions of status, belonging and sense of place within the banality of suburban Australian culture; interrogating personal histories, exploring the role of observer, participant and perpetrator in a post-colonial context.

Troy Quinliven Federico Garcia Lorca 2017 oil on paper 29.7 x 21 cm

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art. - Federico García Lorca Federico García Lorca was a tragic Spanish poet and playwright who wrote about love and death. He was a friend to Salvador Dali and was a fine artist who died prematurely, murdered by fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Troy Quinliven’s interest in literature began when a friend from art school gave him a book in 2002 just before ending his life. Books became a feature in his work after the artist lost his brother in a car accident in 2007. He burnt, bound, and covered books in salt and ash as a metaphor for a life story cut short. More recently he painted portraits of authors, as he turned to honour the lives behind the stories he read.

This was Quinlivan’s final work before passing away suddenly in March 2017.

Ben Rak Pictures of Scratches 2016 silkscreen on paper 76 x 280 cm

Pictures of Scratches is a tongue-in-cheek look at media hierarchies of the art world and the fetishisation of the artist’s mark. Responding to today’s trend of art that is purposefully made to look rough, I begin by sourcing foul-bitten scratches from etching plates. These scratches are an unintentional by-product of the etching process but are often (ironically) valorised by viewers as the truly authentic marks of the artist. I then reproduce the scratch marks in different forms (painting, screen printing…) in an attempt to determine to what degree the value (both artistic and commercial) changes in different forms. To what lengths must the artist go to displace the origin of the marks and successfully ‘pass’ the print as an original?

Lynne Roberts-Goodwin DEADSEA saltlinestereo 010, DEADSEA saltlinestereo 011 2016 archival photographic print– Hanemühle German photorag 310gsm 90 x 127 cm each

We stand, before this photographic pair, directly in front and obliquely over the subject, framing it from above – confounding and calling into question not only the currency and agency of photography and the image but that of the current state of place, navigation and representation. The structure of the photographs is intended to create a strange or uncanny pictorial duality, at once static and agitated – denied a single point of focus. The eye shifts, scans and roves across the contested Dead Sea Basin, grappling for clues as to the current state of displacement and failure to navigate.

Brian Robinson Land Sea Sky - Charting our place in the universe 2016 linocut printed on paper in black ink from one block 100 x 194 cm

The Islanders of the Torres Strait reside in a narrow waterway between the land masses of Zai Dagam Daudai (Australia) in the south and Naigai Dagam Daudai (Papua New Guinea) in the north where the Coral and Arafura Seas meet in one of the most fragile and intricate waterways in the world, a seafaring race of Indigenous people, proud and dignified, whose spirituality is derived from ancestral ties to the land, the sea and the sky.

Torres Strait Islander culture is closely linked to the stars. They inform Islander laws, customs and practices that are recorded and handed down in the form of story, song, dance, ceremony and artefacts.

Islander astronomy also contains practical information about the natural world, which is essential for survival and cultural continuity. Islander culture is linked to Tagai – the creation deity that is represented by a constellation of stars that spans across the Southern Sky.

Inside cover: Brian Robinson Land Sea Sky - Charting our place in the universe 2016 (detail)

Peter Sharp Thinking about Trees 2017 nine charcoal drawings on various sized sheets of paper 150 x 120 cm installation

I tend to find a subject and then make a body of work that reconfigures that subject in various media. But drawing is where it all starts and ends for me.

I’ve been making work about the ubiquitous gum tree for the last five years.

I was interested in what other insights I could draw from such a familiar Australian icon. What else could I add to a subject that painters like Hans Heyson and Fred Williams had tackled.

The drawings are not a direct rendering of the place or the eucalypt tree but a reaction and evocation of how I feel and relate to the tree in that particular area.

The drawings may appear abstract but all of them are started on site looking at the trees and then sometimes reworked in the studio.

Liz Shreeve Deep Blue 2017 ink on drafting film on paper 110 x 160 cm

This work deals with the link between surface pattern and perception of an image. The source for the image was a photorealistic graphite drawing by Vija Celmins of the surface of the sea. The original image Celmins used was a found photograph. A copy of Celmins’ drawing was analysed visually, reduced to a five tone scale and then a translated image was assembled bit by bit with 3,751 individual rectangles of painted and folded paper. The original unidentified image has therefore gone through several transitions, all without computer analysis.

At a distance the pattern of waves is readily seen but at a middle distance the columns of tone predominate and the image is lost. At close range the watery marks of ink can be seen in the film. These three levels of seeing and the painted strips of paper, bent like louvres so the movement of the viewer causes a flicker, combine to give the visual experience of water. The colour is interrupted and the surface appears to move like ripples and flashes of light on the surface of the sea.

Laura Stark Totems VI, Undercliff Walk 2016 photopolymer intaglio, collagraph and monotype 60 x 120 x 30 cm

This work is a part of a series relating to the experience of being in the Australian bush. More particularly it was inspired by a walk in the Blue Mountains during a windy and rainy day, on a path which was rarely frequented and in difficult terrain. But the memories I retained of the overhanging escarpments, the texture and colour of the cliffs and the flow of the watercourses, had remained with me and needed to be expressed.

A collagraph plate was made from which the Undercliff series of prints were produced. Totems IV is the latest work in the series and as a 3D piece aims to give a more encompassing experience. It combines a printed and drawn (monotype) back ground, with tubular ‘Totems’ made from of prints from different sections of the plate, using a variety of colours and incorporating the same monotype segments as in the background. The shapes of the background echo those of the totems and sometimes seem to merge into them. The aim is to give a feeling of the path under the cliffs, winding through trees, rocks and water.

Neridah Stockley Newcastle Landscapes 2016 acrylic and gouache on Arches paper 85 x 109 cm

These collages are based on landscape forms and structures in Newcastle, New South Wales.

Rock profiles, clouds, trees, parks and industrial colours. I enjoy the freedom and play of collage as it pushes the boundaries of drawing practice, reducing what I am observing to simple and articulate relationships.

Abdullah M I Syed One Thousand and Four and Counting – Diptych 2017 acrylic ink, debossed tool and hand cut and assembled uncut one US dollar sheet on handmade vasli paper 74 x 65 cm each

One Thousand and Four and Counting is a diptych mapping the condition of Islamic culture within the context of the current crisis in the Middle East and Asian Muslim countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Desperate to find strength in the midst of chaos and anxiety, Syed, a Pakistani living in Australian diaspora, uses paper banknotes – specifically uncut US dollar bills – and transforms them into a new geography of mesmerising Islamic patterned tile constructions.

The laborious process of cutting out geometric designs by hand, which are then reconstituted on a gold painted handmade paper called vasli, details the struggles of preserving and performing Islamic identity in today’s time.

Yet the deconstruction of banknotes critiques the inherent greed of the capitalist world, including the art market, as it capitalises on the cultural crisis in Islam to create a ‘Western culturalised’ Islamic world. Furthermore, the drawing, cutting and collaging art-making process requires the same meticulous investment of craft and labour that is a hallmark of Islamic art and design.

Sherna Teperson Composition for two parts 2017 acrylic on 300gsm and 280gsm watercolour paper, binder, archival glue 35 x 75 x 80 cm

Composition for two parts plays with two antithetical systems, construction and collapse.

Two modes of energy have been used to make this work: I used a very labour-intensive, precise mathematical process to make the truncated octahedron triangle. Then, in crumbling a sheet of watercolour paper into a ball to make the fulcrum, it was necessary to relinquish control, to work with an outcome contingent on chance more than skill.

The work is split into two colours, fluoro yellow and white, with the fluoro yellow casting a shadow, which, in turn, becomes the source of light spilling between the voids of the interlocking geometry.

Ioulia Teriziz Grainy space time with late light 2015 gelatin silver photograph, edition 2/4 (+2AP) 83 x 97 cm

My work finds origin in the push to explore perceptual boundaries of space in relation to parameters of thought, possibility and consciousness. At the core lies an ongoing engagement with the structure and illusiveness of light, of questions circling materiality, form and the nature and processes of perception.

Recent work is driven by the need to pull at the margins and structures of photography, to stretch its potential readings and relation to other mediums. Grainy Space Time With Late Light intersects photographic, assemblage, drawing and sculptural practices. Photography, as a light marking material, serves as a medium through which spatial constellations are recorded and appropriated. Spatial ambiguity is constructed, perspective is vague, and the assembled elements advance and recede in a tactile picture plane.

TextaQueen The Empire's New Clothes 2017 fibre tip Indian Ink markers, watercolour, acrylic paint pen and coloured pencil on Stonehenge cotton paper 127.5 x 97.5 cm

The titularly referenced tale and its idiom about logical fallacies become an allegory for British colonialism in this self-portrait as Queen Alexandra, monarch of the United Kingdom of Britain and Empress of India. Based on a 1902 photograph in her coronation attire, the Queen wears her crown featuring the famed Koh-i-noor diamond, however her other jewels and gown adornments have been substituted with items that the East India Company traded out of India. This English company, originally owned in shares by wealthy merchants and aristocrats, took its interest in India from trade to territory via private military power, eventually coming to act sovereignly on behalf of the British crown before the latter took direct control in 1858.

The artist, as Queen, offers her own ancestrally Indian body wearing the invisible gown of these colonial legacies. She stands bejeweled with the peppercorns, cardamon, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, tea leaves, cotton, silkworms, opium and ebony seed for which her motherland was colonised.

Her eyes reflect the global reign of the British Empire at the time of Queen Alexandra’s coronation as her thumb bleeds against a thorn of the white English Rose that she prepares to behead with her ivory-handled scissors.

Amber Wallis Veiled Fecund Banana Harvest Diptych 2017 mixed media assemblage on paper 144.2 x 115.5 x 65 cm and 144.2 x 163 x 6.5 cm

Veiled Fecund Banana Harvest Diptych is an amalgamation of fecund drawings, an investigation into the abstraction of the figure and an ongoing interest in the use of paper and previously discarded works to create a place where abstraction, figuration and landscape merge through the use of collage.

This work reflects a way of creating since Amber became a mother, created in a frenzy of stolen time - the time her daughter naps. Using disparate materials within the studio, discarded drawings and prints are often on the underside of paper or torn and reimagined, gathered with more delicately realised images of abstracted sexually-based figuration to create a fecund landscape.

Made over the summer when bananas were harvested from her yard and were hanging in the studio ripening and influencing her ongoing investigation into sexual/fecund imagery merged with the landscape. Like Amber’s painting practice the work is created and found by becoming a sum of many parts.

Amanda Williams Untitled 1-4 (From the Book of Shapes) 2017 unique gelatin silver photographs 25 x 20 cm each

Amanda Williams is a Sydney-based photographic artist whose practice combines analogue techniques and darkroom experimentation to examine connections between the history of photography and architectural Modernism.

In this ongoing series, The Book of Shapes, images are made in the darkroom without the use of a camera or negative. Light is shaped directly onto expired photosensitive paper with the use of educational books from the 1960’s called The Space & Workshop series, designed for high school geometry classes. The resulting photograms bare the physical trace of light falling through the geometric apertures in these books, the trace of the hand that held the paper and the trace of the expired photographic chemicals that brought the shapes to life.

Mumu Mike Williams Mapa Wiya - We don't need a map 2017 ink and acrylic marker pen on found map 59 x 90 cm

Mumu Mike Williams has embarked on a series of paintings on found maps.

Williams deliberately obscures and erases the place names designated by colonialists, adding his own text in Pitjantjatjara: We don’t need a map.

Listen: This land is Aboriginal Land.

We don’t need maps, or bitumen roads, or Government bore water. We don’t need all the borders and boundaries.

In the north, the south, the east and the west, there are Aboriginal people who know their land.

Paul Williams The Painter’s Studio 2016 oil on paper 110 x 84 cm

The Painter's Studio is a fictional scene created from two vastly different sources. One is a photograph of a roadside house in rural Norway taken during an afternoon drive while on holidays. The other, a drawing of the artist's current studio located on the second floor of an industrial warehouse. By combining these two images and through the unusual choice of colours we are a step removed from the reality of both scenes and transported to a place less of this world and more of the imagination.

Sandra Winkworth Wrapper pile-up 2017 watercolour cutouts on found paper cut-offs 4 x 30 x 35 cm variable

In addition to a home already full of endlessly bought and gifted stuff, I have an accumulating collection of detritus sourced largely from the streets of Sydney. For more than one year, I have discriminatively picked up over 130 pieces of tantalising trash to be imitated here in Wrapper pile-up. These little empty packages have a printed and nostalgic charm, full of happy colour.

The recent mission to paint the many things that I have hoarded at home is both to celebrate the joy and beauty in stuff but also as a way of purging from my own object gluttony. I am continually stupefied at how much we consume and throw away – revealing our disregard for our urban or natural environs by a simple drop of an inconvenient item like a humble lolly paper wrapper.

Puna Yanima Antara 2016 ink and acrylic on paper 150 x 150 cm Antara is an important women’s ceremonial site near the Mimili community, located in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunyjatjara (APY) Lands of remote central Australia. Many of the senior women at Mimili Maku Arts represent Antara and its significant Maku (witchetty grub) Tjukurpa in their paintings.

Puna Yanima has utilised the immediacy and loose fluidity of ink on paper to map the ngura (country) of this sacred place, marking its tjukula (rockholes), apu and murpu (rocks and mountains).

Zuza Zochowski Illawarra, Day and Night 2017 watercolour and collage on cotton rag 57 x 152 cm

My recent work has focused on working from plein air and investigating shapes, tone and colour in the immediate landscape. I am interested in the immediacy of working en plein air. The process of painting outside is quick in order to battle the elements of the natural environments, the most prominent being the change in light.

In the interim I have tried to replicate the same feeling of immediacy in the paintings created in the studio. I found collaging landscapes previously painted created a beginning or an aid in transcribe images from memory to a blank, fresh piece of paper. From this starting point I fill in voids, modify or add to develop an image using colours and tone fresh in my memory or by creating shapes to modify the pre-existing landscape. Staining the paper with watercolour as well as reusing features from previous paintings adds a surprise element to the development of the final image.

Tianli Zu NOT FOR SALE! 2017 papercut by hand, ink, installation and animation projection 400 cm variable

NOT FOR SALE! draws upon the disruptive nature of urbanisation since the arrival of European settlement to the present state of overdevelopment and property consumption.

Paper cutting is a metaphor for fragility and sustainability, as new forms are created through the process of deconstruction. Animation expands from the cutout revealing constant change of ephemeral shadow shapes.

The juxtaposition of static and moving images evokes an awareness of the threatened state of the environment.

Exhibition dates 20 May – 16 July 2017 Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre

782 Kingsway Gymea NSW 2227 t: 02 8536 5700 e: hazelhurst@ssc.nsw.gov.au www.hazelhurst.com.au Op en d aily 10am – 5p m Fr ee ad m issio n Images courtesy the artists and Silversalt Photography ISBN: 978-1-921437-94-6

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