Quintet: Lee Bethel, Matt Bromhead, Christine Druitt Preston, Nicole Kelly and Kerry Toomey

Quintet: five southern Sydney artists

Carrie Kibbler, Curator

Quintet is the collective title of five solo exhibitions by leading southern Sydney artists Lee Bethel, Matt Bromhead, Christine Druitt Preston, Nicole Kelly and Kerry Toomey. The cross-generational group of mid-career artists who grew up or live in southern Sydney have diverse practices which include painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, drawing, printmaking, photography and paper cuts. Hazelhurst Arts Centre has a long history of supporting artists from the region and each artist has been commissioned to develop significant new bodies of work for these exhibitions, which come at pivotal points in their careers.

Each artist has produced unique and personal works, yet common threads can be drawn across the five exhibitions.

Each body of work has a relationship to the home and domestic life – Bethel and Toomey explore ideas of women’s domestic life and craft traditions, Druitt Preston delves into the history of Hazelhurst cottage and its owners, and Kelly examines the aftermath of the destruction of south coast residents’ homes from bushfires. While for Bromhead, his domestic duties around caring for his young family shapes his current studio practice, where works are developed in short bursts.

The physical nature of each artist’s chosen medium – whether it be paper, fabric, paint or clay – also informs their works, which employ detailed, repeated and painstaking techniques such as cutting, layering, carving, moulding and stitching.

Lee Bethel is interested in the materiality of paper and how it can be cut, pricked, folded or arranged to create an array of forms, shadows and complex patterns. Her works often explore the relationship between object, place and memory. Her new conceptual body of work A way with words examines women, feminism and the domestic environment using song lyrics, names and significant feminist quotes.

Matt Bromhead works across drawing and sculpture. His works combine elements of collage with intuitive mark-making and found items to create lyrical compositions and forms. The works in his new exhibition Screens begin as gestural ink marks on paper which is then torn and glued to create a series of semi translucent layers. These works are composed slowly, with

each layer informing the next and showing the passing of time.

Christine Druitt Preston predominantly works with printmaking which is often combined with textiles and embroidery. She is interested in the patterns of the domestic – the familiar and the everyday. In her exhibition A stilled life she presents an ambitious multifaceted installation which expands printmaking beyond its traditional limits. The works explore the original Hazelhurst cottage, its architecture, its history and the lives of original owners Ben and Hazel Broadhurst.

Nicole Kelly’s vibrant paintings create a sense of place. Her landscapes, which are often painted plein air, capture the essence and mood of the Australian

landscape, while her interior views document the domestic environment and its inhabitants. Her new panoramic installation Solastalgia focuses on the aftermath of the 2019/2020 bushfires on the NSW south coast. Audiences are invited to enter this immersive landscape and contemplate the current climate crisis and its consequences.

Kerry Toomey is a Gamilaroi woman who grew up in Pilliga, NSW. Toomey’s sculptures and works on paper are interwoven with text, patterns and culturally significant items such as kangaroo hide and emu feathers. For her exhibition Threads of the detachables, she has created a series of wearable collars, each painstakingly embellished and embroidered, representing her relationships with important women in her life and their personal stories, while also drawing on Toomey’s own personal history and culture.

previous page (from left): Lee Bethel Women hold up half the sky 2022 (detail) Lee Bethel A way with words installation detail

Matt Bromhead Pigeon 2020/22 Matt Bromhead Forming (Your Views) I 2022

Christine Druitt Preston A stilled life installation detail Christine Druitt Preston My Place 2018 (detail)

Above (from left): Nicole Kelly Solastalgia 2022 (detail) Nicole Kelly Solastalgia 2022 (detail)

Opposite: Kerry Toomey Detachable collar 8: Tent Days 2022

Lee Bethel: A way with words

The paper cut … a moment of exquisite pain, a shivering wound as paper slices skin, a juncture in time when artist fuses material and gesture to create objects at once sensual and beautiful … underpinned by a whip smart feminist edge. That edge is from paper artist Lee Bethel whose work, often process driven by the material possibilities of paper cutting, folding and repetition, is here propelled by history-making-women, catalysts for Bethel’s current body of work.

“At Moorefield Girls High School in Sydney in the seventies we had strong female teachers, Helen Reddy’s Grammy Award winning I am Woman was our school anthem and then later … The Misogyny Speech by Julia Gillard, a pivotal moment for women. Each spoke to a moment in time.”

Gillard’s words “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man …” delivered in parliament in 2012, are today the pulse to Julia’s Tablecloth, one of six works on exhibition. Here Bethel’s large-scale panels with text cut out, actively disrupt the paper’s surface integrity, are lit creating the sense of relief sculpture. Long shadows cast from the “tablecloth” metaphor the wake of history gone before and the visibility of

the artist’s intent. That intent is witnessed too in Helen’s Tablecloth. Constructed of 42 connecting circles with a line from I Am Woman cut out on each d’oyley/plate it casts further back in history. Hand-cut ornate lace-like script throws shadows and reflections across the table underneath, one paying homage to Judy Chicago’s seminal work, The Dinner Party 1974-79.

“I am committed to drawing attention to how women work around boundaries to be heard and seen, to creating work that is aesthetically beautiful, pretty, domesticated, laboured, that on closer viewing reveals disturbing truths and unveils attitudes that haven’t changed since I was 14.”

The D’oyley Show / An exhibition of women’s domestic fancywork at Watters Gallery, Sydney was the first feminist art exhibition Bethel saw. Grace Cochrane, long time curator for the Powerhouse Museum, notes that at the time of the show there was a renewal of interest in traditional and contemporary lacemaking: “These revivals, as well as encouraging the use of fabrics and fibres in sculpture and other expressive work, were consciously or unconsciously part of a revaluing of women’s domestic

Courtney Kidd

Above and previous page:

A way with words installation view with Julia’s Tablecloth 2022 (background) Helen’s Tablecloth 2022 (foreground)

Lee Bethel

skills, exemplified publicly by exhibitions such as The D’oyley Show of 1979 and the demands of the women’s art movement for acceptance of ‘womens’ materials and their processes in sculpture departments, alongside bronze and steel.”1

A few years prior, cultural activist and theoretician Lucy Lippard had visited Australia and was a significant influence in the establishment of the feminist women’s art movement. Bethel recalls the impact of its Sydney members, Marie McMahon, Vivienne Binns and Francis Phoenix, their feminist urge to question:

“The realisation that a ‘proper’ artist didn’t always use canvas and oil paint was the catalyst to my working with paper. Art

school led me to artists exploring alternate materials and processes. I studied graphic design initially and at that time it was on paper. When I moved across to Fine Arts and explored material I was comfortable with the tactile, fragile, material.”

Bethel acknowledges other influences on her practice – the minimal and poetic works of American abstract painter Agnes Martin and the explorations into materials and memory deployed by American sculptor Eva Hesse. More recently the huge mesmeric ‘pin prick’ works of Fu Xiaotong have intrigued. The Bejing-based artist penetrates rice paper surfaces with thousands of needlepoint holes, a minimalistic exploration into the temporal and material properties of process based drawing that Bethel finds fascinating.

Above (from left):

Women hold up half the sky 2022

Will you still love me tomorrow? II 2022 (detail)

Helen’s Tablecloth 2022 (details)

Lee Bethel

But it is most with Judy Chicago and the scale of her work in The Dinner Party 1974-79 that propelled this body of work:

“I think lockdown viewing made me look more at international artists. Many galleries expanded their online experiences and that led to me expanding my thinking.”

Chicago’s work, a ceremonial banquet of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating a significant woman in history, is made up of doyleys, chalices, painted plates, objects rendered in styles appropriate to the women being honoured, “It is a single immersive installation and it is this magnitude that I worked to embrace in A way with words.”

“I loved those words from Chicago in her autobiography Beyond the Flower where she says, ‘Historically women have either been excluded from the process of creating the definitions of what is considered art or allowed to participate only if we accept and work within existing mainstream designations. If women have no real role as women in the process of defining art, then we are essentially prevented from helping to shape cultural symbols.’”

Where previously Bethel had sourced titles for her works from Emily Dickenson poems and inspiration from the poet’s inclusion in Chicago’s epic feminist work, in this exhibition the Dickenson plate reflects the colour palette captured in Counting the Dead, the chilling record naming women

killed by domestic violence in 2021 and 2022. This delicate charged creation takes its title from the Destroy the Joint Facebook group named in honour of radio DJ Alan Jones who in 2012 commented that too many female politicians would “destroy the joint”.

Group researchers listed every woman dead as a result of domestic violence since 2012. Using statistics from the past two years Bethel has cut out each woman named, using elegant copper plate script, dipped in encaustic wax, a technique enabling the paper to build dimension and welcome light. Hung like a lace tablecloth the meticulously made pale pink paper chains, carry the heart stopping reality that little has changed in the social and political landscape for women – on average one woman per week dies of domestic violence in Australia.

A way with words, propelled by an imperative to question that landscape via beautifully made paper sculptures as delicate as a butterfly wing and at a scale at once majestic and immersive, suggests that Bethel is at the stellar heights of her practice. Watch closely this clever creatrix, who grew up with paper - a Dad a bookbinder, a Mum a manager of a printing factory, and a school holiday job collating books - watch closely to see where next the gravitas of her message takes her.

1 Grace Cochrane, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History, New South Wales University Press, 1992

Above and opposite: Counting the Dead 2022

Lee Bethel

Opposite: A way with words installation views

Above: Will you still love me tomorrow? III 2022

Following page: Will you still love me tomorrow? I 2022 (detail)

List of works

Artist interview

Counting the dead 2022 encaustic and watercolour on hand cut paper names courtesy of Counting Dead Women Australia 2022 @DestroyTheJoint (Facebook)

Helen’s Tablecoth 2022 watercolour on hand cut and pierced paper

Julia’s Tablecloth 2022 hand cut paper

The Shag Pile Carpet 2022 watercolour, ink and encaustic on hand cut paper

Women hold up half the sky 2022 watercolour on pierced and hand cut paper

Will you still love me tomorrow? I-III 2022 watercolour on pierced, folded and hand cut paper

watch artist interview leebethel.com @leebethel

Lee Bethel is represented by The Egg & Dart, Wollongong

Rest & Strength Matt Bromhead: Screens

Leahlani Johnson

As I quickly scrolled through Instagram on my phone, I caught a glimpse of an exquisitely constructed sculptural work on a gallery’s page. A brief glance at this delicate yet strongly pronounced gestural work would stay with me, long after the phone was off and the retention of other images had vanished. Even without being familiar with the artist’s work at this point, the quiet composure and meandering lines of the piece provided a resting place to reflect and imagine within, contrasted by the transient world of social media in which it was housed. This was my introduction to the remarkable work of Matt Bromhead, how significant then that his new body of work created for exhibition at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, titled Screens, should refer to the layering of disparate information to form a view.

Screens is installed centrally within the gallery space, with large partitions masking parts of it from the entrance. Viewers approach the work through breaks in these ‘screens’ which helps frame their view, causing them to catch only snippets

Matt Bromhead

Above, opposite and following page: Screens installation view

Matt Bromhead

of the work as they move through the space. Inside the exhibition, architectural features of line and scale are responded to within the forms of the work. Hues of deep blue and pale brown are apparent, fringing a mostly monochromatic colour palette which is finely controlled and contemplative. Also, immediately evident is an inherent counterbalance between opposing forces: two and three dimensions, positive and negative space, geometric and free flowing forms, large scale and intimate, static and moving, tension and release, push and pull. This balance is not built through striving or strenuous production methods however, but rather through an acceptance and surrender by the artist to the creative process.

In this new body of work, Matt has created a distinct visual vocabulary through a process of gathering and layering, not just with materials but with techniques, cultural idioms and information. Over the past year and a half, Matt has taken his newborn baby, Matilda, for daily walks in the pram, listening out for the chime of strayed objects that may pass under its wheels, as a method of collection. Similarly, after large downpours, Matt has travelled to coastlines in the Illawarra region to undertake explorations for days on end, gathering up debris as remnants of the storm that had been, as he described, “spat out by the sea”. These found objects are ascribed with innate characteristics and history, which Matt engages with as starting points in his

Matt Bromhead

sculptural work, which are created first, with his wall works following soon afterwards as a response. Some of the items are even taken through the cumbersome process of hand dyeing or being cast in clay, which transforms them further, from being flexible or lightweight, into a fixed sculptural element.

With a perpetuating sense of curiosity and an interest in Eastern mark making practices, Matt’s travels have also taken him to China for several months, where he undertook classes in Dongba papermaking. Whilst based there, Matt begun researching Chinese calligraphy, a practice which continues to inform his art practice, refining a drawing technique by attaching a medium to the end of a long stick, establishing a distance between the work and the maker. On returning to Sydney, it is interesting to note that Matt has chosen a studio based within the Chinatown district in Haymarket. It’s there, alongside its energetic streets, that Matt has ‘carved out’ a resting point in which to create within. Choosing to arrive early in the morning to the studio – as he has informed me that “he trusts his decisions in the morning” – is where he focuses on the gradual construction and deconstruction of his imagery, not swayed by other circumstances or the havoc around him.

Thinking on this, I am reminded that sometimes the simplest gesture or object can hold the most acute message or

Opposite

purpose and even generate a sensation of wonder. Just imagine a bird’s nest, made from left over bits and pieces, yet when masterly woven together it is able to house vulnerable and growing chicks. I also contemplate the twentieth century art movement of Arte Povera and even Assemblage, and how a group of artists banded together to intentionally reject high-end art products and seek out to repurpose ‘everyday’ objects to blur the boundary between art and life and create surprising sculptural forms through the combination of unlikely objects. In doing so, they would rock the foundations of established institutions of government, industry and culture. In a similar way, the quiet transformation process of found objects undertaken in Matt’s work, both confounds the viewer by overturning a familiar value system of objects, while simultaneously causing them to marvel.

Matt has intentionally employed low-fi art techniques, in assembling found objects and sheets of semi-transparent paper, to slowly build up an image and openly “work things out” in direct view of the audience. Matt never wears a mask. If another artist can be called ‘a master of disguise’, then Matt is a master of transparency. Following a daily ritual of building an image in response to what he has around him or what has happened before, indicates a level of humility and vulnerability. Yet, this method of working also seeks to take the anxiety out of making by letting go of expectations. Even

Matt Bromhead

so, there are still areas of tension and risk in this process, particularly in the creation of his large-scale wall works. Soaking wet with rice glue, Matt must carry large sheets of delicate Kozo paper across his studio to adhere it on the board without tearing it. As it dries, it changes transparency and reveals six or seven previous layers of marks and information within the one composition. This process is an act of faith in direct making, in incidental encounters and in rearrangement, if necessary, all of which takes great commitment and courage to see it through, not just to see through it.

Matt Bromhead’s exhibition, Screens, scales great complexity from the humblest of beginnings. Banding together layers of washed-up debris, paper, marks and information, that he picked up along the way to inform this new body of work, is a brave way to work. Perhaps this act is a service to viewers, to awaken them from a kind of slumber so they might contemplate also how they are forming conclusions through a similar layering process of collated ideas and influences.

From a uniquely carved out rest-spot, Matt has assembled works with fresh immediacy while maintaining a level of integrity in their physicality and posture. There are paradoxes running concurrently through the works, provoking points of tension and curiosity while being a stabilising force for each other. However, it is the paradox of the artist himself which I find the most intriguing. Matt is willing to surrender to the process of making and yet at the same time be strong in his stance of beliefs, perhaps it is this combination that makes for the most resolute work.

Opposite: Peer

Matt Bromhead

List of works

Five Hundred Views West 2022

charcoal, pastel on mulberry paper on cotton paper

Forming (Your Views) I – III 2022 Charcoal, ink, Kozo paper, rice paper on board

Literally Truth over Tradition 2021 charcoal, ink on Kozo paper on board

Peer 2022 aluminium, brass, perlite, wood

Rest Point (Day 200) 2022 brass, dyed rope, rubber, wood

Screens 1 – 24 2022 charcoal, ink, kozo paper, rice paper on board

So Casual its Cancelled 2022 aluminium, copper, dyed rope, rubber, timber

Tall Tales (You’d Better Listen) 2022 acrylic rope, brass, linoleum, metal, twine

Zone Story 2022 brass, copper, plaster, rope

Artist interview

Small sculptures: After Hours 2022 brass, ink, plaster, wood

Back Where We Started 2022 acrylic, clay, copper, plaster, wood

Hanging Cares (7) 2021 aluminium, clay, copper, plaster, rope, timber

Hanging Cares (8) 2021 aluminium, copper, plaster, rope, wood

Hanging Cares (9) 2021 aluminium, acrylic, copper, plaster, rope, wood

Pigeon 2020/22 clay, copper, cork, felt, plaster, wood

Three Sheets 2021 aluminium, leather, plastic, timber, twine

watch artist video bromhead.com.au @matt__bromhead

Matt Bromhead is represented by Olsen Gallery, Sydney

Matt Bromhead

Above:

A stilled life installation view

Previous page:

A stilled life installation view including (left to right)

My place 2018

My place in sunshine 2018

Bouquet for Hazel 2022 (detail)

Christine Druitt Preston: A stilled life

A stilled life immediately draws you in. The patterned black and white floor covering has a mesmerising effect, calling for you to walk onto it, and into the world of Christine Druitt Preston. Because this exhibition, while heavily researched and steeped in the history of Hazelhurst Arts Centre, is also deeply personal and represents a culmination of years of work by the artist.

Druitt Preston’s work focuses on domestic interiors and gardens, so the decision to explore Hazelhurst cottage was immediate and obvious. However, the show also offered an opportunity to extend her practice beyond lino block prints, a chance to create her first whole room installation. She wished to transform the space, challenging the authority of the traditional white cube and providing the audience with a new lens through which to experience the gallery and see printmaking.

While this was a conscious choice, her process was further broadened by circumstances outside of her control. Traditionally the artist will spend weeks in a space, creating drawings which form the

basis for her prints. However, the period she had set aside for this work was beset by lockdowns and wet weather, so she instead turned to the history of Ben and Hazel Broadhurst and the house they designed and later gifted to the public. Her resources included the Sutherland Shire Council booklet, The Hazelhurst Story, Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s exhibition essay from The Ghost Show in 2010 and the artist David Rankin, whose parents and grandparents worked at the house as gardeners and housekeepers. This immersion in the history of the house and its occupants mean the show is filled with clever references, and the artist feels the three prints based on this research – Roadside bouquet, Bouquet for Hazel and Illumination – are the strongest print works she has ever made.

Indeed, these prints are beautifully rendered, a proliferation of patterns in carefully etched line. In the two bouquet works, one depicting natives found in the area and the other the carefully cultivated blooms that once grew in the Hazelhurst grounds, the patterning of the wallpaper and table coverings merge with the flowers,

Bridget Macleod

Christine Druitt Preston

blurring the edges between foreground and background and creating a captivating field of pattern. Illumination is likewise abstracted, with fleur-de-lys wallpaper snaking across the ceiling rose and through the chandelier.

The three other exhibited prints, Home alone, My place, and My place in sunshine, depict the home of the artist – the spaces she inhabits, the things she chooses to surround herself with. Druitt Preston sees the personal environments that people create to inhabit evidence of the lives they live, and through this exhibition has allowed us to immerse ourselves not just in the lives of the subjects, but of the artist as well.

The prints are the keystone of the exhibition, but also have an important second life, adapted to help create the other pieces on display. As Druitt Preston hand rubs and prints her works, it will often take multiple attempts to get a copy she is satisfied with. This has been built into her practice, in that she is always looking for different ways of using the prints – collaging, rescaling and reinterpreting to see where else she can take them.

The resulting repetition of shapes accords a continuity to a body of work, particularly important in the case of A stilled life, as the heavily patterned room could easily become overwhelming. Instead, it has an internal

Christine Druitt Preston

unity, making for a beautifully balanced installation with details of prints repeating in the wallpaper and floor covering, two chairs and a table, a cushion, a wall hanging and the mirror above a vase of native flowers. This is most notable and ingenious in the case of the chairs and one of three shirts hanging from hooks on the wall. What initially appears to be fabric is in fact paper, meticulously cut and sewn to seamlessly resemble everyday items, work Druitt Preston undertook herself. While she has been sewing on paper since the 1980s, this was her first time re-upholstering with paper, which she has achieved with great aplomb, down to the piping.

From left: Bouquet for Hazel 2022

Illumination 2022 Roadside Bouquet 2022

A stilled life installation view

The shirts are likewise scrupulously constructed, important as they reference the shirt making company established by John Preston Broadhurst and passed to Ben in 1936. Along with the printed shirt there are two translucent white shirts referencing Ben’s brothers Maurice and Jack, who were both killed in action in World War I. Their ghostly appearance also references Ben’s interest in psychic phenomena – séances were often held at Hazelhurst and he believed he could communicate with the dead.

Hazel’s role has been credited in the inclusion of the tea towels and aprons embroidered with the days of the week

Christine Druitt Preston

and common domestic duties – wash, shop, clean, bake etc. The couple had a son who died when he was four, and adopted three children, orphaned during a bombing raid on London, and they are referenced in the wall hangings decorated with images of children playing taken from 1950s children’s colouring books. Through this the artist also wanted to reference Hazelhurst’s current iteration, with visiting children constantly at play in the garden, and to entice them into the galleries. The cutouts are at child height, helping to create a space everybody can engage in.

The accessibility of the space was an important thread throughout the planning of the exhibition. Druitt Preston was interested in seeing whether inhabiting a gallery with the trappings of home disrupts its established purpose, allowing the audience to develop a new way of thinking about art. The division between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ craft and association of the latter with femininity has always been of interest to Druitt Preston. With the definition of craft tied to functionality, the artist wanted to render the exhibited objects unusable through employment of non-traditional, fragile materials and to see how this affects people’s perception of the space.

The title A stilled life was taken from the poem ‘Afterwards’ by Thomas Hardy, a contemplation of life continuing after death, acknowledging the bequest made by the Broadhursts and their legacy to the community. The poem also explores the importance placed by the protagonist on noticing the small beauties in life – an argument for taking the time to fully engage with this exquisite installation.

Opposite: A stilled life installation view

Christine Druitt Preston

Above: Home alone 2021 installation view

Opposite and next page: A stilled life installation views

Christine Druitt Preston

List of works

A stilled life 2022 installation mixed media including Lino block print on Wenzhou paper, tulle, embroidery, found objects, mirror, dried flowers, vinyl including: Bouquet for Hazel 2022 hand rubbed Lino block print on Wenzhou paper edition 1/3, editioned by artist

Home alone 2022 Lino block print on Wenzhou paper unique print, editioned by artist

Illumination 2022 hand rubbed Lino block print on Wenzhou paper edition 1/3, editioned by artist

My place 2018 Lino block print on Wenzhou paper edition 5/5, editioned by Brenda Tye

My place in sunshine 2018 Lino block print on Wenzhou paper edition 1/5, editioned by Brenda Tye

Roadside bouquet 2022 hand rubbed Lino block print on Wenzhou paper edition 1/3, editioned by artist

watch artist video christinedruittpreston.com @christine.druitt

Christine Druitt Preston is represented by Artsite Contemporary, Sydney

Christine Druitt Preston

Artist interview

Above and previous page: Solastalgia installation view

Nicole Kelly

Nicole Kelly: Solastalgia

The land is silent, breathless. Ancient boughs blackened by wildfire stand on their last legs, bodies spindly like strands of thread. Beneath them a charcoal bed, the resting place of the lost. Here are the bones of the bush, the cartilage of catastrophe; what’s left once flesh and foliage have been stripped away.

To love, and to grieve. Such is the deeply felt dichotomy in Nicole Kelly’s installation Solastalgia, where sizzling anxieties about climate crisis plough into a soft and tender love of the land. In her panoramic painting and ceramics, Kelly creates an empathetic space enacting the immersive ability of art to transport audiences from the physical and temporal limits of architectural space.

Kelly’s vast painted landscape – almost twelve metres long and two metres tall –references the catastrophic bushfires that blazed across south-eastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020. Arranged circularly, this fourteen-panel piece recalls the Panorama paintings of the 19th century – yet rather

than delineating sublime landscapes and grand historical events, it layers a burnt landscape with disorienting fragments of interior spaces and figuration. Rooms are cleaved open and left vulnerable to natural forces as interior spaces morph into the landscape itself, swiftly gutted by the climate-affected natural disaster. Potted indoor plants, green and lush, throw the scorched landscape into sharp relief, creating a collision between the cultivated and the wild and casting a sad shadow over the diminished future of ‘nature’.

Silent is the scene, and yet the roar of the wildfire emanates in our collective memory. Within this surreal mashup of dichotomies, hunched figures avert their faces from the viewer, allowing us to transpose upon them our own affiliations. These are not portraits, indeed, but archetypes of sorrow. Amongst the faceless figures a singular young girl stands front on, her skin pale against the charred tree behind her. She is a spectre in a dead land, an apparition of innocence and life. Hope, perhaps, is not lost.

Elli Walsh

Nicole Kelly

Trees in this installation are tropes of hope. Scorched boughs splinter the painted surface like cracks in the panels, their truncated branches reaching up to the sky in desperate supplication. Together these lineal forms appear arterial, circulatory, trailing up and down the composition with the heave of both life and death. Beneath the landscape, a blood red painted ground exposes itself like a shrouded wound in the negative space between trees, gesturing to the ecological trauma underscoring the Anthropocene. The vacant blue sky of Kelly’s painting pushes forward with osmotic force, as if wanting to ingest the parched forms. Yet the trees push back – defiant. They are scarred yet steadfast, a troupe of charred bodies standing like sentinels, soldiers,

survivors. Far from a panorama of futility, this is a vista of hope. The strong verticality coined by the mass of tree trunks creates an urgent tugging downwards, towards the earth, towards the soil and the seed. Renewal. There is a certain compositional density here, a compression of space that consumes the viewer, while the weary trees encircling us watch on with a kind of panoptical omniscience. Surrounding the painted panels, 214 saggar fired ceramic trees line the perimeter of the exhibition. These twisted and tormented limbs, rubbed with hues of burnt orange, dirty umber, ash white and charcoal, resemble ossified fragments of some prodigious skeleton. Literally born of fire, flecked and fortified by flames, they materialise the carbonised

Above: Solastalgia 2022 (painting component)

Nicole Kelly

trunks in a way that speaks not only of tragedy, but of strength and resilience.

Throughout this installation – and indeed her oeuvre – Kelly engages with the fragment, the synecdoche, to create a coded space for gentle cogitation. There is something unshakingly poetic to this pictorial strategy. Solastalgia does not conjure the beauteous forms of Wordsworth, nor the Romantic lyrics of Keats, but the doleful, fragmented images painted by modern thinkers like T. S Eliot. When moving inside Kelly’s painted space, and around the perimeter of the tree-lined exhibition space, the viewpoint shifts, imagery falls apart, slips in and out of focus and appears incomplete. Optical

tremors spawn uncertainty, doubt, the provisional and the unfinished as we step, metaphorically, into an era of environmental unknown. The paintings themselves act as a counterpoint to representation as Kelly employs various methodologies that fight against the image. Veiling and camouflage are induced by layers of paint scraped back, erased and obfuscated, as well as lumps of congealed paint buried beneath lavishly loaded surfaces. Deliberately effaced edges mingle with crude sketching, giving rise to visual slippages where crevices between forms collapse into each other, contorting any representational logic. Secrets are sewn into the work, offering the promise of enlightenment whilst also shining light on our collective ignorance. The trees know all,

Nicole Kelly

the trees have seen it all – they look to us for help yet despair at our inaction. Within Kelly’s painterly stratification is a spatial and temporal splintering, a clever turbulence that prevents the eye from sitting still or resting on a vanishing point. Observation, here, becomes excavation as we untangle meaning from mark, and form from fragment.

In the years following Australia’s 2020 bushfires, collective grief and subsequent discussion about land practices forced many Australians to not only consider how precious and vulnerable the environment is, but also how endemic mismanagement continues to influence and change the landscape. Solastalgia occupies a place in the ongoing question of how we represent our changing and sensitive relationships with the landscape. Kelly’s fluency with paint, along with the immersive nature of her work, steers the viewer through confronting terrain, seducing our eyes before delivering dense cognitive content. With almost lifesized figures looming in the foreground of her painting, the artist positions anthropogenic activity as a catalyst of crisis whilst also situating humanity as a bastion of hope – the planet’s only hope. This idea is unwittingly performed by the viewer of Solastalgia, for as we actively explore the static installation our agency is reflected back, brightly. We are agents of change, and the earth is moaning for help.

Opposite: Solastalgia installation view

49Nicole Kelly

Above and following page: Solastalgia installation view

Opposite: Solastalgia 2022 (detail)

Nicole Kelly

List of works

Solastalgia 2022 installation

oil on board, fourteen panels; ceramic, terra sigillata, saggar fired, mixed media, 200 pieces

Artist interview

watch artist interview

nicolerenaekelly.com @nk_nk_

Nicole Kelly is represented by Arthouse Gallery, Sydney and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne

SPECIAL THANKS

I would like to thank and acknowledge Architect Jon Jacka, Ceramicists Di Brock and Bruce McWhinney for their technical assistance at Gymea Tafe, as well as my studio assistant Mark Merrikin and my partner Lauren Forlonge for their contribution to help realise this project.

Nicole Kelly

Above and previous page: Threads of the Detachables installation view

Kerry Toomey - the remembering

It’s remarkable what memories will emerge when one has a clear-out of a lifetime of gathered belongings. Treasured memories of a life lived well including its happy yet humble beginnings. Memories of those who went before us – these memories I call ‘cultural memories’ or ‘familial memories’ are inherited through the bloodlines by the telling and re-telling of stories. Stories of events; of aspirations; of hopes and of hardships, and stories of forced histories.

And in a recent clear-out Kerry Toomey came across a detachable fur collar in the shape reminiscent of a returning boomerang. Upon discovering this collar Toomey’s personal and inherited memories came flooding back and swirled around her, filling the space in her cosy bush studio.

This furry boomerang collar returned to her, and dropped at her feet, the motivation to explore working with textiles – a medium removed from her established practice of working with paper and tissue. Constructing a timeline of sorts by honouring the women in her life through the creation of oversized and unwearable collars, Toomey deliberately

chose the fabrics of each collar so that they reveal the story of the individual or of the slice of her life being commemorated.

The denim collar suggests Toomey’s teen years whilst enrolled at Wee Waa Central where firm friendships were established. Using an old pair of Levi jeans suggestive of the longed-for 501s of the time, Toomey embellishes this piece with symbols of 1974 – the rainbow colours along with the peace sign being indicative of the peace and the ‘flower power’ movements of the 70s. The rainbow coloured thread used in this work spells the words ‘love’, ‘peace’ and ‘maliyaa’ which is the Gamilaraay word for ‘friend’. A beautiful word to speak aloud, maliyaa is rendered here with love in multicoloured thread. These are the symbols of a generation determined to see love and peace in their time are surrounding a portrait of two young friends who found in each other the shared hopes for a future full of beauty and joy. This friendship is still as strong today as it was when first began during those heady days of global civil unrest and protest.

Tess Allas

Kerry Toomey

With the work of 25 scarves, all donated from various friends and each imbued with their own memories, Toomey has created a collar so strong in its connectedness of one scarf with another it speaks to her history of learning and teaching and being a part of a greater movement of First Nations educators and the women who, in comradeship, supported Toomey’s career in education. This strength in this work is that it would take a force greater than the union of women to dismantle it and so this collar will endure for decades to come.

One of the most touching collars created by Toomey is the one dedicated to an aunt who herself was well-known for her work with textiles as a quilter and a knitter. Here Toomey gathered fabric remnants and created a collar so intricate and so detailed and precise that it honours her aunt’s own practice. Small pieces have been patiently sewn together that when fashioned into the collar create the illusion of feathered

wings. And yet these flightless wings are tethered to the soil by Toomey in another loving gesture to her aunt – the knitted border of flowers which pay tribute to the aunt’s award winning gardening skills. Her aunt once won the local Wellington Garden Competition at a time in our nation’s history when Aboriginal people (especially women) were more often than not pushed outside the activities of the broader community. They were hardly ever granted access into local events such as gardening competitions. The strength and resilience of Aboriginal women throughout our history is deeply felt by Toomey with this particular piece.

Another moving collar is one fashioned from a lace tablecloth. It’s very age indicates it has belonged to many generations and holds the stories of the families who owned it. The memories embedded in this collar hold Toomey’s own memories of helping her aunts working as ‘domestics’. Toomey would help with the laundry duties folding

Above (from left): Detachable collar 6 and 7 2022

Kerry Toomey

Opposite: Threads of the Detachables installation view

Opposite (from left):

Untitled portrait 2022 Smalls 2022 (detail)

Above: Found object 2022

Following page: Threads of the Detachables installation view

sheets and tea-towels. This collar of a tightly knotted tablecloth contains the intergenerational stories of the women forced into domestic labour, more often than not without ever being paid. These domestics were enslaved workers. They are the unsung and unpaid heroes of what is generally known in our history as the era of nation-building.

As an accompaniment to these collars, Toomey has gathered a collection of photographed images of women wearing the displayed collars. Each one of these women have a relationship to the stories captured in the collar they are modelling. There are other photographs, too, of Toomey’s children and of Toomey’s ancestors providing a reminder of the unbroken bloodline of her people.

Toomey herself has produced a self-portrait that gives us pause for thought. Here we see her draped in both a kangaroo pelt and another lace table cloth, her face and

body ‘painted up’ with ochres while her gaze slightly left of the camera lens offers a suggestion of the creative force within.

Connecting all these works are two found objects. On a family trip back to the site of Minnon Mission at Pilliga on Gamilaroi Country from where Toomey’s people hail, the artist found a heavy ancient iron, the type used by ‘domestics’ across this landscape to keep the sheets, tea-towels, tablecloths wrinkle free. Perhaps this old iron was one used by the women of her own family. The other object is a lump of chicken wire all twisted and woven into a heartshaped sculptural form. Toomey found this object half buried in the dirt battered into its new shape by time and by the elements over the decades since it was abandoned. These objects provide a tangible link of Toomey’s matriarchal past on Gamilaroi Country. All the evidence she needs to show the strength and endurance of the women who came before her and of those who have left an indelible stamp on her soul.

List of works

Detachable collar 1 2022 kangaroo fur, feathers, thread, stick

Detachable collar 2 2022 Levi jeans, thread, inkjet print patch, embroidery patches

Detachable collar 3 2022 found wire, kangaroo fur, emu feathers, felt

Detachable collar 4 2022 kangaroo leather, assorted buttons and thread, fur trim

Detachable collar 5 2022 old lace tablecloth

Detachable collar 6 2022 muslin, feathers, lace tablecloth, linen, string and thread

Detachable collar 7 2022 tablecloth, satin, thread

Detachable collar 8: Tent Days 2022 echo dyed canvas, thread, hessian, old blanket, lace

Detachable collar 9 2022 cloth dolly’s, thread, beads, lace, kangaroo fur

Detachable collar 10 2022 cloth remnants, thread, interfacing, wool, monoprinted cotton

Detachable collar 11 2022 recycled scarves, thread

Found objects 2022 rusted vintage iron and chicken wire

Smalls 1 – 24 2022 watercolour, paper, inkjet print, cotton and metallic thread, beads, emu feathers, kangaroo fur

Untitled (series) 2022 digital photographic prints on cotton rag

@kerry.toomey

SPECIAL THANKS

I would like to thank curators Carrie and Naomi for including me in this exhibition, I appreciate the advice and support that has been provided along the way. My family and friends who without any hesitation were models of my detachable collars, including Norma Griffin, Cetrice Sargeant, Jacinta Sargeant, Charline Emizin-Boyd and Betty Doolan. Thank you to Southern Framing for printing, Silversalt for wonderful images. A special thank you to all of my extended family and friends that have continually supported me. Threads of the detachables is multilayered with a lifetime of stories attached.

Opposite: Detachable collar 1 2022

64 Artist interview

Kerry Toomey

watch artist interview

Acknowledgements

Sutherland Shire Council acknowledges the Dharawal people as the Traditional Custodians of the land within the Sutherland Shire. We value and celebrate Dharawal culture & language, and acknowledge Dharawal people’s continuing connection to the land, the sea and community. We pay respect to the Elders and their families, past, present and emerging, and through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

QUINTET is produced and presented by Hazelhurst Arts Centre with the support of Sutherland Shire Council and Create NSW

HAZELHURST STAFF

Director: Belinda Hanrahan Curator: Carrie Kibbler

Assistant Curator: Naomi Stewart Public Programs & Education Coordinator: Natalie O’Connor Public Programs & Education Officer: Lisa Barnfield Marketing Coordinator: Stephanie Hopper Arts Centre Coordinator: Fiona McFadyen

Team Leader Visitor Services & Administration: Caryn Schwartz Venue Duty Officers: Vilma Hodgson, Cameron Ward, Giada Cantini

Visitor Service Assistants: Hannah McClaren, Marilyn Brown Exhibition Preparators: Gilbert Grace, Brendan Van Hek, Jenny Tubby, Sam Spragg, Paul Williams, Haydn Martin

We also acknowledge our teachers and volunteers who bring the exhibitions to life for our visitors.

QUINTET

Lee Bethel, Matt Bromhead, Christine Druitt Preston, Nicole Kelly, Kerry Toomey 10 September - 13 November 2022

Curated by Carrie Kibbler and Naomi Stewart

© 2022 Hazelhurst Arts Centre 782 Kingsway Gymea NSW 2227 Australia

T: 61 2 8536 5700 E: hazelhurst@ssc.nsw.gov.au www.hazelhurst.com.au ISBN: 978-1-921437-78-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

Artwork documentation by Silversalt Photography except, page 2, first image from left: the artist page 3, first image from right: Document Photography page 4, second image from left: Flore Vallery-Radot page 34-35: Document Photography page 46-47, 51: Flore Vallery-Radot Videography: Constantine Productions

This exhibition is supported by

Principal partners