© Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright Savanhdary Vongpoothorn This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. COMPILER: Ally Russell-Floyd PHOTOGRAPHER: Brenton McGeachie COLOUR SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney Cover Image: Fire Sutra II, 2021, bamboo strip, gesso, acrylic on perforated canvas, 230 x 180 cm
SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN Grounded and Glowing 22 July - 15 August 2021
MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY 15 HAMPDEN STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021 TEL: 02 9331 7997 FAX: 02 9331 7050 info@martinbrownecontemporary.com www.martinbrownecontemporary.com GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY - SUNDAY 10:30AM - 6PM
Grounded and Glowing
Grounded and Glowing reflects my experience of “finding the ground” again in a post bushfire, post Covid world. After a busy period of travelling and exhibiting in Asia, these works reflect my experience of engaging intensely with the environment around me and taking stock. Having explored the Australian bush in my early work, I’ve returned to this landscape with a more mature and cosmopolitan eye. Using iridescent and phosphorescent paints, I’ve sought to create works that literally glow in these dark times.
From 1995 I dedicated five years to exploring the Australian landscape, painting the natural environment around the bush studio in Wedderburn where I lived and worked for eight years. This period resulted in solo exhibitions at King Street Gallery in 1996, 1997 and 1998 where I showed works on perforated canvases including “Horizon”, “Wattle”, “Rain”, “Before Winter” and “Wind in the Trees”. These paintings marked a turning point and a kind of landmark of spiritual growth for me. With them, I felt that I finally achieved a synthesis of the forms of the Australian landscape with the visual language of traditional Lao textiles. I felt that it was important to include these paintings in my 2019 Survey exhibition, “All that Arises”.
More than a decade after those King Street Gallery shows, in a 2013 solo exhibition entitled “The Beautiful as Force”, I made extensive use of patterns observed on scribbly gums, for me a powerful figure of beauty in nature. After first encountering these gums around the bush studio in Wedderburn, I rediscovered them in the Blue Mountains, where we have a family farm. Maybe I’ve been influenced by the magical beliefs of my animist ancestors, but I see beauty such as that found in these patterns as something more than just aesthetic. For me it’s a vital natural and spiritual force, an agency in itself.
Patrick White opens “The Tree of Man” with his protagonist setting down his cart between two great stringy barks and contemplating the home he will build there. In these new works, I have again taken up the motif of the scribbly gum tree as a symbol for the difficult and tenuous belonging White’s hero and his descendants forge in the Australian bush, finding resonance in it with Buddhist ideas about the transient nature of any belonging we might have in this world of suffering and desires. I believe that this perspective helps mediate between the (ongoing) history of violence done to Indigenous people and Country by settler society, and our common dreams of finding spiritual belonging in the Australian landscape.
All of this has been amplified for me by recent events. In late 2019, my family were caught very scarily in the bushfires on the South Coast of NSW. No sooner had we recovered from this when, in January 2020, my father passed away. After that, Covid and lockdowns arrived. Like many others, I was helped at this time by Julia Baird’s (2020) book Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark. In a kind of homage to her, I have explored using phosphorescent paint to make works that glow in the dark. With this amazing new material, I am engaging anew with familiar elements of my visual language, including the patterns from scribbly gum bark, Lao-Pali text and the broken Fire Sutra.
Since the late 1990s I have made perforated canvas a hallmark of my oeuvre, inspired by the act of weaving that is central in Lao culture. During Canberra’s Covid lockdown, I discovered a stack of these canvases that had been prepared for me by my late father who, up until his passing,had long been my studio assistant, helping me produce these canvases using a soldering iron.
As Nicole Soriano has identified:
Suddenly, what had once been abandoned in untouched storage spaces now holds invaluable meaning to Savanhdary. As if poignantly holding on to the physical vestiges of her father’s presence and actions, Savanhdary shares how she closely examined the intricacy of the gridded lines and burnt, uniform holes on these canvases upon their discovery. (Nicole Soriano, 2020)
As I’ve already recounted, I have long been enchanted by the cryptic scribblings found on the scribbly gum trees, and I have been wanting to ‘decipher’ them. Now I have combined the scribbly gum motif with Lao-Pali text to make up the compositions on these discovered perforated canvases. The Lao-Pali text is a broken Sutra, or a Fire Sutra, and appears abstract and fragmented – as if lacking a coherent flow and narrative. Yet, the physical act of applying iridescent and phosphorescent paint to the canvases, thus making the work glow in the dark, has been enormously satisfying for me.
In closing, I am honoured to further quote Nicole Soriano, who has written of these paintings that:
Created during a time of both personal loss and collective fear and uncertainty, [this] work is a powerful allegory of how brokenness can be transformed into beauty – and how that beauty contains a light that persists, even in a dimming world. (Nicole Soriano, 2020)
Nicole Soriano, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, The Humanity of Small Things, 2020, Gajah Gallery, Singapore,
Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, 2021
LIST OF WORKS
Grounded and Glowing III, 2021, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 122 x 60 cm (opposite) Phosphorescence II, 2020, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 230 x 180 cm Weaving the Fire Sutra, 2021, bamboo strip, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 86.5 x 61.5 cm Grounded and Glowing I, 2021, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 120 x 100 cm Grounded and Glowing II, 2021, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 61 x 61 cm Phosphorescence III, 2021, acrylic and gesso, 230 x 180 cm Fire Sutra III, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm Fire Sutra VI, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm Fire Sutra IV, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm Fire Sutra V , 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm Fire Sutra II, 2021, bamboo strip, gesso, acrylic on perforated canvas, 230 x 180 cm
Phosphorescence II, 2020, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 230 x 180 cm
Weaving the Fire Sutra, 2021, bamboo strip, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 86.5 x 61.5 cm
Grounded and Glowing I, 2021, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 120 x 100 cm
Grounded and Glowing II, 2021, acrylic on canvas with perforations, 61 x 61 cm
Phosphorescence III, 2021, acrylic and gesso, 230 x 180 cm
Fire Sutra III, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm
Fire Sutra VI, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm
Fire Sutra IV, 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm
Fire Sutra V , 2021, acrylic on coloured etching, 59.5 x 44.5 cm
Fire Sutra II, 2021, bamboo strip, gesso, acrylic on perforated canvas, 230 x 180 cm
SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN 1971 Born in Laos 1979 Arrived Australia 1990-92 B.A. Visual Arts. UWS Nepean, Sydney 1993 M.A. Visual Arts. UNSW College of Fine Arts, Sydney SOLO EXHIBITIONS
COLLECTIONS
2021 Grounded and Glowing, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2020 Broken Sutra, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2019 S.E.A. Focus: A Spotlight on Southeast Asia, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 2019 All That Arises, (Survey Exhibition) Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, Canberra 2017 Pali Sound, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2016 Ramayana on the Mekong, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2014 All is Burning, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2013 The Beautiful as Force, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2011 Stone down a Well, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2008 Re-enchantment, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney 2005 Incantation, Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney 2004 A Certain Distance, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2003 Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney 2002 bindi dot tartan zen, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2000 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Allens, Sydney Artbank, Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales Atanaskovic Hartnell, Sydney Australian National University Campbelltown Arts Centre Jackson Smith Solicitors, Sydney Janet Holmes à Court Collection Jim Wolfensohn World Bank Lady Caruthers Collection, Western Australia Macquarie Group, Australia Macquarie University, Sydney Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art SCEGGS Redlands Sherman Foundation The Australian Club University of Melbourne (Australia India Institute) University of Western Sydney, (Macarthur), NSW University of Western Sydney, (Nepean), NSW University of Wollongong, NSW Westfarmers collection Various private collections
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2021 Space YZ, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW 2020 Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2020 The Humanity of Small Things, (online exhibition) Gajah Gallery, Singapore 2020 Re/production: Australian art from the 1980s and 1990s, 16 Albermarle project space, Sydney 2019 Currents: Hiroshima House (inside Wat Ounalom), Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2019 Shifting Tides, A3 ARNDT ART AGENCY, Jakarta, Indonesia 2019 Shaping Geographies: Art / Women / Southeast Asia, Gajah Gallery, Singapore 2019 Discrete Encoding, Fost Gallery, Singapore 2018 Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, University of the Philippines Vargas Museum and Yuchengco Museum, Manila, Philippines 2018 Infinite Conversations, National gallery of Australia, Canberra 2017 Artist Profile: Australasian Painters 2007-2017, Orange Regional Gallery, NSW 2017 Abstraction: Celebrating Australian women abstract artists, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and touring 2016 Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2015 James and Jacqui Erskine Collection, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University 2015 Making Connections: Southeast Asian Art @ ANU, School of Art Gallery, Australian National University 2013 Crossing Paths III, RAFT artspace, Alice Springs 2013 The Imperceptible something..., Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Morten Bay 2013 Vibrant Matter, Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Healesville 2012 Korea International Art Fair, Niagara Galleries, COEX, Seoul, Korea 2012 Melbourne Art Fair, Niagara Galleries, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne 2011 Korea International Art Fair, Niagara Galleries, COEX, Seoul, Korea