A Thousand Different Angles by mcclellandgallery

A thousand different angles McClelland 21 February–5 June 2022

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Catalogue published by McClelland February 2022 McClelland 390 McClelland Drive Langwarrin VIC 3910 Australia www.mcclelland.org.au info@mcclellandgallery.com Curators: Lisa Byrne and Simon Lawrie Editor: Simon Lawrie Copyeditors: Susie Raven, Lisa Byrne A thousand different angles / Lisa Byrne and Simon Lawrie

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect those of the Elisabeth publisher. Murdoch Sculpture Copyright © 2022 McClelland, authors, artists, Fund Elisabeth photographers and designer. Apart from any use as Murdoch Sculpture Fund permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any process, electronic or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to contact persons owning copyright in the works of art or photographs illustrated in this book. In cases where this has not been possible owners are invited to notify McClelland. Except where otherwise noted, all works are courtesy of the artists, their representative galleries and estates. Images are reproduced with kind permission of the artists, their representative galleries and estates: Estate of Inge King, Estate of Norma Redpath, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australian Galleries, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Daine Singer, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Neon Parc, Sarah Scout Presents, STATION, Sullivan+Strumpf. Photography credits: Christian Capurro: pp. 6–7, 12–17, 19, 25, 27, 29, 33, 35, 39, 45, 46–7, 54–5, 58, 60; Mark Chew: p. 28; Mark Pokorny: p. 31; John Brash: p. 36; Mitchell PelnsRoss: pp. 42–3 Design: 5678 Design Printing: Bambra Press Pty Ltd Edition: 150 ISBN 978-0-9946191-7-4 McClelland respectfully acknowledges the Bunurong, particularly their Elders past, present and emerging, as Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters on which the Gallery’s exhibitions take place. This catalogue was produced on Kulin Nation land. McClelland acknowledges the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Boon Wurrung as the first and continuing custodians of these lands and waters, and pays respect to their Elders, past and present.

Government Partners:

McClelland Partners:

Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund

Director’s Foreword Lisa Byrne

10 A thousand different angles Simon Lawrie 18 Fiona Abicare Fiona McDonald 20 Samara Adamson-Pinczewski Jane O’Neill 22 Marion Borgelt Chloé Wolifson 24 Consuelo Cavaniglia Melissa Keys 26 Natasha Johns-Messenger Melissa Miles 28 Inge King Simon Lawrie 30 Sanné Mestrom Emily Cormack 32

Noriko Nakamura Liang Luscombe

34 Nabilah Nordin Amelia Winata 36 Louise Paramor Jane Devery 38 Kerrie Poliness Carolyn Barnes 40 Norma Redpath Caroline Colbran 44 Meredith Turnbull Rebecca Coates 48

Artist biographies

List of works

Acknowledgements and contributors

Natasha Johns-Messenger Envelop 2022

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD Lisa Byrne

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD The examination of artistic expression through time is a rewarding and thought-provoking endeavour. The exhibition A thousand different angles provides just that opportunity, pairing the two significant Australian modernist sculptors, Norma Redpath and Inge King, with eleven contemporary artists all engaging with renewed vigour, in their respective ways, with the legacy of modernism in sculptural practice. The 50th Anniversary year of McClelland in 2021 provides a concurrent opportunity to think through the history and practice of sculpture as it was defined through McClelland, as the home of Australian sculpture. Our program over the year (despite the impacts of COVID-19) took as its foundation the question, ‘what does sculpture mean in the 21st Century?’ Post-object and object-based exhibition projects over the course of the year interrogated this question, and this exhibition provides an obvious focus to some of the many female artists working in Australia in the medium of sculpture. It is by no means, nor was it meant to be, an exhaustive list. In its scope the exhibition foregrounds abstraction in sculpture, through planes, surfaces and forms, evoking fragility and strength, at times formal deceptions or conundrums of shapes and colours and of materiality, all addressing themselves to the ways in which objects or their absence affect space and our perceptions of it.

Our hope is that this exhibition brings to light new discourse, and spurs on future generations of spatial investigators, to look back and forth through time when considering how to interpret the physical world, and to extrapolate artworks that provide us with much to contemplate in our consideration of spatial relationships in the world. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of numerous people and organisations. Our sincere thanks to the Australian Government through the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; The Besen Family Foundation; Susie Nathan, Sally Baillieu, Robyn Beddison OAM, Sarah Brockhoff, Susie Brookes, Sue Clifford, Marilyn Cookes, Andrea Dudley, Marianne Hay, Lou Heffernan, Kylie Heine, Titania Henderson, Jane Kiel, Simone Neal, Caecilia Potter, Lousje Skala, Melissa Smith, Deb Thomas, and Lorna Wallace; and Bruce Parncutt AO. We could not achieve what we do without your generosity and interest. Thanks to all gallerists, and private lenders, for your generous efforts and loans of works, which have contributed greatly to this exhibition, A thousand different angles.

Simon Lawrie

The exhibition A thousand different angles foregrounds the legacy of Inge King AM (1915– 2016) and Norma Redpath OBE (1928–2013), two central figures of Australian modernist sculpture with significant works in McClelland’s outdoor collection. In conjunction, eleven contemporary artists are showcased who extend conceptual and aesthetic concerns in King and Redpath’s practice, and who expand the legacies of modernism in a contemporary spatial context: Fiona Abicare, Samara Adamson-Pinczewski, Marion Borgelt, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Sanné Mestrom, Noriko Nakamura, Nabilah Nordin, Louise Paramor, Kerrie Poliness, and Meredith Turnbull. Curated by Lisa Byrne and Simon Lawrie, this exhibition is titled after Inge King’s observation that ‘sculpture is drawing from a thousand different angles’ and explores the dynamic spatial properties of sculpture in relation to both environmental context and the contingent experience of the viewer. Set across both McClelland’s indoor galleries and outdoor sculpture park, it includes works of diverse scale from small maquettes to monumental public sculpture in a bushland environment. Works by King and Redpath from the 1980s infer an expansive experiential space, albeit one that is contained within discrete sculptural objects. For both artists, the form of the maquette is metonymic of larger scale works in public contexts and establishes relations to the broader urban or natural environment. While Redpath sought to integrate her sculptures, such as Paesaggio Cariatyde 1980–85 and Desert Arch 1964 with the surrounding landscape, King often pitted her angular black steel constructions, such as Jabaroo 1984–85 or Island Sculpture 1991, against the Australian bushland. While industrial materials and fabrication processes inform these artists’ work and were central to King’s practice in particular, the manipulation of form, and of experience, remains direct. King’s welding techniques often introduce organic expression to the dynamic yet

comparatively rigid geometry of her sculptures, and Redpath’s conspicuous traces of plying, kneading and gouging a sculptural form bring a similar manual trace to her works in bronze and clay. Contemporary artists extend these concerns with context and experience using varied media, disciplinary frameworks, and artistic approaches. The languages of interior design, domestic and retail spaces pervade Fiona Abicare’s sculptures and Meredith Turnbull’s modular installation. Natasha Johns-Messenger and Consuelo Cavaniglia present quasi-architectural installations which foreground spatial subjectivity and processes of perception, while the fragmented forms and vibrant colour palettes of Samara Adamson-Pinczewski’s 3-D printed sculptures similarly activate and complicate the viewer’s comprehension. Tactile bodily experience and materially guided process define the work of Noriko Nakamura, Sanné Mestrom and Nabilah Nordin. Cosmological patterns and natural cycles feature in the living sculpture of Marion Borgelt. Drawing on the potential of industrial plastics, Louise Paramor’s sculptures, including the monumental Panorama Station 2010 on Peninsula Link freeway near McClelland, offer a pop sensibility at architectural scale. An expanded conception of painting and sculpture feature in Kerrie Poliness’s video work, through the openended journey of the art object itself. In the context of the limitations on movement and contact brought about by COVID-19, where digital experience has often eclipsed physical interaction, this exhibition attempts to re-ground us through the direct experience of objects in space, while offering diverse perspectives and approaches to contemporary spatial practice.

Fiona Abicare Fiona Macdonald

Overexposures and America in the Dark were conceived as part of Fiona Abicare’s exhibition Americano (2016)—an aesthetic affair between sculpture, and the dreams and ideals of the production design of the Hollywood Studio System (1927–1949). Sculpture’s role in this Hollywood affair, as a performer in the filmed interior, draws on a melange of classical design motifs to reproduce in its screen image a beau ideal of display—a role that returns, via the Hollywood Regency design style, as scenography for the domestic interior, set dressing for the display of domestic life as art. These works—credenzas, as the artist describes them—are not axiomatic. On first encounter in the context of the Americano exhibition at Sarah Scout Presents, placed in the Paris End Regency setting of the gallery with its parquet floors, French windows and Georgian fanlights, they appear in a supporting role, as plinths for an accompanying pair of vesselforms. A seemingly benign pair that are also disturbingly asymmetric. The dense slab of clay maché that forms the front face of each piece—and threatens the equilibrium of their cuboid form and their immaculate Victorian Ash construction—is also the scene of a radical intervention, an opening produced in the façade of one of the pair by the penetrating force of an unknown projectile. As their titles suggest, the credenzas embody a relationship to light, or its absence—too much or too little. Seeing these works at the artist’s studio exposed their autonomous being, the closed structure changing from supportive, to hermetic and self-referential. These credenzas are not functional; the interiors are inaccessible—even the forced opening in the façade of America in the Dark reveals no aperture to an interiority, only a deep pit in the plasticity of that interior. Next to Overexposures—a domestic monolith extreme in its closure and resembling a tomb—the void of America in the Dark appears as an invitation

to participate in its form and with the action that produced it. This simultaneity of exclusion and participation is a key concept across Abicare’s work. Here, it is a logic of the work and a key affective experience of the work for the viewer; design and art, film set and gallery, each occurring at once and exchanging apparatus and anatomies across time. And as part of that exchange a double-movement takes place, at once bringing into view the hegemony of such a circulation of forms, and simultaneously exposing the void of America in the Dark as an expression produced from within its interior plasticity against the Presence of Hollywood Regency, its tropes of Empire, its celebrity carte blanche, and its procuring and conversions of forms. Overexposures and America in the Dark are double-movements; they illuminate the transactional network of desire that fuels that circulation of forms through the dreammachine; at the same time, they dis-establish those symbolic engendering actions by producing themselves as difference. The benign is simultaneously repellent, the transgressive is simultaneously intimate, and each formed and experienced materially and temporally. A difference formed within and through the artworks. As a kind of revolutionary time. A kind of Intimate Revolt.

Fiona Abicare Overexposures 2016 (left) and America in the Dark 2016 (right)

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski Jane O’Neill

To view these works at McClelland, we must first pass by larger forms—sculptures by icons of Australian modernism such as Norma Redpath and Inge King. If travelling by car, we might see public commissions by well-respected artists such Emily Floyd, Louise Paramor or Manon van Kouswijk. By virtue of the context in which these works by Samara Adamson-Pinczewski are exhibited, it is impossible not to imagine them in a much larger form. The Around the Corner series is a recent progression from the artist’s two-dimensional painting practice which itself is informed by the spatial relationships between objects. With a proliferation of angles, both curved and oblique, the forms of these sculptures can be readily understood as both architectural yet faceted like a jewel. There is a sequence of shifts between scales, both in the way the works are constructed and in how we read them visually. In the first stage of production, the sculptures are configured with Arches paper and paint before undergoing a transformation in scale through 3-D printing.

1. Conversation with the artist during studio visit, 1 November 2021

In the gallery setting, the sculptures appear as maquettes for architectural forms. The title Around the corner invites inspection of surfaces in ways that we might navigate a building. At times voids open unexpectedly to the light whilst others lead to a closure. The artist describes how:

I often use multiple angles and iridescent materials in my work because they communicate feelings of movement and transience. Through creating irregular spatial structures, the viewer is prompted to experience different angles and in turn activate colour shifts by walking around the work.1 There are also pronounced curves, echoing the silhouettes of instruments and the historical legacy of Cubism. In many of the formal components the vibrations of modernism are

never far, with the most striking influence of Russian Constructivism. Yet the colours signal a new universe of unexpected shades such as fuchsia, iridescent blue or magenta layered against a backdrop of soft pearlescent shades of white. The artist describes how the process mostly follows a progression from lighter colours to dark, and during this time each colour, along with the number of coats required to finish, is documented and recorded. For AdamsonPinczewski, colour might be found in the most unexpected places, including the historical archives of Frank Stella who was known to purchase out-of-season decorator paint for one dollar a gallon. Embedded within these works is a family history of recycling scrap metal; a high degree of sensitivity to colour; and many adventurous voyages to architectural sites and museums. An avid walker and observer of modernism in Melbourne, the artist’s own pedestrian engagement with the world informs the title for the series. Whether travelling or walking locally, Adamson-Pinczewski is closely engaged in the observation of how the human figure interacts with architectural spaces. For the artist, space is something that unfolds through active participation and continually shifts according to the light.

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski Around the corner 8 2021

Marion Borgelt Chloé Wolifson

Coming out of the landscape / Belonging to the landscape: Marion Borgelt’s Living Spiral: Variation No. 1 2021

Between the hours in which a fern frond unfurls and the millions of years over which a layer of rock is formed, time in the natural world is marked by cycles and repetition. Living Spiral: Variation No. 1 2021 continues Marion Borgelt’s investigation of sculptural expressions involving separate pieces brought together using the spiral motif. Living Spiral is a work of elemental balance and contrast. The rock itself exhibits both rough and smooth qualities, with its chipped, exfoliated body and polished flat lip. Its stone forms are complete, while the plants emerging from them grow and change. Granite is hard and unyielding; foliage is frilly and unruly. The growing greenery has the potential to disrupt the formal aesthetics of the spheres’ arrangement. Living Spiral is also an exercise in possibilities, as the subtitle Variation No. 1 suggests. The logarithmic spiral arrangement of 16 components, used previously by the artist, is resolved while simultaneously suggesting infinite scalability. The work asserts itself on the polished floor of the gallery but has been conceived for outdoor display. Borgelt’s original vision was of a much larger Living Spiral resting on the mound of a hill, with the potential for its boulder-like forms to gradually become subsumed into the landscape. In contrast, many of the artist’s sculptures, while exploring similar forms and themes, employ delicate materials requiring an indoor setting.

While Living Spiral seems to appear fully formed, a logical synthesis of nature and the human hand, every element is the result of experimentation and testing of materials and methods. Borgelt is not wedded to a particular medium, instead preferring to be responsive to context. When viewed in this arrangement, stone and frond can imply a multitude of possibilities, animal, vegetable and mineral. Spirals, with their suggestions of growth and evolution, occur in subtle and striking ways in the natural world, from a mollusc’s shell to the arms of a galaxy. For Borgelt, this intersection of mathematics and nature is fertile ground. The origin of things is of endless interest, kindled during the artist’s country upbringing spent gazing across wide vistas, an experience which also equips her to consider scale in the broader environment. This formative time intersected with the growth of the land art movement of the 1960s and 70s, and while Borgelt has developed a distinct visual language, the influence of that period of art history is clear in works like Living Spiral. Borgelt’s Living Spiral channels the viewer’s primal understanding of a naturally occurring inner logic. Inside the gallery the unruly foliage is a literal breath of fresh air, caressing our biological impulses with its vibrant green tendrils. Set outdoors, as Borgelt intends and imagines it, the geometry of the arrangement of granite spheres would appear in contrast to its surroundings, before gradually becoming subsumed back into the earth. This spiral is scaled in relation to the human body, yet proposes a continuum of extremes extending into galaxies in one direction, and cells in another.

Marion Borgelt Living Spiral Variation No. 1 2021

Consuelo Cavaniglia Melissa Keys

1. Elieen’s Gray’s house E-1027 was named after its creator and her partner at the time architect Jean Badovici, who was the owner of the property. The ‘E’ stands for Eileen, ’10’ represents the letter J for Jean, the ‘2’ is B for Badovici and ‘7’ signifies G for Gray.

2. Consuelo Caviniglia’s title is a quotation from a text titled ‘Of Other Spaces’ by Michel Foucault, the author writes, ‘I come back toward myself: I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I was’. See ‘Of other spaces’ published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October 1984.

Arrayed along the museum wall, Consuelo Cavaniglia’s enigmatic installation I come back toward myself I, II and III 2019 leads the viewer’s eye through a sequence of openings—apertures cut out of assembled planes of green and grey tinted glass set into a framework of articulated metal supports. The glass panels partially capture and hold reflections, offering fugitive glimpses of ourselves within the work and encouraging us to move, look and look again.

When observed from the side, the holes in each structure appear to align, together creating a vertiginous tunnel-like visual effect. This construction appears to be purposeful, like some kind of scientific, medical, or photographic apparatus designed to perform an optical or perceptual function. Encountering the installation one is invited to gaze through and beyond the framing forms and opaque media, triggering imagination and experimentation by exploring the possibilities of the interplay of structure, materials and surfaces in space. Influenced by the modernist glass and chromiumplated steel furniture and folding screens of the Irish-born architect, Eileen Gray, one of the most innovative designers of the early twentieth century, Cavaniglia’s sculpture both frames and transcends its environment, initiating a dynamic tension between abstract phenomenological and everyday sensory experience. The modular hinged forms imply a sense of animation, of things unfixed, or, subject to change, and allude to Gray’s iconic modernist house design, E-1027,1 completed in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France, which features a series of sliding, concertina windows that allow light to flood through the house throughout the different phases of the day. Gray’s designs largely comprise circular and rectangular structures which are echoed in Cavaniglia’s vocabulary of forms and arrangements, while her spherical apertures evoke the shape of the sun and the passage of light and time.

The artist’s ongoing use of industrial materials and reductive systems of basic forms reminds us of the serial nature and cool materiality of minimalism, however, unlike her antecedents of the sixties Cavaniglia nudges our thoughts past the physical in search of new dimensions, places and spaces beyond the here and now. Her practice is suggestive of both the bodily mechanisms of perception and the capricious lens of vision—from inner consciousness to the ever-watchful eye of surveillance, the menacing infrastructure of machines that record and monitor our every movement. I come back toward myself is both stimulating and disorientating, drawing our critical imagination through a multitude of ideas, material propositions and moments in time. The poetic title of the installation speaks of things external turning inward, and while ultimately ambiguous, and elusive, alludes to both the phenomenological and the metaphysical nature of sight and experience.2 Cavaniglia’s clean smooth surfaces and geometric forms draw upon the rational visual language and aspirations of modernist architecture and design, and are simultaneously open to the uncertainty of psychological dynamics. Charged with narrative promise, the work invites interaction that leads everywhere and nowhere, taking the viewer through a series of materials, structures and shapes that ask us to investigate the way that we see and apprehend our surrounds.

Consuelo Cavaniglia I come back toward myself I, II, and III 2019

Natasha Johns-Messenger Melissa Miles

Natasha JohnsMessenger: Mirrors and Windows

Mirrors and windows were famously invoked by the Museum of Modern Art curator, John Szarkowski, to describe how photographic artists approach their medium either as a tool for self-reflection or a window through which to observe the world around them. Natasha JohnsMessenger’s site-responsive spatial practice allows us to step into the mirror and through the windowpane, transforming these visual framing devices into portals to another experience entirely. This Melbourne and New York based artist has established an international reputation for her architectural interventions and sculptural works that lure us into riddles of optics, embodied experience and space. Variously using lenses, screens, mirrors, light and the existing conditions of exhibition spaces, JohnsMessenger manipulates reflections and lines of sight to immerse us in extraordinary spatial and perceptual conundrums. The complexity of Johns-Messenger’s work is belied by the elegant simplicity of her aesthetic. The architectural features of the gallery and her own artistic interventions work together to subtly direct where we look and move. Cleverly, Johns-Messenger anticipates our likely path through and around existing architectural elements, and uses our prior experience with simple optical devices to turn the familiar into something quite unexpected. Most of us interact with mirrors every day and are used to looking at their two-dimensional surface and registering depth and space. Yet we know that mirrors can offer both clarity and trickery. For Envelop 2022, Johns-Messenger draws on that comfortable familiarity with mirrored surfaces and puts it to work with a large window that invites gallery-goers to look out to a tree in the McClelland grounds. Picking up on the human scale of the individual glass panels comprising the window, she uses periscope optics, light and mirrors to displace lines of sight and profoundly alter our experience of the gallery space inside and out. In merging the indirect or mediated perception experienced through the mirrors

with the more direct perception of the gallery space, Johns-Messenger’s work seemingly absorbs us into an abstract image. The power of Johns-Messenger’s work is that it shows how space and embodied cognition are enlivened through their interaction. By working at human scale, Johns-Messenger’s perplexing spatial practices are as much the products of the movement of bodies, our height, posture, and the sounds that bounce off surfaces in the gallery as they are about vision. This is a radical departure from the mirrors and windows invoked by Szarkowski, and his focus on looking at the world, or within, with critical distance. In Envelop, the visual world is not ‘out there’ waiting to be represented or apprehended. Rather, this work dramatizes how we are enfolded in the gallery space and the artwork. Johns-Messenger’s spatial interventions thereby create a heightened sense of awareness in viewers that is particularly potent at this historical moment, as we emerge from lengthy periods of isolation in which screens were our primary contact with the outside world. This work celebrates art ‘IRL’, challenging us and significantly elevating our sense of wonder and curiosity about the spaces we inhabit and share with others.

Natasha Johns-Messenger Envelop 2022

2. Inge King, taken from undated notes in her archive, quoted in Trimble, Inge King, Sculptor, 1996, p. 78.

1. Inge King, quoted in Judith Trimble, Inge King, Sculptor, Craftsman House, 1996, p. 19.

3. Phrase borrowed from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1956, a book that was highly influential for King. Moholy-Nagy proposes that ‘vision in motion is simultaneous grasp. Simultaneous grasp is creative performance—seeing, feeling, and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It instantaneously integrates and transmutes single elements into a coherent whole. This is valid for vision as well as for the abstract… vision in motion is seeing while moving’, quoted in Trimble, Inge King, Sculptor, 1996, p. 111.

4. Inge King, quoted in A thousand different angles, Frontyard Films, 2010, 27 mins.

Inge King Simon Lawrie

Inge King’s sculptural works, whether maquette or modernist monument, establish complex spatial relationships which extend beyond the object to implicate both the viewer and environment in their matrix. King’s positioning of sculptures in relation to the landscape and cityscape was no doubt coloured by her immigration to Australia, an experience both uncertain and underwhelming which she once described as ‘like opening a can of flat beer.’1 Her geometric steel forms were intended to be set in tension against the organic unruliness of the Australian bush. They rely equally on the spatial relationships within the work as on their scale and context to constitute a powerfully engaging presence: ‘I try to measure my work against the vast spaces of this country. It is not the size of the sculpture, but the simplicity and clarity of form expressing inner strength and tension that is the motiving force. I see my monumental sculptures as part of the environment, that they should challenge people to feel the forms and arouse their curiosity to explore them.’2 While King’s early figurative works followed her European expressionist training, by midcentury these had given way to an internationalist abstraction. Sitting between these two approaches, the plaster bas-relief Cathedral of Autun c1951 demonstrates an expressionistic treatment of this gothic French cathedral’s sculptural details. In the decade following her arrival in Australia in 1951, King began to use sheet steel in dynamic geometric abstract compositions that embodied her conception of sculpture as ‘vision in motion’.3 With industrial welding techniques, she joined intersecting planes imbued with expressive texture as molten metal accrued in the crevices. Through a series of maquettes, a form of working and conceptual process which she considered akin to sketching in three dimensions, this technique allowed King to experiment with both the internal spatial configurations of the sculpture, but to also explore potential relations with the environmental context of the work and the viewer’s experience of it. Flight Arrested 1964 and Island Sculpture

1991 demonstrate this approach, both sited in the bushland setting of McClelland’s sculpture park. King’s concern with the public context and reception of sculpture, in particular its integration with architecture, was key to the Group of Four and later Centre 5 sculptors, of which she was a founding member.

Inge King Island Sculpture 1991

Informed by the sleek spareness of Minimalism, by the 1970s King developed more precise engineered shapes with carefully crafted intersecting edges, sometimes using industrially produced elements such as pipes which were sectioned into rings and discs. Through the 1980s she utilised these curved and folded pieces of steel to form a series of arches and environments, often as maquettes for expansive and immersive public sculptures which might be traversed or inhabited by the viewer. The 1990s marked a return to circular and elliptical forms for King, with arrangements of stainless-steel rings evoking the orbital movement of planets and inspired by the first images of space taken by NASA’s Hubble telescope. Rings of Mercury (2) 2006 sets intersecting circles in tense balance, pulling and pulsing with implicit motion and gravitational force. In these works, the cosmological field of infinity provides perhaps the most fitting context for King’s conception of sculpture as ‘drawing from a thousand different angles’4—an immense and unfathomable arena.

Inge King Rings of Mercury (2) 2006

Sanné Mestrom Emily Cormack

A thousand different women

Mestrom’s series Body as verb visualises a woman’s verb—ever moving, shaping, changing, holding, grabbing, kneeling, sinking, striding, being—what her daily doing might look like. Across popular culture and art history women are more frequently represented as adjectives—used to describe a product, a man, or a ‘lifestyle’. Women’s bodies are instrumentalised in this languorous de-verbing. Stripped of action, they are portrayed as coy, limp and inert, and with well-moulded handles for ease of holding. For using and being used, but not for their own doing. Conversely, in Māori creation stories, the earth mother Papatūānuku is the origin of everything— her deity children, the forest, animals, fish and all life—and yet her ‘form’ is unknown. Papatūānuku’s many offspring are given defined forms, described as human or sometimes animal, whereas Papatūānuku is formless. She is only ever described by her actions, her efforts and her output. Her verbs. She is immanent with all life but in herself has no finite or certain form. Instead, she is an ever-active essence or force, an infinite font of unknowable power.

1. Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer coined this term in, ‘Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into what Women Saved and Assembled—FEMMAGE,’ Heresies I, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78), pp. 66-69.

How then to reconcile this contradiction? The informé of a woman’s doing, whilst we wade the swamp of her décolletage?

Mestrom’s practice digs for this force, the doing. She wields heavy tools to scratch and hack her way to the hot, dark, strength that is the female body. Each of her works hits a hard chord giving rise to the shadow form of woman, twisting her head, not pretty or coy; she has a furrowed brow and thick thighs. As in life—phone to ear, one baby wet-mouthed on the shoulder, another clinging to the bruised thigh, dragging bags, kicking car doors closed, jangling keys in a tangle of hair and sweat, with strong jaw and hard-won composure. In these sculptures Mestrom expresses the exertion, the heavy toil and brute, unspoken effort of woman. Her vagina is thrown forward, her breasts are structural.

For in reality, the female body has never been the soft-curved, compliant form imposed upon it. It has always been useful, always busy doing. And yet, her visibility has been so distorted. Shape-shifted, excised, collaged and extracted. Winched-in stomachs, accentuated arses, plumping lips, and labiaplastic distortions. As if we are attempting to internalise a collaged version of ‘woman’, when ‘cut n’ paste’ meets ‘sense of self.’ Femmage1—feminist collage—a term from the 1970s turned this fragmentation into a site of freedom. In co-opting the overlaid cipher of visual pleasure, femmage purported to break it apart, disempowering it. Such collage might show the slick face of fashion models deformed by sliced lips, open to ants or vacuum cleaners. The world of collage is open and endless, either subverting the everyday with slight shifts, or giving way to complete absurdity. Whilst this is a kind of freedom, it relies on the existence of the visual pleasure cipher, the existence of representation. For Mestrom she begins the collage process anew. Mestrom invents her own sculptural vocabulary through which to view the female form, and female-being. Mestrom’s hard bodies, tables, tools and props are the brutal components of a new visualisation of woman, one that has always been and is no longer reliant on the aestheticised renderings of others. Hers’ are a collage of doing, with the body’s activity a means to agency. Mestrom’s sculptures are a stripped-back rendering of Papatūānuku’s doing, expressions of women’s effortless wielding of the weight of the world.

Sanné Mestrom You Rush I Fall 2021 and The Gaze II 2021

Noriko Nakamura Liang Luscombe

2. Deborah Caslav Covino, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2004, p. 21.

1. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 1.

Have you ever glimpsed parts of your own body whilst in the middle of some particularly enthusiastic and exhilarating sex? When in the briefest moment your limbs and torsos are twisted and compressed in ways that are hard to imagine form your own body. This could not possibly be me; I can’t do that, you think for a split second. Cut to Noriko Nakamura’s latest installation Womb Realm (2022), in which compressed nipples protrude from the layers of rope that press firmly against the upper chest and abdomen revealing two plump breasts. The smooth, rounded form of a buttocks emerges from the textured surface of the sedimentary rock formation, sitting on a bed of rope. Further ropes—or perhaps human strands of hair—burst forth and weave their way out from the womb-like cavity of a rock basin. Across Noriko Nakamura’s series of sculptures, the maternal body bubbles up and emerges, fragmented, and constrained by rope and then recedes, melting into the limestone forms from which they are carved. Through the lens of abjection, Nakamura draws on a web of personal experiences in which the body’s sensory perception of the self becomes flooded and upended during acts of sex, childbirth, and Kinbaku (a form of Japanese BDSM). As feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva writes, ‘The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.’1 Here, the boundaries of selfhood and the physical body become ambiguous, in the excess, and in violation of its own borders. Nakamura’s installation is made up of three discrete sculptures in which one could hardly say that the works themselves evade the definable edges of objecthood. Instead, Nakamura attempts to translate the experience of sensory overload in which pleasure and pain become increasingly intermingled into spatial bodily fragmentation within each sculpture itself. The central and most dynamic sculpture, the internal space of the womb becomes external, bursting forth, potent and then calcified in stone. In this work, Nakamura gestures toward Kristeva’s central proposition, that abjection in a Western paradigm is resolutely

maligned to the domain of the maternal, as both the object of waste and due to her menstrual blood and her child’s dependence upon her, a site and source of abject life.2 Nakamura plays with the concept of the mother’s womb as an entity considered a threat by the patriarchal order in order to discuss the complex way the figure of the mother becomes quite literally a site of splintered and contested meaning. In Womb Realm, Nakamura entangles the maternal with masochism, attempting to understand her maternal experience through the erotic framework of BDSM. Ropes pull and press upon the sculpted body, as Nakamura asks how domination becomes a way to break down distinctions of self and the Other to discover an expanded sense of subjectivity through a desire for self-annihilation. Could motherhood be the ultimate experience of self-annihilation and pain as pleasure through an interdependence formed between mother and child? The work recalls a proposition by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, that the action of masochism highlights to us the impossibility of denying subjectivity because ‘in order to cause myself to be fascinated by my self-as-object, I should necessarily have to be able to realize the intuitive apprehension of this object such as it is for the Other, a thing which is on principle impossible.’ It is this very impossibility that Nakamura utilises as her primary sculptural material, in which as the subject and sculptor, attempts to reassert her objectivity, that she only further is engorged and even beset with her own ever-present subjecthood.

Nabilah Nordin Amelia Winata

If modernity was predicated upon anything, it was upon a sense of certainty—a more or less positive, future-oriented principle. Pondering the legacy of modernist sculpture within our less certain times, Nabilah Nordin’s Backward Twist 2022 reshapes Inge King and Norma Redpath’s monumentality to suit the present day—combining the modernist logic of the monument with an undercurrent of precarity and humour. As archetypes of Australian modernism, King and Redpath’s sculptures were created with a sense of rigour, as though declaring their intention to stand the test of time. Usually cast in bronze or steel and occupying very public spaces, these sculptures have in many cases long outlived the modernist dream, reminding viewers of the utopian ideals of decades gone. In many ways, Nordin’s practice is the antithesis of King and Redpath’s sculpture. Those who are familiar with it will immediately think of her frenetic and bright, multi-piece installations that swell, like expanding foam, across entire rooms. Now presenting a single, large-scale sculpture, Nordin nonetheless continues within the convention of her previous work, combining cement, bronze and steel to produce a work of multiple elements that appear to be precariously collaged together. The core theme of Backward Twist, something that the title suggests, is a simultaneous acknowledgement of and adjustment of standard conventions through the language of sculptural form. Indeed, Nordin began with bronze, what she calls the ‘inescapable bones of sculpture’ and, by proxy, modernism, to create a wing-like form—albeit a vestigial one. She then built the rest of the sculpture around this bronze wing. Slowly but surely, Nordin’s less ‘noble’, more contemporary materials—cement, steel—grew around the bronze element, almost superseding it. A few small sprouts of bronze emerge from the work’s base and uppermost tips, reminding the viewer of Nordin’s seed material. The flat and

undeniably contemporary cobalt of the Backward Twist’s cement section is at odds with the penny bronze patina, but they manage to co-exist, even if awkwardly. There are plenty of such incongruities in Backward Twist: monumentality is fragility, the monolith becomes the aggregate, the monotone is replaced by colour. We might also consider the fact of Backward Twist’s resemblance to a chair and, therefore, its seeming utility. This utility is just as quickly refused by the acid green curved ‘handle’ placed in the centre of what would be the chair’s seat—signalling for the viewer to adjust their expectations. Ultimately, what Nordin gives the viewer is a warping of expectations. Nordin acknowledges the unavoidable presence of traditional sculpture within contemporaneity while also adjusting it to suit our more heterogenous historical moment. Formally, the mismatched elements in Backward Twist play off traditional sculpture’s formal purity, adding a graphic visuality that modernist sculptors might have cried in the face of. We may have had to come to terms with the dissolution of the modernist dream (indeed, we have had several decades to come to terms with it), but all is not lost. Nordin offers a visual eyeful, captivating the viewer with playful humour. Rather than bury modernism she, instead, reveals the constant precarity of even the most outwardly steadfast moments in art history.

Nabilah Nordin Backward Twist 2022

Louise Paramor Jane Devery

> Louise Paramor Divine Assembly #5 2018, installation view, Sacred Heart Convent, Ballarat

2. Charles Baudelaire, ‘On Wine and Hashish’, in Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond, Citadel Press, New York, 1996, p. 7.

1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 48.

3. Louise Paramor, artist statement, 2017

‘Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse,’1 so wrote Walter Benjamin, invoking Charles Baudelaire’s chiffonier, an itinerant figure in 19th century Paris who gleaned and sorted through the debris of the city. An emblematic figure of modernity and metaphor for the poet, the rag-picker, as Baudelaire saw it, was ‘responsible for gathering up the daily debris of the capital. All that the city has rejected, all that it has lost, shunned, disdained, broken, this man catalogues and stores…. like a miser hoarding treasure, he gathers the refuse that has been spit out by the god of Industry, to make of it objects of delight or utility’.2 Something of a contemporary rag-picker, Louise Paramor finds latent potential in a material that is omnipresent in our daily lives: plastic. Over the past fifteen years, the Melbournebased artist has been sourcing and stockpiling brightly coloured plastic items and repurposing them into lively sculptural assemblages. She has sorted, upended, jerry-rigged and jammed together a miscellanea of cheap plastic kitsch sourced from junk piles, hard waste collections, two-dollar shops and industrial waste recycle centres. Exploiting the aesthetic and associative potential of plastic as a material, Paramor translates into three-dimensional form her understanding of contemporary urban life, mindful of the ways that architecture and industrial design relate to human experience in the 21st Century, as she once remarked: What makes these works distinctly of our time are the materials employed – industrial plastics, which are widely used in the manufacturing world. These plastics are especially tactile and often lurid in colour— characteristics which, not surprisingly, evoke an irresistible sense of play … I have embraced the physicality of this “stuff” to create dynamic, anthropomorphic works that also offer viewers an opportunity for reflection on our wider built environment.3

Although she also works in two-dimensional forms, including collage and photography, Paramor’s practice is firmly based in the sculptural. Her works are sometimes small and maquette-like or monumental in scale, as in the case of her well-known public art commission Panorama Station on the Peninsula Link Freeway in Melbourne’s southeast. In many instances, her sculptures are made in series and with specific sites and contexts in mind. Divine Assembly #5 2018, for example, is one of a series of seven large sculptures that she first exhibited in 2019 in the Sacred Heart Chapel Convent in Ballarat, in regional Victoria. With its stack of heavy-duty plastic hot pink discs perched precariously on one corner of a bright green base, it asserted an exuberant presence in dialogue with its equally bold sculptural companions in the austere church interior. Like many of her sculptures, Divine Assembly #5 has an improvisational air that stems from her intuitive working process based on continual experimentation and trial and error. Yet the results of Paramor’s labours are always carefully considered assemblies where the remnants of industrial processes are reinscribed with new values and transformed into joyful agglomerations of the consumer world.

Louise Paramor Panorama Station 2013 Collection of Southern Way, Southern Way McClelland Commission Major Work

Kerrie Poliness Carolyn Barnes

1. Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, Verso, London, 1995, p. 86.

Back and Forth 2018–2022 is one of many travelling exhibitions of diamond painting by Kerrie Poliness, each documented in the form of videos or postcards. This multilayered work reflects Poliness’s interlinked interest in aspects of the world that are imperceptible to our senses and how art’s institutional operation isolates it from broader fields of experience. The anchoring principle here—represented by the pink diamond painting propped against the railings of a Queenscliff to Sorrento ferry—is the illusory nature of horizontality and verticality. What we perceive as horizontal or vertical lines always diverge slightly from the right angle, these tiny deviations potentially leading to large end-effects. For Poliness, the partiality of our knowledge of conditions in the universe drives human hubris in thinking that nature can be controlled despite natural systems consisting of countless dynamically interacting elements at the macro and micro scale.

For Poliness, we live in a diagonal universe where all lines inevitably intersect. In her ‘wave’ drawings, small anomalies of execution push a network of lines in unpredictable ways across a gallery wall or a section of pavement or lawn. In Back and Forth, the path of the ferry and other boats and the shape of the seabed and coastline interact with tidal flows to create irregular wave patterns on the water, the work highlighting the phenomenon of intrinsic randomness, where even exact knowledge of the initial state of things permits only probabilistic predictions of what will unfold. As the ferry decks rise and fall, irregularities in the shape of the water against the coastline are revealed. The surface of the bay is in constant motion. No straight lines—a primary marker of industrial, capitalist modernity—here. The diamond painting, ferry decks and railings are the constants in each image, but all else is in flux. Are the ferries moving across the water or are they still and it is the world that is moving beneath them?

Marc Augé argues that in modernity, all places eventually become places that people travel through; travel is integral to the spatial logic of modernity, but in this the experience of place is lost.1 The looped videos in Back and Forth amplify the ferries’ cyclic travel between Queenscliff and Sorrento. At the midpoint of each video, there is a moment where the ferries reach the same point in their journey, disrupting the sense of progress through time and space. Poliness’s choice of where to hold an exhibition is always important in terms of human history or geological time, contesting the problematic structure of temporal consciousness in modernity. She has mounted exhibitions of diamond paintings from Lake Bolac in central Victoria to Zagreb, Croatia, each interrupting the flow of everyday life to highlight something missed. An exhibition in suburban Footscray marks the edge of an ancient lava flow. The ferries in Back and Forth cross an area that before the last ice–age was the grassland home of the Boonwurrung and Wathaurang people, whose oral histories record this fact. Where today there is an international shipping channel, the Yarra River flowed, cascading down a waterfall where the head of the bay exists today before travelling on to join the Tamar River in Tasmania. While the art gallery is the main physical site of contemporary art today, Poliness’s informal exhibitions of diamond paintings travel to critical locations, restoring abstraction to the world as a catalyst for observation and recognition.

Kerrie Poliness Back and Forth 2018–2022

Norma Redpath Caroline Colbran

4. Ibid., p. 35.

3. Ibid., p. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 18.

6. Norma Redpath, ‘Notes on Approach to Commissioned Sculpture’, unpublished manuscript, artist’s papers, 1969, cited in Dr. Jane Eckett in ‘Progression in space: works from the Norma Redpath studio’, Charles Nodrum Gallery website, https://www. charlesnodrumgallery.com.au/exhibitions/ norma-redpath/essay-by-jane-eckett/.

1. Norma Redpath, quoted in Gordon Thomson, Norma Redpath: An overall study of the work of Norma Redpath and in particular the years 1969–1970, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, p. 2.

5. Norma Redpath, quoted in Sculpture Australia 69, Commonwealth Film Unit, 1969, 28 mins.

7. Dr. Jane Eckett, ‘Man sights an object in space: Norma Redpath’s approach to public art’, Art Monthly, May 2013, p. 63.

Norma Redpath’s sculptural practice is profoundly concerned with the phenomenological experience of the embodied subject encountering sculpture in situ. The very foundation of her practice, her formal language of fragments, ‘are dedicated to and related to, the stature and psyche of man in relation to his environment, who consciously and subconsciously identifies himself with form and form fragments of past experience, who constantly strives to adjust and identify his needs with the psyche of his era, with his shelter and the surrounding space’.1 From the mid-1960s, Redpath became increasingly interested in architectural forms, such as arches, buttresses, columns, and portals. Drawing from both the natural environment and classical architecture, her sculptural language evolved through the re-evaluation of these archetypal forms— breaking them down into ‘form fragments’ to be resynthesised, further fractured, and reunited again into structures insinuating, or in some cases directly referencing, universally recognisable natural and man-made phenomena.2 Desert Arch 1964 can be seen as a confluence of these two major influences. Fragments are welded into a roughly delineated archway, with sweeping bronze slabs and emergent broad horizontal shelves, symbolising the arid expanse of the Australian desert. Redpath rejected the idea of sculpture being self-contained.3 Rather, her works engage negative space and integrate with the surrounding landscape, and are concerned with the experience of the viewer and their relationship with site and sculpture—‘man sights an object in space for visual equilibrium and physical balance to help him establish his identity in scale with his surroundings’.4 In Desert Arch the relationship between site, sculpture and viewer is accentuated by the presence of a ‘viewing slot and narrow chink’ through which the viewer can see but not move.5

The consideration of movement through space is apparent from Redpath’s early work in carved wood and first bronzetti, including Horizontal Movement 1962, through to the 1980s and diminutive clay propositions such as Flying Colonnade, Captive Sun Span (maquette) 1985. Through fragmentation and reformulation, Redpath often interrupts the implied trajectory of the arch, unsettling the accepted archetype as it exists in the collective unconscious of viewers, leaving them to understand the continuing momentum of the arch, through the negative space beyond the bronze. Such works indicate ‘an invisible but nevertheless ‘felt’ progression in space, an extension from an inner core, beyond the physical dimensions of the sculpture’.6 Redpath’s interest in architectural form was well established in her sculptural practice ahead of her public commissions of the 1960s and 1970s, and her integrationist approach to public sculpture seems only natural.7 Paesaggio Cariatide (Landscape Caryatide) 1980–85, commissioned for the foyer of the State Bank Centre in Melbourne, was Redpath’s final commission. This monumental structure references two seemingly disparate elements from the history of architecture: the classical caryatide of Ancient Greece and Rome, symbol of Apollonian beauty and order, and the flying buttress of the European Gothic Era in Europe, ornate and romantic. The title translates roughly as ‘carrying the landscape’: Paesaggio Cariatide integrates into the landscape, extending upwards and outwards supporting the weight of the sky above the earth in a show of epic strength.

< Norma Redpath Gate of the Suspended Sun 1985 9. Ibid.

8. Norma Redpath, quoted in Sculpture Australia 69, Commonwealth Film Unit, 1969, 28 mins.

After a decade of being based alternately in Milan and Melbourne, Redpath returned to establish a studio in Carlton. Her works during this later period, such as Gate of the Black Plumes 1985 and Flag Gate 1985, demonstrate her enduring interest in classical architectural forms, while also indicating a return to the carved wood works of her early career. Redpath’s sculptural forms often consist of two disparate elements in dialogue which contribute to the elegant balance of the overall structure, for instance in Gate of the Suspended Sun 1985 a single wooden sphere is suspended between two columns. Redpath worked with the motif of the sun from the time of her first bronzes and well into the 1980s, bringing a robust and ‘physical presence’ to the form, as seen in Sun Image: Night Sun 1985 and Sun Image: First Noon (maquette) c. 1985.8 Whether through their monumentality, or their conceptual underpinning, there is at the core of Redpath’s sculptures, a nobility that works to engage the ‘epic qualities’ of man and landscape alike.9

Overleaf Norma Redpath Horizontal movement 1962

Meredith Turnbull Rebecca Coates

Working from home Meredith Turnbull and the pragmatics of space

A thousand different angles explores the legacy of Inge King and Norma Redpath, two central figures of Australian modernist sculpture. Their work is presented alongside the work of eleven contemporary artists, including Meredith Turnbull. Turnbull contributes a number of smaller-scale pedestal sculptures from 2019 to the exhibition, alongside Room Divider, Composition I and Room Divider, Composition II, from 2014, a self-styled modular installation that plays with space itself in a contemporary take on a traditional modernist architectural device. Her works reflect the questions that Turnbull asks through her projects, teaching and research about what it is to be an artist in our current world. What is the relationship of work to life? What is a sustainable practice? And how do you work ethically and effectively as an artist? ‘Working from home’ has become part of life for many more people in the past two years. But it is not new for many artists, who often carve out a home studio or space to work alongside every-day life. Studio spaces can reveal a lot about an artist, their history, and ideals. These spaces tell stories of people and their industry, often revealed in the little things gathered as inspiration, or left over as the residue of past projects or events. Artists—like many people—select furniture, objects, and the artwork of others to make their spaces functional and to express their ideals and beliefs. These might be called the principles of good design, according to the artist, and Turnbull refers to them in her work Room Divider 2014, two timber geometrically shaped frames that are inserted into the space at right angles to the wall. The work evokes traditions of screens and room dividers, while vertical planes offer surfaces on which to position objects and frames others beyond. It is a device to encourage us to pause, its language of warm timber a nod to the materials used by many of the modernist designers and architects from the time of Inge King and Norma Redpath.

Scale is important for Turnbull. Her sculptures are domestic in size, whole works in their own right, not models for larger public artworks. Everything is considered, and nothing more, nothing less is required. They are neither fussy nor stark. For Standing sculpture oval mirror 2019, an effervescence of black plastic-coated wire floats around its brass tubing armature, lightly attached by a regular office copper paperclip. This is 3-D drawing with wire. It reflects the breadth of Turnbull’s background—a PhD in the field of sculpture and spatial practice, alongside training in photography, art history, and fine arts (gold and silversmithing). An artist, curator and writer, Turnbull’s practice can sometimes be difficult to pin down. She describes herself as a project-based artist, unlike Redpath and King, who saw themselves as studio-based artists—apart from extensive periods collaborating with others to get works manufactured. Turnbull’s work is informed by extensive research, collaboration, and her practice also encompasses curating, lecturing and teaching and arts administration. As a consequence, whether Turnbull’s projects result in artworks, exhibitions, jewellery, or collaborative projects, all entail extensive research and are often supported by writing. For her project Closer 2018 at the Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne, she was the artist/curator of a two-part exhibition that presented Collection objects alongside her own photographic prints of those same works. The broader research questions seemed to include the blurred boundaries between ‘craft’ and ‘art’ (with a capital A), and the importance of revealing overlooked histories—often women artists and makers whose names have disappeared as older generations pass. She highlighted histories, revealed makers, and exposed the sometimes sketchy provenance details endemic to many museum collection databases—as a gentle form of institutional critique.

Meredith Turnbull Standing sculpture twin mirror 2019

Turnbull is still questioning the line between art and craft. The small sculptural objects selected for this exhibition at McClelland reflect Turnbull’s training as a jeweller and silversmith in her eye for finish, and facility in working with materials, both manufactured and repurposed. Ceramicists are increasingly concerned about the ‘plinth’ on which their work is placed, and it is the same for sculptors with a jewellery or silversmithing background, where every aspect is central to the work. The bases of Turnbull’s sculptures are created through folds of metal, stacking and wedging which provide deceptively simple and sophisticated solutions essential to the whole. The ethics of materials are also important for Turnbull. Though often employing pre-used materials in her artwork, she doesn’t describe these components as found materials. Instead, they are recycled parts that contribute to a new whole. The underpinning ethic is the importance of making art sustainably. It leads Turnbull to find the beauty in things past and sometimes overlooked. In Steel waveform with pink tie 2019, for example, she uses a small pink thread as a bow that loosely foulards at the neck of a folded copper sheet. Flat steel 2019 is similarly resolved, with circular holes pre-punched in lines around two sides of a square steel sheet, contrasting with the rust bloom on the metal base and other parts of the plate, and a scraffito of white lines that might be a drawing by Turnbull added later, or something else found. There’s something profoundly satisfying about the materials selected and Turnbull’s language of playful restraint. One can’t help but think of the use of found materials in assemblages by great male artists in the early 20th century such as Robert Rauschenberg, Arman and the like. But we shouldn’t forget the 1970s feminist practices that similarly championed recycling up as art materials and a sophisticated low-fi environmental aesthetic in their teaching and community based-projects.

The ethics of artmaking clearly continue to challenge Turnbull. Her recent exhibition Mood Mirror (2020) at Daine Singer was in part an investigation of ‘why make art, and why make it now’. She questioned the sustainability of practice, the need to make a wage, and the demands of family in the middle period of her career. So, she connected with family members separated by pandemic-induced isolation by incorporating materials found at home such as her daughter Roma’s primary school art, the flowers from her mother’s garden, and her mother’s silk and ink test-pieces. Turnbull notes that this approach enabled her to examine the world of things ‘as the form-creating basis for culture’. And culture is as much about connection and people, as it is a collection of things.

Meredith Turnbull installation view

LIST OF WORKS

Fiona Abicare Working through the expanded practice of sculpture, Fiona Abicare’s work corresponds with a range of fields, such as sculpture, fashion, interior design, and cultural history. Interested in transforming the traditional distinctions between art and design, she pays specific attention to the material qualities of objects and how an audience might encounter their placement in space. Based on extensive material research and conceptual framing, Abicare’s methodology addresses the intersection between histories of social space and their contemporary contexts. Abicare completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (1994), Honours in Sculpture at RMIT University (1999) and a Masters of Arts in Interior Design at RMIT University (2006). She undertook an Australia Council London Studio residency in 2012, and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: Rose Moon, Westspace, Melbourne, 2019; A Stitch in Time, Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria, 2019; The World is a Teenager, LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; The Enigma Code, Sarah Scout Presents, 2018; Auto Body Works, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne, 2018, Spring 1883, 2014/2018; Why not walk backward?, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2014; Scandinavian Freestyle, Hero Building, 2013; NEW11, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2011; COVERS, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2008-9. Abicare’s work is held in public and private collections across Australia including Monash University and the University of Melbourne. Based in Melbourne, Fiona Abicare is represented by Sarah Scout Presents.

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski Samara Adamson-Pinczewski is a Melbournebased artist whose abstract geometric work explores the experience of architecture and urban space. Through painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, her use of iridescent materials, sharply fragmented forms, and vibrant colour palettes complicate the viewer’s reading of space. Her recent practice incorporates new technologies in paint pigments and 3-D printing processes. Adamson-Pinczewski received a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) from Monash University in 1998, a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Honours) from

RMIT University in 1999, a Graduate Diploma in Education (Visual Art) from the University of Melbourne in 2001, a Master of Fine Art (Research) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2003, and a PhD from the School of Art, RMIT University in 2013. Solo exhibitions including Light Gestures, Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 2021; Spatial Persuasions, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 2018; and The Beautiful Corner, Gallery 9, Sydney, 2015. Group exhibitions include The Paul Guest Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, 2019; Abstraction Twenty Eighteen, Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne, 2018; and Open Studio, Cité International des Arts, Paris, France, 2016. In 2013 Adamson-Pinczewski was the recipient of the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency Program in New Berlin, New York, USA, and her work is held in public and private collections including the Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne, and Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne. Samara AdamsonPinczewski is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery.

Marion Borgelt Born in Nhill, Victoria and based in Sydney, Marion Borgelt draws inspiration from universal themes such as life cycles, cosmology, optics and phenomenology. Her sculptural and installation work incorporates abstract forms with affinity to the natural world, such as spirals, and diverse materials such as beeswax, canvas, felt, glass, pigment, stainless steel, wood, stone, and organic matter. Borgelt completed studies at South Australian School of Art and has exhibited widely since 1975. Solo exhibitions include Silent Symphony, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney, 2021; Luminous Void, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney, 2019; Signature Works, Turner Galleries, Perth, 2017; Marion Borgelt: Memory & Symbol, 20-year Survey, Newcastle Gallery, NSW, 2016. Notable group exhibitions include A Discernable Air, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017; Vibrant Matter, curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healsville, 2013; Deep Space: new acquisitions from the Australian Art Collection, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2012. Her work is held in major international and Australian institutional collections such as Los Angeles County Museum, USA; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki , NZ; and

Limerick City Gallery, Ireland. Marion Borgelt is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.

Consuelo Cavaniglia Consuelo Cavaniglia is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Melbourne whose work explores perceptions of space using ambiguous and illusory visual cues. Informed by film, photography and architecture, her sculptures, photography and installations employ simple technical and optical devices to disturb the viewer’s relation to the work through reflection, refraction, and repetition. The spaces thus created exist in both the imaginary and the real, activated by the viewer. Cavaniglia completed a Masters of Fine Art, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2017, a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Art) Honours, Curtin University in 2002, and a Bachelor of Arts degree (Art and Languages) from The University of Western Australia in 1993. Solo exhibitions include an underlying surface partially obscured, STATION, Melbourne, 2020; an unreliable narrator, with Brendan Van Hek, Getrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019; and in the distance a pool of light was not what it seemed, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2012. Group shows include The Gymnasium, SCA Gallery, Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney, 2020; Vanishing Point, Australian National University Gallery, Canberra, ACT, 2019; and The Theatre is Lying: the inaugural Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2018. Consuelo Cavaniglia is represented by STATION.

Natasha Johns-Messenger Natasha Johns-Messenger is an Australian installation artist and filmmaker who is based in Melbourne and New York. Her site-determined installations develop from an intuitive approach to specific spaces through improvisational architecture. Less about objects than about heightened perceptual experience, JohnsMessenger’s work highlights the framing and viewing of space. Johns-Messenger completed a Masters of Fine Art in Film, Columbia University, New York, in 2012, and a Masters by Research in Fine Art at RMIT in 2000. She has exhibited internationally in Italy, Tokyo, Bogota, China,

The Netherlands, Taiwan and USA. Recent exhibitions include LIGHTMATTER, with Leslie Eastman, STATION, Sydney, 2021; Water-Orb, 2018, Ian Potter Sculpture Court Commission, MUMA, curated by Charlotte Day; an artistic collaboration with John Wardle Architects for the work Somewhere Other, La Biennale di Venezia, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition; Sitelines at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2016; ThreeFold at El Museo de Los Sures, New York, United States, as part of the ISCP program, 2015; and Yellow, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2011. Notable public works include Alterview 2013 for Hunters Point HS/IS 404, New York; commissioned by Percent For Art and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and ThisSideIn commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund in 2009. In 2007 Johns-Messenger won the Den Haag Sculpture prize in The Netherlands presenedt by Queen Beatrix, and in 2005 won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture with Open Spatial Workshop.

Inge King Inge King AM (1915–2016) was pivotal in developing and diversifying abstract sculpture in Australia, working actively until she was 98 years of age. King was part of the Centre 5 group of artists whose mission was to foster greater awareness and understanding of contemporary public art. Often adapting animal and cosmological forms in her sculpture and printmaking, King embraced the dynamism of three-dimensional experience to forge complex relations between viewer, object, and site. Born in Berlin, King trained at the Berlin Academy from 1937 to 1938 and later at the Royal Academy School in London in 1940 and the Glasgow School of Art from 1941 to 1943. She taught art in Glasgow and London from 1944 to 1949, and after moving to Australia in 1950, taught sculpture at RMIT University from 1976 to 1987. King held solo exhibitions from 1940 onwards in London, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Geelong. Retrospective exhibitions of King’s works were held at the Bendigo Regional Gallery in 1995 and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992. Major commissions include monumental works at McClelland, Victoria; the Arts Centre, Melbourne; the University of Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Touring

exhibitions of Inge and Grahame King’s works were exhibited through McClelland in 2004. King was awarded the Eltham Prize in 1965 and 1967, a British Council Travel Grant in 1969, the RAAF Memorial Prize in 1971 and the Mildura Sculpture Triennial Prize 1975. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1984 and in 2008 was awarded the Visual Arts Emeritus Award by the Australian Arts Council, recognizing her pivotal role in raising the profile of modern sculpture in this country. King received a Doctorate in Literature from Deakin University in 1990 and an Honorary Doctorate in Arts from RMIT in 1997. King’s work is held by numerous collections including McClelland; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Artbank, Sydney; Parliament House, Canberra and several regional and university galleries. The Estate of Inge King is represented by Australian Galleries.

ACCA 2013. Mestrom has held residencies at Studio Residency, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne from 2010–12, and Artist Residency, SOMA, Mexico City in 2009, and has received numerous awards and grants including most recently the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for researching playable public sculpture. Sanné Mestrom is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf.

Sanné Mestrom

Nakamura completed a Fine Art Foundation Diploma at Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012. She has presented solo exhibitions at Sutton Projects, Melbourne; West Space, Melbourne; and TCB Art Inc, Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited at Aperto, Montpellier France; XYZ Collective, Tokyo; RM Gallery, Auckland; Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch; Murray White Room, Melbourne; and National Gallery of Victoria Studio, Melbourne. Nakamura was a recipient of the Maddocks Art Prize in 2017. In 2015 she undertook a residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo and was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary 2016–18.

Sanné Mestrom was born in 1979 in the Netherlands, before moving to New Zealand, then Melbourne, and finally New South Wales where she currently lives and works. Comprising sculpture, installation, painting and drawing, Mestrom’s practice often references and redefines iconic twentieth-century artworks and institutional contexts to question the cultural and aesthetic assumptions they carry. In her objects and installations Mestrom constructs a dialogue between visual, conceptual, and physical spaces. Equally engaged with formal and experiential qualities, Mestrom’s recent work often invites social interaction and play. Mestrom completed a Bachelor of Arts, Fine Art (Honours), PhD, and Graduate Certificate in Public Art at RMIT University, Melbourne. Recent solo exhibitions include Body As Verb, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, 2021; Black Paintings, McClelland 2018; CORRECTIONS, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney 2019; Black Paintings, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne 2014. Selected group exhibitions include: TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form 2018; Installation Contemporary, Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks 2017; Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2016; McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award, McClelland, 2014; Future Primitive, Heide Museum of Modern Art 2013; NEW 13,

Noriko Nakamura Noriko Nakamura is a Japanese-born artist based in Castlemaine whose sculptures and installations draw on ideas of animism, ritual, and maternal experience. Using traditional handcarving techniques with limestone, Nakamura works in collaborative dialogue with the natural properties of her material—limestone holds the fossilised remains of ancient life forms, and these organic inconsistencies shape her shaping of the material and its meaning.

Nabila Nordin Nabilah Nordin is a Malay SingaporeanAustralian artist whose playful sculptures and installations emerge from an improvisational process of transformation and destruction. Eschewing traditional sculptural techniques in favour of intuitive experimentation, her practice embraces wonky craftwork to celebrate the tactile and anthropomorphic qualities of materials such as cement, metal, paste, fabric, confetti, feathers and gap filler. Nordin’s studio process draws on ‘domestic’ activities such as cooking, DIY construction, or interior

decoration, to conjure absurd monuments and amorphous environments. Nordin completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University in 2013. Solo exhibitions include Birdbrush and other essentials, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2021; Covergirl Adhesives, COMA Gallery, Sydney, 2020; An Obstacle in Every Direction, Singapore Biennale, Singapore, 2019; and Malay Wedding, Chapter House Lane, Melbourne, 2017. Group shows include Salient Features, Changwon Sculpture Biennale, South Korea, 2020; 1991, Neon Parc Brunswick, Melbourne, 2020; Those Monuments Don’t Know Us, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne, 2019; and In a World of Wounds, Artbank, Sydney, 2018. Nabilah Nordin is represented by Neon Parc.

Louise Paramor Louise Paramor is a Melbourne-based sculptor who explores the aesthetic potential and conceptual connotations of plastic in relation to histories of architecture and abstraction. Using brightly coloured forms resembling domestic and industrial objects, such as bollards, cassette towers, lampshades, spice jars or toy parts, her funky assemblages and large-scale public art commissions combine the formal concerns of modernism with a pop sensibility. Paramor was born in Sydney in 1964 and, being an ‘army brat’, her family moved many times, finally returning to Western Australia where she studied painting at Curtin University. In 1986 she moved to Melbourne and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sculpture from the Victorian College of Arts. Paramor has exhibited widely since 1988, including Divine Assembly, Geraldton Regional Art Gallery, Western Australia, 2019; Palace of the Republic, National Gallery of Victoria, 2018; Supermodel, Turner Galleries, Perth, 2014; and Emporium: a survey 1990–2013, Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne, 2013. She has been awarded several grants and international residencies, including an Australia Council fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin from 1999–2000, and the McClelland Sculpture Survey Award in 2010. Paramor’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including McClelland, Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Kerrie Poliness Kerrie Poliness is a Melbourne-based artist whose systematic, collaborative, and often open-ended process produces paintings, drawings, sculptures and films inflected with histories of conceptual and abstract art. Her large-scale wall-drawings and public artworks rely on the agency of the artwork’s participants—each individual’s interpretation of the artist’s instructions—coupled with the physical conditions of a site, and challenge the fixed parameters of the work by rendering the outcome unpredictable. Poliness is associated with an influential group of artists who reiterated the relevance of geometric abstraction in Melbourne in the late 1980s and 90s, through the innovative artist-run space Store 5 which she co-founded. Poliness’s significant exhibition history includes Field Drawing #1, HOTA, Gold Coast, 2018; Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017; Landscape Paintings (Lake Bolac and Zagreb) and Wave Drawings (orange and green), G MK, Zagreb, 2014; Trace: Performance and its Documents, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014; Wall works, Arts Lifts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013. Poliness has developed a number of site-specific public artworks including Parliament Steps Walking Drawing, Melbourne, 2021; Field Drawing #1, Maywar Green, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014; Wave Drawings, Highpoint Shopping Centre, Melbourne, 2013; Field Drawing #1, The Agora, Latrobe University, Melbourne. Public collections include the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; and Dowse Museum, Lower Hutt. Kerrie Poliness is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Norma Redpath Norma Redpath OBE (1928–2013) was born in Melbourne in 1928 and studied art at Swinburne University and sculpture at RMIT. Her early carved timber sculptures of the 1950s echoed the organic forms of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, before she began to work with

bronze casting. In 1956 Redpath travelled to Italy where she studied at the Brera Academy in Milan and cast her first works in bronze in Rome. In the early 1960s she formed part of Centre Five group who championed modernist sculpture in Australia and its incorporation into architecture and public space. Her sculptures unite classical and modernist elements, informed by an intuitive response to landscape and an interest in architecture. These works become frames for the viewer’s experience by focusing and augmenting the perception of place.

performance What does wearing something do? with Behn Woods at RMIT Design Hub in 2019 and the exhibition SHE TURNS at c3 Contemporary Art Space in 2017. Her artworks have been acquired for numerous private and select public collections including MUMA, Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne. Meredith Turnbull is represented by Daine Singer.

Redpath held her first solo exhibition at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1963, with works winning the Mildura Prize and the first Transfield Prize for Sculpture in 1966, and which were later exhibited at the Australian Pavilion at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal. This was followed by the completion of her major work Treasury Fountain in Canberra, which led to her being awarded an OBE in 1970. Redpath’s final commission, Paesaggio Cariatide, was completed in 1980 for the State Bank Centre in Melbourne, and is now in McClelland’s permanent collection. The Estate of Norma Redpath is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery.

Meredith Turnbull Meredith Turnbull is a Melbourne-based artist, curator, and writer whose practice concerns the cultural context of creativity and the experiential and temporal register of forms. Her work engages various disciplines, scales, art historical traditions and genres, and establishes connections between the body and sculpture, images, decorative objects, and jewellery. Often using a modular approach with suites of individual objects, her installations reference the presentation modes of the museum and interior design, as well as domestic environments. Turnbull completed a Bachelor of Art (Honours) in Art History at La Trobe University in 2000, a Bachelor of Fine Art (Gold and Silversmithing) at RMIT University in 2005 and a PhD at Monash University in the field of Sculpture and Spatial Practice in 2016. She has developed projects for the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University. Recent works include Material Community and Mood Mirror at Daine Singer in 2020 and 2021, the

LIST OF WORKS A thousand different angles

Fiona Abicare

Consuelo Cavaniglia

America in the Dark 2016 credenza; Victorian Ash, ClayShay 83.2 x 72.5 x 63.0 cm

I come back toward myself I 2019 steel, tinted glass 105.0 x 97.0 cm

Overexposures 2016 credenza; Victorian Ash, ClayShay 83.2 x 72.5 x 63.0 cm

I come back toward myself II 2019 steel, tinted glass 105.0 x 97.0 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents

I come back toward myself III 2019 steel, tinted glass 105.0 x 97.0 cm

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski Around the Corner 8 2021 acrylic, iridescent acrylic and fluorescent acrylic with UV Topcoat on ABS resin (SLA) 27.0 x 55.0 x 27.0 cm Around the Corner 9 (a) 2021 acrylic, iridescent acrylic and fluorescent acrylic with UV Topcoat on ABS resin (SLA) 55.2 x 75.0 x 37.5 cm Around the Corner 9 (b) 2021 acrylic, iridescent acrylic and fluorescent acrylic with UV Topcoat on ABS resin (SLA) 52.8 x 71.7 x 35.8 cm Courtesy of the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery

Marion Borgelt Living Spiral: Variation No. 1 2021 flaked and polished granite with plantings (16 components of varying sizes) 215.0 × 200.0 × 40.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert

Courtesy of the artist and STATION

Natasha Johns-Messenger Envelop 2022 wood, paint, mirror, two-way mirror and glass film 290.0 x 554.0 x 400.0 cm Courtesy of the artist

Inge King Impression from Autun Cathedral c1951 plaster bas-relief 30.0 x 23.0 cm Collection of McClelland, gift of the estate of Marion Fletcher, 2012 Flight Arrested 1964 painted steel 242.0 x 255.0 x 218.0 cm Collection of McClelland, purchased with assistance from the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, 1976 Jabaroo 1984–85 steel, painted black, red and blue 376.0 x 235.0 x 125.0 cm Collection of McClelland

Island Sculpture 1991 painted mild steel 300.0 x 880.0 x 342.0 cm Collection of McClelland, commissioned for McClelland through the Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund, 1991 Rings of Mercury (2) 2006 stainless steel 50.0 x 67.0 x 55.0 cm Collection of McClelland Courtesy of the Estate of Inge King and Australian Galleries

Sanné Mestrom To Trickle/ We Drift 2021 cast concrete 58.5 x 41.5 x 40.0 cm edition 3 of 3, 2 AP The Gaze II 2021 hydrostone 34.0 x 29.0 x 20.0 cm edition 1 of 3, 2 AP Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf

Nabilah Nordin Backward Twist 2022 bronze, welded steel, structural wire mesh, cement, sand, hydrated lime, cement fibres, mortar plasticiser, cement waterproofer, exterior undercoat, exterior paint, water based acrylic spray paint, epoxy modelling compound 216.0 x 110.0 x 87.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Neon Parc

Louise Paramor Divine Assembly #5 2018 mixed media 190.0 x 136.0 x 136.0 cm Courtesy of the artist

Kerrie Poliness Back and Forth 2018–2022 2 single-channel video installations, HD video, 16:9, colour, sound; 37:56 and 1:15:50, acrylic paint on acrylic, 56.5 x 40.5 cm, edition 1 of 1, AP Collection of McClelland Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Norma Redpath Horizontal Movement 1962 bronze 14.3 x 28.3 x 12.0 cm Collection of McClelland, purchased through the Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund, 2006 Desert Arch 1964, bronze 125.0 x 324.0 x 225.0 cm Collection of McClelland, gift of Mr Rupert Murdoch, 1990

Untitled (Theatre Lobby relief) 1964, 367.0 x 73.0 x 25.0 cm Collection of McClelland, gift of Hudson Conway Ltd., under the Commonwealth Cultural Gift Program, 1994 Paesaggio Cariatide (Landscape Caryatide) 1980–85 cast and fabricated bronze 500.0 x 800.0 x 300.0 cm Collection of McClelland, gift of Commonwealth Custodial Services Ltd. under the Commonwealth Cultural Gifts Program, 2003 Gate of the Suspended Sun 1985 laminated wood with steel screws 17.4 x 15.5 x 5.0 cm Private collection Flying Collonade, Captive Sun Span (maquette) 1985 clay with red wax and black glaze 6.5 x 15.0 x 4.2 cm Estate of Norma Redpath Sun Image: Night Sun 1985 clay, black glaze 13.5 x 4.7 x 2.2 cm Estate of Norma Redpath Sun Image: First Noon (maquette) c1985 clay, black glaze 10.2 x 5.0 x 2.5 cm Estate of Norma Redpath

Meredith Turnbull Room Divider: Composition I 2014 pine, blackwood, aluminium rod, stainless steel screws 240.0 x 122.0 x 9.0 cm Room Divider: Composition II 2014 pine, blackwood, aluminium rod, stainless steel screws 240.0 x 122.0 x 9.0 cm Standing sculpture twin mirror 2019 copper, brass, copper clips, mirror, enamel paint, steel 36.0 x 15.0 x 10.0 cm Standing sculpture oval mirror 2019 brass sheet, brass tube, plastic coated wire, mirror, copper clip 36.0 x 10.0 x 10.0 cm Steel waveform with pink tie 2019 steel sheet, aluminium tube, copper sheet, copper tube, plastic tube 31.0 x 9.0 x 7.0 cm Flat steel 2019 steel, balsa, enamel paint 23.0 x 15.0 x 10.0 cm Custom display table Courtesy of the artist and Daine Singer

Flag Gate 1985 laminated wood with steel screws 27.2 x 18.0 x 4.8 cm Estate of Norma Redpath Gate of the Black Plumes 1985 laminated wood with steel screws 26.5 x 16.0 x 3.8 cm Estate of Norma Redpath Courtesy the Estate of Norma Redpath and Charles Nodrum Gallery

Works are listed chronologically by artist with all measurements in centimetres to the first decimal point, height x width x depth. All works copyright and collection of the artist, except where noted otherwise.

Acknowledgements

Contributors

McClelland acknowledges the generous support of this exhibition by the Australian Government through the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; The Besen Family Foundation; Susie Nathan, Sally Baillieu, Robyn Beddison OAM, Sarah Brockhoff, Susie Brookes, Sue Clifford, Marilyn Cookes, Andrea Dudley, Marianne Hay, Lou Heffernan, Kylie Heine, Titania Henderson, Jane Kiel, Simone Neal, Caecilia Potter, Lousje Skala, Melissa Smith, Deb Thomas, and Lorna Wallace; and Bruce Parncutt AO.

Associate Professor Carolyn Barnes (PhD Melb 2004) is Academic Director of Research Training at Swinburne Design, where she teaches research methods for design and researches co-design practices. Carolyn has been published widely in journals and monographs, writing on the subjects of Australian non-objective art and artistinitiated activity.

We are grateful for the ongoing assistance and contributions of all our sponsors, partners, donors and patrons: Baillieu Myer AC (1926– 2022); Her Excellency The Honourable Linda Dessau AC Patron-in-Chief; Lyn Williams AM; Creative Victoria; Frankston City Council; Crown Resorts Foundation; The Hugh D.T. Williamson Foundation; Packer Family Foundation; The Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund; Aidan Graham Trust; International Art Services; Corrs Chambers Westgarth; Plenary Group; Elgee Park; Haymes Paint. Special thanks are due to the artists and writers involved in this exhibition, their representative galleries and lenders, the Estate of Norma Redpath, the Estate of Inge King, Mark Rubbo, Jo Tanaka-King, Angela Hey, Richard Green, Dr Jane Eckett, Amanda King, Fabio Cavadini, and Frontyard Films. Thank you also to McClelland’s dedicated team of staff and volunteers, as well as Brian Scales, Jacob Raupach, Eric Jong, Fred Ganim, Aaron Carter and Cem Yildiz.

Rebecca Coates is an established curator, writer and lecturer who has worked extensively in Australia and overseas. She is the former Artistic Director and CEO of the Shepparton Art Museum (2015–2021). With a PhD in Art History from the University of Melbourne, she speaks and writes regularly on contemporary art, curatorial practice, art in the public realm, and contemporary museum architecture. Caro Colbran is Collection and Exhibitions Officer at McClelland. Recently graduating with a Masters of Art and Cultural Management, Caro completed internships with McClelland and the University of Melbourne Archives and Special Collections. Emily Cormack is an independent curator and writer with a special interest in how art operates within the public realm. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University (2021) and has curated over thirty exhibitions including recently From Will to Form: The 2018 TarraWarra Biennial. Cormack has also published extensively writing articles, reviews, chapters and catalogues.

Jane Devery is a curator and writer based in Sydney. Recently appointed Senior Curator, Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she previously held the positions of Project Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art (2021) and Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (2013-2021). Melissa Keys has more than 20 years of national and international experience working within institutions and independently. Currently Senior Curator, at Heide Museum of Modern Art she was formerly Senior Curator, Art Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne and the inaugural Curator of Buxton Contemporary. Liang Luscombe is a Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist. She has contributed essays and reviews for numerous publications and cultural institutions such as Artlink, Raven, Discipline, un Magazine, Art Collector and Monash University Museum of Art and is currently the editor of Liquid Architecture’s journal Disclaimer.

Jane O’Neill is a curator, writer and artist based in Melbourne. She has curated numerous exhibitions including Fabrik: conceptual, minimalist and performative approaches to textiles at multiples venues, 2016, and Hauswerk at McClelland 2019. Amelia Winata is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer. She has written for publications such as Artforum International, The Saturday Paper and Art Monthly Australasia. She is also an editor of Memo Review and Index Journal and a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne. Chloé Wolifson is a Sydney-based independent arts writer, researcher and curator whose work includes reviews, catalogue essays, and reports on exhibitions and art fairs throughout the AsiaPacific. Her writing is published in mastheads and magazines across the region.

Fiona McDonald is an artist working in Naarm/ Melbourne. She works across installation and screen media and has exhibited in Australia and internationally. She holds a PhD from Monash University (2009). Professor Melissa Miles is an art historian based at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her books include Photography, Truth and Reconciliation and The Language of Light and Dark.

A Thousand Different Angles

Articles inside

Acknowledgements and contributors

List of works

Meredith Turnbull

Artist biographies

Noriko Nakamura

Kerrie Poliness

Nabilah Nordin

Louise Paramor

Norma Redpath

Sanné Mestrom

A thousand different angles

Director’s Foreword

Fiona Abicare

Natasha Johns-Messenger

Marion Borgelt

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski

Inge King

Consuelo Cavaniglia