2014
Cover: Ray Coffey, Daniel 2013 (detail)
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FOREWORD
Going from strength to strength over its forty year history, the 2014 National Works on Paper (NWOP) exhibition attracted an unprecedented number of entries from across Australia. Consolidating its reputation as arguably this country’s most important national paper-based visual arts exhibition, the depth and range of works entered and ultimately selected for display was quite remarkable. Most excitingly the 2014 exhibition includes 66 works, of which at least one will question and extend the concept of what ‘on paper’ is and the significance or value (in the broadest sense) of the materiality of the medium. Congruently, the manipulation, placement or overlaying of paper in several other works is extraordinarily inventive – confronting, even, or difficult to fully comprehend. And, of course, while content and subject matter span a spectrum from the deeply and often obscurely personal to the obvious and revelatory, there is no escaping the convergence of myriad aspects, thought and conceptual processes embedded in many of the works. Central to a significant number of works is the most fundamental and primary source of picture making or recording – drawing. Not only do these works remind us of the origins of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s biennial national works on paper exhibition – which had its genesis four decades ago as a specific drawing prize – but they also are a clear sign that drawing remains vital and powerful in an increasingly complex and conceptually broad spectrum of artistic practice in Australia. 4
Supported by our most generous funding partners, we have slightly increased our capacity this year to acquire works for the MPRG’s permanent collection. Significant thanks are extended to the Mornington Peninsula Shire, Beleura House and Garden (the Tallis Foundation), the Friends of Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and, most recently, the Ursula Hoff Foundation. To the many, many artists who entered the 2014 NWOP our gratitude is of the highest order. Unfortunately, in an exhibition such as this only a certain number of works can be selected and this year we have included as many as we can display respectfully. To the selected artists we are appreciative of them contributing to a fine exhibition that illuminates national, contemporary artistic practice on paper. Adding enormous credibility to the Gallery’s enduring showcase exhibition is the panel of judges who have undertaken associated responsibilities with a great deal of sensitivity and respect that is underpinned by their collective experience and standing in the public galleries’ sector. The panel comprised three judges this year: Jenepher Duncan, Curator, Contemporary Art (Art Gallery of Western Australia); Jane Devery, Curator, Contemporary Art (National Gallery of Victoria) and myself. Finally, a project on this scale would not be possible without the commitment and professionalism of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery team. Special thanks are deserving of the whole team but particularly Wendy Garden, Narelle Russo, Neil Pinnick (past Registrar), Rowena Wiseman and Stina Haug. Jane Alexander, MPRG Director 5
ON PAPER Wendy Garden Senior Curator, MPRG The 2014 National Works on Paper (NWOP) exhibition showcases the vitality of artists’ responses to the medium of paper. Paper is remarkably versatile and the selection of works in this year’s exhibition spotlights a broad range of the possibilities that paper presents. Paper is torn, cut, woven, stitched, folded, sculpted, moulded, pinned and collaged. Its surface is glued, painted, printed and drawn upon. For artists paper has a long history as a site to experiment and work through ideas. For others paper can expand the reach of an image through multiplicity – a defining feature of numerous printing processes. As an alternative to canvas, many artists have long preferred its smooth, unpretentious surface and greater affordability. Paper is not precious although time can make it so. Within contemporary practice much of paper’s currency rests in its durability. Unlike digital technologies, paper provides certainty. It has a long history as the preferred medium for documentation, storage and communication and its role in making laws, recording history, carrying out business and maintaining bonds with loved ones has been fundamental to the development of society.(i) However, the rise of online media and the proliferation of digital exchanges have eclipsed paperbased forms of communication. In the frenzied to and fro of emails, texts, blogs and tweets – instantly sent and swiftly deleted – there is a lost physicality to much interaction. This opens up a heightened sense of the transitory nature of things. Within this atmosphere, the materiality of paper is being reconsidered by a number of artists. Even its prior functionality can be an important component of the artwork itself. This is nowhere more poignantly expressed than Lisa Waup’s Admit to Care, 2014. A paper document, specifically an Order from the Children’s Welfare Department committing her to State care as a child, is the base for the work. Waup, a Gunditjmara woman, draws linear and diamond designs over the language of white bureaucracy thereby asserting her connection to country 6
that the document tried to sever. A fine green thread is stitched at horizontal intervals across the page in a culturally affirmative gesture. This work draws upon paper’s history as evidence, and the capacity of art to express resistance. Christopher Hillstead deploys documents of his daily movements on discrete sheets of paper neatly filed in a cardboard box. By plotting the coordinates of longitude and latitude of his footsteps during his daily routine, Hillstead considers his imprint on a psychogeographic landscape. A number of artists in this year’s NWOP, including Peter Atkins, Tarli Glover, John Nixon and Anthony Sillavan, repurpose everyday functional paper items in formalist compositions. In John Nixon’s collage, paint sample cards, packaging labels and photographic grey-scale calibration sheets are combined with found pieces of coloured paper cut and torn into stark geometric shapes. The description of colour is one of the most arbitrary elements of the visual field and the paint sample card, like the grey-scale, is an attempt to standardise and communicate via a paperbased object. Peter Atkins also deploys paint colour charts from 1960s Detroit in his series of ready-made abstractions. For both artists abstraction is a modernist retake that elevates obsolete paper throwaways to the status of art. Carole Wilson and Susanna Castleden salvage discarded maps in their compositions. 1960s school atlases are the basis for Wilson’s investigations into place and memory. Each map is cut to form the name of a native bird, many extinct or endangered, in an apt reminder of their dependency upon territory for survival. Castleden’s torn maps are collaged together utilising both the front and reverse side of the map in a play between what is known and what remains hidden. Clipperton, an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, has a tragic history of failed settlement and contested ownership. Maps are visualisations of place that mark out terrain. However, they are only a partial account and do not convey the traces of human experiences upon the land. In a similar vein, Nell utilises redundant record sleeves of a 1963 recording of Mahler’s Resurrection. Upon the covers she adheres plastic blowflies in a reflection upon repetition and mortality. In Katherine Hattam’s collage, pages from a book about chess jostle alongside her paintings of a laptop, mobile phone and camera, 7
holding in tension past and present forms of communication. The spines from Penguin paperback novels are juxtaposed with pages illustrating potential chess manoeuvres and chapter title pages inscribed ‘Test’ or ‘Answers and Explanations’. A reflection upon the game of life, Hattam’s work considers the desire to seek meaning and solutions to life’s ordeals. Tully Moore’s work is influenced by the political protest posters he came across in Spain during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Abstracting torn remnants into a visual pastiche, Moore enlists the functionality of posters to convey insights into the shifting nature of public discourse. Both Alexander Brown and Jeremy Bakker transform photocopy paper into sculptural works that revoke its use value. Brown rolls and moulds blank paper into thousands of tiny tubes to form a larger construct that questions the value we place on different media. For Bakker, paper’s allure lies in possibility. He creates a tall plinth from sheets of paper upon which sits a great orb of pencils. Playing with parameters of intent and scale both artists reject paper’s two-dimensional limitations. For many artists, paper’s appeal is its low-fi aesthetic. Tim Woodward’s Narrative Arc for a Lost Dog in Four Parts, 2014, is deceptively unassuming. There is no frame to confer value and communicate the work’s status as art. Rather he tapes each sheet of paper to the wall with a piece of blue masking tape. By plotting the narrative sequence in a single line, Woodward’s reductive approach sits in tension with the excesses of contemporary commentary. Other artists extend a low-fi approach to the materials they use to draw with. For instance TextaQueen, Lisa Young and Jess Johnson use coloured pencils or textas, while Indigo O’Rourke’s Pale Blue Dot, 2014, is drawn from a ballpoint pen achieving a sumptuousness that belies the utility of this humble writing implement. Of course, many artists continue to use more conventional materials such as pastel, ink, watercolour, oil and acrylic paint to great effect and Ray Coffey’s portrait Daniel, 2013, displays mastery in his handling of charcoal. The work of a number of artists illustrates the increasing fluidity between mediums. Jodi Woodward animates torn paper squares in a stop-frame animation 8
to question the abrogation of responsibility in society. Against a background of various shades of grey tiles Woodward forms words in cherry red to create her message. In the history of the NWOP this is the first time a video work has been included. Whether this work is about paper or a work on paper recorded digitally is open for discussion. Likewise photography has an increased presence in this year’s selection. Digital printing technologies utilised by both printmakers and photomedia artists collapse the traditional distinctions between these two media. For instance Rose Farrell and George Parkin’s Unified Field, 2011–14, combines portrait photography with digital manipulation to create a work that unites the real and the imaginary across time and space. Lesley Duxbury also harnesses the camera’s capacity to capture an indexical trace. She combines a photograph of scenery in Iceland with an image taken from an iPhone app locating the constellation of stars in the evening sky. Throughout the time of her visit she experienced perpetual daylight so the iPhone provided a surrogate night sky, mediating her experience of reality. By superimposing one form of technology over the other, Duxbury creates a composite image of a liminal space that grafts the unseen upon the observed. James Tylor and Jo Scicluna also consider perception and the photograph’s relationship to place. Tylor examines the absences that photography cannot make visible, while Scicluna intervenes in the perceptual field by placing a Perspex sheet across the horizon line of her seascape to interrogate photography’s fidelity to phenomena. Andrew Hazewinkel screenprints 19th century glass-plate negatives of classical Roman busts onto sandpaper to explore the nexus between past and present. During the 19th century, faith in photography’s ability to document led to a craze in creating photographic paper records. Writing in 1859, Oliver Wendall Holmes considered the redundancy of an artwork or object once photographed: ‘Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up.’(ii) Hazewinkel’s image invites speculation on what is lost and gained in the translation of sculptural antiquities to a two-dimensional medium. 9
Other artists attempt to defy paper’s limitations by creating large-scale images that flout its physicality. While paper is remarkably durable, it can also be quite vulnerable and easily damaged particularly when in a large sheet. The fragility of paper underscores both Pat Macan’s monumental Stoppers – Living Room, 2013, and Angela Cavalieri’s Combattimento, 2013. At four and a half metres wide, Macan’s image is a full-scale drawing of a wall of the Bellevue Hill apartment block in Sydney. Fallen into disrepair, the building’s modernist design is translated into a minimalist aesthetic. The uncompromising palette, together with the sheer scale of the work, endows the paper with a robust monumentality. Cavalieri’s project over recent years has also focused on architecture. Her work is a response to Claudio Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals (War and Love), specifically the Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which tells the story of a knight who kills a warrior who he later discovers to be his lover disguised. Cavalieri builds her image from fragments of text in a monument to sorrow. The broken words create a stonelike edifice suggestive of a large cenotaph. In contrast, a number of artists respond to paper’s potential to be intricately worked in miniature gestures. Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s elegant filigree paper cutouts influenced by batik motifs are a reflection upon the experience of migration and return to homeland. Philip Faulks’ finely incised cutout of a menacing drone considers identity, inheritance and ancestry, while Fiona Cabassi’s brightly coloured assemblages create a fantastical minute world. While these artists work with paper in a slow and controlled manner, other artists celebrate the immediacy of a mark made on paper. For instance there is an infectious energy in the ink drawing of Tom O’Hern and Constanze Zikos’ painting, while Catherine Cassidy’s loose approach has a raw dynamism. Together the works in this year’s NWOP highlight the centrality of paper in much art practice today. Amidst the mobile, networked interactive potentialities of technology, paper continues to provide an important platform enabling both maker and viewer to reconnect in the physical world. Nicholas A. Basbanes, On paper: the everything of its two thousand year history. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, 2013, p. xvii. (ii) Oliver Wendall Holmes, ‘The stereoscope and the stereograph’, in Classic essays on photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980, p. 80. (i)
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THE WORKS
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Peter Atkins
ACME Automotive Paint Project 2014
Jeremy Bakker
untitled 2012
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Dean Bowen
Owl 2012
Alexander Brown
Material Study in Paper 2014
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Peter Burgess
Object & idea collective #1 1999–2013
Janet Bush
Trajectories 2013
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Fiona Cabassi
Dropping my wings into the ocean 2014
Catherine Cassidy
Landscape Twice Divided 2014
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Susanna Castleden
Clipperton Island 2013
Angela Cavalieri
Combattimento 2013
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Ray Coffey
Daniel 2013
Christopher Day
Untitled (Permanent Deferral series) 2013
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Lesley Duxbury
Midnight Sun 2013 (detail)
Rose Farrell and George Parkin Unified Field 2011–14
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Philip Faulks
Drone descending 2013
David Frazer
Waiting for Rain 2013
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Tarli Glover
Mass 2013
Rona Green
Lazer 2013
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Helga Groves
Lithic (topology series) animation stills #1 2014
Irene Hanenbergh
Vivienne Westwood ~ Summum Bonum 2013–14
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Katherine Hattam
The Middle Game 2013–14
Andrew Hazewinkel
Material Collision [Staring together at the stars] Parts 1, 2, 3 2012
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Pei Pei He
Eastern to Western Perspective 2014
Christopher Hillstead
Black Box 2013
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Deanna Hitti
The Country Justice containing the practices of the justices of the peace out of their sessions 2013 (detail)
Louise Jennison
A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds 2013 (detail)
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Jess Johnson
Mysteria Mystica Maxima 2014
Josie Kunoth Petyarre
Sugar Bag Story 2013
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Joanna Lamb
2014 Airport Lounge 2014
Adam Lee
The Veil/The Unknown 2014
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Karyn Lindner
In the Pink 2013–14
Pat Macan
Stoppers – Living Room 2013
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Nongirrnga Marawili
Baru 2012
Julian Martin
Untitled 2013
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Fiona McMonagle
The bird lady 2013
Andrew McQualter
Untitled (for R) 2013
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Viv Miller
Entrails 2013 (detail)
Jennifer Mills
In the echo chamber (If I were you I would do more listening than talking) 2014
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Tully Moore
Chasing Shadows 2014
Dorota Mytych
Sonnets from the Crimea 2014 2014
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Glen Namundja
Mimih Kabirridjangkan 2014
Nell
Double Resurrection 1895/1963/2013 2013
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Anie Nheu
Baggage 2012
John Nixon
Untitled (work in 10 parts) Part 4 2012 (detail)
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Tom O’Hern
Europe by car (no hand jobs on a dead planet) 2013
Indigo O’Rourke
Pale Blue Dot 2014
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Mike Parr
Landscape of the pig 2014
Christopher Pyett
Arch & Slab No. 12 – Birthday at perfect drop 2012
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Teho Ropeyarn
Yati Ayun Thinbara (freshwater and saltwater during low tide) 2013
Vin Ryan
Prickly pear, Sunshine 2012
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Sangeeta Sandrasegar
You ask me about that country 2012–13
Jo Scicluna
Where Two Horizons Meet 2013
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Andrew Seward
Studies for a Drawing 2011–12 (detail)
Liz Shreeve
Double Rainbow 2013
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Anthony Sillavan
Drawing 2013 (detail)
Wilma Tabacco
Dreamscape #1 2013
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TextaQueen
Expecting (Self Portrait) 2013
James Tylor
(Deleted scenes) from an untouched landscape #14 2013
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Lisa Waup
Admit to Care 2014
Stephen Wickham
For Kazmir, Larry and Kenzo #1 2014
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Deborah Williams
looking from the outside 2012
Carole Wilson
Bird Atlas 2013
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Jodi Woodward
I never wanted to change the world 2012 (still)
Tim Woodward
Narrative arc for a lost dog in four parts 2014
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Lisa Young
Drawing all over the page 2014
Constanze Zikos
Pin-ups 2 2013
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THE ARTISTS
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PETER ATKINS
JEREMY BAKKER
DEAN BOWEN
b. 1963, New South Wales Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1979, Canberra Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1957, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne
ACME Automotive Paint Project 2014 collage on original paint colour charts 5 sheets, each 27.0 x 21.0 cm
untitled 2012 pencils, paper 90.0 x 40.0 x 40.0 cm
Owl 2012 charcoal on paper 75.0 x 105.0 cm (sheet)
Working across a drawing, object and installation-based practice, I make work that explores shifts in scale and perspective – between the micro and the macro, the detail and the whole, the individual and the collective. I am interested in an internal tension of human experience, one that requires us to come to terms with being both separate from and connected to everyone and everything around us. It is how this tension might be explored creatively through the materials around me that underpins my art practice. untitled plays off the tension between the individual and the whole, incorporating thousands of pencils and sheets of paper brought together to form a ‘drawing’ about drawing. Within each sharpened pencil and each blank sheet of paper is an imbued sense of creative possibility – a sense that there are countless drawings yet to be made.
Observing a perching owl in the Botanic Gardens of Melbourne was a great joy that in part inspired this work. While looking at the bird I noticed that the owl’s eyes had a great depth and darkness that was like looking into eternity and the bird displayed a powerful dignity that was both unmistakable and inspiring. My charcoal drawing Owl is from a large series of finished drawings using the bird as subject matter. These black and white drawings make up a complementary body of work that reflects developed studies of the bird in my oil paintings and sculpture.
Represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
My recent projects have as their common denominator an investigation into collected forms, patterns and structures appropriated from the real world: product packaging, highway signage, record covers and other seemingly ordinary or common abstract elements that surround us in our day to day existence. Of interest to me are those abstract forms that not only provoke memories of a personal experience, but also provide a shared connection to collective memory where we are all encouraged or invited to partake and claim ownership. ACME Automotive Paint Project continues this investigation. A series of original paint colour charts from mid-sixties Detroit have been reworked to remove all existing incidental details, leaving instead the beautiful, abstract, lozenge floating forms. The colours presented in these charts, including the deep cherry reds and ‘School Bus’ yellows, become a record and will perhaps be a reminder of a previous era.
Drawing has been a crucial part of my art work for many years and the foundation to all kinds of cascading ideas and developments. The sensitivity of charcoal and its endless markmaking potential is something I greatly enjoy.
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ALEXANDER BROWN
PETER BURGESS
JANET BUSH
b. 1986, Adelaide Lives and works in Adelaide
b. 1952, Sydney Lives and works in Sydney
b. 1947, Sydney Lives and works in Hobart
Material Study in Paper 2014 recycled photocopy paper 9.0 x 126.0 x 2.5 cm
Object & idea collective #1 1999–2013 digital print on paper 112.0 x 112.0 cm (sheet)
Trajectories 2013 silver ink on black paper 75.0 x 110.0 cm (sheet)
My practice explores minimal metamorphic processes as a means of questioning the value associated with materials that can be considered commonplace and ordinary. I am interested in how modest intervention by the human hand can radically evolve a material as to allow it to be interpreted and experienced in a more progressive yet unexpected way.
This work continues and forms part of a twenty-five year long ongoing investigation into the relationships between image, text and object.
Drawing is a way of mining the subconscious. Via processes of continual drawing without intent, aspects of my persona deeply buried come to the surface. Trajectories is the exploitation of multiple smaller drawings that perhaps revive journeys or lines of thought. Reflecting the patterns, meanderings, avoidances, being lost, coming back on track, intersections, meetings and repetitions, the work evolves into a concern with surfaces.
Material Study in Paper explores a metamorphic process with photocopy paper that firstly uncovers an alternate expression – the texture that results when the paper is torn. This is communicated through the circle that is created when the torn edge is rolled into a tube. The next part of this process is to mass and reprogram the alternate expression through repetition – 5500 of these tubes were constructed. Finally each individual alternate expression is assembled into a threedimensional form: the resulting object is the material rebirthed and now offers a greater, more dynamic interpretive capacity. 80
Object & idea is a collective series of works that spans more than fourteen years in production. This body of work is intended to operate as a broad visual/cultural set of pairings within pairings that treats language as a kind of ‘readymade’ code. Each pairing is taken from common language usage. When the individual pairings are placed in context with each other, new meanings are constructed. The operative text is ‘and’. Within each pair there exists a dialectic that is further extended when the phrase pairings are coupled. The background colour fields are randomly generated RGB numbers based on the letter formations of the top text in each panel. The lower colour field is its complement or supplement.
The grid underpins my drawing practice. As an orderly starting point it then allows itself to be distorted, disrupted and discontinued. It is a process of restoring the spirit of the grid in the search for tranquillity and meaning as I go about my daily life.
FIONA CABASSI
CATHERINE CASSIDY
SUSANNA CASTLEDEN
b. 1970, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1949, Victoria Lives and works in Sydney
Dropping my wings into the ocean 2014 acrylic on paper, pins 274.0 x 295.0 cm
Landscape Twice Divided 2014 vinyl and synthetic polymer paint, white charcoal and collage on paper 76.0 x 114.0 cm (diptych)
b. 1968, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 1977 Lives and works in Perth Clipperton Island 2013 maps and varnish on rag paper 120.0 x 140.0 cm
Represented by Art2Muse Gallery, Sydney
I primarily invent and construct paper-cut wall installations, which playfully experiment with paper, colour, shape, line and pattern. My work explores the possibilities of combining these various elements to create chaotic and fantastical worlds. Dropping my wings into the ocean continues my experimentation with boldly painted and patterned intricate paper cuts, which form a complex web mapping out an imaginary topography, where curvaceous patterned shapes are densely layered and packed together creating an intense environment full of detail and minutiae.
My painting practice is everevolving as my investigations of place and mark change and develop over time. Over the last eight years it has hinged on work trips to remote regions of Australia. Here, I can find raw material for later abstraction through observation and stillness. I am continuing a pursuit of mark and colour, subsuming the subject but keeping it whole. I pursue recall and vestiges of memory that can bring the subject back. In my work Landscape Twice Divided these pieces and fragments of place knit together to form a new place of recognition. Paintings often begin with small plein-air pictures that are a point of origin for developing larger resolved pieces that make their own worlds. I work with acrylic and vinyl paint and bodies of work consist of large format paintings on linen and polyester, wood panel and heavy paper.
The wall-based work Clipperton Island builds on ideas of the imaginary, the unseen and the unknown. The work is formed from discarded maps, using both the front and reverse sides to mark out an unknown and uninhabited territory that lies on the other side of the world. The subtle shifts in colour, tone and contrast seen through the back surface of the torn maps create interplay between the seen and the unseen. Moreover, the island appears to conceal itself through the fold of the slipping map, remaining partially covered or obscured. This work is part of my ongoing practice that, although often firmly aligned to the visual language of mapping, aims to reflect shifting ideas of mobility and being.
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ANGELA CAVALIERI
RAY COFFEY
CHRISTOPHER DAY
b. 1962, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1969, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 2004 Lives and works in Brisbane
b. 1978, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
Combattimento 2013 hand-printed linocut and synthetic polymer paint on paper 148.0 x 218.0 cm
With letters we make words and from words we create stories. Stories are written. They tell a tale. These tales tell about people, cities, experiences, histories and the imagination. I want to use these words to write my own tales. Combattimento is based on the words from Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda from Claudio Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals (War and Love). Recently, I have been exploring ‘music as storytelling’, looking at Monteverdi’s operas and the early poets who inspired his madrigals. I explore the ‘art of writing’ in visual form using literary, religious and historical narratives that eventually manifest as image. Fragments of experience and narrative find their form in the enlarged, broken and repaired text that I construct. Seeing the text as an image, I re-write that part of history by re-working and integrating the text into forms that reinforce its physical and material presence. The narrative is constantly changing and rediscovering itself and new narratives appear.
Daniel 2013 charcoal on paper 75.0 x 55.0 cm (sheet)
The creation of my work explores determinism. Each subject is interviewed about how they came to their particular position in life. Within this I’m looking to explore how time and place has more effect than perceived choice. How lives are shaped by random uncontrollable events, not general providence. As Karl Marx put it: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’
Untitled (Permanent Deferral series) 2013 pigment print on paper 30.0 x 21.0 cm (sheet)
I put together photomontage composites drawn from my personal photographic archive of unexpected historical and contemporary subjects. Employing collage as a language to disrupt meaning, my documentary images of everyday scenes, nature and objects meld into faces and far-off dreamscapes. Prioritising the extravagant, the surreal and the humorous, Permanent Deferral explores the opulence of pleasure in our decayed future.
LESLEY DUXBURY
ROSE FARRELL AND
PHILIP FAULKS
b. 1950, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 1983 Lives and works in Melbourne
GEORGE PARKIN
b. 1959, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 1976 Lives and works in Melbourne
Midnight Sun 2013 inkjet prints and silver ink on paper 6 sheets, each 33.0 x 48.3 cm
Rose FARRELL b. 1949, Brisbane Lives and works in Melbourne George PARKIN b. 1949, Corowa; d. 2012, Melbourne Unified Field 2011–14 digital print on archival rag paper 62.0 x 126.0 cm
Drone descending 2013 cut paper 180.0 x 200.0 cm
Represented by Arc One Gallery, Melbourne
I spent three months of 2012 in North Iceland close to the Arctic Circle where in mid-summer there is twenty-four hours of daylight. The sky was never dark enough to see stars or planets and I reoriented myself to the rhythms of day and night with my iPhone app Night Sky, through which I was able to superimpose the actual night sky over the permanently light landscape. In Midnight Sun I have overlaid photographs of the panorama of the Icelandic landscape at midnight with snapshots from the Night Sky app to depict the liminal moment, a mysterious in-between space, which is neither fully dark nor fully light, when day and night come together. I further exaggerated the constellations made visible through the app by drawing silver tracery over the prints to provide a point of familiarity in such a physically and psychologically unfamiliar place.
Throughout our collaboration, performance was at the core. In 2003 we drew the camera closer and photographed our own faces which began an ongoing interest in the selfportrait. This image of George’s and my face was taken in 2011 and was pixelated, distorted and constructed by George at that time. It shows our embrace of the changing digital technology that had, since 2003, allowed for the more extreme ‘closeup’ in order to experiment with the face ‘as the landscape or tableau’. I, Rose, in 2014, with George’s passing in 2012, have incorporated a collaged digital landscape to reference our love of historical landscapes and nature, which we previously used to paint as background sets in our large constructed photographic tableaux. Here the landscape of our faces are joined and unified across the imaginary field that divides us now.
Drone descending imagines the unmanned flying vehicle as an ornate image cut from black paper, emphasising a graphically oriented exploration of ideas of ancestry, mortality and genetic inheritance via a stylistically patterned figurative panorama. Familiar as a potent motif of modern warfare, a ‘drone’ can also be a sustained monotonous noise, an enslaved worker, a doomed fertiliser of the queen bee or even slang for a specific type of drug. Metaphors that are all embedded in an image that attempts to shed light on the true nature of the duality of familial love.
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DAVID FRAZER
TARLI GLOVER
RONA GREEN
b. 1966, Victoria Lives and works in Victoria
b. 1963, Victoria Lives and works in Victoria
b. 1972, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne
Waiting for Rain 2013 linocut on paper 162.0 x 118.5 cm (sheet)
Mass 2013 synthetic polymer paint, charcoal and ink on paper 100.0 x 135.0 cm
Lazer 2013 hand-coloured linocut on paper, edition of 23 83.0 x 76.0 cm (sheet) Represented by Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney
Waiting for Rain is my most ambitious work so far. It has culminated from years of smallscale wood engraving and the influence of my recent working trips to China. It is a love letter to the Australian countryside. It captures the feeling of standing above the landscape the moment before embracing it.
Mass belongs to a large and ongoing series titled Paper Scape that developed as an offshoot to earlier ideas based on severe climatic events and extreme and changed environments. The variable nature of the recycled artwork used for this series, and the manner in which they were being manipulated and applied, led to the works representing the ‘abstract’ in the natural world. The Paper Scape works are an exploration of various aspects of geology and physical structure, interpreting lineal characteristics and patterning in the landscape. The series is continually evolving and aims to elicit thought and discussion about the various characteristics and make up of the environments that surround us. Mass investigates and examines surface and textural qualities in a broader context of the ‘landscape’ theme. It symbolises a fictional terrain yet evokes a real sense of landscape within the patterns created.
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The pictures I make explore use of the figure as a vehicle for narrative. I’m especially interested in how identity is expressed via the body, physical appearance and the ways it can be altered, the skin and its potential to be the stem point for transformation. Use of tattoo as a motif is fired by its capacity to tell a story – it can convey information about origin, affiliation, status and proclivities. As a form of communication tattooing has the ability to transcend language barriers. Tattoos can speak to (or be read by) anyone on some level, which makes them an exciting device for transmitting ideas. The hybrid characters I create are loners, misfits and outcasts who bear the marks and scars of past experience. Through them I celebrate individuality, idiosyncrasy and difference.
HELGA GROVES
IRENE HANENBERGH
KATHERINE HATTAM
b. 1961, Queensland Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1966, Netherlands; arrived Australia, 1998 Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1950, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
Lithic (topology series) animation stills #1 2014 pigment print on cotton rag 124.0 x 124.0 cm (sheet) Represented by Sutton Galleries, Melbourne
Vivienne Westwood ~ Summum Bonum 2013–14 ink, pencil and watercolour on paper 3 sheets, each 57.0 x 38.0 cm
The Middle Game 2013–14 mixed media, book pages, charcoal, gouache, wallpaper and fabric on paper 120.0 x 80.0 cm (sheet)
Represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne and Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane
Geophysics and natural phenomena are themes I am investigating within my interdisciplinary art practice. My current work focuses on the subjectivity of geomorphic processes that occur close to the surface of the earth and the sighting of patterns from visible science.
Vivienne Westwood ~ Summum Bonum combines various folk traditions and deals with concerns of disciplined immaterial sensibilities in marginalised Visionary-Fantastic arts practices. I combine Eastern European folktale, heavy metal fantasies, but also popular and historical fashion icons.
This archival pigment print Lithic (topology series) animation stills #1, has evolved through the process of hand-drawn animation stills, using layers of acetate, watercolour, tracing paper and graphite. Each frame represents a rotational still of a geometrical rock form surfaced with lichen growth patterns. On mass they read as microscopic maps suggesting geophysical time in suspended animation.
These three works, watercolour and ink on paper, invoke rituals and flashes of nostalgia, comprising of compulsive or delusional longing. The triptych relates to alternative interpretations of marginalised Fantasy phenomena and Visionary-Folklore. By merging these marginalised forms and alternative references with contemporary techniques and subject matter, I create work that slips between low and high culture. This is not an attempt to upgrade ‘low’ to the level of ‘high’ (the Summum Bonum being the one school of thought), but a request to stop thinking in terms of such diametrically opposed categories. Through blurring distinctions between the three parts of the triptych, classification becomes obsolete.
Within my personal visual language the intention is to depict the psychological. This work, The Middle Game, takes its title from a book about chess. Pages are placed randomly in the central space – both window in and window out. Bordering it are images in my language: there are two different clocks, one analogue, the other digital, referencing both real and psychoanalytic time, the fact that the past can erupt into the present. The inside and real world is laid out on the table with my studio scissors and things I cannot live without: camera, mobile phone, computer, novel, a bottle of water, a beautiful bowl carried back from my Australia-China residency in Beijing. In making the work, correcting and changing my mind, reparative acts are made possible through layers of book pages that both reveal and conceal.
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ANDREW HAZEWINKEL
PEI PEI HE
CHRISTOPHER HILLSTEAD
b. 1965, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1954, China; arrived Australia, 1987 Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1961, New Zealand; arrived Australia, 1982 Lives and works in Western Australia
Material Collision [Staring together at the stars] Parts 1, 2, 3 2012 screen print on carborundum sandpaper (triptych) 3 sheets, each 146.0 x 113.0 cm; 351.0 x 113.0 cm (overall)
The central theme of my work is an interest in the psychological correspondence between memory, material and the body. Recent work investigates connections between the broken figures of classical sculpture and our contemporary realm. Drawing on fields as diverse as archeology, geology, art history and archival research, I examine objects created in other times; this provides me with a means of understanding and commenting on social aspects of our time. These cycles of human experience are reflected here by a material cycle. These screenprints are made on carborundum sandpaper. Carborundum is a compound made of silicon and carbon; it is closely related with silica, the main component of glass. The original photographic images from which I have created these works are sourced from a collection of fragile 19th century glass-plate negatives documenting unearthed antique figures. Working with material of this nature exposes a layered comingling of time and illuminates connections between the deep past and the everyday.
Eastern to Western Perspective 2014 pencil on paper 32.0 x 150.0 x 100.0 cm (variable)
I am always fascinated by the rhythm of the modern city. This installation project reflects my observation of the busy street and the spirituality of human beings in the crowded urban environment. As a Chinese-born Australian artist, I am interested in the form and length of the scroll: it is very distinctive, which can be rolled and unrolled, and it carries multiple perspectives. I feel fairly spontaneous and excited to draw on paper scrolls and set them as a dimensionvariable installation work. I consider it may have the capacity for my purpose of depicting the endlessness of city life. To bring contemporary Western society street life into traditional Chinese art forms means so much to me, as I have deep Eastern roots and many years of Western life experiences.
Black Box 2013 cardboard box, synthetic polymer paint and printed text on blue non-carbon copy paper 9.0 x 9.0 x 22.5 cm
The documentation of my lived experience within an endemic spatio-temporal environment is the cornerstone of my practice. My life is all about routine and repetition within a prescribed space. My work explores these themes through the recursive nature of my mark-making that invokes a sense of infinity suggestive of journeys, the grid and labyrinths. The registration of line as an expressive device records the rigours of rhythmic nuances and the traces of my presence on that landscape. Time not only represents a lineal construct from one point to another but is cyclical as an ever-repeating phenomenon like automated clockwork. The suggestion of metaphysical puzzles, patterns and traces just below the surface of the ordinary alludes to the paths and cycles of my psychogeographic landscape. This current work Black Box is indicative of an indexical trace documenting my footsteps over a prescribed period of time, to a precise location, expressed by the co-ordinates of longitude and latitude.
DEANNA HITTI
LOUISE JENNISON
JESS JOHNSON
b. 1975, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1976, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
The Country Justice containing the practices of the justices of the peace out of their sessions 2013 inkjet on paper (artist book) 30.0 x 25.0 x 5.0 cm (closed), 1100 pages
A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds 2013 single colour lithograph offset with pencil on paper (artist book) 17.0 x 25.0 x 1.0 cm (closed), 16 concertina pages
b. 1979, New Zealand; arrived Australia, 2002 Lives and works in Melbourne Mysteria Mystica Maxima 2014 artist frame, pen, fibre-tipped markers, metallic paint on paper 75.0 x 105.0 cm (sheet); 121.0 x 90.0 cm (framed) Represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; Utopian Slumps, Melbourne and Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland
The Country Justice artist book is a compilation of the top 1000 banned books across the world in the last 100 years. The book illustrates how cultural values change through time and provides a platform to discuss censorship and the right for the public to access banned literature. The book is created in a clandestine manner using a domestic inkjet printer. The book titles are arranged and printed at random. Each image is overlayed onto pages of a book about book binding and design. The pages are bound in a linen cloth cover with a title unpresuming of its true content.
This work features the handcoloured portraits of the Yellowbilled Kingfisher (Syma torotoro), Red-rumped Parrot (Psephotus haematonotus), Crested Jay (Platylophus galericulatus), Yellow-fronted Woodpecker (Melanerpes flavifrons), Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae), Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis), Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), Red Knot (Calidris canutus), Superb Fruit-Dove (Ptilinopus superbus), Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus), Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata), and the Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia). Each bird is encircled by the food it eats (the adult and juvenile Southern Boobooks by a mischief of mice), the home it keeps (the Rufous Hornero in her dried mud nest-cum-oven), and the things it does (the sticks cleared by the Kakapo to make a stage from which to woo a mate).
My drawing and installation practice is inspired by the speculative intersections between language, science fiction, culture and technology. In my drawings I create complex worlds that combine densely layered patterns, objects and figures within architectural settings. My image-making technique reflects my diverse interest in historical art forms, ranging from illuminated manuscript to folk art traditions such as quilt making. My drawings are often displayed within constructed environments that extend the geometric encryption, patterning and symbology of the drawings into the gallery space. These installations act as physical portals into my speculative worlds.
The bird is shown as a living creature to respect and to be in awe of, and as something not so very different to ourselves.
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JOSIE KUNOTH PETYARRE
JOANNA LAMB
ADAM LEE
b. 1959, Northern Territory Lives and works in Northern Territory Language: Anmatyerre
b. 1972, Perth Lives and works in Perth
b. 1979, Melbourne Lives and works in Victoria
2014 Airport Lounge 2014 collage, acrylic on paper 60.0 x 72.0 cm (sheet)
The Veil/The Unknown 2014 watercolour, ink and synthetic polymer paint on paper 105.0 x 75.0 cm (sheet)
Sugar Bag Story 2013 synthetic polymer paint on paper 57.0 x 78.0 cm (sheet)
Represented by Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney
Represented by Station, Melbourne
Represented by Mossenson Galleries, Perth
The term ‘sugar bags’ is used to describe the sweet honey made by one of around fourteen species of native stingless bees found across Australia. As a visual motif, it is one of the most variable and iconic in Australian Indigenous art. For thousands of years, sugar bags have adorned the faces of rock-art sites in the Kimberley, Arnhem Land and the Central Desert.
My practice is an ongoing exploration of the idea of urbanity and suburbanity and how our experience of the spaces within these environments becomes repetitive, disconnected and anonymous. The works I produce are deliberations between realism and abstraction and are influenced by processes more familiar to mass media and advertising. The imagery is reduced to flat planes of colour and a flattened perspective, the surface is flat and quick to read like an advertising poster. The images become evocative of place rather than specific to it. One place resembles many places. 2014 Airport Lounge (a painted paper collage) is a derivation of an existing airport lounge whose facsimile can be found anywhere in the world. It is a non-place, a transit lounge, a place where our experience of it is essentially a non-experience.
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My work is situated within painting and drawing traditions. It references a wide range of sources including historical and colonial photography, biblical narratives, natural history, and contemporary music, film and literature to investigate aspects of the human condition in relation to ideas of the spiritual and natural world. In recent years my work has explored a re-interpretation of landscape painting and old worldly portraiture to investigate humanity’s interface with the environment of the natural world. The Veil/The Unknown is loosely based on a 1935 photograph of a group of mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The work touches on the idea of mankind’s exploration of the known world and the attempt to touch upon its spiritual counterpart.
KARYN LINDNER
PAT MACAN
NONGIRRNGA MARAWILI
b. 1957, Adelaide Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1975, New Zealand; arrived Australia, 2005 Lives and works in Sydney
b. 1939, Northern Territory Lives and works in Northern Territory Language: Mitwatj
In the Pink 2013–14 watercolour, coloured pencil and pencil on paper 198.0 x 268.0 cm (overall)
Stoppers – Living Room 2013 oil stick on brown paper 315.0 x 458.0 cm (sheet) Represented by yuill | crowley, Sydney
Baru 2012 screenprint on paper 67.0 x 60.0 cm (sheet) Represented by Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory
I investigate the use of watercolour as an equivalent to the blur in painting. Academic and writer Rosemary Hawker has written about Gerhard Richter’s use of the blur in his paintings, ‘… this blurring shows nothing yet at the same time it generates a play between what is visible and what cannot be shown …’ (i) How are mothers and related subjects represented by the media and by history? Depicted are a variety of people whose actions have helped shape our opinions around mothering. We are ‘haunted’ by them. The title refers to the phrase ‘In the Pink’, meaning in perfect condition. We usually associate it with good health, but in earlier times it was used to express excellence. Pink is the stereotypical colour that ‘screams’ female, but it is also the colour of human scars, the underside of our hands and feet and our ‘insides’. Rosemary Hawker, Blur: Gerhard Richter and the Photographic in Painting, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2007. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/ UQ:158803. Accessed 12 October, 2010. (i)
For over a decade, drawing – generally oil stick on paper – has been my primary discipline. While subjects vary, my work often uses a minimal aesthetic, drawing on narratives that allude to similar themes: entropy, being, nothingness, authenticity and the replica. Stoppers – Living Room is from a project recording the final days of an apartment block designed in 1957 by Laurence Tibor Rayner. Known in the 1950s as ‘the jewel of Bellevue Hill’, the building was a fine example of Australian modernism, though it had fallen into considerable disrepair in recent years. Its degradation paralleled abandonment and break-down in the architect’s personal and professional lives. Stoppers – Living Room is a 1:1 scale drawing of a glass, timber and concrete wall that was a focal point in the apartments. The drawing operates as an abbreviated plan for the wall, representing it in its perfect, untouched form, transcending the entropic force of material decay.
These are the children of the Baru (the crocodile) with their Mari (grandmothers). The Baru is from the Gumatji and the Madarrpa clans. Baru signifies the bringing of fire for the Madarrpa people. Here the grandmothers hunt fish and bring them to the babies to eat at the river’s edge.
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JULIAN MARTIN
FIONA McMONAGLE
ANDREW McQUALTER
b. 1969, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1977, Ireland; arrived Australia, 1977 Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1970, New South Wales Lives and works in Melbourne
Untitled 2013 pastel on paper 38.0 x 28.0 cm (sheet) Represented by Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
Characterised by their rich velvety surfaces and intriguing abstraction, Julian Martin’s pastel works make a unique visual statement. Highly methodical in his approach, Martin will carefully choose a photographic reference or an arranged still-life before selecting his highly refined palette. His works combine tonal nuance and mysterious forms. Signs, symbols, human figures, animals and inanimate objects all become transformed: recognisable yet veiled.
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The bird lady 2013 ink and watercolour on paper 114.0 x 78.5 cm (sheet)
Untitled (for R) 2013 graphite, watercolour, colour pencil on paper 80.5 x 72.5 cm (sheet) Represented by Daine Singer, Melbourne
My art deals with the familiar of our suburban lives, I believe that where you spend your adolescent years will mark you as a person. In the work The bird lady I am exploring the transitions between the known and perceived.
My practice is concerned with a series of interrelated ideas – connection, community, ontology, relationships and culture. I imagine these ideas as landmarks occupying a landscape that I journey across in the course of my practice. I am drawn toward one or another of these ideas in turn; individual works are a view of the landscape from that particular vantage point, a point on the map. Sometimes, the view surprises me. This spatial conception of my practice was explored in a large wall-drawing titled A partial index (2011–13). My works on paper are like sketches of individual elements in that landscape. This work stems from exercises I was given to calm the mind – it is an image of the search for self-knowledge, simultaneously profound and awkward; stylistically the work draws on traditions of spiritual art, comics and graphic novels.
VIV MILLER
JENNIFER MILLS
TULLY MOORE
b. 1979, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1966, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1981, New South Wales Lives and works in Melbourne
Entrails 2013 pencil and gouache on paper, pen and synthetic polymer paint on acetate 4 works, each 73.5 x 92.0 cm
In the echo chamber (If I were you I would do more listening than talking) 2014 gouache, watercolour, ink, pencil and oil pastel on paper 115.0 x 200.0 cm (sheet)
Chasing Shadows 2014 oil on oil sketch paper 76.0 x 56.0 cm (sheet)
Represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne and Gallery 9, Sydney
My paintings and drawings move between abstraction and realism, drawing on elements of the natural world as well as computer graphics and cell animation. In creating the Entrails series, I wanted to imagine the span of the drawing as if it possessed its own visual churn or flow, akin to the digestion of a gut. One section flows onto the next, and snakes and coils around other parts. The layering of acetate over the drawing on paper might also provide an impression of a vivisected image. Entrails is entirely handmade, but its passages of small, intricate geometric patterning might suggest something of a digital aesthetic. I am interested in how the layering and building of imagery in these works might imitate the visual grammar of computer programs. Also, an analogy to digestion carries into this realm too, as digital culture contains its own language of feeds, flows and streams.
Represented by John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
Represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
In the 1960s Phil Spector created the Wall of Sound by cramming musicians into a small room, making use of thousands of reverberations, or echoes, of sound bouncing off the walls to create a deep, layered sound. In a 1967 episode of Get Smart, the evil guru warns Max and 99 trapped inside an echo chamber: ‘If I were you I would do more listening than talking’ because the sound has been amplified to the point that a pin drop will ‘blow their brains’. In 2014 an autistic boy puts his fingers in his ears: he does more listening than talking. My practice relies upon the navigation of city landscapes and the different facets that make the backdrop to contemporary living. Design, intervention, and decay are a constant and my wanderings and subsequent paintings form an incidental map of the terrain. Precise in their execution, my works often feature architecture, street signage and graffiti, with text appearing in a cacophony of meaning and banality.
This work was a product of a trip that focused on the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, with an emphasis on Spain. Chasing Shadows is a replication of collected images that followed the trail of the protest movement associated with the debt crisis. These political posters acted as a source of information during my time in Spain and speak both of the public’s sentiment and how the transition of such a public forum is in perpetual flux. This work demonstrates the more abstract nature of some of these posters, here the hands on this poster clamber for supremacy over the layers that have obscured the posters’ intent.
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DOROTA MYTYCH
GLEN NAMUNDJA
NELL
b. 1970, Poland; arrived Australia, 1996 Lives and works in Melbourne and Cracow, Poland
b. 1963, Northern Territory Lives and works in Northern Territory Language: Kunwinjku
b. 1975, New South Wales Lives and works in Sydney
Sonnets from the Crimea 2014 2014 charcoal and pastel on paper 101.0 x 180.0 cm (triptych)
Mimih Kabirridjangkan 2014 ochre on paper 102.0 x 76.0 cm (sheet) Represented by Injalak Arts, Gunbalanya, Northern Territory
Represented by Station, Melbourne
I grew up in Poland in the 1980s during the Communist era. At that time to see crowds everywhere was common: organised military marches; organised groups of protesting students and the chaotic dispersion of them; striking; people queuing for food, shoes and toilet paper. These experiences have influenced this work.
Three Mimih spirits, armed with spears, woomeras and stone axes walk through a landscape of abundant game. The central figures in this work are kinga, the saltwater crocodile, ngurrurdu the emu and kolobarr the antilopine kangaroo, the largest macropod in Arnhem Land. These are surrounded by smaller animals – ngarrbek the echidna, boywek the gecko, kurndamen the frill-necked lizard, burarr the water goanna, kedjebe the file snake, dalkken the dingo and ngalmangiyi the long-necked turtle.
My great love of music, art and small wonders manifest in artworks that are everyday meditations on what it means to stay intimate with the certainty of our mortality. Like a tune without a beginning or an ending art, music, time and place ricochet through this work. The record sleeves depict a detail from Grünewald’s The Isenheim Altarpiece. Incongruously yet tenderly, blowflies radiate outwards from the golden halo of one of Grünewald‘s angels. Blowflies reoccur in my work as classic memento mori and as my very own Australian angels.
I am particularly interested in crowds of people seen from a distance, so that one can perceive a general overview, a pattern created by people. When the focus tightens, the details of the crowd gain resolution creating a more intimate personal relationship. The title The Sonnets from the Crimea 2014 is taken from the poems written almost 200 years ago by Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz wherein he recounts the beauty and harmony of Crimea. This drawing is a direct response to the present day upheaval in Ukraine.
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According to the Kunwinjku people of Western Arnhem Land, Mimihs were the original spirit beings and taught Aboriginal people many of the skills they needed to survive in the bush along with ceremonies, dance and song. These spirits continue to live in rocks, trees and caves but are rarely seen by humans. They are frequently seen in the rock art of Arnhem Land as small, dynamic figures.
Double Resurrection 1895/1963/2013 2013 plastic blowflies on cardboard record sleeves 48.7 x 78.6 cm
Riffing on Warhol’s Double Elvis and the serial nature of mass-produced records, here instead of the one, unique Resurrection there are two angels – a Double Resurrection. Mahler’s Resurrection premiered in Berlin in 1895, this version was recorded in London in 1963 and I made this artwork in 2013. Hence the dates form part of the title and imply that the Resurrection could go on forever.
ANIE NHEU
JOHN NIXON
TOM O’HERN
b. 1965, Taiwan; arrived Australia, 1982 Lives and works in Sydney
b. 1949, Sydney Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1985, Tasmania Lives and works in Hobart
Untitled (work in 10 parts) Part 4 2012 collage of photographic and printed papers on cardboard 10 sheets, each 30.0 x 21.0 cm (variable)
Europe by car (no hand jobs on a dead planet) 2013 ink on paper 213.0 x 200.0 cm
Baggage 2012 colour pencils and watercolour on gessoed paper board 76.0 x 50.0 cm
Represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart
Represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
I have chosen to explore the body as the instrument of identity to examine the metaphor of surface as a site of exchange or interface where the body is formed by its environment and where the space (environment) is defined by its inhabitant. In this work I have used paper as a metaphor for the skin of the body in the broadest sense. I am particularly sensitive to the surface treatment of the paper and how the forms are connected and hung together. This informs the emotive content of the work. In Baggage, I am interested to bring to the surface emotional experiences formed through habitual exchange in close relationships. These mark and form identity and behavioural patterns and become baggage when attachment is formed towards those experiences from which strong self-identifications are formed. Despite the negative emotions derived, the body chooses to retain engagement with these experiences for fear of losing its identity.
Recently within my paintings and collages I have begun to cross the edge of the canvas or cardboard to work both inside and outside the rectangular support to allow for a greater dynamism. In this group of ten collages I am also bringing together different elements from art and photography. Abstraction is used to combine both coloured papers and greyscale photographic calibration sheets with other small printed material cut from labels, which add textural diversity and contrast with the plain colours. The actual works evolve over a number of days in a rather random, trial and error fashion and in a non-predetermined manner allowing variation on a theme to naturally grow resulting in a single work made of ten parts.
The work is the culmination of diary entries from four months spent in Paris. I drank cheap wine and rode my bike. I drank black coffee ’til the bones in my hands hurt. We slept in the back of a van in the ice and snow of the Pyrenees and the Alps. Generally, I just hid in my sketchbooks. We looked all over France for the ghost of a maneating wolf. He was beaten to death in front of the Notre Dame. I grew up in the valley where the last thylacine was caught, and I was attracted by the parallel persecution. I liked that it was an animal doing the eating for once. The work is a primitive and cathartic out-pouring of imagery both from personal diary entries and stolen from medieval paintings.
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INDIGO O’ROURKE
MIKE PARR
CHRISTOPHER PYETT
b. 1983, Australian Capital Territory Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1945, Sydney Lives and works in Sydney
b. 1943, Melbourne Lives and works in Victoria
Landscape of the pig 2014 etching ink on mulberry paper bonded to canvas 221.0 x 232.0 cm (irreg.) Printed by John Loane, Viridian Press, Canberra
Arch & Slab No. 12 – Birthday at perfect drop 2012 gouache on paper 100.0 x 102.0 cm (sheet)
Pale Blue Dot 2014 blue ball point pen on paper 75.0 x 75.0 cm (sheet)
Represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney
My drawing practice evolves from a rather personal narrative investigating the art of the everyday in which I document my life in drawings. After a two year hiatus where I was unable to draw due to injury, I have recently reemerged with a new body of work that includes Pale Blue Dot. These new drawings deal with the complex experiences of being human and take on a more critical view of social, political and cultural issues in today’s world. The carefully rendered drawing Pale Blue Dot aims to remind us just how temporary and insignificant we are.
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It would be a mistake to believe that this work is intended to impugn the policies of the current government or its unprincipled opposition; nor am I concerned especially by the encroachment of the feral animal population. Rather, I am trying to expunge a profound sense of isolation and dissociation induced by a vanishing point that resists all possibilities of surface memories and temporal scars. Nothing is illustrated in this work except the floundering residues of the self-portrait project reduced to arms’ length gesturing and broken, indivisible remainders.
Colour fills my creative life and I continue to be totally involved with its mysteries. I find it compelling and it allows me to continue to discover its myriad possibilities.
TEHO ROPEYARN
VIN RYAN
SANGEETA SANDRASEGAR
b. 1988, Queensland Lives and works in Queensland Language: Injinoo Ikya
b. 1969, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1977, Brisbane Lives and works in Melbourne
Prickly pear, Sunshine 2012 pencil on paper 118.0 x 135.0 cm (sheet)
You ask me about that country 2012–13 watercolour on cut paper 30.0 x 70.0 x 7.0 cm (overall)
Yati Ayun Thinbara (freshwater and saltwater during low tide) 2013 vinyl cut print on paper, edition of 30 100.0 x 210.0 cm
My work depicts my culture: stories, totems, clans, country, environment and my home community of Injinoo. My passion is to restore and preserve old stories passed down from Injinoo Elders and I use Injinoo language for the titles of works. The stories I use in my prints were told to me by my Elders during cultural lessons in school and over the years. Mandang Ikamba translates as ‘strength of a crocodile’ in the Injinoo Ikya language of my people. The crocodile knows its territory from birth. The crocodile is patient, a guardian of its territory. The crocodile will travel away but always comes back to the area where it lives. ‘We need to be strong like the crocodile. It has survived thousands of years and lived alongside our people for over 40,000 years. If we become the crocodile, our culture and language will be preserved and maintained for the future generations to come.’ Aunty Rev. Mary Eseli (Injinoo Elder)
Represented by Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
This is a drawing of a prickly pear that used to grow near the creek at the back of my house. I was attracted to it because of the apparent random shapelessness with which it grew. It seemed to contrast beautifully with the geometry and order of suburban Sunshine. I made several drawings of it and a series of photographs. Then one day I went for a walk along the creek and saw council workers systematically chopping it down, piece by piece and putting it into large plastic bags. They looked like gallery assistants taking down a show. I imagined that it must have felt to them like a pretty pointless task. If they’d cast their eyes along the creek they would have seen the hundreds of new mutations poking their heads up through the grass.
Represented by Murray White Room, Melbourne
I work within a research-based practice, building narratives in which every new work connects to previous projects. My practice consolidates postcolonial and hybridity theory, exploring my context within Australia and its relationship to migrant communities and homelands. The series You ask me about that country takes its title from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz about passing time affecting one’s recollections of real and imagined experiences. Created following a return to Malaysia after twenty-five years, each suite of filigree papercuts includes a self-portrait confronted with three portraits indicating Malaysian cultural groups. The portraits deal with a confrontation: from questions of return and homelands, to love and belonging, stasis and diaspora. Patterned with batik motifs that reflect the legacy of migration, colonisation and post-independence politics, the cutouts and shadows suggest alternate identities and memories.
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JO SCICLUNA
ANDREW SEWARD
LIZ SHREEVE
b. 1969, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1967, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
Where Two Horizons Meet 2013 pigment ink on cotton rag, clear acrylic, Victorian Ash timber 90.0 x 90.0 cm
Studies for a Drawing 2011–12 pencil and watercolour on paper (series of 16), hand-made folio, hand-made vouchers 51.0 x 34.5 x 2.0 cm (closed)
b. 1949, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 1958 Lives and works in Sydney
My interest in photography is motivated by the medium’s intrinsic relationship to phenomena. The photographic image is a pliable component of my spatial practice: an object whose material condition holds much conceptual potential. The relationship between the photograph and the sculptural act is an active process. I aim to explore the conceptual and phenomenological scope of this relationship. This work is part of an ongoing series exploring coastal sites along the Mornington Peninsula. Activating the frame conceptually, a piece of clear acrylic is cut in a curve below the horizon line, casting an alternative horizon line, and exposing the materiality of the underlying cotton-rag print. This material and spatial interplay, rupture a generic seascape. The horizon as a locational reference point, relies upon the subtlety of direct encounter. Strong place-making underpins this process engaging landscape as an ongoing, surrogate portrait, charting my search for home as the eternal ‘elsewhere’.
Double Rainbow 2013 watercolour on cut and folded paper 86.0 x 62.0 x 2.0 cm
Represented by Gallerysmith, Melbourne
Represented by Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney
I think that making art and looking at art are coterminous experiences.
My work focuses on visual phenomena and perception. I am interested in the way simple structures can be repeated and combined to give seemingly complex forms. I am interested in the way light falls on surfaces and encourages us to look intently.
These are studies of particular plant fragments found at a certain time and place. Making the drawings was an intimate (by which I mean slow, concentrated and quiet) experience that I wanted to reproduce in the viewing of them via the portfolio housing and display.
In Double Rainbow the paper units are folded to catch ambient light and flood it into the coloured spaces. The surface is slightly unfocused as the light scatters. I want to slow the process of looking so that for the patient viewer, the light becomes visible as a coloured cloud tinting the front of the white paper vanes. I hope the meditative mood of the making can be felt in the finished work.
ANTHONY SILLAVAN
WILMA TABACCO
TEXTAQUEEN
b. 1955, United Kingdom; arrived Australia, 1974 Lives and works in New South Wales
b. 1953, Italy; arrived Australia, 1957 Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1975, Perth Lives and works in Melbourne and California, USA
Dreamscape #1 2013 metal leaf and pigment on polycarbonate on paper 144.0 x 60.0 cm
Expecting (Self Portrait) 2013 fibre-tip marker on cotton paper 127.0 x 97.0 cm
Drawing 2013 drilled cardboard 157.0 x 150.0 x 16.0 cm
Represented by Langford 120, Melbourne
While experimenting with cardboard as a drawing surface for some years, I have also been interested in the use of different tools to make a mark. The pursuit of enquiries into texture and tone are ongoing. In this case, an electric drill has been used to make a textured surface in stacked cardboard. The work is presented in six panels in slab boxes. It has been conceived as a work that rests face-up on the floor. The materials used were mostly found between Sydney and Cooma, and I like to think I collected some of it from the same parts of the Monaro Highway that Rosalie Gascoigne collected her material from. The lines, tones and textures are reminiscent of geological layering, suggesting the passage of time, as well as the use of the elements, (sunlight, rain) to weather the cardboard.
I have been incorporating pure gold or gold foil in paintings and works on paper since 2009 and this recent work bypasses traditional usages of this material to explore its potential as a substitute for the drawn mark. The Dreamscapes are created from excess gold foil retrieved from the shapes applied to large canvas works. The thousands of fragments used are abstract forms selected and configured for their shape and size. While some are dispersed, isolated shapes, most are overlaid to create irregular clusters. The spatial arrangement, format and pictorial elements suggest associations with Chinese landscape painting and its derivatives. The use of rice paper as a supporting structure strengthens this allusion. However, the image is purely abstract, creating an evanescent beauty from studio detritus.
Represented by Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney
My portraits use the humble and unforgiving felt-tip pen aka ‘texta’ on paper to explore complex politics of sexuality, gender and race as they relate to subjective and collective expressions of identity. I was born and raised far from the land of my cultural roots and around few people who share them so in this self-portrait, through metaphorical fantasy, I connect to the heritage I believe my body still holds within. As I sit on a Goan beach, the Chico baby confectioneries that were a problematic icon in my childhood become representations of my ancestors. They float in the ache of my knee joint, in the overflow of the breast-milk-filled coconut and down around me, past the Sagittarian constellation escaping between my legs and into the infinity of the ocean, while a tiger cub sleeps gently in my womb representing the unknown potential in continuing my bloodline.
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JAMES TYLOR
LISA WAUP
STEPHEN WICKHAM
b. 1986, Victoria Lives and works in Adelaide Language: Kaurna
b. 1971, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne Language: Gunditjmara
b. 1950, Melbourne Lives and works in Victoria
(Deleted scenes) from an untouched landscape #14 2013 inkjet print on paper with hole removed, mounted on foam core with black velvet void 50.0 x 50.0 x 3.0 cm
Admit to Care 2014 inkjet print on cotton rag paper, cotton stitching and synthetic polymer paint 79.0 x 62.5 cm
For Kazmir, Larry and Kenzo #1 2014 digital print on paper 80.0 x 80.0 cm (sheet)
Represented by Baluk Arts, Mornington
Represented by Marshall Arts, Adelaide
(Deleted scenes) from an untouched landscape discusses the absence of Indigenous artefacts and culture from the Australian farming landscape. The first European farmers forced the local Indigenous people off their traditional lands and cleared the landscape for agriculture, in this process ethno-culturally clearing the landscape of Aboriginal identity. This series seeks to challenge the notion that the Australian landscape was ‘untouched’ before European colonisation and the contemporary absence of Indigenous culture within the landscape is censored by this process of colonisation.
My work is made of many layers or pieces that symbolise the layers of history and story that I am continually uncovering about myself and my adoption at an early age. My stitching symbolises reattaching fragments of history, woven into a cohesive visual whole. This is epitomised in my twodimensional multi-media works in which I include reports I found through the Freedom of Information Act relating directly to me and my family members. These works connect the historical documents with Indigenous Victorian linear designs, symbols and motifs and stitching to reconnect the fragmented layers of my background. They for me are a replacement of ancestral Indigenous history that is unknown and lost, and is a tangible piece of cultural information. My works are an important vehicle for ensuring cultural continuity through my story and are a connection to place and kin.
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This work celebrates the centenary of the genesis of Kazimir Malevich’s masterpiece the Black Quadrilateral, the contemporary fashion designer Takada Kenzo and the work of Larry Poons. The work conflates the notion of Malevich as the quintessential modernist, of Kenzo representing postmodern culture and of Poons, a key figure of high modernism. Whereas Malevich is known for his innovative formalist and monochromatic paintings, Kenzo is a fashion designer who has a profound knowledge of textiles and love of effusive colour. Poons carried op art forward with Frank Stella and Bridget Riley. The grouping of these three artists has generated a flow of motifs and ideas from the rigorous austerity of early modernism to the exuberance of postmodernist excesses via the energies of Hi-Mo. For Kazimir, Larry and Kenzo #1 is visually playful with a narrative that elucidates the signs and coda of high art and popular culture.
DEBORAH WILLIAMS
CAROLE WILSON
JODI WOODWARD
b. 1967, Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1960, Canberra Lives and works in Victoria
looking from the outside 2012 etching, engraving and roulette intaglio on paper 57.5 x 77.0 cm (sheet)
Bird Atlas 2013 hand-cut maps on paper 3 sheets, each 100.0 x 35.0 cm
b. 1968, Sydney Lives and works in New South Wales
Represented by Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney
When I look at dogs in and around me, I question whether dogs are seen for what they are, as separate beings. I observe that while we do not objectify our dogs per se, our feelings are frequently filtered through human perspectives; these dogs are therefore anthropomorphised and brought unwittingly into our worlds. I strive to challenge the anthropomorphising of dogs even though I acknowledge that my work, in common with historical and contemporary contexts of the representation of dogs, is nonetheless filtered through my own perspectives and brought into our world. For a dog, it must surely be a complex relationship, enduring and interdependent, loving and loyal, yet simply ‘other’. It is the ‘other’ that I endeavour to depict. I aim to depict the dog not as a breed above, apart or beyond, but of its own. Captured in a moment.
Bird Atlas forms part of a continuing investigation into aspects of place, memory, gardens and the built environment. It builds upon the influences that informed the work I produced during time in the Northern Territory. One of the most enduring memories of living in Darwin was the bird life that flourished in suburbia. As a resident of Curlew Circuit, I was often woken at night by the plaintive cry of the curlew. It took some time to realise that all the streets in that particular suburb were named after birds. The suburban layout of Darwin, which is largely a replica of that other territory, transported me to the streets of my childhood in Canberra and memories of primary school. This is reflected in my selection of 1960s school atlases from Northern Territory and Victorian opportunity shops, which I continue to utilise to convey a sense of time, place, and identity.
I never wanted to change the world 2012 digital film, charcoal and soft pastel on paper duration: 1 minute 20 seconds
Through my work I explore complexities and the multiple layers of the human condition. My work uses methods of repetition, layering and overlapping, reflecting the repetitive nature of human behaviour. My short, stop motion animation of overlapping paper squares, ‘I never wanted to change the world’, aims to question the complex nature of what it is to be human. In shades of grey I reveal and conceal multiple layered paper pieces to build a question. What are the things we observe about others that we refuse to acknowledge or understand? What are the layers that lie within the individual? What is seen or what is observed? How do we respond? And … with whom does the responsibility lie? Influenced by storytelling, my story, other’s stories, the stories of the disenfranchised, the abused, the ignored, the neglected and those without a voice, my work aims to remind us that people’s lives are never simple or one-dimensional. 99
TIM WOODWARD
LISA YOUNG
CONSTANZE ZIKOS
b. 1985, Brisbane Lives and works in Melbourne
b. 1958, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne
Narrative arc for a lost dog in four parts 2014 synthetic polymer paint, pencil and masking tape on cotton rag 100.0 x 49.0 cm
Drawing all over the page 2014 pen and fibre-tipped marker on digitally printed paper 66.0 x 50.0 cm (sheet)
b. 1962, Greece; arrived Australia, 1968 Lives and works in Melbourne
Represented by Sarah Scout, Melbourne
Represented by Murray White Room, Melbourne
This riotous and cartoonish work engages with my current interest in both line and architectural form. The process is layered, involving hand drawn images that are scanned into the computer, then overlayed – the final printed work is further overdrawn. The image is not particularly intentional but evolves as a form of doodle script.
The recent series, titled Pinups 2, reveals an interest in the disruptive tendencies of kitsch. These images comprise geometric renders and patterns that employ motifs from historical decorative art and regalia to evoke a fragmented, voiceless and imagined history.
Represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
As an artist I’m interested in generating moments of confusion, play and symbolic resistance within the everyday; manipulating existing cultural objects and images in order to re-imagine the world we live in. The work Narrative arc for a lost dog in four parts was made during a recent residency in Paris at the Art Gallery of New South Wales-managed Moya Dyring Studio. Originally shown in the exhibition A black line wriggling on a white sheet at The Cité Internationale des Arts, this four-part drawing is constructed as a playful interpretation of diagrammatic reasoning, specifically in relation to narrative and the everyday. A narrative arc is typically reduced to its four key stages – exposition, complication, climax and resolution. A lost dog isn’t typically anything, except perhaps confused and a little bit sad.
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Pin-ups 2 2013 gouache on paper 27.0 x 37.5 cm (sheet)
My recent works on paper from the series Pin-ups 2 invent contemporary images born out of art historical modes of representation, symbolism, architecture and design.
Note to reader: All artwork titles are printed as submitted by the artists. Photography credits: All photos have been provided by the artists unless otherwise stated. Helga Groves, photo Andrew Curtis, p.30; Christopher Hillstead, photo Mark Ashkanasy, p.35; Nell, photo Jarrod Rawlins, p.53; Constanze Zikos, photo Mark Ashkanasy, p. 77.
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2014 National Works on Paper A Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery exhibition 23 May – 20 July 2014 Project management: Jane Alexander, Director, MPRG 2014 NWOP judges: Jane Devery, Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria; Jenepher Duncan, Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Jane Alexander, Director, MPRG Curatorial team: Wendy Garden (Senior Curator, MPRG) and Narelle Russo (Co-registrar) Catalogue editor and production: Rowena Wiseman External editor: Vanessa Pellatt Marketing and publicity: Stina Haug, Rowena Wiseman and Sharon Wells (Pan and Bacchanalia) Design: Linton Design Printing: Blue Star Print ISBN: 978-0-9807566-7-8 Edition: 2014 Print run: 500 Š External authors and the Mornington Peninsula Shire
Authorised by Manager, Libraries, Arts and Culture, Mornington Peninsula Shire, Marine Parade Hastings