NEW ACQUISITIONS

eX de MediciThe wreckers 2019 Viewed in the light of the devastating pandemic, The wreckers has a startling prescience. Extending across almost six metres of chaos, this powerful allegorical statement was initiated by an impending sense of global calamity. eX de Medici’s miniaturist technique and technical virtuosity draws from her experience as a tattooist. Subverting the conservative medium of watercolour, she applied her detailed brushwork to this large-scale coded interrogation of entwined power and trauma. Over 12 months the artist painstakingly constructed a violent tableau from archived images of vehicle, drone and plane wreckage. With a backdrop of warring flags, the anarchic sprawl is approached through samples of local vegetation and petrol-station flowers. Unfurling along the base is a damning list of ‘the worst people responsible for doing the worst things in the world’. The wreckers is a formidable act of endurance.

 By Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings Sanné MestromMe & You 2018

Sanné Mestrom speaks to the life of images, exploring how they repeat and recur, grow resonant and endure. Described as ‘gently counter-canon’, her work mimics and subtly undermines the language of modernism, including the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and his Mlle Pogany 1912/1913. In speaking of the lives of images, Mestrom also touches on the lives of people, and she considers how each inflects the other. She says: ‘In many cases those closest to us are the most difficult for us to see: we are merely mirrors to each other. This indistinction is important to me, because we are so dependent on those closest to us for definition. Without the mirror of another we may cease to exist.’

Me & You will feature in the forthcoming exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now.

 By Elspeth Pitt, Curator Australian Painting & Sculpture (20, 21 centuries)

Janet Fieldhouse Kalaw Lagaw Ya/Meriam Mir peoples Skin Deep Journey 2019

Janet Fieldhouse combines her Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge and memory with the non-traditional medium of ceramics.

Acknowledging both her matrilineal connections to Badu (Mulgrave), Muau (Moa), Kirri (Hammond) and Erub (Darnley) Islands and South Sea Islander heritage and her father’s European lineage, her practice centres on identity, family and community.

In this work the chocolate brown twolegged form is topped with a woven raffia and coconut fibre closed bag that reflects an abstract, 3D view of traditional scarification and tattoos. Deliberately balancing these components further skews the visual plane, challenges the imagination of the viewer and encourages a different interpretation thus opening up a deeper engagement with the cultural knowledge Fieldhouse reveals.

Through her remarkable use of ceramics and combination of materials, Fieldhouse ensures that knowledge of culture, history and her identity remains strong. These works form part of a new direction in her practice using different mediums, technique, construction and presentation.

 By Tina Baum, Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

eX de Medici, The wreckers 2019, watercolour on paper, 115 x 596cm, purchased 2020 © eX de Medici Sanné Mestrom, Me & You 2018, approx. 230 x 65 x 65 cm, cast bronze, purchased 2019 © Sanné Mestrom. Courtesy of the Artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore Janet Fieldhouse, Kalaw Lagaw Ya/Meriam Mir peoples, Skin Deep Journey 2019, buff raku trachyte, chocolate brown, mid-red, raffia, coconut fibre, 52 x 40 x 30 cm, purchased 2019 © Janet Fieldhouse, courtesy of Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne