CREATION IN ISOLATION From embracing TikTok and producing art on toilet paper to virtual galleries, how some Australian artists responded to the pandemic

Above: Jelena Telecki, Toilet Paper Diaries 2020. Courtesy of Sarah Couttier Gallery Opposite: Works from Justine Varga’s Tachisme exhibition (L-R): Aggregate 2018–19, Visage 2018–19, Refraction 2018–19 *Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Page 26: Stills from Giselle Stanborough’s TikTok account (@ThirstyTheory). Courtesy of the artist Page 27: Glenn Barkley, Plague potz 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney

CREATION IN ISOLATION

From embracing TikTok and producing art on toilet paper to exhibiting in virtual galleries, Noelle Faulkner explores how some Australian artists responded to the global pandemic.

“When things are in a state of flux, it’s important to be able to reach out with something, with artwork for people to view,” says Justine Varga.

The Australian photographic artist is talking via FaceTime from Oxford, England, in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown period and from where she had to quickly adapt her exhibition plans when the pandemic shut down the world. “I had such a lovely response, it was quite moving – it shifted things for me, and I hope in some small way with other people too.”

Just a few weeks before we speak, Varga’s show Tachisme was due to open at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne. She was supposed to return to Australia in early March, but as events and travel bans escalated, the artist decided to stay in Britain, where she has been based since late last year.

“It is quite disappointing,” she admits. “I was meant to present a full gallery installation piece, not just framed works in the gallery. So there was another component that, without my presence, was just not feasible.”

The show, or at least the works that could be shown, shifted to online-only, seen through Tolarno’s new digital viewing room and the physical exhibition was postponed to an indefinite date, likely early next year. “I was actually so surprised how uplifting it was to put something positive out into the world,” says Varga. “Especially at this very moment.”

As we adapted to a new norm of isolation, the internet became our personal gallery, and digital media our new window to the world. Institutions, including the National Gallery, were forced to pivot and unite, opening up online through #MuseumFromHome, encouraging engagement through social media-driven challenges such as the popular #BetweenArtandQuarantine, where people have recreated famous works in their home; accessibility to art became literally a finger tap away.

Conceptual artist Giselle Stanborough’s immersive performance work CINOPTICON – which centres on topics such as internet narcissism, surveillance and social media

algorithms and which was to be held at Carriageworks in Sydney – was also transferred to screen-only.

Ironically though, Stanborough’s work couldn’t be timelier. Through her Instagram and TikTok accounts @ThirstyTheory, Stanborough made 15-second TikTok videos in her home that amalgamate pop culture soundbites with intellectual commentary.

“I am interested in the abstraction of the voice that occurs on TikTok,” she says. “That these roaming soundbites are completely decontextualised and then anonymised before they re-enter the body of somebody else, like a poltergeist.”

For many artists, lockdown didn’t only mean they were unable to show, but that they were also unable to make, at least in the usual sense.

In an interview with ABC’s The Art Show, artist and National Gallery Council member Sally Smart highlighted the issues that some artists, particularly women, faced. That includes burdens that traditionally fall to women such as domestic duties, financial hardship (some artists support themselves by working part time in other industries that have also been impacted, like hospitality), or the problems that arise when faced with relegating a studio to home, especially when doubling as a classroom while home-schooling children.

Often, the home is not an ideal place of work, so even if artists wanted to create their own King Lear – after all, Shakespeare supposedly produced a masterpiece in quarantine – many creatives have found it difficult beyond the anxieties that the pandemic has already presented.

This is the case with Sydney-based artist Jelena Telecki, whose living room-cum-studio relocation had a major effect on her practice. “I tried to work on a painting I was close to finishing before the move,” she says. “But soon realised it was a lost battle … I brought in all my materials and surfaces, determined that nothing will disrupt my focus and my working routine. But I couldn’t stop tripping over materials, spilling turps and stepping on paint.”

Telecki was born in Yugoslavia and lived in Croatia and Serbia before arriving in Australia 20 years ago. Her practice is often tinged with humour and wry social commentary, something she recently brought to Instagram with her Toilet Paper Diaries – small painted works on the wrappers of Who Gives A Crap toilet paper rolls, created while in lockdown.

“Toilet Paper Diaries was my solution to finding a way to work from home when painting on a large scale, proper surface failed,” she says. “I was always drawn to the idea of diaries; in how they preserve a sense of time

and what one wished to communicate to future self. In this sense, diaries truly are time souvenirs. They offer a glimpse of things that were funny, sad, or perhaps downright bizarre. This was what really prompted me to start painting on toilet paper wraps – I wanted to leave a pictorial record that I can come back to if I ever feel nostalgic for these crazy times.”

Of course, toilet paper speaks to much of the panic buying consumer reaction and fear caused by the pandemic. “Toilet paper became a highly desired item,” she says. “TP now corresponded deviously to art items’ categorisation as ‘luxury goods’ in the market – something I found entertaining and perhaps a little bit unsettling in the time when the future of art, artists and art industry, in general, has never been bleaker.”

Sydney ceramicist Glenn Barkley also set up a downsized studio at home in the inner west suburb of Camperdown during the lockdown. However, he was lucky as his second home – the non-profit studio Kil.n.it Experimental Ceramics in Glebe, which also runs a kiln service for the clay community - managed to stay open by adapting its services to adhere to social distancing rules. After being asked by one of his former workshop participants if he would make her a soap dish, Barkley began crafting the small works, selling them as part

of an online fundraiser to keep Kil.n.It alive, and encouraging the other artists-in-residence to join in.

“They are also things I can make relatively quickly,” he says, noting that he likes the function and pragmatic form of the dishes.

The ceramicist has also been working on a series of “plague pots”, that are easier for him to move around in a makeshift environment. “I think they might be one body of work, a diary of this time,” he says.

An independent curator and writer, Barkley points out that the arts community is currently living in economic fear, despite all that the arts bring to culture: “Artists are the first people to be tapped to support the communities they live in,” he says. “But, in this time, I’m seeing the arts community support each other.”

Barkley highlights the Clay For Clay Community (@clayforclaycommunity) project, set up by ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa, which encourages ceramicists and potters to sell work using the #clayforclaycommunity on social media. For every five works an artist sells, they commit to spending 20 per cent of the profits on a work from another maker.

Of the role of art and the artists in a pandemic, Barkley says makers need to keep making, both for their own mental stability and as cultural historians.

“Writing, drawing, making what you can and trying new things if you are unable to do the work you were doing before,” he offers. “Art can also document the time we live in; making soap dishes wasn’t something I would have seen myself doing.” ■