Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Melbourne & Singapore – Jul/Aug 2023

Tony Albert

Kirsten Coelho

Daniel Crooks

Lynda Draper

Joanna Lamb

Sam Leach

Michael Lindeman

Lara Merrett

Tim Silver

Jemima Wyman

Editorial Directors

Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf

Managing Editor

Claire Summers

Senior Designer & Studio Manager

Matthew De Moiser

Designer Ben Simkiss

Proofreaders

Claire Summers

Millie McArthur

Chloe Borich

Production polleninteractive.com.au

SULLIVAN+STRUMPF

Ursula Sullivan | Director Joanna Strumpf | Director

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Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to the people, cultures and elders past, present and emerging.

FRONT COVER: Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Sorry About That!), 2023 finger painted acrylic on mirror

31.5 x 38 cm

33.5 x 40 cm (framed)

BACK COVER: Jemima Wyman World Cloud, 2023

Handcut digital photos 122x122 cm

Tim Silver postcard #3, 2023 cast patinated bronze unique 30.5 x 19.5 x 18 cm

DEL KATHRYN BARTON

PAT BRASSINGTON

LOUISA CHIRCOP

LYNDA DRAPER

FREYA JOBBINS

DEBORAH KELLY

MADELEINE KELLY

JUZ KITSON

LUCY O’DOHERTY

JENNY ORCHARD

JILL ORR

PATRICIA PICCININI

CAROLINE ROTHWELL

JULIE RRAP

MARIKIT SANTIAGO

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT

JELENA TELECKI

ANNE WALLACE

KAYLENE WHISKEY

AMANDA WILLIAMS

Draper Dracaena 2021, ceramic, various glazes. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Melbourne.

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Contents

8. Editor's letter: Where the Personal and Political Intersect

10. Quick Curate: Field Notes

12. What's On

14. Introducing: Daniel Crooks

18. Tim Silver: Among the Leaves

26. Lara Merrett: Swimming in time

34. Lynda Draper: Drifting Moon

42. Kirsten Coelho: Hauslieder

52. Entering Jemima Wyman’s World Cloud

60. Tony Albert: Ashtralia + Wheel of Misfortune

66. Sam Leach: Perceiving Artificial Intelligence —A Multifaceted Exploration

74. Jonna Lamb: One Day Like This

82. Michael Lindeman: Not everyone understands Duchamp

90. Last Word: Tim Ross

94. Up Next

Where the Personal and Political Intersect

Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf

Deep winter has descended across the country, bringing with it the lucid clarity of a new season and a moment of much-needed reflection. Whether you’re at home or abroad, we can always rely on the annual half-way mark to rear its head and remind us to slow down, pause and reassess what is truly important to us and how we intend to spend the remainder of the year to come.

In keeping with this sentiment, our July/August issue witnesses the lines between the personal and political weave together in the most pertinent ways. On the cover, Michael Lindeman humours us with his tongue-in-cheek Regression Painting (Sorry About That!) (2023). In the pages that follow, Tai Mitsuji introduces us to the tender world of Tim Silver Among the Leaves; Amelia Wallin shares her journal entries kept over the course of the creation of Lara Merrett’s tissu tissue; Jemima Wyman sweeps us into her World Cloud through complex yet mesmerising collages of unrest; and Managing Editor Claire Summers delves into the potent symbolism behind Tony Albert’s latest limited-edition series, Ashtralia and Wheel of Misfortune

And in time with the seasonal shift bringing in new perspectives, we are delighted to introduce revered multidisciplinary artist Daniel Crooks to the gallery’s stable. Recognised for his ability to alter and manipulate motion and time through digital media, Crooks continuously pushes the boundaries within his field. We are so excited to share more about his practice with you in this issue.

All our best and happy reading,

Jo+Urs

Quick Curate: Field Notes

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing In this edition of Quick Curate: Field Notes, the works of six artists collectively consider the slipperiness of this dissonance through the elusive subjects they observe and endeavour to capture.

In Darren Sylvester’s Séance (2022), a group of beautiful people conjure conversations with the dearly departed, their gelled hair and rhinestone embellished garments glowing by candlelight. Marion Abraham lures us into her tempestuous landscape, Disobedience And Positive Thinking (2023), where all is not as it may seem. In contrast, Seth Birchall’s Ante Meridiem (2022) offers a luminous, sun-drenched view of a valley flooded with neon pigments.

Yvette Coppersmith returns to the familiar gaze of her reflection in Self-portrait (Yellow ochre) (2022) with knowing, steadfast focus. Sanné Mestrom similarly takes her own form as subject, casting soft bodily mass in bronze for She Seeps/You Ripple (2021). While James Lemon’s earthen totem I’m pretty sure it’s actually about the destination (2023) rises from the ground as a contemporary relic, glimmering with freshwater pearls and a viscous glaze the colour of milk.

TOP: Yvette Coppersmith

ochre)

Borich, Artist Liaison.

Photographed by Daniel Hanslow.

Marion Abraham Disobedience And Positive Thinking, 2023 oil on linen 182 x 198 cm

Seth Birchall Ante Meridiem, 2022 oil on canvas 153 x 122 cm

Darren Sylvester Séance, 2022 lightjet prints 90 x 180 cm

James Lemon

I'm pretty sure it's actually about the destination, 2023 stoneware, glaze, fresh water pearls, lustre Overall: 106 x 34 x 34 cm

What's On:

ACT

National Gallery of Australia

Jonathan Jones: (walam-wunga.galang). Until 23 July 2023.

Haegue Yang: Changing From From To From. Until 24 September 2023.

New Collection: Nan Goldin. Until 28 January 2024.

National Portrait Gallery

Thinking of something, someone. Until 2 October 2023. National Photographic Portrait Prize 2023. Until 2 October 2023.

VIC

National Gallery of Victoria

Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi. Until 8 October 2023.

Rembrandt: True to Life. Until 10 September 2023. 2022 NGV Architecture Commission: Temple of Boom

Until August 2023.

Takahiro Iwasaki Reflection Model (Itsukushima). Until October 2023.

Jewellery and Body Adornment from the NGV Collection

Until September 2023.

Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre. Until October 2023. Melbourne Now. Until August 2023.

Heide Museum of Modern Art

Sarah Ujmaia: Of Particle and Wave. Until 23 July 2023. Paul Yore and Albert Tucker: Structures of Feeling. Until 3 September 2023.

Beneath the Surface: Behind the Scenes. 29 July – 22 October 2023.

Always Modern: The Heide Story. Until 4 February 2024.

ACMI

Two Girls From Amoonguna. Until 20 August 2023. Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion. Until 1 October 2023.

Angela Tiatia: The Dark Current. 5 September – 12 November 2023.

NSW

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Brett Whiteley: Eternity is Now. Until 13 August 2023.

Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2023. Until 3 September 2023.

brick vase clay cup jug curated by Glenn Barkley. Until January 2024.

Museum of Contemporary Art

Steve Carr: In Bloom (IndigiGrow), 2023. Until 2 October 2023.

MCA Collection: Eight Artists. Until 20 August 2023.

Adam Linder: Hustle Harder. Until 20 August 2023.

Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the river. Until 5 November 2023.

MCA Collection: Artists in Focus. Until 10 March 2024.

Memo Akten: Distributed Consciousness. Until 16 June 2024.

SA

Art Gallery of South Australia

Milton Moon: Crafting modernism. Until 6 August 2023.

Ramsay Art Prize 2023. Until 27 August 2023.

The Nature of Culture. Until 27 August 2023.

Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution. Until 17 September 2023.

Angela Tiatia: The Pearl. Illuminate Adelaide, 7 – 23 July, 6 – 11 PM nightly.

WA

PICA

Hatched: National Graduate Show 2023. Until 23 July 2023.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson: ām / ammā / mā maram. 4 August – 22 October 2023.

Wu Tsang: Duilian. 4 August – 22 October 2023.

Sriwhana Spong: This Creature. 4 August – 22 October 2023.

AGWA

Boodjar: Through the Works of Meeyakba Shane Pickett

Until 30 July 2023.

Against The Odds. Until 10 September 2023.

Spaceingout. Until 17 September 2023.

Özgür Kar: Good Night. Until 22 October 2023.

QLD QAGOMA

Lies, Magicians and Blind Faith. Until 30 July 2023. Michael Zavros: The Favourite. Until eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness. Until Looking Out, Looking In. Until 6 August 2023. Gone Fishing. Until 21 January 2024.

Introducing: Daniel Crooks

We are thrilled to welcome esteemed multidisciplinary artist Daniel Crooks to the Sullivan+Strumpf artist stable. Aotearoa-born and Naarm/Melbournebased, Crooks is an innovator in the field of moving-image, photography and installation. Daniel will have his first solo exhibition with us at our Eora/Sydney gallery in March, 2024.

By Oliver Todd, Artist Liaison and Gallery Assistant

For over thirty years, Daniel Crooks has questioned our understandings of time and motion, carrying audiences through space, and altering perceptions of reality. Over this time, Crooks has developed a distinct visual language, completely unique to his practice, one that moves solidstate to something far more mercurial. His multidisciplinary practise - spanning video, photography, sculpture, and installation – has established him as leading authority in the moving image field and contemporary art.

Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) [2009], first premiered at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, is an example of his iconic ‘time-slice’ work that Crooks is best known for; a term coined by the artist to describe his digital video and photographic works that manipulate time, image and motion. He uses multiple cameras and

editing techniques to select small segments of images, which are then warped and recombined across the screen. The results are mesmerizing deviations from the linear and the absolute, depictions of motion that are released from their time-space constraints, creating alternate and fluid realities.

A more recent work, Boundary Conditions (2022), was a major commission by Museums of History NSW, displayed on a monolithic screen in the forecourts of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. Using historic sites, Crooks utilised precision robotic motion control and advanced post-production techniques to create a rolling tapestry of combine footage, inviting audiences to reconsider their internal models of time and space, speaking to the precarious liminality of our contemporary movement.

Crooks is a master of his medium, maintaining a dynamism and agility in his approach, constantly engaging with and employing new digital technologies. Drawing on his studies in animation at the Victorian College of Arts, Victoria, and further post-graduate research at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, his practice is constantly evolving, yet maintaining his unmistakeable visual language.

As a new generation of artists enter the digital sphere, Crooks stands out as a pioneer, continuing a practice exploring and investigating new technologies that push against the limits of the moving image.

Major recent public projects include Structured Light, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022; Water Clocks, 2022, Murdoch University, Perth; and Phantom Ride, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2016. Daniel Crooks’ works are also included in significant international collections and institutions including National Gallery of Gallery, Canberra; M+/Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland.

TOP: Daniel Crooks Imaginary Object #2, 2006 Lambda photographic print 109 x 109 cm

BELOW: Daniel Crooks Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), 2009-10 single-channel digital video, colour, sound 5:28 minutes

RIGHT: Daniel Crooks Boundary Conditions, 2017 single-channel HD video, 9:7 19:12 min

Tim Silver: Among the Leaves

For his new solo exhibition, Tim Silver introduces Among the Leaves, a realm punctuated by tender encounters that collectively grapple with the impermanence of time.

By Tai Mitsuji

Two people stand in a moment of embrace. They cradle each other’s naked bodies, unaware of the world passing by around them. They are alone and yet together. Temporarily surrendering their bodies’ autonomy—their separateness—they fold into one another, and into a singularity of form. The preciousness of this kind of communion derives, in-part, from its temporary nature, and the fact that, at some point, we must all let go. Put simply, that we can’t hold on forever. Yet Tim Silver’s sculpture, can I, just wait here with you (2022), resists this reality. His embracing figures are caught in a moment of paradox—their oxidised copper forms assuming a permanent fleetingness.

The artworks throughout Silver’s exhibition, Among the Leaves, all seem to play with flat physical realities, and the contoured emotional lives that lie beneath. can I, just wait here with you, for instance, was made through the process of life-casting, using the bodies of two embracing models as its basis. Silver jokes to me that he is not so much a sculptor, as he is a caster and copier. That is to say, that his three-dimensional works almost function like photography, arresting the motion of life through the indices of art. Yet this description fails to really describe what Silver does. Indeed, any written description of can I, just wait here with you—of “two people hugging”—feels destined to fall short. Perhaps no medium is more physical than sculpture: it is an inherently weighted form, which is constantly fighting against the constraints of gravity and contending with the limits of its own materiality. But standing in front of Silver’s work, one gets the sense that his actual medium—the real thing that he is moulding—is far less tangible. Here, the deep poetics of reality, which underpin the simple physical gesture, are finally revealed.

Reality itself comes undone in Silver’s sculpture, fall on me (2023). This second sculptural work, made from beeswax, is a kind of deconstructed version of the first, can I, just wait here with you. Silver tells me that when producing can I, just wait here with you things did not always go to plan. “We had some fuck ups in that process,” he recalls, before adding, “which I just thought were beautiful.” It was this fractured beauty that Silver sought to recapture with fall on me. Here, the two embracing bodies still cling to one another, yet are riven by gaps and threatened by fragmentation. Here, the seamless unity of can I, just wait here with you begins to come apart. And again, one gets the sense that the material existence of the work is trafficking in concept and metaphor as much as it is in the physicality of form.

Like fall on me, Silver’s three sculptures, postcard #1, #2 and #3 (2023), similarly reveal their connective tissue. Each of the bronze sculptures captures the profile of two people kissing, their lips gently brushing against one another. It is a tender moment, yet it is also one that is almost concealed from us, by the artist’s hand. “I kind of love that the detail and the likeness is sort of hidden from your viewership of it,” Silver says. “And all you get to see is the messy process ‘making’ backside of it.” Rather than parade the spectacle of affection, the inward-facing compositions only allow us to see a smaller, somehow more precious, sliver of intimacy. Much of the work instead exposes the typically hidden anatomy of the sculpture— the backside of the face revealing it’s rougher underside and internal machinations.

Tim Silver can I, just wait here with you, 2022 copper infused Forton MG 160 x 60 x 60 cm

Tim Silver velvet sky of dreams, 2023 cast patinated bronze unique 34 x 15 x 20 cm

When I ask Silver about his artworks, his instinct is to resist. His reticence does not emerge out of shyness, nor does it suggest an absence of ideas. “We’ve all seen an artist talk about their work and we’ve left a little deflated and disappointed because of it,” he says. “I think that it’s the intersection between the work and the audience—that’s where meaning is formulated.” Understood against such statements, Silver’s recalcitrance is actually incredibly generous, as it suggests that his art is not only for him. “I don’t really like to talk about my work that much, because I believe that your authoritative voice can overpower,” Silver explains.“ I don’t come from that top-down position of saying ‘this is what the work is about’.” By refraining from prescribing precise meaning to his art, Silver allows audiences to interact more freely with it. Critically, his silence allows for a kind of slippage to occur, wherein the experiences of the audience are free to meld and interact with the body of the artwork.

Silver’s refusal to define meaning itself becomes visualised in his work, with the ink of a ghost (2023). Across an expanse of 122 by 264 cm, the artist performs a kind of automatic writing, allowing his stream of consciousness to spill onto the paper. Yet when one begins to look more closely at with the ink of a ghost, their gaze quickly

becomes frustrated by the lines of text which stop short of forming decipherable phrases. The artist’s cursive always teeters on the edge of legibility, offering the shape of letters and the hint of a word. It flirts with our eye, suggesting the presence of text, while simultaneously withholding its meaning.

The process of writing is a deeply personal one, which almost always betrays something of the author. However, here, the implied contract between the writer and reader is broken, with the opacity of Silver’s text refusing this assumed insight. But that is not where the work ends; its conclusion is not simple refusal. In staging a kind of push-pull, which sees us both brought close to the work’s meaning and kept away from it, I can’t help but feel that Silver redirects our gaze to the urge—the need—that we all feel in reaching, across the spaces that separate us, and fumbling for connection. Because even if we cannot fully share the content of the words written here, we still feel the presence of the person that made these marks. Each line is a physical index of the movement of Silver’s body, over the course of minutes, hours, days, and weeks; the artist standing in front of the work in the same spot that we now find ourselves. It is here that the artwork reaches out and speaks to us, even in the absence of words.

“By refraining from prescribing precise meaning to his art, Silver allows audiences to interact more freely with it.”

Tim Silver fall on me, 2023 cast beeswax 105 x 65 x 60 cm

Lara Merrett: Swimming in time

Landlocked in Central Victoria, lecturer and writer Amelia Wallin immerses herself in the watery landscape, lifestyle and art work of Lara Merrett over the course of several weeks.

By Amelia Wallin

Lara Merrett in her studio.

Photographed by Hugh Stewart.

May 15

When Lara Merrett and I speak, she is in her studio on Gadigal land, and I am at home in Djarra, central Victoria. Merrett speaks of her ties to Jerrinja land, saltwater country, where she lives and makes projects and swims in the ocean every Friday, depending on the conditions. You learn to read the water, she explains to me, to negotiate the changes in current and conditions before deciding whether to swim. This experience of saltwater feels far flung from the central Victorian bushlands where I have recently moved. The largest body of water close to me is a reservoir, the current water temperature hovers around 8 degrees. Later I gingerly shop for wetsuits online wondering if I, too, can commit to swimming weekly in a body of water.

It is these weekly encounters with the watery world that inspire Merrett’s paintings, along with the Country she encounters on her bushwalks. She has deep roots in this community, whereas I am a relative newcomer to the town in which I now find myself. But both regions, like so many coastal and inland towns, share experiences of bushfires and floods, ecological disasters occurring with more frequency. Climate activism is a large part of Merrett’s life, from planting inner city forests, to leading workshops with local communities.

May 22

I fall asleep listening to Tim Winton’s audio book of Blueback, which Merrett tells me she is reading to her ten year old child, a story about ocean conservation and friendship between a human boy and the more-than human coastal world he inhabits. I dream watery dreams of being a strong swimmer, of being at home in the water. We’re often reminded that our bodies are 60% water, but, just as astounding, I am reminded that Earth is more than 70% water. We land-dwellers are the minority on a watery planet. No wonder being in water feels like trespassing. Being in water offers glimpses into another world that exists in harmony without human animals, where we are unwelcome intruders.

May 28

A friend once remarked how in her household, many bad moods had been remedied by watercolour paints. The transformative effect of turning crumbly pigment into sweeping arcs of color transfixes and soothes my children as well. We paint one afternoon as it rains and the glass jar muddies from blue to brown to purple. As the jar inevitably gets tripped over I am reminded of Merrett’s process in the studio. Using inks and vast quantities of water, sometimes a broom, Merrett shifts and manipulates her watery colours across the canvases. Working on a horizontal plane, gravity guides the colours into tributaries.

In Merrett’s paintings, often a singular colour dominates before merging together with other colours in a chorus of unity. I feel pulled inside this colourscape, and could easily lose myself in this negotiation of pigments. These paintings provide a sense of transportation, a chance to be held within their watery surfaces. Hazy and fluid, they evoke memories of touch and smell, of being in water or in nature. Using a colour palette drawn directly through Merrett’s experiences in the natural world, from her weekly ocean swims to regular bushwalks, this sense of immersion is deliberate.

Merrett’s paintings urge a haptic encounter, rather than only ocular. For Merrett, touch has frequently been a tool through which audiences are invited to encounter her work. In the past she has created site specific installations where the audience is invited to interact with her paintings. In an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, several of Merrett’s paintings hung loose in arcs, suspended from the ceiling, in which you could sit or lie. In another installation at Carriageworks, audiences were invited to navigate her paintings with scissors, taking home whichever fragment they had snipped off.

LEFT: Lara Merrett staring at the sun, 2023 ink and acrylic on cloth and linen 220 x 150 cm

Lara Merrett urchins , 2023 ink and acrylic on cloth and linen 220 x 150 cm

June 10

In Merrett’s most recent body of work, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf in Melbourne, touch is communicated in the relation between pigment and canvas. The scale is slightly larger than one person, which sustains the feeling of being with a seascape or landscape. Borders of wooden frames are drawn around the once saturated canvases, creating a tension between the hazy images and the taught fabric. The ink is applied thinly enough that the texture of the rough cotton shows through. The staining of the ink reads like an impression, similar to the tide leaving its trace along a shoreline. It's possible to see where the colours pooled, and the ink ebbed. The crinkle and folds of the fabric run like veins through the painting and in some places thick seams interrupt the fields of colour, drawing attention to the function of the fabric as a membrane.

We like to imagine our skins are membranes or barriers, between our watery bodies and the watery body of the planet, but as academic and hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis argues, this impermeability is an illusion. Neimanis reminds us that “we perspire, urinate, ingest, ejaculate, menstruate, lactate, breathe, cry. We take in the world, selectively, and send it flooding back out again.”

June 15

As I write this, one son stands and splashes at the sink, delighted by the warm water and bubbles, and the other sits next to me, close enough that the soundtrack of the Octonauts washes over me, detailing the aquatic adventures of a band of animal explorers. The Octonauts travel around in specialised submarines and I find myself longing for a similar experience of submersion. To slip under sea, to find the quietness that water offers. What other experiences offer the same feeling of submersion? A bath, an afternoon painting with watercolours. A plunge, a dip, a bucket of water-based paint tipped upside down on canvas on the floor, a moment standing in front of a painting. Duration is irrelevant, submersion can occur in an instant. And there you stand, saturated in colour. What surfaces in the work of Merrett is a sense of reverie, of quiet study and active participation.

“We like to imagine our skins are membranes or barriers, between our watery bodies and the watery body of the planet, but as academic and hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis argues, this impermeability is an illusion.”

Lara Merrett up close and personal, 2023 ink and acrylic on cloth and linen 220 x 150 cm

Lynda Draper: Drifting Moon

Lynda Draper’s upcoming exhibition, Drifting Moon conjures the dreamlike memories of childhood road trips lovingly curated by her father, and invites us to ‘travel along the Rainbow’ with her.

By Jaime Tsai

Lynda Draper in her studio. Photographed by Paul Hiigs.

“The invisible speaks to us, and the world it paints takes the form of apparitions; it awakens in each of us that yearning for the marvelous and shows us the way back to it – the way that is the great conquest of childhood, and which is lost to us...

Perhaps we have seen the Emerald City in some faraway dream...

Entering by the gate of the Seven Colors, we travel along the Rainbow.”

The surrealist poet and painter Alice Rahon believed that art making is a form of conjuration. That like shamans, sibyls and wizards, the artist humbly mediates between invisible forces and the material world and awakens a ‘yearning for the marvelous’ that disappeared with childhood. In this exhibition, Lynda Draper conjures the dreamlike memories of childhood road trips, and invites us to ‘travel along the Rainbow’. Lovingly crafted by her father, these family road trips of the 1960s and 70s carried the young children all across Australia. To this day, Draper remembers the thrill of anticipation in the lead-up to these journeys that promised to rupture the fabric of ordinary life. The three kids were bundled up, cheek by jowl in the backseat of a Holden station wagon, and with a trailer towed behind, they would drive all night by the light of a drifting moon.

Alice Rahon, Shapeshifter, translation Mary Ann Caws (New York: NYRB, 2021)

The next morning when the darkness lifted, a strange new world and the promise of adventure awaited the children. The kaleidoscopic vistas of the Australian landscape must have felt like an extension of their dreams. Along the rainbow they visited tropical rainforests, snow-tipped peaks, red deserts, and the Emerald Cities of coral-rich coastlines. They would touch million-year-old mineral deposits transformed, as if by magic, into luminous thunder eggs and geodes, or in caves, the slippery prongs of stalagmites and stalactites. Along the highway, colossal roadside monuments punctuated their journey and added to the vernacular of dream: lobster, guitar, pineapple, prawn, mango, koala, banana. Draper particularly loved the quirky local museums that made private obsessions public business, such as the long-gone Queensland oddities Santa Land (Currumbin), and the House of Bottles (Tewantin).

As a schoolteacher, Draper’s father never missed an opportunity to open up the world beyond what was taught in their schoolbooks. Through contact with Indigenous communities, he engaged his children with alternative knowledge practices, and through surreal natural wonders such as termite mounds, he encouraged their curiosity. On those holidays he was the Wizard of Oz. Not so much the Wizard of Frank Baum’s books, who was a Nebraskan conman with a god complex, but an ordinary person who loomed large in the imagination of his children. And insofar as they are both conjurers, Draper follows in his footsteps. Across generations, they remedy the paucity of everyday life by enchanting it. This was also the surrealists’ mission: to embrace the revelatory nature of the marvellous, which could alter sensibility and with it,

the world. As her father creeps toward a century on the planet, Draper’s Drifting Moon acknowledges how these marvellous adventures transformed her modes of seeing, doing and being.

The ceramic sculptures of Drifting Moon allude to these early childhood reveries. The stems of Draper’s handpinched and pulled Paperclay evoke the interlaced tendrils of a rainforest canopy, or equally, the uncanny, waxen corporeality of stalactites. The vivid baubles that seem to float amongst these tendrils suggest the flash of tropical fish as they weave between coral reefs and seaweed, or oysters and anemone nourished by tides. Walking laterally along Draper’s wall works, or encircling her sculptures also creates an undulating kinetic effect that parallels the rhythmic cadence of underwater tidal movements. These allusions to natural phenomena in the ceramics of Drifting Moon are fragmentary and ephemeral, they pass in and out of focus like a mirage. In this sense they are like childhood memories: oneiric and too slippery to grasp for more than a moment, and yet robust enough to be forever impressed in one’s mind. In contrast to photographic archives, memories return at the most inconvenient times, with the smell of home-cooked baking or the touch of wool. They return impure and entangled and just as intoxicating as the day they were born. I suspect this is why the evocative nature of memory is so suited to her ceramics, which are simultaneously fragile and resilient, porous to myriad associations and water-tight vessels of meaning.

TOP: Lynda Draper Remanent I (Wall Piece) (detail), 2023 glazed ceramic

BELOW: Lynda Draper Lime Creeper (Wall Piece), 2023 glazed ceramic

Lynda Draper Remanent II (Wall piece) , 2023 glazed ceramic 62 x 33 x 34 cm

Anaïs Nin famously said that ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are’, and Draper’s collection certainly invites pareidolia, the very human tendency to impose personal meaning onto nebulous phenomena. They are hallucinatory in their openness to association, and their organic, primordial forms call to mind the suspended worlds of Joan Miro, or the amoebic constellations of Jean Arp’s friezes. Because Miro and Arp’s floating realms allude to the world without being anchored in it, they are similarly open to interpretation and imaginative projection. As surrealists, they dispensed with the Western tradition of using Euclidean geometry – grids – to render a precise illusion of the outside world, instead their abstract universes attempted to reconcile representation with perception. Like many twentieth century avantgardes, they were influenced by Henri Bergson and phenomenology in recognising that the world cannot be quantified rationally. According to Bergson, the world is not perceived as a frozen, isolated snapshot, nor is all sense experience assigned the same value. On the contrary, because time and space are lived and embodied, they should be measured creatively, through intuition and experience.

Draper’s drifting worlds acknowledge the instability of memory, the vagaries of perception, and the transitory quality of nature. Drifting Moon conjures the memories of childhood and honours the wizardry of parenting. The road trips around Australia may be hers alone, but through this marvellous collection, we travel along her rainbow.

Kirsten Coelho: Hauslieder

Throughout her career Kirsten Coelho has been inspired to bring objects depicted by painters to life. For her upcoming exhibition Hauslieder at Sullivan+Strumpf, she has taken cues from seventeenth century Spanish painters Francisco De Zurbarán and Juan van der Hamen y Léon. Both painters depict vessels made from porcelain, like in Coelho’s earlier works. However they also include red terracotta water cups which she has lovingly recreated in the same red, porous earthy material for the very first time.

By Patsy Hely

Kirsten Coelho Sustain, 2023 porcelain, matt glaze, saturated iron glaze, iron oxide 29.5 x

In the musical form Lieder, music is often written in response to an existing poem, as Viennese composer Franz Schubert famously did with the poetry of the German poet Goethe. In her upcoming exhibition Hauslieder, Kirsten Coelho does something similar, giving her own expression to existing vessel shapes and forms she then composes into considered pairings and groupings. As well as combining music and poem, Lieder is given expression through just voice and piano, and a similar conception, of one thing paired with another, is threaded through much of this most recent work. Even in the works presented as singular objects, the idea of more than one thing at play is clear.

As a Lieder fan, Coelho coined the term Hauslieder to refer playfully to both the place where it was historically performed, and to the setting in which her ceramic forms are rooted: the home. Most of the forms in the exhibition are drawn primarily from the domestic sphere: cup, bottle and bowl shapes. A small number draw upon the mechanical and the industrial either in shape or surface addition, but the home too is a place where repetitive acts abound in the functions and rituals of everyday life. Although the domestic space per se is not Coelho’s primary concern, she borrows from its traditions to perform a complex staging of her works where the narrating of ‘the insignificant and significant stories of our histories’1 might unfold.

The majority of works in Hauslieder are shown as pairs or as ensembles of three or more forms, all recognisable either from Coelho’s oeuvre, museum archives or canonical painted representations. They have been produced using several porcelain clays, each chosen for a specific attribute. Almost opposite in terms of preciousness, a hardy red terracotta is used here for the first time in a new series of works.

“As a Lieder fan, Coelho coined the term Hauslieder to refer playfully to both the place where it was historically performed, and to the setting in which her ceramic forms are rooted: the home.”

Kirsten Coelho Yearn, 2023 porcelain, terracotta, satin glaze, cobalt glaze, terra sigillata 23 x 22 x 15 cm

Kirsten Coelho Etude #2, 2023 porcelain, crackle glaze 36 x 21 cm

Throughout her career Coelho has responded to objects depicted by painters, particularly evident in this body of work, where she has taken her cue from vessels seen in the works of seventeenth century Spanish painters Francisco De Zurbarán’s Still Life with Four Objects and Juan van der Hamen y Léon’s Still life with Porcelain and Sweets. Both paintings depict vessels made from porcelain, alongside red terracotta household water cups or holders (referred to as bucaro) as finely imagined and modelled as their porcelain counterparts. Terracotta vessels remain porous after firing and so evaporation takes place when filled with water, cooling both the water and the air around the vessel. To preserve this porosity they are rarely glazed, though Coelho’s works have been coated in terrasigillata, a fine red clay ground until the clay particles move to a plate-like orientation, reflecting light and giving a soft sheen to the object.

Looking at Coelho’s work over previous years, it is hard to imagine how it could be further refined, but it has been. She cites Lieder’s ‘…reductive way of presenting song…’2 as a guiding principle in this body of work and here all is reduced to exactly what she imagines. These are not modern forms and function is not in play: impression, resonance and idea are the focal concerns. The works appear to be abstracted versions of familiar things with more in common, perhaps, with their painted equivalents, yet without relinquishing three dimensional solidity. In Coelho’s work the presence of the hand, which is so often cited as a feature of ceramic objects, almost disappears, such is her skill at developing meticulously wheel-thrown works and producing seamless form and glaze pairings.

But there are exceptions. Just as bucaro might be termed ‘machines for living’ (apologies to Le Corbusier) — working to cool the water, cool the air — it is the abraded surfaces of Coelho’s terracotta cylindrical vessels that conjure up the labour of earlier industrial machines and domestic objects. Placed amongst her formal arrangements of abstracted shapes and forms on shelves which hover between shelf and table, and in works which otherwise appear to be, in Norman Bryson’s words, ‘objects uniquely destined for the gaze’3, it is the terracotta works that act as a bridge or transition between table and wall.

Likewise, the artist’s hand can be seen in the larger works through their regular rhythmic patterning with small added clay shapes; these have a more machine-like presence despite the forms being domestic in association. But they might equally represent musical notation and an attempt to pair rhythm with static form. These larger works are perhaps the most abstract of the works. Their larger scale takes them out of the sphere of the domestic and the clay and glaze, so resolutely one thing now after firing, gives them a quality of architectural form.

Kirsten Coelho Host, 2023 porcelain, satin glaze, cobalt glaze 28 x 19 x 12 cm

2Artist Statement, June, 2023. 3Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, Reaktion Books: London, 1990, p82.

Coelho’s use of colour in this latest body of work is thoughtfully considered. Her blue glaze, for instance is matte and dense and she uses it to suggest a shadow, in some lights, amongst the ensembled forms4. It is an intense blue loaded with cobalt oxide, the material universally used for ceramic decoration throughout history, here compressed into overall surface. In this way the blue forms also seem similar to the larger body of vessels in that they appear as abstracted and condensed forms of something recognisable, not yet fixed.

Lieder is an emotive form despite its formal staging, the charge coming from the interplay between voice and piano. Interplay is everywhere in Hauslieder as well: between formal arrangement and increasingly abstract form/surface fusion, between colour and surface quality, between historical and contemporary reference and between shape and juxtaposition. In this new work, Coelho points to disparate places, disparate uses and differing historical periods, and within the gentle tension between these elements lies the strength of her vision. Using her consummate skill as a maker and her encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Coelho liberates the domestic object to resonate both within and beyond the domestic space.

Kirsten Coelho in her studio. Photographed by Daniel Noone.

Jemima Wyman in her studio. Photographed by James Naish.

Entering Jemima Wyman’s World Cloud

Jemima Wyman’s collaged forms destabilise traditional schools of thought. Her complex hand cut photographic collages bare a resemblance to forms of architecture and painting, presenting a terrible beauty that transcends any singular reading.

Jemima Wyman is a Palawa woman who was born in Sydney and raised in North Queensland (Dysart, Moranbah, Tolga and Mackay). Her own visual sense of identification and what would emerge in the public sphere as a question of both indigeneity and authenticity, were perplexing, challenging, and unresolved growing up—a matter further complicated by living in a diasporic context.

Wyman’s political interest in the mutable nature of representation is what eventually led her to Los Angeles. The California Institute of Arts (CalArts) had become home to the historic feminist art programme founded by artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Los Angeles was also a haven for the aesthetic politics of artists engaged with the social aspects of visual culture, home to artists including Andrea Bowers, Nancy Buchanan and Suzanne Lacy1. After completing her MFA, the world was in flux. The Arab Uprisings and Occupy marked the beginning of a world order delineated by civil war and constant revolutions mediated through broadcast, and increasingly, through social media platforms. Wyman’s interest in how patterned fabric served as a form of codification was amplified. The fluidity of gender and personhood as mutable within these sites served as a consistent topic of question. Could a curtain, a colour field, a work of lyrical abstraction, offer shelter to these individuals, or perhaps, reprieve?

In the exhibition World Cloud (2023), Wyman is painting, conjuring, summoning the ghosts. Her practice is constituted by meticulously cutting thousands of digitally printed photos from numerous archives, to form plumes, mandalas, and hazes, which become architectonic accumulations of smoke from protest. At first glance, the ethereal plume is revealed to be a siege unspooled from a subaltern realm. Plume No. 23 appears as if it is spitting, transmitting, and uncloaking figures whose visual identity has become subsumed by news and photo agencies such as Getty Images. In Plume No. 22, a pink car crash, unfolds. In Plume No. 21, shades of blue—the gendered colour of melancholy, abound. How does one decode this? The infinite titles that accompany each artwork,

mark every visual protest—forming a rhizomatic public archive. The lengthy titles identifying and situating these conflicts, are demonstrative of Wyman’s concern with indexicality—her desire to produce a capacious, opensource library before it disappears. The visual references of racialised, gendered, and/or perceived ‘othered’ bodies have consistently vanished—vanquished by state regimes, news and photo agencies, copyright law, and the like. Wyman liberates them with her World Cloud—evidently a play on the term, word cloud—computational tags that give preference to commonly used words, creating deterministic social hierarchies.

In the artist’s Haze constellations, such a No. 12, a cluster of images unfold akin to a leviathan. Is this goliath?

In Haze No. 11, peering at the hovering bodies, it’s reminiscent of the late queer photographer Jimmy De Sana’s staged bodies from the 1980s, and the sense of the exposed and unprotected—a volatile vessel that is prone to attack. The celestial is also evoked, suggestive of Chicago-based artist, Paul Heyer’s otherworldly paintings on silver lame. An iridescence transmutes the subject from a present state into a singular, contoured, world of their own making.

Wyman, despite life or circumstance, is consistently cultivating her embryonic ideas. A new body of work, Distress from 2023, presents pigment prints forged by the anxiety provoked by the Los Angeles floods, which have occurred regularly since 2005 through to 2023. Tangentially influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s A Deluge (1517-1518), now in the UK’s Royal Collection Trust—the work seeks to interrogate the environmental impact wrought by the distributed inhabitants of Southern California. Animate bodies return in another of Wyman’s new series, Declassified, which present constellations of protestors who have fallen out of the fold—people erased by the archive. Here, human detritus coupled with Wyman’s negative space form plural Haze landscapes—a shrine to those who have been erased by official record or history.

Jemima Wyman World Cloud, 2023 Handcut digital photos 122x122cm

1Jenni Sorkin (2011) ‘Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman's Building’. Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building. Otis College of Art and Design. pp. 36–65 and Laura Meyer (2003). ‘The Los Angeles Woman's Building and the Feminist Art Community, 1973–1991’. In David E. James (ed.). Sons And Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A. Temple University Press. pp. 39–62.

Collaging the unseen—each cut-out fosters an embodiment for the absent figure—a scene for them to co-exist. Wyman has described the constellation of works on view as part of an ‘Atlas of Protest’, but it is also an interrogation into what constitutes the notion of a dominant ocular sensibility or ideology. She queries: who constructs it? And where do these images find their indigenous site, their space of origin? Is it the subject (body) in the image, the photographer, the news agency that owns its perceived copyright, or is it the spectator, who brings to the animate body in conflict, their own projections? Wyman has found inspiration in the collage works and visual words of artist, Arthur Jafa. After a recent talk at the Hammer Museum, Jemima pointed out a single sentence by Jafa that is both emotional and aptly situated: ‘where the images meet is in you’. The human’s capacity to feel and construct fields of vision, what the spectator brings to the picture, is integral, generating its distinct aesthetic politics.

Wyman’s collaged forms destabilise traditional schools of thought. Her works are paintings, as much as they are forms of architecture and photography. They pose a fascinating challenge to Walter Benjamin’s oftdebated concept of the aura and the art object in the age of reproducibility.2 Wyman’s World Cloud may be composed of found, culled, and cut images, but as they are constituted entirely by hand, using the same ink and pigments that would be found in painting; they possess a magnificent aura that pulls together space and time, nurturing a distinct world all of their own. Whether we are at war with an image, or curious to engage its materiality, Wyman proffers sensuous visual pleasures that transcend any singular reading.

When the smoke dissipates, what side of the political fence will you be standing on?

2 Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura has been an intense point of negotiation. In recent books, such as Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Phaidon 2023), likewise, it can be argued that Benjamin’s notions of the aura can be redeployed in the digital age. Indeed, sensuous pleasures can be gleaned in works of art experienced on screens and tablets, if the works are native to those platforms. Likewise, it is my argument that Wyman’s plumes challenge the singular notion that the aura exists within an individual image or work, but rather that it can be transposed across surfaces, mediums, art-forms, and platforms.

“When the smoke dissipates, what side of the political fence will you be standing on?”

Tony Albert: Ashtralia Wheel of Misfortune +

Tony Albert’s work simultaneously presents confronting issues while embodying a spirit of positivity, triumphant in the face of adversity. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, his work poses important questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

By Claire Summers

Through mechanisms of pop culture and iconography, Tony Albert continues his excavation of the symbols and artefacts of colonial Australia, steeping them in an atmosphere of misplaced of nostalgia. Albert imbues these symbols with meaning, charging them with a new political energy and historical context. Though these totems of pop culture are deeply personal, in matters of history and the way it is told, the personal always intersects the political, permeating a larger cultural narrative.

In Ashtralia, Albert continues his Ash Tray series, a visual narrative that the artist has spent 15 years developing and exploring since its first iteration in 2008. Albert makes use of an instantly recognisable symbol–the ashtray–seen again and again in the shape of Australia, placed atop visuals of violent colonialism or colourful “Australiana”.

In Albert’s work, a symbol repeated is a symbol

strengthened–its potency does not dilute but rather intensifies with each reprise.

The act of ashing a cigarette is inherently casual, a gesture deprived of any sentiment or grace. Behind each Australiana ash tray, the choice to construct the colonial gaze in the backdrops of this imagery was a very deliberate one: fleets of ships, depictions of colonial soldiers and slogans of a contemporary white Australia form the backdrop on which Albert’s commentary gathers momentum towards its meaning. A deliberate friction exists in these works: the scene of the butted cigarette, blasé and unconcerned, set against the gravity of an enduring jingoism–a patriotic extremism that, in the case of Indigenous narratives in Australia, erodes the accountability owed by colonial structures and controls the way we have allowed history to be retold in the present.

Tony Albert Ashtralia #2, 2023 pigment print on paper

(framed)

Tony Albert Ashtralia, 2023 Installation view

Wheel of Misfortune collides pop cultural icons embedded in Albert’s childhood memory with catchphrases of the political present. Leveraging the visual framework of prominent 80s gameshow Wheel of Fortune, Albert asks the question: how would it read if Indigenous people got control of the board? The answer looks to the sense of place and history that, to this day, lacks visibility in mainstream vocabulary and imagines them emblazoned on the Wheel of Fortune board.

Following many of the same rules of the original game, where the answers were popular song titles, movie references or cultural mementos, Albert introduces narratives neglected during the era of Wheel of Fortune’s reign in the zeitgeist. These phrases–Live, Laugh, Land Rights; I See Deadly People; or Invasion Day–tell the story of the shifting conversation in the Australian political vernacular and the strain that continues to define the discourse. Many of the slogans of Albert’s Wheel of Misfortune now find themselves as mainstays in the cultural conversation surrounding First Nations People and their relationship to their own history and how colonial Australia has controlled it’s telling.

Never entirely didactic, Albert invites us to stand with him at the edge of the meaning behind these phrases. Through a mix of humour, nostalgia and deliberate juxta-positioning, we are invited to arrive at the meaning by placing it in the context of our own political position. Imbued with the same sense of playfulness that has brought a buoyancy to Albert’s career of agitating complex social and political histories, Wheel of Misfortune presents interventions in the gameboard with catchphrases of today’s vocabulary.

“Never entirely didactic, Albert invites us to stand with him at the edge of the meaning behind these phrases. Through a mix of humour, nostalgia and deliberate juxta-positioning, we are invited to arrive at the meaning by placing it in the context of our own political position.”

Sam Leach:

Perceiving Artificial Intelligence —A Multifaceted Exploration

Seducer, Coach, Oracle, Alchemist and Priest. Whatever your views on Artificial Intelligence, the human response to the new knowledges spat out by machines is real. Our thinking is altered, identities formed and emotional responses shaped. Amid all the hype surrounding AI, the human agent is still present in the creation, the synthesis and the reaction, and Sam Leach’s work brings this agent greater visibility.

By Dr Kristin Alford

Every day I pass by Flow Landscape (2018), a painting by Dr Sam Leach we commissioned for our first exhibition MOD. The fine details expose odd scientific shapes of infrastructure in an otherwise moody landscape, poking at the ways in which we might understand land from human and non-human perspectives.

While in that case we were considering avian perspectives, AI perspectives have dominated the technology risks news since the public release of ChatGPT followed by an amplification of the warnings about the existential risks of generative artificial intelligences.

This is something that we have been discussing over the last few years, most recently with our online game POINT OF IMPACT. This game explored the risks and consequences of applying artificial intelligence to solve the climate crisis. It’s also a topic that comes up regularly in conversations with visitors at MOD. as we explore the ethical boundaries of research and new technologies.

Exploring these boundaries are evident in Leach’s recent body of work too, with works that use artificial intelligence in various ways. Experiments include the development of algorithms that generate imagery trained from inputs selected by Leach, or those that provide a sense of prediction about the direction of new works. Leach and I teased out the ways in which his exploration of approaches to artmaking using AI intersect with the conversations we have with visitors and researchers. As we circled around the use cases of AI, certain archetypes started to emerge.

Like the serpent tempting Eve with forbidden fruit and the promise of god-like knowledge, consumer AI in the form of large language models like ChatGPT tempts us with the promise of summarising the infinite knowledge of the internet, improved productivity and the gift of finding the right words in times of stress. Board charters, letters of resignation, radio guest biographies and eulogies are all examples recently whispered in confession. Education is grappling with detection and prohibition, and image generation tainted by artistic copyright issues. Yet to not use these tools is to deny reward. Here AI is a seducer of our attention in our quest to be better, faster, smarter.

I am a fan of the promise of productivity though. My early experiments with ChatGPT were about fine-tuning weekly family meal plans and incremental experiments in having it dictate exercise plans in the hope I might adhere to something. The promise of AI is to fine-tune the human condition, bringing the personal data of genetics, location, social networks, consumer data and biometrics together for the creation of a personal digital twin where we may all be coached to perfection.

As a futurist, much of my craft is scanning research and media for repeated signals, sensing when there are enough signs to suggest system change. Or summarising evidence to support a phenomenon as a significant driver of future change. While not technically prediction, these clues suggest possible alternatives of the future. With large datasets and modelling capability, the idea of a predictable future becomes even more enticing. In a recent exhibition at MOD., Nina Rajic’s Mirror Ritual provoked delight and confusion. This interactive artwork invites visitors to sit in front of a mirror where they are then greeted with a poem crafted by AI based on their apparent mood. Often these poems had layers of relevant meaning, picking up details for people relating to jobs, sickness and personal stress. Patterns of repetition and variation that echo in Leach’s work. This processed data feels weighty, it feels real, though there is still no guarantee of accuracy.

Even more so when the processes of algorithmic calculation remain in their black boxes, where we are unable to assess the weight of bias in the training sets

“The oracle is a false idol, a hint at truth that requires a healthy dose of doubt. Repeated remix and copies of copies make the oracle even further shaky.”

or interrogate the assumptions in the calculations. Even the labelling of querying as prompt engineering seems to deflect. Our visitors seem uncertain, willing to take the psychometric calculations of a work like Lucy McRae’s Biometric Mirror at face value, celebrating their assessments of being found weird or truthful from a photograph. Like an alchemist, Leach’s work also leans into exploration of the mechanics, with mis-trained algorithms provoking unexpected weirdness.

It may be that AI is as a priest calling us to faith and service. Despite false oracles and misguided coaches, the human response to the new knowledges spat out by artificial intelligences is real. Recipes that can hasten and heal, our thinking is shaped, and identities formed. Our emotional responses shaped through our words and artistic responses hold real cultural value. The human agent is present in the creation, the synthesis and the reaction, and Leach’s work brings the human agent greater visibility.

Of course I ran these archetypes through ChatGPT in an attempt to fast-track the writing of this article. Despite a predictable essay, it also concluded that Leach and Alford had developed a new methodology for perceiving artificial intelligence. A multifaceted exploration through which we can explore the perceptions of AI through five distinct lenses: Seducer, Coach, Oracle, Alchemist and Priest. Each lens offers a unique perspective on how we perceive and engage with artificial intelligence, uncovering its allure, predictive power, emotional resonance, potential for human enhancement, and the imperative for transparency and ethics. So I may claim this new methodology, as ways in which Leach’s work and our conversations with visitors evolve, scuffling in the continued dance between human and non-human knowledges.

Disclosure: The article title and text in bold were generated by ChatGPT by OpenAI. Other ideas and text were generated by the author. Dr Kristin Alford is a futurist and the Director of MOD. at the University of South Australia.

Joanna Lamb in her studio.

Photographed by Nicholas White.

Joanna Lamb: One Day Like This

Building from her previous work on suburban landscapes, Joanna Lamb creates a vibration in our perception of dimension with her exacting representation of everyday spaces and our interior life.

By Kelly Fliedner

Within this new suite of works is a large compartmentalised laser-cut Laminex interior, and a series of gardens including private backyard scenes and exterior streetscapes. This exhibition as with previous works by Lamb is rich in art historical reference, entering into conversation with many, including Patrick Caulfield, Jenny Watson and Louise Nevelson and offers a means of referring to the aestheticised attachments and sediments of Lamb's own childhood spent in coastal suburban Perth and her still current suburban existence south of the Swan River in Applecross. These works come after Covid where the local takes on new meaning in light of lockdowns, travel restrictions and policed boundaries, recalling the paradoxical closed openness of prior works and prior eras, and the open closeness of what is immediately at hand.

The private backyard paintings are a continuation of Lamb's interest in breaking down imagery into components made of flat colour. For someone interested in flatness, the elaborate scenes of hundreds and thousands of individual leaves, petals and stalks makes for complex textures, all illuminated by a plethora of light sources. This complexity continues an inflection begun in Lamb's oeuvre from 2019 onward. They are dense with intricate shapes and patterns, deeply layered in a way that speaks of what flatness can become when it becomes this formally complicated.

In Backyard with Brickwall a garden bed is lit at night composed of a medley of surprising colours — oranges, greens, purples. They come together to give an otherwise banal scene of standard pot plants an air of drama. Multiple palms and ferns join the eponymous in Backyard with Frangipani to create a lush scene of light and colour, a riot of juxtapositions that contains a sense of play. With ‘Backyard with ficus' the shapes are familiar, even as we’re uncertain exactly what these plants are. This is a backyard that exists in a semiotic economy we already recognise, but askew, askance, aloft — those shapes are terracotta pots even if they are merely flat discs in these paintings; those bricks are red bricks from the 70s even if they are merely a purple grid of rectangles; hose fields of flat pale green colour are boundaries, even if they are merely fields of colour here. These gardens are thriving, leitmotifs that are well attended to, loved, conspicuously watered in a way, suggestive of status and tidy town competitions, just for neighbours, friends and family. They are sheltered and interior and private. They are intimate.

At the centre of One Day Like This is 'Laminex Still Life', which takes as its inspiration American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988). Nevelson made sculptural installations of boxed, grouped arrangements containing

various collections of wooden scraps and found objects like table legs and wood-working tools painted in monochrome. Lamb’s interpretation similarly gestures to cubist and surrealist assemblages with puzzle-like components coming together to create a large and impressive alter-like monument, a jigsaw of the suburban, domestic, interior. They differ on the plane of relatability — Lamb’s flattened abstract shapes made of layers of green, yellow and brownish Laminex, which in form and material are far more familiar than prior generations’ discards: an ornate table leg, the rounded curve of a chair, a hint of the distinct Corn Flakes cockerel, a squeezable honey bottle, citrus fruit, cups, bottles of all sorts. These objects are simultaneously familiar, rendered in the nostalgia of a quintessential suburban material, and defamiliarised in their lack of texture and lurid planes. They are a cool generalisation of curves and gesture towards a reform of what is at home.

This knowing and expressive detail is there in 'Curbside garden' as well. We are let into an entire world with the subtlest information — a small band of grey in the bottom right hand corner, the sparse and lower profile of the plants, and the open recession into the background. We can apprehend a roadside curb garden, a nature strip, a verge that rolls out across these liminal spaces, the borderland between public road and private home. This work in particular feels like a post lockdown joyous appreciation for the kind of floral display one happens upon in the everyday act of walking around the neighbourhood. It is what we are attracted to on our doorstep when we begin to consider that where we live can be a site of art, of poetry, of contemplation. It is there too in Frontyard with Rose Garden, Street with Raven and Donnybrook House

When taken together, these three distinct domestic spaces of the front yard, the backyard and the interior, are juxtaposed to present an idea of a particular suburb at a particular time by a particular artist. They speak from this particularity to a more common language of place making in a historical moment in an aesthetic way. This is where Lamb engages productively with 'defamiliarisation' at a conceptual level, which is why the Laminex material is central in terms of form, style and content. It is defamiliarisation rather than unsettlement or alienation, Lamb gestures towards. This is because it comes from within a lived experience of suburbia as an attractive frame that often goes unseen by those living in its very midst. Through her participant observation, she elevates rather than simply distances ordinary or the mundane, the flat or the boring, the gothic or the eery, the spectacular or the charming. It recalls, Viktor Shlovksy, when he wrote in 1917 in 'Art as Technique' that:

“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

Joanna Lamb Backyard with Brickwall, 2022 Acrylic on superfine polyester 122 x 91 cm

Joanna Lamb Streetside Garden , 2023 acrylic on superfine polyester 175x175cm

Joanna Lamb

It seems fitting then, that one is left with a 'sensation' of suburbia — a raven perched here, a security screen there, pot plants and curbs, a car idling, maybe parked, maybe waiting to follow someone home. This is not as we know and live in it on an everyday basis. Through her highly technical skill, Lamb then makes the art of suburbia just that — forms, outlines, symbols, all of which ask us to change our perception.

When we return home after seeing this exhibition we are called to the very reality that was always there right in front of our eyes — the honey bottle, the flowers, the pool, lawn, fence. And that may be Lamb's great virtue and accomplishment, whereby a viewer both appreciates the art as art right in front of them upon viewing these works, and then is transformed in how they see a world that is right in their own backyard, sees the possibility that Lamb allows. Prior to this, they may have only glimpsed it briefly in the bright light of day waiting for a moment of consciousness in which to comprehend and contemplate the mundane in its honorific importance. This art elevates, in a critical and detailed way, what is, after all, how the majority of people live, and for that we can only be grateful that suburbia becomes the subject once again, of living and of art in Joanna Lamb’s One Day Like This

Backyard with Frangipani, 2022 acrylic on superfine polyester 180 x 134cm

Michael Lindeman: Not everyone understands Duchamp

Although Michael Lindeman can’t explain why he started finger painting in bright colours on mirror, his Regression Paintings present themselves as the most enduring series of his oeuvre to date. Anne Loxley deciphers Lindeman’s new series of loose gestural abstractions.

By Anne Loxley

Michael Lindeman

Regression Painting (Conceptual Artists Have Feelings Too), 2023 finger painted acrylic on mirror 31.5 x 70.5cm

Photo by Mark Pokorny

Commenced in late 2021, Michael Lindeman’s Regression Paintings are the most enduring series of his oeuvre to date. Their loose gestural abstraction and mirror substrates are significant stylistic departures in a practice covering more than twenty-five years. Lindeman’s work spans sculpture, installation and painting, from Duchampian assemblages to installations riffing off suburban cricket, to painted simulations of newspaper classified advertisements. The through line in all Lindeman’s work is considered conceptualism combined with enigmatic self-deprecation. With absurd humour and incessant references to either art history or the art world, Lindeman critiques the art ecosystem and structures of power, all the while questioning himself.

Lindeman can’t explain why he started finger painting in bright colours on mirror. “Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis”. Maybe. He definitely has a track record of plundering his vulnerability in service of his practice: he prefers to cover his head with a paper bag for professional portrait photographs and has made at least one pathos-laden text work seeking artist friends: ‘No online pseudo friend bullshit, I can’t get you a show and won’t be judging a prize anytime soon. If you’re into chugging a beer or two at the Pub and having a snigger then give me a call. 0481 289 273.’ It’s details like the use here of his actual phone number that makes Lindeman’s work so hilarious and his intentions so tricky to unpack.

However, rather than self-doubt, the Regression Paintings come from an inspired and intuitive coalescence of Lindeman’s ongoing concerns and realisations about his practice. “My previous work could be cold and restrained. It needed something to engage the viewer. It has taken me a long time to realise that not everyone understands Duchamp.” While pondering “an extreme juxtaposition with the hard edge of the text”, the idea of finger painting in bright primary and secondary colours came to mind. Lindeman proffers that while not consciously arrived at, perhaps his latest stylistic choice is not so surprising: “ideas lie dormant in the subconscious while they build”.

While the act of making these works was instinctual, Mike Kelley has preoccupied Lindeman’s thinking throughout his work on the series. The celebrated late American conceptual artist is a touchstone for Lindeman: “He was not afraid to be irritable and outspoken, and embraced failure when most artists invent their own glory.” Kelley’s soft toy series including works such as More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987 and Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999 have been particularly important. “Critics said the work was linked to childhood abuse, Kelley railed against this but the idea stuck. Kelley said the only abuse he suffered was Hans Hoffmann’s indoctrination of ‘push and pull abstraction.’” His interest in this aspect of the historiography of Mike Kelley led Lindeman to Freud’s work on repression and regression; and certainly, Lindeman’s latest paintings burble with resonances of these two psychoanalytical concepts.

Lindeman says “Intoxication, emptiness, currency, excess, and narcissism - the Regression Paintings are guided by auto-biographical experiences.” The works range from contemplations of self-doubt in Regression Painting (Confused…) and Regression Painting (Amateur…), and human relationships in Regression Painting (Friends…) to tart critiques of art world values in Regression Painting (Professional…) and Regression Painting (Fashionable…) and art styles, specifically, in the case of Regression Painting (Thick…) the valorised impasto. Invariably each text piece is complex, if not contradictory in tone. Regression Painting (Fun…) could be a meditation on friendship with words like ‘fun, shenanigans, mischief’ but it also includes ‘bad behaviour’, ‘mockery’ ‘sneer’ and ‘lampoon’.

Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Non-Art Art Brat), 2023 finger painted acrylic on mirror 41 x 29cm

TOP: Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Pyjamas and Cocktails…), 2023 finger painted acrylic on mirror 98 x 112 cm (framed)

BELOW: Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Fun...), 2022 finger painted acrylic on mirror 100 x 110 cm

TOP: Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Fashionable...), 2022 finger painted acrylic on mirror 109 x 170 cm (framed)

BELOW: Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Friends...), 2022 finger painted acrylic on mirror 109 x 170 cm (framed)

Where is the viewer in all of this? I am instantly drawn to the decadence of the lead words of Regression Painting (Pyjamas and Cocktails…), but repelled by those that follow ‘strategic plays, bumptious egos, airkissing, selfies galore’. Has Michael Lindeman tricked me into some kind of complicity with the posturing vacuity I see – and try to avoid - in the art world?

Reflected in the mirror substrates, viewers are more than engaged, they become involved. Looking longer at Regression Painting (Pyjamas and Cocktails…), I happily identify with ‘hair and make up’ and ‘uncertain smiles’ but am less comfortable with ‘slick manoeuvres’ and ‘chase the heat’. Ultimately, this beguilingly palatable painting cajoles me into acknowledging some of the less palatable machinations of my professional world.

While the smaller, more recent works in the series are based in conversations, observations, and books he’s read, the themes are familiar – musings on relationships, existential angst, art world and structural critiques, witty references to art history. When I ask about Regression Painting (Duchamp Plumbing), Lindeman mentions both the canonical Fountain and his own recent (unsuccessful) attempts to discuss the iconic artist with a plumber working in his house. (My darling plumber-dad would have been just as nonplussed).

The shorter texts combine with the sensuous abstraction and inviting mirrors to make these works profoundly relatable and appealing. Regression Painting (When Good Friends Go Bad) makes my heart skip; feelings of empathy are triggered by Regression Painting (Sorry about That!) Others, like Regression Painting (Conceptual Artists Have Feelings Too) and Regression Painting (Loner Waves to In-crowd) are laugh out loud funny.

Not everyone understands Duchamp it’s true. But a lot of people will understand - and relate to - Michael Lindeman’s Regression Paintings

“Has Michael Lindeman tricked me into some kind of complicity with the posturing vacuity I see – and try to avoid - in the art world? ”

MICHAEL LINDEMAN, REGRESSION PAINTINGS, 21 SEPTEMBER – 14 OCTOBER, SULLIVAN+STRUMPF EORA/SYDNEY

Michael Lindeman Regression Painting (Fashionable...) (detail), 2022 finger painted acrylic on mirror 109 x 170 cm (framed)

Tim Ross Last Word:

Tim Ross’s devotion to meaningful design and its place in the Australian story is profound, permeating his view on contemporary culture and the history of this country. In the opening episode of his new series, Designing a Legacy, Ross visits the Ball-Eastaway House (1980-83), a home designed by Glenn Murcutt for artists Sydney Ball and Lynne Eastaway. This home, buried in bushland a short trip north of Sydney, was imagined and built to integrate with its environment while casting the ideal backdrop for the artistic lives of both Ball and Eastaway. Sullivan+Strumpf’s Communication Manager Claire Summers interviewed Tim Ross on his experience at the Ball-Eastaway house and the making of Designing a Legacy.

Tim Ross and Lynne Eastaway at the Ball-Eastaway House. Courtesy Designing a Legacy, ABC.

Claire Summers / Your encounter with the Ball-Eastaway house in your new program Designing a Legacy is steeped in an atmosphere of reverence. What was the most profound element of the property?

Tim Ross / It’s definitely the landscape and the way the house responds to the site. When you drive in and weave through the trees and then the house appears, seemingly floating in the bush, it has a profound affect on you.

CS / Glenn Murcutt designed The Ball-Eastaway house to cause the least interference with the landscape it exists in. How does the internal world of the house extend that ethos?

TR / Behind the hallway which was designed to exhibit large artworks is a balcony that basically puts you in the bush. It’s one of the most successful spaces I’ve ever been in. You sit up high in the landscape in what feels like an open air corrugated iron box and you are instantly connected. The lack of a balcony may worry some but for me it’s why the space works.

CS / What elements of your architectural interests were best embodied by the house?

TR / Beside the way the house responds to the landscape and “touches the earth lightly” what really is special about the home is how it represents the lives of the two artists and lives well collected.

To me the spirit of the home is linked to the warmth and hospitality of Lynne and how she’s embraced living in the house again after Syd died.

I love being in her studio and hearing about how being in the bush inspires and informs her work and the way she beams when she talks about art and her life.

CS / Designing a Legacy feels as if an exercise in storytelling through the built environment. What part of our national story do you feel is best told through architecture, as opposed to other cultural artefacts?

Sydney Ball in his studio, 2013.

TR / There’s a permanence to what we build but they are also incredible fragile things that are subject to our greed and stupidity.

What we tear down tells us more about ourselves that what we build sometimes. We don’t celebrate our architecture enough, we view it as a commodity not part of our cultural history.

The best buildings are often initially hard for us to understand and they sprint ahead of us waiting for us to catch up.

The intersection of art and architecture touches us deeply, the symbiotic relationship between the two inspires us from a very young age. Those school excursions to galleries are formative in so many ways.

As we move forward it’s incredibly important for our buildings to tell a broader story of who we are and to acknowledge more than the last 200 or so years.

CS / Just as a home tells a story of both who designed it and who lives in it, so too does an artwork tell us a story of both the artist and the person who buys it; the object (house, artwork) becomes this intimate meeting point of multiple people’s stories. How does this resonate with your experience on Designing a Legacy?

TR / Our relationships with art and architecture can be incredibly deep if we let it and it evolves over time. We don’t renovate art but we can move it from room to room. A painting in a bedroom lets you reflect on it in a different way to that in a lounge room, hallway or dining room.

Both have the ability to lift our spirits. I think people have generally accepted that from art but haven’t always accepted that from architecture.

Both are snapshots of where our heads are at and where the architect of the artist is at.

Then it’s how we use them and how we add the layers of story and the moments that happen around them is where the magic is at.

Tim Ross at the Ball-Eastaway House. Courtesy Designing a Legacy , ABC.

Up Next

Sydney Art Fair

Polly Borland

19 October - 11 November

Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney

Marion Abraham

26 October - 11 November

Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney

Sydney Contemporary

7 - 10 September

Melbourne

Sam Leach

14 September - 7 October

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

Off-Site

Gregory Hodge

26 October - 11 November

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

London: Story Place

6 - 28 October

9 Cork Street

City Lights

See Angela Tiatia’s The Pearl light up the façade of the Art Gallery of South Australia at Illuminate Adelaide’s free city-wide centrepiece

07 – 23 July

Art Gallery of South Australia

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Ursula Sullivan | Director

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