Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Australia and Singapore - June/July 2022

Yvette Coppersmith

Karla Dickens

Julia Gutman

Gregory Hodge

Natalya Hughes

Sam Leach

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

Lara Merrett

Dawn Ng

Editorial Directors

Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf

Managing Editor

Alex Pedley

Senior Designer & Studio Manager

Matthew De Moiser

Designer

Mani Nejad

Proofreader

Chloe Borich

Mariia Zhuchenko

Hannah Sharpe

Production polleninteractive.com.au

SYDNEY 799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia

P +61 2 9698 4696

E art@sullivanstrumpf.com

SINGAPORE

P +65 83107529

Megan Arlin | Director E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com

sullivanstrumpf.com

@sullivanstrumpf

@sullivanstrumpf

@sullivanstrumpf sullivan+strumpf

Advertising enquiries art@sullivanstrumpf.com or +61 2 9698 4696

Subscriptions

6 print issues per year AUD$120

Australia/NZ $160 Overseas

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of whose lands the Gallery stands. We pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging and recognise their continued connection to Culture and Country.

FRONT COVER: Karla Dickens, The Royal Tour, 2022 mixed media, 125 x 125 cm

Photo: Aaron Anderson

Limited edition of 100. Available for pre-order now

The first major monograph on the boundary-pushing work of painter and sculptor, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran.

Special edition signed by the artist. Includes hardcover clamshell case, purple edge pages, with bronze sculpture titled ‘Double-sided Bronze Figure’.

Pre-order now: https://bit.ly/ravmsbk

A Certain Slant of Light

As we embark on the second half of 2022, the sense of optimism in the air is palpable. We’re breathing life back into art spaces, voices are echoing together at openings once more, the ability to plan and our collective ambitions have been restored. Similarly, the collective intentions of our artists are in sharp focus in this issue, illuminated by the theme of lucid Winter light, that falls just so.

Capturing this fortified spirit is a collection of special new exhibitions. Karla Dickens presents a formidable new body of work in her debut with S+S, Cover-Up, Sam Leach enters uncharted AI territory with Everything Will Probably Be Fine, Gregory Hodge explains the intricate technique in his signature painting style in Figures, Lights, and Landscapes, and Julia Gutman brings fabric to the fore in her first ever solo show, Muses.

We hope you will be moved and energised in this new season, and new issue, as you read on.

Urs & Jo

Quick Curate: A certain Slant of light

Julia Gutman: Muses

Dawn Ng: London Bound

Karla Dickens: Cover-Up

Gregory Hodge: Figures, Lights, and Landscapes

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Polymorphic Idols

Sam Leach: Everything Will Probably Be Fine

In Focus : Yvette Coppersmith

Ties that Bind: Larra Merrett

At Home: Natalya Hughes

Last Word: Dr Simon Maidment

Quick Curate: A certain

Slant of light

In this edition of Quick Curate, A certain Slant of light, we explore via our artists the ways in which light evolves as the colder months set in. For Emily Dickinson, this slant of light is ‘Sent us of the Air—’, and while oppressive in her Winter Afternoons, it also carries with it a certain promissory chill. From coolly hued brushwork, latent exposures, and furnace firings to other solstitial references, they herald for us the arrival of Winter—and we could not be happier about it.

Lara Merrett The Lake, 2018 acrylic and ink on cloth and linen 184 x 175 cm $16,500

Yang, Yongliang

The Flock , 2016 giclee print on fine art paper 80 x 100 cm (unframed)

Edition of 5 (#4/5) USD$11,200 film on lightbox 29 x 34 x 18.5 cm (box)

Edition of 10 (#4/10) USD$10,700 or

Yvette Coppersmith

Self-portrait as St Vincent wearing Cara’s dress, 2016-18

Kirsten Coelho Pair of Cups , 2019 porcelain, celadon and saturated iron glazes each cup 9.5 x 9.5 cm (approx.) $1,210

Lynda Draper Angel’s Trumpet, 2021 ceramic, various glazes 140 x 51 x 51 cm $14,000

Gregory Hodge Winter House, 2021 acrylic on canvas 195 x 130 cm $18,700

Dane Lovett Foxglove 8, 2019 oil and acrylic on poplar panel 60.6 x 40.6 cm (framed)

$4,400

Julia Gutman: Muses

Elyse Goldfinch, Associate Curator at Artspace, Sydney, looks at the ‘muse’ in Julia Gutman’s textile representations of community and friendship among women, on the occasion of the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf.

EXHIBITION:

Julia Gutman in her Sydney studio, 2022

Photo: Simon Hewson

This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

Julia Gutman Behind the Curtain, 2022 donated textiles and embroidery on stretched linen 76.5 x 81 cm

Photo: Simon Hewson

Through western art history, the three graces have been used to represent the ideal female form. Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalya were associated with love, nature, joy, fertility and creativity. The graces were prototypes of femininity, endlessly depicted and manipulated by the desires of men. Typically seen as opulently beautiful young women, often nude, occasionally headless. Flesh exposed and gazes distant—they were readily consumable by design.

The three graces were always posed together, embraced with clasped hands to represent the circle of friendship between women. Yet, they were always performing for some imagined spectator, watching themselves being seen. In Julia Gutman’s Muses, she considers how women were depicted historically and reimagines them as contemporary figures: herself and her friends. Moving imagery away from the objectification and performance of the male gaze and bringing to her subjects the power of self-determination, of agency. Conceived during Sydney’s extended lockdown in 2021, this exhibition portrays moments of playfulness, intimacy, closeness and the repetition felt when sharing isolation with your best friends.

In Once More with Feeling, Gutman presents herself and her housemates confined with one another throughout the intermittent lockdowns of 2021. Irreverently titled, with reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, the three figures lounge together on and around the living room couch as the show plays beyond the scene. The plot of the episode sees the titular character becoming

“There’s a deep intimacy to Gutman’s materials as they relate directly to the body. Her materials once made contact with skin, acting as a layer of protection and comfort. It shows the physical history of that person: marks, stains, tears, all produced in the daily wear and utilitarian function of apparel.”

an automaton trapped in the cycle of daily life—an apt analogy for the routines we developed during lockdown, in the grasping pursuit of ‘normalcy’. The banality of the scene is unsettled by the self-aware expressions on the subject’s faces. Gutman, who is depicted on the left, looks directly at the viewer. Her knowing expression and raised eyebrow suggest that she knows she is being watched. It’s a challenge, a confrontation to us.

Another unguarded moment is seen in Bed Politics where two figures lie together, close in proximity yet expressions detached. The distance between them is a metaphorical cavern as they turn away from each other, tethered only by the tentative hand reaching across the divide. Perhaps post-argument, the scene shows the way our bodies gravitate towards and away from the other. In Gutman’s works, chains and ropes are used to physically and symbolically connect her subjects, forming links between bodies and emotions. Here the ropes weave across the scene, a suggestion that these figures are still joined despite this current moment of boundlessness.

The reclining figure is one of the most common poses in art history, one that is connected with the passivity of the sexualised female form. In All Adults Here, Gutman represents her friend in repose, absorbed in reading a book of the same title. Unlike traditional depictions of reclining women, we don’t see her splayed open for the viewer’s consumption, rather she is captured in a quiet state of concentration, lying at the Cooks River, the only body of water accessible within a five-kilometre radius—an effigy of introspection. The title is a nod to the in-between state of being an adult but still feeling a connection to the safety and play of childhood, negotiating that sense of masquerading in one world while being secured to another.

The theme of water continues with Rainbow Fish where the artist is seen bathing in a luminous river, light reflecting off the water’s surface; and, in Hang me out to dry, a play on words referring to the betrayal of being felt to suffer unfairly with the Sisyphean task of clothes washing, made more ironic still as the work is literally made from old clothing. Every work is rendered in fabric that once belonged to the subjects represented. There’s a deep intimacy to Gutman’s materials as they relate directly to the body. Her materials once made contact with skin, acting as a layer of protection and comfort. It shows the physical history of that person: marks, stains, tears, all produced in the daily wear and utilitarian function of apparel.

Embroidery was traditionally seen as ‘women’s materials’ connected with domesticity, craft and the silencing of women’s voices in art history. Gutman’s subjects physically become the work as the donation of their clothes transforms into expanded portraits. By focusing

“Gutman’s muse is no longer passively objectified but is actively represented. They contribute to the process and creation of the work. It’s part of a collective action, one based in the desire for community, tenderness and friendship between women.”

Julia Gutman Bed Politics, 2022 donated textiles and embroidery, metal chain, donated rope 200 x 200 cm (approx.)

Photo: Simon Hewson

Julia Gutman

All Adults Here, 2021

Donated textiles and embroidery, metal chain 200 x 200 cm (approx.)

Photo: Simon Hewson

on images of herself, her family and friends, as subject matter and inspiration, Gutman is renegotiating the history of portraiture and the representation of the ‘muse’. Her allegorical re-imaginings represent how women continue to be portrayed as inspiration for works of art. Gutman’s muse is no longer passively objectified but is actively represented. They contribute to the process and creation of the work. It’s part of a collective action, one based in the desire for community, tenderness and friendship between women.

As someone who spent isolation alone, in drawn-out solitary hours, I see these works and imagine the solace these women found in each other. The comfort and ease of their bodies in proximity to one another. This body of work centres the importance of friendship and the representation of love between friends as something equally as important and worthy as romantic love. As bell hooks writes, ‘Romantic friendships are a threat to patriarchy and heterosexism because they fundamentally challenge the assumption that being sexual with someone is essential to all meaningful, lasting, intimate bonds.’ This exhibition is a patchwork of entanglements grounded in the yearning, connection and contact between ourselves and those closest to us.

EXHIBITION: JULIA GUTMAN, MUSES, JULY 28 - AUG 13, 2022

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW

London Bound: Dawn NG

Dawn Ng presents her first major solo exhibition Into Air in London in three transformational parts, including photography, film and residue painting at St. Cyprian’s, Marylebone. The highly anticipated new body of works, which is also headed to Sydney in August, is dedicated to the pursuit of time. Through one form to the next, Ng’s subject is subtle and elusive—evading capture like the shifting states of the mediums through which she travels: from solid, to liquid and finally Into Air.

Into Air, begun in 2018, is a growing body of work rooted in developing an alternate understanding and expression of time. What started out as a benign curiosity about holding time in an ephemeral object like ice, grew into a full-blown obsession with creating and documenting the disintegration of large sculptural blocks of frozen pigment. Ice is a perfect material because it cannot last. Its metamorphoses from solid, liquid to air, reflect both the arresting presence and passage of cyclical time. This journey of chasing time from one state to the next, crystallises in a large body of work that can be broken down into 3 parts: a series of photographs, Clocks; a series of films, Time Lost Falling in Love; and a series of residue paintings, Ash The works are all traces and residues of each block’s existence as it memorialises its states from solid to liquid, and eventually to air. This passage from monumentality to nothingness is a work of remembrance and an ode to the truth that the most beautiful things in this world are the ones we cannot hold on to no matter how we try.

Dawn Ng in her Singapore studio, 2022.

Image courtesy Dawn Ng Studio

St Cyprian’s Church, Marylebone, London.

Photo: James Retief

Clocks are monumental photo portraits of frozen pigment blocks in disintegration. Consisting of a melange of acrylics, inks, watercolours and dyes, each block is built in layers at sub-zero temperatures over a month. Once hauled from the freezer, these meteorites of melting colour are captured at regular intervals until they erode completely. Ice is the perfect material in Singapore because it cannot last. Each photo portrait stands as an arresting solidification of time in a colour, shape and form for the viewer.

While Clocks is a process of stopping time, Time Lost Falling in Love grew as an endeavour to bend time through the use of time-lapse videography. Each moving image traces the hypnotic collapse of a 60kg block of frozen pigments. Filmed in a custom-built pool set, the luscious disintegration of each vivid block is recorded in full detail over the course of 15-20 hours in the studio. With the goal of suspending time between one’s self and a moving image, each second is sped up through a meticulous editing process to create a meditative rhythm of falling colour, mirroring the majestic collapse of a waterfall or avalanche in slow motion.

Ash are residue paintings created by the manoeuvred staining, dredging and evaporation of melted pigment through large sheets of watercolour paper. In the final stage of each frozen block’s ‘return to air’, all residue is collected in a custom vat, which is lined with a twisted and compressed acrylic film. The paper, which acts as a sieve filtering time between two states from liquid to air, is lowered to blanket the melting pool of colour. Over time, the vat is manipulated to allow pigment to wash over certain areas, forming residual tributaries; while coagulating in others, to encourage the chemical breakdown and resurrection of paint. The long period of steeping results in a topography of blooming shades and allows paper fibres to fray, so parts of its surface can be peeled back by hand to reveal a lighter, distressed finish, echoing the patina of time.

Sullivan+Strumpf will be presenting new works by Dawn Ng from the Into Air series in London and Sydney in 2022.

Dawn Ng INTO AIR

London

Curated by Jenn Ellis 7 – 23 July 2022

St. Cyprian’s Church, Marylebone, London

Sydney

18 August – 10 September 2022

Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY DAWN NG ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS bit.ly/dawnng2

“This passage from monumentality to nothingness is a work of remembrance and an ode to the truth that the most beautiful things in this world are the ones we cannot hold on to no matter how we try.”

Dawn Ng

Love is old, Love is new, Love is all, Love is you, 2022 archival pigment print

115 x 149 cm

Image courtesy Dawn Ng studio

Karla Dickens: Cover-Up

By Daniel Browning

The latest series of works by Karla Dickens represent a paradigm shift—or at least a more minimalist approach—in her wide-ranging practice as an installation artist. As a creator of maximal environments, she re-presents found objects to expose their barely concealed history as once functional moving parts in the complex perpetual machine of Australian settler colonialism. In Dickens’ previous work, objects that seem to have been liberated from their purpose or intended use—straitjackets, fencing masks, abandoned farm machinery, a discarded Australian flag, ethnographic postcards inscribed with racist messages—are deconstructed, subversively remade and rehabilitated.

EXHIBITION: KARLA DICKENS, COVER-UP, 16 JUN – 16 JUL, 2022

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are advised that this article contains images of deceased persons and includes images and themes that may be distressing.

Karla Dickens Soldiering On (detail), 2022 mixed media 125 x 125 cm

Photo: Aaron Anderson

Cover-up

In days of libraries and books some searched for answers facts, knowledge and histories others for justification or fantasy books held up as gospel upright black-and-white truth-tellers write as crime-concealing magicians

Covering-up

The words of writers giving birth to authority perpetrators of misleading concealment scandalous creatives masking one-sided evidence white-washed reality with educated vocabulary sealed with gold embossed titles honourable biased a mass-formulated instruction prompting signals to deflect guilt illusory narratives sold as best-selling must-haves

Covering-up

Pages fail to speak words of the many wrong-doings only by the ‘others’ the bad, the native and the unknowing strings of tightly-woven deceptions bound together painting pretty pictures for the faint-hearted keeping unethical acts of the real villains hidden avoiding silent criticism

Breaching duty of trust or committing crime

Covering-up

Drawn to a book by its cover foundation make-up screening ugly truths hard words missing under hardcovers passive non-telling and word twisting adventures reader beware as you grip a dusty jacket be active in discovering lies between the lines not all pictures are worth a thousand words listen to spoken words from those not found in books Re-write the cover-up

Hers is an environmentally sustainable practice which recasts the discarded, broken, and obsolescent into new schemes in an almost Duchampian process of upcycling or creative reuse. Her interventions however function politically, in that they unmake a unilateral national story into a set of counter-narratives where Aboriginal people are not victims but empowered agents of history, actors rather than extras in the strange, nihilistic epic film that is Australia. In every sense, her practice is regenerative. Even as she fossicks at the tip or browses auctions online, Dickens is engaged in the work of salvage and repair.

In Cover-Up, Dickens breaks the spine of books that recall the mythos of white heroes clearing the land and reclaiming it for their own, in a true boys’ own adventure punctuated by royal visits, souvenir cut-outs and orgiastic mythmaking. There is something ritual in the unbinding of these relics of white Australia, as if the artist is undoing their claim to historical truth or cultural value. Exposed and hollowed out, their textual meaning has well and truly been exhausted. They are now simply objects of curiosity—part of our national detritus, to be upcycled or buried in landfill. Broken, cut up and recombined in these subtly beautiful works however, they strike me as somehow fixed—cleansed by the artist in a redemptive act of aestheticisation, in effect overwriting their unilateral purpose as mythmaking propaganda.

When I first met Karla Dickens, she was producing seemingly domestic and—dare I say it— feminine collages with fabric and lace, belying their deeper meaning. I have watched the scope of her work enlarge in ways that I could never have imagined, to be almost monumental in scale, A Dickensian Country Show (commissioned for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 2020) for example. When I visited her studio in early 2022, and first saw the eviscerated cloth-bound books in Cover-Up, neatly laid out in grids on a worktable, she admitted that perhaps she was becoming more subtle in her old age. Dickens was

almost apologetic. I don’t buy it. There is no mellowing, but a seductive appeal to our national subconscious to tell the hard truth, whatever the implications for our collective sense of self. To every object she remakes and manufactures into tightly curated individual works she ascribes new political meaning, subverting and rehabilitating them in the process. Artists such as Dickens create the world they wish to inhabit, and hers is one where the self-delusion, lies and dissembling that characterise the rhetorical way in which Australian history is taught, and the brutality and violence that was covered up, are exposed to blinding ultraviolet light. Laid bare like unearthed bones, these relics of our collective past are only recirculated—or upcycled— to disfigure them with ritual spine-breaking and bury the unreconstructed, one-sided metanarrative which they inscribed with a kind of ceremony. Don’t avert your eyes. Hope is radical, and Dickens work to rehabilitate these objects demonstrates her own belief in the regenerative process, echoed in the trajectory of her own life. As she writes in her poetic essay accompanying this exhibition:

Drawn to a book by its cover

Foundation make-up screening ugly truths

Hard words missing under hard covers

Passive non telling and word twisting adventures

Readers beware as you grip a dusty jacket

Be active in discovering lies between the lines

Not all pictures are worth a thousand words

Listen to the spoken words from those not found in books

Re-write the cover-up

Installation view of Karla Dickens Cover-Up featuring Pound for Pound #2, mixed media 196 x 41 x 41 cm, Pound for Pound #10, mixed media, 160 x 41 x 41 cm, and Pound for Pound #4, mixed media, 198 x 41 x 41 cm (left to right).

Photo: Aaron Anderson

Return

4 (detail), 2021 inkjet print 174 x 128 cm (large) edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs

or

27.5 x 96 cm (small) edition of 8 plus 2 artist’s proofs

Karla Dickens

to Sender

EXHIBITION: KARLA DICKENS, COVER-UP, 16

, 2022

Karla Dickens, Return to Sender: Walkthrough, Carriageworks 6-30 January 2022. Video courtesy the artist and Carriageworks, Sydney.

The Exhibitionists: Karla Dickens 2022. Northern Pictures, Screen NSW and ABC TV: Australia

Gregory Hodge: Figures, Lights, and Landscapes

With Kelly Gellatly

Over Zoom between Melbourne and Paris, Kelly Gellatly and Gregory Hodge discuss the artist’s forthcoming exhibition, the influence of Paris and art history on his painting and take a deep dive into his intriguing and complex working methods.

Kelly Gellatly: You arrived in Paris at the start of your Art Gallery of New South Wales residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in October 2019 and have decided to stay. What does the city give to you and your work?

Gregory Hodge: It’s been a real opportunity being in Europe, and particularly in Paris. I think the main thing has been to really spend time looking. It’s always important to spend time looking at work, at exhibitions, at painting. I think though, being here, it’s been a more intentional part of my practice. I’m spending a lot of time looking at works of art in various collections. I see a lot of contemporary painting as well, which has been a really good thing.

KG/ Do you have favourites?

GH/ For this show, I’ve been regularly going through the Louvre tapestry collection and the Gobelins Manufactory to see the collections of tapestries there.

At the Musée d’Orsay and the Pompidou, favourite painters at the moment include Vuillard, Matisse and Van Gogh. You can see in their work not only the influence of the patterning apparent in carpets and textiles, but also how the richness of colour and intensity of their painted surfaces relate to the complex surfaces of woven fabrics and tapestries.

I also saw a beautiful show of textiles and paintings by Anni Albers at the Musée d’Art Moderne recently.

KG/ 17th-century tapestries have been of particular interest for your new body of work. Can you tell me a little about this? What is it that initially attracted you to them?

Gregory Hodge in his Paris studio with works-in-progress 2022.

Photo: Janelle Sweeney

Gregory Hodge Autumn Landscape (detail), 2022 acrylic on canvas 195 x 130 cm

Image courtesy the artist

Gregory Hodge Window (detail), 2022 acrylic on canvas 195 x 130 cm

Image courtesy the artist

GH/ I’ve always been interested in illusionistic painting and the long tradition of Trompe l’oeil mimicry—how paint can mimic other surfaces—like imitation painted marble on the walls of ornate rooms.

For these new paintings, I spent a lot of time in collections here and it wasn’t the paintings that I was really absorbed in and found myself returning to, but the tapestries. What I’m really drawn to in these tapestries is the way that in weaving together different coloured threads, the image is embedded in the picture plane—it’s not sitting off the surface like a painting does, it’s embedded in the warp and weft of the thread.

My work comes from this complex roundabout way of looking at something that’s not a painted surface, and that’s generally representational and trying to understand how to use paint and develop tools to mimic that surface, but also how to do this in a way that’s within a language of abstraction.

KG/ I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which many artists use a kind of a system or structure, or a means of limitation, to move their practice to wherever they think it needs to go. You obviously create these kinds of structures within your own work, am I right?

GH/ That’s a really good way to put it, and sometimes you don’t know that’s what you’re doing. Within all that complex kind of problem solving there are parameters, but maybe not intentionally at first. Initially, it feels like everything is potential—and then, through the editing process you narrow things down. My work is formed out of a process – from constructing the tools to make certain marks, to trying to generate surfaces that are painted but that look like other surfaces. Within all of that, you have to limit yourself.

KG/ I imagine there’s so much that you want to achieve, and then it’s honed down to get the kind of precision, and the juxtaposition and that jostling of different elements in your work. There’s a constant sense of movement that makes your eye bounce around the composition because you’re shifting from one element to the next and investigating the way they intersect and butt up against each other. With something that looks visually random, even if deliberately so, it takes real discipline and constant refinement to achieve that.

GH/ My paintings have a kind of visual intensity to them—there’s a stacking of space and elements. There are visual elements that you might see—a representational moment that is partially concealed by an abstract gesture, and then there may be another motif that lays over the top of that. Its full of hidden elements and things that are stacked and obscured and revealed.

I’m into Baroque ceiling paintings with tumbling figures falling out of space; limbs obscuring fabric, fabric obscuring landscape elements. I am also interested in modernist collage and the way in which collage is usually generated by combining materials, motifs or imagery that aren’t necessarily meant to go together.

Gregory Hodge in his Paris studio 2022.

Photo: Janelle Sweeney

Installation view of Gregory Hodge’s Studio Drawings 1-10, 2022 pencil and marker on paper, 29.7 x 42.0 cm (approx.) Image courtesy the artist.

Gregory Hodge in his Paris studio 2022.

Photo: Janelle Sweeney

KG/ You work with a lot of source material to help you construct the complex surfaces of your paintings. Are you ‘bowerbird-ish’ with these sources? Do you have piles of things that you can draw upon or do you approach it quite specifically, in that something will take you in a particular way and that will be a focus for a while? Can you talk us through the type of images you create and materials you work with prior to painting?

GH/ There’s a very formulaic way that I generate source material. I have a digital database of imagery that includes elements of my own paintings, whether it be gestures or a painted mark or something that I’ve used in previous work. I have a collection of things that I pull up and re-adapt into new paintings. So, on a very practical level, it’s files like ‘Gestural Marks’, ‘Painted Rocks’, or ‘Fabric’.

I have digital archives of collage material, and things that I’ve been photographing often find their way into the paintings—for example, close ups of tapestries that aren’t necessarily pictorial but might be more about the surface – elements that make me think, ‘How do I paint that?’ I’ve taken photos in the botanic gardens in Paris and developed tapestry-esque ways of painting. I generate digital and physical collages from that database. I print out some of this imagery and cut and slice them up, glue them together, re-cut them, paint over the top of them, and then sometimes I also scan and work on them in Photoshop.

As a result, elements of paintings from 2019, 2018, find their way back into new work—they get re-adapted and re-articulated with the new material. They may sometimes look intuitive, but they’re actually really contrived and thought out. I also do that as a means of removal that is quite intentional—how do I take steps from this other work to make it into something that’s different, that’s not necessarily a replication? There’s an adaptation. I get these weird moments that I would never have thought of through that source material process.

KG/ You make tools and adapt brushes to create the extraordinary surface effects on your paintings. Can you describe the type of devices you make and what you achieve with them? Is this something you continue to do, or have you now landed on a set range of tools to suit different purposes?

GH/ I have a resolved set of tools and others I keep refining. The tools are really specific to the kind of marks and surfaces that I want them to make. I spend so much time trying to work them out.

I make colourful ribbon-like marks that come out of a history of gestural painting. These gestures appear to be quick, but they’re actually rehearsed, as I’m copying a previous gesture that I’ve made before. There are tools that I’ve made specifically for those—multi-head brushes.

Several contemporary painters do this—Jack Witten, Bernard Frize, David Reed for example, but my works also echo Lichtenstein, who made paintings of gestures.

I also add shadows to gestures to make them appear as if they don’t live on the same surface of the painting, and there are particular tools I return to for that.

To paint woven surfaces, the warp and weft effect is made by very specific tools that I’ve created in the studio— sponges and trowels I cut up and drag paint through to generate these marks.

KG/ Despite the continuing conceptual and technical concerns across your practice, your work can change quite dramatically from series to series. Do you have a sense of what might be next for you?

GH/ I think this new series of paintings is just the beginning of a much larger body of work with hopefully a number of various iterations. The research I have been doing and the source material I’ve been making hasn’t been exhausted yet, so they will continue to inspire new work. Along with the paintings I have been making a series of coloured pencil drawings, some of which I will include in the show, and I am excited about that. +

EXHIBITION: GREGORY HODGE, FIGURES, LIGHTS, AND LANDSCAPES, 21 JUL – 13 AUG, 2022

“I make colourful ribbon-like marks that come out of a history of gestural painting. These gestures appear to be quick, but they’re actually rehearsed, as I’m copying a previous gesture that I’ve made before.”

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Polymorphic Idols

In conversation with Gill Minervini

Vivid Sydney Festival Director Gill Minervini sat down with Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran to chat about his new work, commissioned for the largest event of its kind in the world, and his read on contemporary monuments, spectacle and audience engagement. Ramesh’s large-scale, multi-limbed and mutli-headed installation will be presented to over 2 million visitors expected at this first iteration of the festival since 2019, and coincides with the special edition launch of his Thames+Hudson monograph and his Sullivan+Strumpf solo exhibition Polymorphic Idols, exclusively online.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in his studio with Fertility Figure II, 2022 earthenware, 128 x 54 x 40 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS bit.ly/rameshmn

VIVID SYDNEY FESITVAL: 27 MAY - 18 JUNE, 2022

EXHIBITION: POLYMORPHIC IDOLS, FROM 26 MAY

Installation view of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s Earth Dieties, 2022, sculptural light installation for VIVID Sydney, 27 May – 18 June 2022. Produced with collaborators Mark Dyson, Lighting Designer, DarkHouse (Australia), Zoe Robinson-Kennedy, Curator, Creative Road (Australia) and Racheal Dease, Sound Artist (Australia).

Photo: Mark Pokorny

Gill Minervini (GM)/ This is the first Vivid Sydney festival I’ve directed, and it brings together all the things I love. Public art, ideas, music, and the incredible canvas that is Sydney. This year, I want to explore the relationship Vivid has with its own city, what that means and ask: what makes great cities feel amazing? What is that palpable energy, that beating heart making them incredible places? Nine times out of ten, it’s about creativity, whether it’s architecture, food, people, stories, or history. I wanted to explore a variety of artists’ voices and their response to it. Signature works, like yours Ramesh, respond to the site, the city, to things we find in cities. What emerges is a narrative about our city, what we have in common with others, and what sets us apart.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (RMN)/ I grew up in Auburn, Western Sydney, in a migrant refugee community. I was never taken to art galleries or museums, but we would go to festivals that were public facing or more democratic in terms of access. Therefore, I’m excited to present something outdoors, immersive and large scale for the Vivid festival. With Vivid, people expect something experiential and buzzing. With the sculptural work I’m creating, the first level of engagement will be spectacle. This will be created by the number of lights, scale, colour, movement, the soundtrack and the iconic nature of what’s around the work. It will be surrounded by the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park! I want my work to feel simultaneously incongruous and congruous in terms of its relationship to these surrounding monuments. I also want the work to feel anti-monumental.

GM/ It’s been my life’s work to break down gallery and theatre walls and present to the public things they might not necessarily seek out. One of my early experiences was as the Festival Director of Mardi Gras in Sydney, years ago, working with amazing artists. The parade and those parties were giant public art projects. I then directed Art and About for City of Sydney for many years, then Winter Fest

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Elephant Figure with Helmet, 2022 earthenware

72 x 33 x 30cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

“I want my work to feel simultaneously incongruous and congruous in terms of its relationship to these surrounding monuments. I also want the work to feel antimonumental.”

for Dark Mofo… I’ve always been interested in dynamics that happen with large and diverse audiences. I’ve never tried to dumb it down. The more progressive leadership you show through the art you present, the more your audience will respond. When we did the first Dark Mofo, we were amazed at how many families came and loved it. It will be similar with your work, leading a conversation about monuments, who they’re for and how we walk past public art every day and don’t notice it, because it’s been there for 100 years or more. We are creating new monuments, new ways of seeing our culture. This work of yours exemplifies that. I love its scale. It’s in an amphitheatre of monuments in terms of the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park. It’s powerful to draw people in with the spectacle, the ‘wow’ and all the lights, and then ask them to think about what this work is.

RMN/ I agree. When I was looking at Hickson Road Reserve and imagery of the site at night, I noted it seemed like a postcard setting. When many think of Sydney, this is what comes to mind.

GM/ Absolutely. It’s the picture, the postcard.

RMN/ The other element I considered when creating this work was photographic traction. In the last two years especially, we’ve come to further understand the significance of an artwork’s life online. The way works are virtually presented, consumed and disseminated can meaningfully extend a work. I was strategic to conceive the proportionality and size of my work for Vivid in relation to humble modes of photography. I think this work will be photographed.

GM/ I have no doubt!

RMN/ I thought, how could I create a major sculptural work that would invite a level of phone photography that heightens some ideas I’m exploring? How could I present a contemporary artwork that encourages people to see the world differently via their experiences of mediation with a lens? On a very basic level, I wanted this work to have a sense of physical and figurative multiplicity. The head is four-sided. The figure has multiple legs and its expressions are visible from various angles. This multilimbed sentiment connects to figurative representation within Hinduism and other imaginative styles of representation present in animation or mythological narratives. I believe creating works that have the potential to invite multiple avenues of speculation can be powerful. Throughout history, towering figures in public space have often promoted singular or propagandist narratives.

GM/ Well, they’re very politicised, aren’t they?

RMN/ That’s it. I am exploring possible antidotes to this lineage. In doing so, I wanted it to be apparent that this

work was made by a human. And, that there are multiple ways to read the work.

GM/ The contemporary image I have of monuments now is them toppling over. This is certainly a thoughtstarter, asking what does the new monument look like? What is it about? How does it represent this incredible location, audience and occasion? I wanted that handmade feel because the whole premise of Vivid is creativity, innovation, technology. That doesn’t mean it’s not human. Your work is the most fundamentally tactile. I love that because it’s not something Vivid’s done a lot of and that’s a game changer. Vivid can still be innovative, creative, and bring these ideas to the fore, but in a very different way.

RMN/ Activating works with light and electricity is powerful. People generally have more literacy with moving images connected to light. Working with light and animation has potential to democratically engage audiences.

GM/ Totally. When I was very little, growing up in Adelaide, every Christmas on the banks of the Torrens, the local brewery would put on a light show. There was this volcano and a mechanical sculpture of Vulcan would come out, spewing fire. I was only about three or four, but I remember that as clearly as anything. When kids see your work, it’s exactly the kind of work that will stay in their minds. They’re not thinking about monumentalism, they’re going to have a visceral reaction and it will excite them. It might scare them a little bit because the volcano scared me a little bit, but it’s going to be in their memory. We can intellectualise works and that’s important, but with an event like Vivid, the sheer delight, energy and emotion

“We are creating new monuments, new ways of seeing our culture. This work of yours exemplifies that. I love its scale. It’s in an amphitheatre of monuments in terms of the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park.”

your work will create is something you won’t necessarily get in a gallery.

RMN/ I love art. It can provide these formative moments of encounter where you’re not prescribed a way of viewing the world. A thriving culture provides permission to speculate. We can have room for non-linear ways of thinking and value these approaches.

GM/ There are many entry levels into this work and I’m just so excited that you’re part of Vivid. Your work symbolises many things about where this country is right now, and where we’re going into the future. That’s important to have in the largest festival of its kind in the world. It’s going to bring a whole new dimension to the experience—and to about two million people that visit the festival!

RMN/ Oh, thank you! I imagine as the Artistic Director overseeing the identity of such a high-visibility program, you must feel pressure. How do you manage that?

GM/ There’s going to be people that love your work, people that like something else more, and people that don’t. I’m happy for that. Across the 50 artworks we’ve got, there’s something for everyone. It’s a narrative, a

cast of characters if you like, and some people are going to like some characters more than others. It’s about the whole experience. Part of it is never dumbing down and presenting the best work we can. Hand on heart, I have done everything I can to do that. There is work like yours, and then in Darling Harbour we’ve got a Bellagio style massive water, light, and music show that might be more accessible for some people, and there’s a part of you or me that will love that work as well. I go back to the quality of audience experience, though it’s not an exact science. That’s all you can do and be true to yourself. You’ve got to have an enormous amount of confidence in your decisions. The absolute joy for me is being in the crowd when no one knows my involvement and watching people enjoy it. That is the best gift in the world. Thanks for being part of it.

RMN/ Pleasure. I can’t wait!

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS bit.ly/rameshmn

VIVID SYDNEY FESITVAL: 27 MAY - 18 JUNE, 2022

EXHIBITION: POLYMORPHIC IDOLS, FROM 26 MAY

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Pink Spiky Figure, 2022 earthenware and automotive spray 74 x 58 x 30cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

Sam Leach: Everything Will Probably Be Fine

With Kate Crawford

Internationally renowned AI scholar Professor Kate Crawford sits down with Sam Leach to discuss his work in the context of AI—one of the most concentrated, distortionary industries in the world ahead of his solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf in June.

Professor Kate Crawford is one of the world’s leading scholars on the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. A research professor and a honorary professor and visiting chair of numerous international institutions such as USC Annenberg, University of Sydney, the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, she is also a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, New York. Over her 20-year research career, she has produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations.

Projects such as Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Beazley Design of the Year award and was acquired for the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, and the V&A, London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen produced Training Humans, the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. Their project Excavating AI won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science.

Crawford’s latest book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press) has been described as ‘trenchant’ by the New York Review of Books, ‘a fascinating history of data’ by the New Yorker, a ‘timely and urgent contribution’ by Science, and named one of the best books on technology in 2021 by the Financial Times.

Crawford sits down with internationally recognised AI artist Sam Leach to discuss his contributions to the field ahead of his solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf.

Sam Leach Polar Bear with Optimised Bananas, 2022 oil on linen 51 x 51cm

Image courtesy the artist

Sam Leach (SL)/ Kate Crawford, thank you very much for taking the time to talk about machine learning (ML), my work, artificial intelligence (AI), and the rapidly advancing technological Armageddon. The scope of machine learning applications is growing extremely quickly, how far do you see this extending, how is it likely to shape society and what role can artists play in that?

Kate Crawford (KC)/ Well, they’re a lot of very big questions! Let’s start from the top. Machine learning has really suffused into almost every aspect of everyday life. It’s in education, it’s in healthcare, it’s in hiring, it’s in criminal justice, it’s in policing, it’s in the military. It really has become an all-purpose tool. It’s the hammer for which everything is being turned into a nail. It is already well and truly a very active participant in shaping our social worlds in terms of how we see ourselves, how we see other people, how we understand the world in front of us, everything from autonomous vehicles to smartphones, to the sensors that track us as we move through city streets or when we go in and out of airports. All these applications are not just extracting enormous amounts of data about us, they’re also making predictions about how we will live, what we will buy, whether we’ll be a good employee, whether or not we deserve to get bail.

There are a small handful of tech companies that run these systems at scale, I tend to think of them as the great houses of AI. There are fewer than 10, depending on how you count, around the world. And in terms of the ones that actually control and own the backbone, which is poorly named ‘The Cloud’—because of course it is not at all spectral and abstract and floaty, it is in fact a profoundly material and energy consuming structure—there are really only four companies that own those structures. It is one of the most concentrated industries that we’ve had in the history of the world.

We see billionaires quietly buying up everything from how we’ll be accessing communication networks like Twitter, through to how we get shopping, through to how we get things delivered to us. So how do we get more people having a say? How are we really able to push back to say these are the places where AI is useful, and those are the places where it’s failing us and should not be used?

Artists have an extraordinarily important role to play here. One of the great privileges of my job is that I’ve collaborated with multiple artists around the world, like Trevor Paglen, Vladan Joler and Hito Steyerl. These artists ask questions about power and technology and, in doing

Sam Leach testing object detection using facial recognition software, 2022. Image courtesy the artist.

Sam Leach Large Bubble, 2022 oil on linen 240 x 175cm

Image courtesy the artist

so, they make these questions available to a much bigger audience than I normally would in academic corridors.

SL/ Given artists do play a role in widening the audience and bringing to light some of these hidden processes, I’m interested to get your thoughts about how a physical medium like painting can say something relevant about machine learning.

KC/ I think the way that you’ve been engaging with the tools of machine learning is really at the layer of how images are generated and how they are understood through the machinic gaze, if you will. In giving us the ability to see that, I think it does a couple of really powerful things:

One, it allows us to see the kind of distortions or ameliorations, an alien vision that is constructed at the level of a neural net. It shows the ways in which you can get things horribly wrong. What you see is how many sorts of stereotypes emerge, how many kinds of clichés around the visual there are, the deep Americanization of vision itself, and the profound cultural capture and appropriation of these tools. I think painting allows an intervention at that level to see that alien nature, and to start to question how meaning is being made.

The second thing that I think is really important for painting, and for art more generally, is to give us a way to think of the world differently, to open up an imaginative space, to think about how could AI be otherwise? In what other ways could we use these tools creatively, politically, to actually unseat forms of undemocratic power? I see

“What you see is how many sorts of stereotypes emerge, how many kinds of clichés around the visual there are, the deep Americanization of vision itself, and the profound cultural capture and appropriation of these tools.”

Sam Leach Polar Bear Detection I, 2022 oil on linen 51 x 51 cm

Image courtesy the artist

it as a profound space of utopian potential. These tools can do different things than simply be used for targeted advertising, hiring and targeted attacks; there is this other way. In that sense, certainly, art can be very powerful. I’m curious about your experience, Sam, in terms of how you’ve been working with this data and models. What have you been discovering?

SL/ Using the large pre-trained models (that are trained using the whole of the internet) they tell you something about internet users and how they understand images. With these models, I’m seeing images generated that remind me of oil spills and polar bears, these avatars of climate change. There’s a certain mood or theme portrayed that I’m not directly putting into the models, but they seem to be pulling these things together regardless. It is also interesting to see it’s really only a few lines of code that generates these results and the rest is just the data that fed into it. What I’ve learned is that the actual mechanism that’s driving these models isn’t that complicated, but rather the data and scale that’s generating such surprising conclusions.

KC/ I think what you say is so deeply resonant with my experience, so that people assume these systems are highly sophisticated and doing profoundly impactful things. I’ve used this term with a scholar, Alex Campolo. He and I wrote a paper on the concept of ‘enchanted determinism’, the idea that these systems are enchanted, they’re almost magical and superhuman in their power. They’re deterministic and they’re somehow able to give highly accurate predictions around what should be done or how we should live. But, in fact, the opposite is true. These are systems that are profoundly simple, basic, and, in many cases, just wrong. They are the opposite of neutral or objective, they’re profoundly political and skewed.

I love the images that you produce, the recurring polar

bear and these images of almost environmental collapse are haunting. I think about them almost as the ghosts in the AI machine. We’re seeing the legacy of the true planetary costs of these systems. This is a core, mostoverlooked issue when it comes to AI, it is leaving such a toxic environmental legacy. In your work, I think all of those kinds of deeper truths are actually evident in the imagery, which is just so interesting to me.

Working with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), there’s a particular type of look that you get, a melted plastic, or weird underworld feeling where it looks like a slightly nightmarish Daliesque vision of the world. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to see that visually and to imagine ‘if that’s what it looks like aesthetically, what does that look and feel like politically? What does that do linguistically? What does that do in all of the other different ways that these systems are being asked to interpret and intervene in our world?’

I think this is why artists have actually got a really extraordinarily powerful set of tools to play with, not just to create these images, but to use it as a way to give sense

“These tools can do different things than simply be used for targeted advertising, hiring and targeted attacks; there is this other way.”

Sam Leach Wolpertinger, 2022 oil on linen

Image courtesy the artist

Sam Leach Polar Bear Ghost with Bananas, 2022 oil on linen 51 x 51cm

Image courtesy the artist

to how these systems themselves are distortionary, how they create distortions by their very nature. That is one of the most important things for people to really grasp. There are many different ways to do it, but I feel like art is one of the most arresting and immediate ways where people can see what that strange, nightmarish landscape can look like and how it might be actually affecting them in the many different ways in which AI is already playing a role in their lives.

SL/ Absolutely. I feel like that’s actually a great place to wrap it up. Thank you again for taking the time to talk.

KC/ IIt’s been such a pleasure, Sam, really. Your work is so beautiful and it’s so important to be doing this kind of work at this time and to be raising these questions.

EXHIBITION: SAM LEACH: EVERYTHING WILL PROBABLY BE FINE, 9 JUN – 16 JUL, 2022

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW

“What I’ve learned is that the actual mechanism that’s driving these models isn’t that complicated, but rather the data and scale that’s generating such surprising conclusions.”

Yvette Coppersmith In Focus:

With her first solo exhibition since joining Sullivan+Strumpf fast approaching, Yvette Coppersmith reflects on the major moments of her career progression to date—from the intensity of winning the Archibald to the quiet of a residency in Mullumbimby, sharing the spectrum of experience that can profoundly impact an artist’s practice.

In 2017 and 2018, two notable things happened. Firstly, I painted Gillian Triggs, then President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Secondly, I became the tenth woman to win the Archibald Prize, with a self-portrait influenced by the desire to paint Jacinda Ardern.

These events marked the starting point of my political awareness as an artist and helped me to realise that I had a visual language to communicate with a national audience. I began to understand how my work could contribute to broader political and environmental conversations.

As soon as you paint a figure like Gillian Triggs, the work becomes a political statement. Aesthetic choices take on a new significance. For example, I chose emerald greens and wavy lines to express the beautiful, joyful and celebratory nature of her time and achievements in the very public role of President of the AHRC.

This gave me an avenue for thinking more about the nature of portraiture: that who you choose to paint is important, and how moving between self-portraiture and painting others is a way of platforming important and timely messages. I realised I am innately embedded within the portraits I choose to paint, that through a conscious visual language, I can embrace the social and political context for my work.

Another progression in my thinking and painting occurred in 2019, during a six-week residency in Mullumbimby. The residency was situated on a private property atop a hill—

formerly made available through the Byron School of Art. I was surrounded by the exquisite beauty of the land. As a Melbourne-based artist, the opportunity to live there for six weeks was life altering.

That idyllic landscape of the Northern Rivers has been both physically and psychically damaged by climate change. This was already occurring in 2019 but has become even more urgent since then. New IPCC reports have been published, coupled with the catastrophic bushfires of 2019-20, and recent and continuing floods. Mass consciousness around climate change has shifted dramatically. This is an era of protest, and there’s an awareness that everything is at stake in this decade. The movement that is building, seems like many chords to strike, and many voices need to create this choir.

The lack of structured time in Mullumbimby gave me space to process these, as well as other more personal

“I began to understand how my work could contribute to broader political and environmental conversations.”

Yvette Coppersmith in her Melbourne studio 2022.

Photo: Mel Savage

ideas and feelings. The creative shifts I began out there are still unfolding in my practice, and it became a seedbed for the works I’ve made since.

One of those shifts was that I realised I had been painting self-portraits in isolation for many years, and that I had a desire to bring a masculine energy into my work. This was the beginning of my paintings with a dance partner. Whilst there are two figures in these paintings, I think I was really trying to balance out my own inner masculine/feminine energies—to find an internal integration. These works were a step towards accessing an embodied energy and state of feeling, and a step towards moving further into abstraction.

One of the books I bought recently is Another World, The Transcendental Painting Group, and it has been a significant source of inspiration. The group were based in New Mexico in the 20th Century, and Agnes Pelton was

one of their most well-known artists. I discovered that these artists were heavily influenced by the Theosophical Society, and that this influence was also present in the work of Australian artists at the time such as Roy de Maistre.

These artists questioned the status quo of a growing materialistic culture and considered the spiritual in art as a way to nourish the soul; to elevate the human experience from the depravity of war. The Theosophical Society was also deeply connected to the suffrage movement and was a space for women’s political empowerment. The first woman elected to parliament in Australia—Edith Cowan— was a Theosophist. It’s her portrait on the $50 note.

Recently, I have been working with abstraction, with a desire to express embodied energies that can support the climate movement in a restorative way; paintings that can provide spiritual nourishment at a time when hurdles to achieving climate justice can seem overwhelmingly large. The aims of my work are to communicate a mental and spiritual awareness beyond the illusory forms of materialism. For me, the beautiful and transcendent are inherently political.

Yvette Coppersmith studies in the studio, 2022.

Photo: Mel Savage

Yvette Coppersmith works-in-progress for her upcoming solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf 2022.

Photo: Mel Savage

EXHIBITION: YVETTE COPPERSMITH, PRESAGE, 25 AUG – 10 SEP, 2022

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM

Inside Yvette Coppersmith’s studio 2022.

Photo: Mel Savage

Lara Merrett’s natural dye experiments in Bendalong, Yuin Country, with Joanna Fowles, 2022. Image courtesy the artist.

Lara Merrett Ties that Bind:

Lara Merrett shares the personal stories and connections that have underwritten much of her work over the last couple of years. After major exhibitions across the country including at UQ Art museum, MCA, Artspace, Sydney, and more, By my side walking, 2022, is the culmination of a new phase of research and collaborations resulting in her exciting first solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf.

I returned to my NSW South Coast home of Bendalong at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. I had watched the 2020 bushfires from Java Indonesia, horrified. How strange it now felt to be back home and to not know where I was. The familiar forest and coastline I once knew so well was charred, empty and in deathly silence.

Talk in the community was that there was a parcel of unburnt bush on the edge of town about to be bulldozed for a development. These 80 acres of pristine forest would be destroyed in less than a week. ‘Surely not’, we thought, after everything that had happened.

Calls and texts were made, news was spreading that there was going to be a blockade early in the morning before the diggers turned up. The developers had tied fluoro pink strings around the trees that would stay. When

I turned up, all I could see was a forest of pink stringed trees. Obviously, the community had been busy. We set up yoga mats on the side of the road as walkers, cyclists, skateboarders, and prams came out in force to ‘legally’ protest at a 1.5 metre covid-safe distance from one another.

This is where my current body of work and recent activism all started.

After the last few years, I knew I wanted to make a body of works about the Manyana and Bendalong communities, where I live, their resilience and how this has been written through experiences of hardship. My communities, and collaboration in general, are incredibly important to me, so I wanted to make a body of work which was dedicated to this—to embark on research about local histories

Lara Merrett, Work-in-progress (detail), 2022. Image courtesy the artist.

Bendalong, Yuin Country, 2022. Image courtesy the artist.

Lara Merrett’s natural dye experiments in Bendalong, Yuin Country, 2022. Image courtesy the artist.

Lara Merrett’s natural dye experiments in Bendalong, Yuin Country, 2022.

Image courtesy the artist.

of survival and resilience that hold incredible value, reverberating as they do beyond their local borders and speaking to a universal human condition.

By my side walking, 2022, is a series of ‘readable’ paintings. Composed of both stretched and sculpturally folded or suspended linen canvas, these fabrics are tactile and tender, requiring physical viewer interaction to be ‘read’. My creative and Manyana (Yuin Country) communities were collaborative participants in their making, imbuing them with their stories and knowledges as a means of coming together, to share, to recover.

In the gallery, the paintings will be arranged and mounted using walls, floors and suspension encouraging a free, fluid and non-linear engagement. The works are intertextual and bring together not only the communities with whom I work but also the different areas of my practice. I hope that by bringing people into contact with the works and each other, they become physically immersed in the stories told within.

Bringing together community to paint, recount decisive actions and strategies, to share knowledges about the land and the ongoing protection needed in the surrounds of the Conjola National Park, and to reiterate these stories in the space of the gallery, is a really powerful thing—art is not only able to bring communities together but can actually create communities which might not have existed before.

Lara Merrett

EXHIBITION: LARA MERRETT, BY MY SIDE WALKING, 29 SEP –15 OCT, 2022

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW

Natalya Hughes At Home:

Ahead of her much-anticipated solo show

These Girls of the Studio with the gallery in September, Sullivan+Strumpf put a few questions to Natalya Hughes about her move north, her studio practice, the recent floods and what she holds most dear. With the announcement of another major solo exhibition, this time with the IMA, Brisbane, a much desired studio extension might also be on the cards as this next year promises to be one of Hughes’ biggest yet.

Natalya Hughes’ home studio, Tarragindi, NSW, 2022.

Photo: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Natalya Hughes, Work-in-progress in the studio, 2022.

Photo: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Where do you call home? Can you describe the view from your favourite window?

Home right now is Tarragindi, on the edge of Toohey Forest Park. From any one of the windows (studio included) can be seen very, very, old, very tall trees and an abundant, if not a little wild, garden. It’s been a pretty big shift from the concrete courtyard of our Sydney home to all this greenery.

Is there a significant moment, memory or piece of history that you associate with this house?

Since we’ve been in this house we’ve slowed right down. This is in part because of the move to Brisbane, in part because of the age of our daughter, and in part because of the pandemic. During lockdown, we were at our most quiet but also most productive (studio wise). We live upstairs, our studios are downstairs. And that was perfect. That period will remain forever in my mind because I learnt so much about how I work and what (and who) I want around me. Still feeling grateful that I had that experience to just be here.

Your studio is also based at your home, which was recently subjected to terrible flooding. Has the space recovered? How does this proximity to your work usually influence your creative process?

So, I guess that’s the one downside to having my studio in my home. When one goes bad, they both kind of suffer. I want to say with regards to the floods that we were, by comparison, incredibly lucky. It wasn’t the kind of terrible flooding others experienced. And to this extent, it’s hard

to even complain. But it was an exhausting and terrifying experience seeing water fill the studio for three days and nights, despite constant bailing. In any case, almost everything was saved, despite some ongoing asbestos issues. So, on we go.

I’m certainly not giving up on the home studio concept. At this point in my life, I want the privilege of being able to put my child to sleep then walk down the stairs and work for a few hours. I like being able to grab small amounts of time wherever they may be, without having to drive somewhere or even get dressed in anything but pyjamas. Sometimes, I miss having other artists to talk to (other than my partner) but not as often as I expected. I am much, much, more productive this way. I love it, despite the current rebuild mess. And I am looking to extend, to grab even more working space as soon as I can, so I have been working with a friend who’s an architect to make that happen.

“it was an exhausting and terrifying experience seeing water fill the studio for three days and nights, despite constant bailing.”

Natalya Hughes studio view, 2022.

Photo: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Are you a collector? Do you have a most treasured object?

I realised in the flood that I have many treasured objects, and I don’t treat them nearly as carefully as I should. There is a lot of art here, gained mostly through swaps with other artists. I have bought a few things and been gifted a few things. And, as it turns out, I am also very attached to things that don’t read as treasure to others but are treasures to me: brushes, books, easels, tools, yarn, textiles...Those, and every single thing my daughter and my partner have ever made, I was staring at and thinking: ‘I don’t want to be without you, thing’.

What do you do to unwind?

Ha! I am known for not being very good at that. I think I need to be taken to the beach, or a pool. Then I unwind, just enough to entertain the idea of unwinding further. Other than that, it’s just making that alleviates anxiety. And sometimes gardening. I sound old.

EXHIBITION: NATALYA HUGHES, THESE GIRLS OF THE STUDIO, 22 SEP – 15 OCT, 2022

Natalya Hughes studio view, 2022.

Photo: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Last Word:

Dr Simon Maidment, Associate Director, Museums & Collections, University of Melbourne

Dr Simon Maidment portrait, 2021. Image courtesy The University of Melbourne.

Dr. Simon Maidment is Associate Director, Art Museums, in the Museums and Collections department at the University of Melbourne, and Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art and Buxton Contemporary, as well as overseeing programming at Old Quad and the 2019 M Pavilion, all situated in Melbourne. Previously, Maidment spend eight years at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), as Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and completed his PhD at the University’s Centre for Ideas in 2018.

His research into curatorial practice as a method to investigate art’s relationship to social and political change is directly informing new acquisitions and programming now being implemented across the collection.

Here he talks to Ursula Sullivan about revitalising collections and programming.

Exhibition view of ‘Observance’, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2021-22.

Photo: Christian Capurro

Exhibition view of ‘Observance’, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2021-22, featuring Angela Tiatia’s Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis, 2010, single channel digital video, colour, silent, 0:01:31 mins, aspect ratio 16:9, edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs. Photo: Christian Capurro

Hi Simon, welcome back after your trip to Venice! How was it? Any highlights?

Thank you, Ursula, it was an immensely productive trip. I went with two First Nations staff members who were involved in the aabaakwad program, linked to the Sámi Pavilion presentation—also known as the Nordic Pavilion. It was fantastic reconnecting with my network again and engaging in some informal exchange and knowledge sharing. While the move to Zoom has allowed a certain type of exhibition and project development to be streamlined, the flow of ideas in less structured ways has been impacted and it was fantastic to have access to that more organic process with international colleagues. Seeing art in the flesh was a highlight too. The Australian representation with Marco Fusinato’s performance installation was really exciting, and I loved experiencing and considering it in contrast to, and exchange with, the French, Belgian, Romanian, Sámi and Polish Pavilions in particular.

We’ve noticed a new direction for the University collections and exhibitions, one that perhaps aims to highlight both First Nations and Female artists—the recent exhibition at Buxton Contemporary Observance was a powerful example of new perspectives to be shared. What drives this?

We are not alone in recognising this important moment to expand the opportunities for more diverse voices. We have developed a new Artistic Vision for the program which reflects a shift in the University’s vision, Advancing Melbourne, which acknowledges Grand Challenges that face us today and we are committed to contributing to addressing them. This recognition of a socially impeded position is a significant statement of agency and shared responsibility. It acts as a call to action across the University, marking a shift of institutional mindset from a distanced ‘apolitical’ position to an active poly-political one. This carries into our new Collection Strategy. The Strategy identifies that the University of Melbourne Art Collection should primarily advance opportunities for research and educational activities through object-based learning. Gaps in the Collection will be addressed, beginning with a recognition that efforts must continue to diversify voices within the Collection. The priorities are to increase the numbers of works by women, LGBTIQ+ identifying artists, artists of colour, artists of diverse cultural backgrounds, and art from certain regions and Indigenous language groups around the country.

What was one thing you wanted to change about what works were acquired, and how these were engaged with by audiences (so two things!) when you took up this position?

In terms of what was collected, the main change is to

refocus priorities to collecting works that will be actively used by different faculties and areas of the University for teaching and learning, rather than replicating the accumulation that might typify a State Gallery or Museum with a more ‘encyclopaedic’ approach to representing an era, or movement. This collection needs to be used in a different way to those. This means greater consultation with our academic colleagues when identifying typologies of work to collect.

What are some of the greatest challenges about the acquisition process today?

Establishing clear provenance in collecting historical works is an enormous challenge. Aside from this, I would say the process of acquisition itself is not terribly challenging,

but instead, time consuming. There is a great deal more documentation required—for good reason—than in the past, which I put down to the industry becoming more aware of its responsibilities.

The greatest challenges are more to do with how a work is managed following its acquisition. These issues include: its digitisation and discoverability; increasing access for communities, including communities of origin, and deciding what that access looks like (for instance where cultural objects might be held); in the cases of historical collections issues of provenance, repatriation and rematriation; adherence to cultural heritage legislation; and resourcing consultation with communities. These all factor into the decision to acquire and are ongoing for as long as the work remains under our custodianship.

Finally, a favourite moment since taking the role?

Look, there are many, I really enjoy the challenge and opportunities and I am at home in the context of the University, with which I have had a very long association. Most recently, I had a moment on the weekend where I felt deeply moved as part of my role. I was humbled to listen to Observance artists Julie Gough, Lisa Hilli and Angela Tiatia in conversation with the curators Samantha Comte and Hannah Presley. The insight, resilience, vulnerability, generosity and solidarity they all embodied was very special. The event acted as a reminder to me of the responsibilities we have, to bring care and close attention to our roles on an everyday basis, and of the incredible opportunities we have to reshape our future if we listen carefully and work together in support of those goals.

Photo: Christian Capurro

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its ar ts funding and advisory body The IMA is supported by the Queensland Government through Ar ts Queensland, the Australian Government through Australia Council for the Ar ts, and the Visual Ar ts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Federal, State, and Territory Governments. The IMA is a member of Contemporary Ar t Organisations Australia.

Up Next

DAWN NG INTO AIR

18.08.22 – 10.09.22

YVETTE COPPERSMITH PRESAGE

25.08.22 – 10.09.22

SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 07.09.22 – 11.09.22

NATALYA HUGHES THESE GIRLS OF THE STUDIO 22.09.22 – 15.10.22

29.09.22 – 15.10.22

LARA MERRETT BY MY SIDE WALKING