In Focus: Yvette Coppersmith

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.

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

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

Yvette Coppersmith works-in-progress for herupcoming solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf 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.

Inside Yvette Coppersmith’s studio 2022.Photo: Mel Savage

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