Sullivan+Strumpf Oct/Nov/Dec by sullivanstrumpf

Irfan Hendrian, Unearthly Matter 5, 2024, Risography and dye cut on layers on paper, 97.4×56.4×7.8 cm

As another year storms towards its closing act, the energy at Sullivan+Strumpf remains high. We find ourselves with no shortage of extraordinary milestones, meaningful exhibition programming, and significant off-site projects. This edition is a celebration, one that we are so proud to share with you.

In the galleries, Jemima Wyman extends her rigorous study of protest, of political and social narratives in Atmospheric Disturbances, a new exhibition realised in vibrant colour the result of complex cataloguing; Marion Abraham’s Joyride ruminates on themes of joy and resistance, of love and disobedience, set against a back-drop of light and shadow; Natalya Hughes’ first solo exhibitions in our Collingwood gallery, An Entertainment enters in a striking visual dialogue with the fashion and costume illustrations by Erté Romaine de Tirtoff through Hughes’ own illustrative language; Glenn Barkley’s experimental idiocy sees the artist unite the traditional materiality of ceramics with phrases and slogans now prolific in our contemporary lexicon; and Lara Merrett explores the language of colour and of the self through gestures as free and flowing as water in fathom and feet. Presented at the Arts House, Singapore, Irfan Hendrian exhibits new works rendered in paper and steeped in a personal reflection of cultural identity.

We have the joy of celebrating the unveiling of Lindy Lee’s Ouroboros at the National Gallery of Australia. Ouroboros was commissioned by the National Gallery on the occasion of its 40th anniversary and marks a most significant career milestone for Lee, one that represents new frontiers in her career and in the landscape of contemporary art in Australia.

Two art fairs remain in our calendar for the year: Frieze London and Art Jakarta. This mark’s the gallery’s debut presentation at Frieze London, a significant milestone for us and for our artists. With a curation of works by Gregory Hodge, Lindy Lee and Naminapu Maymuru-White, we are proud to be bringing such extraordinary Australian artists to Regent’s Park in the heart of London. Our return to Art Jakarta, one of the highlights of our year, comes with a presentation of new works by Irfan Hendrian, Kanchana Gupta, Tiffany Loy, Carmen Ceniga Prado and Enggar Rhomadioni. We are thrilled to partake in this important platform for artistic exchange and cultural dialogue, deepening our connection in a region so vital to the gallery. The beginning of 2025 will see the art fair calendar begin anew with ART SG in Singapore and Melbourne Art Fair here at home in Australia. We look forward to welcoming you to each of these significant art fairs, near or far.

As the year’s end brings you to every manner of celebrations, we would like to thank you, sincerely, for your support and engagement with contemporary art, and wish you the best of everything in the coming year.

Happy reading,

Jo+Urs

The Water Understands

Miguel

Angelo Libarnes, Leah Bullen, Michael Cook, Tamara Dean, Keg De Souza, Phillip George, Shaun Gladwell, Gregory Hodge, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Douglas Schofield, Angela Tiatia

13 Dec 2024 - 16 Feb 2025

Curated by Ben Rak

Manly Art Gallery & Museum

West Esplanade Reserve, Manly, NSW

Open 10am - 5pm, Tue - Sun | Free entry

@magamnsw magam.com.au

Gregory Hodge, Seascape, 2024 acrylic on linen, 200 x 160cm Photography Gregory Copitet

Quick Curate Mariia Zhuchenko

Sullivan+Strumpf Frieze London

Jemima Wyman Atomspheric Disturbances 30

Marion Abraham Joyride 38

Irfan Hendrian Incognito 46

Natalya Hughes An Entertainment

Lara Merrett Fathom and Feet

Glenn Barkley Experimental Idiocy 72

Lindy Lee A Beacon Unveiled: Ouroboros

Last Word Deborah Hart

MARIIA ZHUCHENKO ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, SINGAPORE

AS WE bounce into spring (or autumn, if you are reading this in the Northern Hemisphere), we welcome a seasonal shift: nature’s transition into or from a cool slumber, and a flow of transformational energy. Everything sprouts back to life after either a quiet rest or a much-needed holiday. The art world is no exception. Artists feel rejuvenated and inspired, museums prepare to launch their seasonal blockbuster exhibitions, collectors amplify their curiosities and galleries are back to planning their next art fairs.

I consider Art Jakarta a personal favourite in the yearly art fair calendar. Taking place in early October, it brings together artists, galleries and curators from all corners of Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on celebrating the rich and diverse art ecology of Indonesia. It is a fair where a solo visitor, without any knowledge of Indonesian artists, can swiftly make long term friends and connections while gaining an insight into what inspires and influences practitioners in the region.

This year, we return with a diverse presentation of Southeast Asian artists. Irfan Hendrian will present a large work ahead of his highly anticipated solo exhibition in Singapore that will explore resilience and the traumatic history of Chinese Indonesians; Enggar Rhomadioni’s group of smaller paintings will no doubt keep visitors curious to discover many hidden narratives and details from his childhood; Carmen Ceniga Prado will also return with a painting that looks at her experience of motherhood – a new body of work that is to be presented at the end of September at the Singapore Studio; and Sullivan+Strumpf is thrilled to be introducing new artists at Art Jakarta, Kanchana Gupta and Tiffany Loy.

Portrait of Mariia Zhuchenko at Singapore Studio, 2024, photograph Sarah Isabelle Tan

Carmen Ceniga Prado Sitting in the Dark, 2024 ink and acrylic on canvas, 152×106 cm

Irfan Hendrian ◙☼, 2023 layers of paper on board, 201×200×6 cm

Kanchana Gupta Open and Close #25, 2024 Oil paint skin burnt and stripped off French machine made lace, 82×64 cm

Tiffany Loy Depth Exploration 01, 2023 abaca, polyester, 77×77×2 cm

Carmen Ceniga Prado Echo of a Transformation, 2024 ink and acrylic on canvas, 172×97 cm

Irfan Hendrian ◙+, 2024 layers of paper on board, 170×240×6 cm

Kanchana Gupta Open and Close #24, 2024

Oil paint skin burnt and stripped off French machine made lace, 79×65 cm (framed)

Enggar Rhomadioni Lima Puluh Satu Derajat Celcius (Fifty One Celsius Degree), 2024 oil on canvas, 30×43 cm

Tiffany Loy Depth Exploration 05, 2024 abaca, polyester, 42×62×1 cm

Frieze London

Sullivan+Strumpf

Regent’s

In October 2024, Sullivan+Strumpf makes its debut appearance at Frieze London, one of the most significant events in the yearly art fair calendar. With a presentation of new works by Gregory Hodge, Lindy Lee and Naminapu Maymuru-White, we are proud to be bringing such extraordinary Australian artists to Regent’s Park in the heart of London.

Gregory Hodge is an Australian artist based in Paris, France. His paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, layering personal source material with painterly gestural marks and obscured motifs of foliage, interiors and architecture. With an ongoing interest in how to render different material surfaces in paint, Hodge’s recent works eschew a slick, pop finish for a deliberately handmade quality designed to resemble the warp and weft of tapestries and other woven materials.

Gregory Hodge in the studio, Paris, 2024, photograph Gregory Copitet

He does this using specially handmade tools and brushes, working from illustrations and photographs that are digitally collaged before being painstakingly recreated in paint. These layered compositions convince as collage, with Hodge’s use of shadows and sharp edges reinforcing these intellectual as well as visual collisions, with forms and shapes seeming to hover and stack. The foremost layer of Hodge’s paintings though are the ribbon-like painterly gestures that move across the surface of the composition, standing in for figures, fabric and other restless forms. In paintings that appear to grapple with wanting to be representational, these gestures are designed to disrupt any coherent reading of the symbols and surfaces, and to return these densely packed paintings back to the subject and experience of painting.

Gregory Hodge, In Bloom, 2024, acrylic on linen, 200×160 cm

FRIEZE LONDON

LINDY LEE

Over four decades, Lindy Lee has established herself as one of Australia’s most influential and respected contemporary artists. Drawing on her experiences as a second-generation Chinese Australian, the artist has explored ideas around connection, belonging, identity, and history to create some of Australia’s most important contemporary artworks. Augmented by her study of Zen Buddhism and Taoism, Lee’s contemplation of materiality and immateriality, has seen her produce work in co-creation with nature—often employing elements of chance to produce works that embody a profound connection with the cosmos.

In Lee’s fire and rain drawings, collaborations with natural forces are realised through mindful engagement with the elements. Inspired by Zen & Taoist cosmology and philosophy, the drawings are meditations on interdependent, cyclical, and generative interactions. In reference to Indra’s net, and to indicate infinite connecting points of celestial light, countless perforations are scorched into paper marked by fire and trailing smoke. Some works are offered to the rain and as it falls, Lee responds and enhances the mark with a flask of Chinese ink that swirls and surges before settling. Hereafter, as light passes through each delicate aperture, we are reminded of the vastness of the cosmos and the interconnection of all things. Through her multifaceted and expansive practice, Lindy Lee reminds us of the immensity and wonder of the universe and the dynamism of life.

Left: Lindy Lee, The Sun of Another World, 2024, Chinese ink, fire and rain on paper, 200×140 cm. Right: Lindy Lee, Depths of Quintessence, 2024, Chinese ink, fire and rain on archival paper, 200×140 cm

A contemporary powerhouse of Yolŋu painting, Naminapu Maymuru-White continues to captivate audiences worldwide, melding sacred creation clan designs that explore Yolŋu cosmology, with a contemporary instinct that is uniquely her own. Her significance in the art world is undeniable, with her works held in major collections both nationally and overseas, reflecting the global resonance of her practice.

Portrait of Naminapu Maymuru-White in the studio, 2024, photograph Leicolhn McKellar

This year, Maymuru-White’s inclusion in Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedroso, the prestigious exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale, marks her as a critical voice internationally, confirming her status as a cultural ambassador and innovator, redefining Yolŋu art in the 21st century. The major multi- piece installation is a testament to her ability to push the boundaries of traditional Yolŋu art while staying deeply rooted in its core principles, offering the international audience a glimpse into the rich cultural landscape of Northeast Arnhem Land.

Maymuru-White’s upcoming inclusion in Frieze London has cemented her role as a major figure in contemporary art. Her participation in these significant events signals the continuing evolution and growing recognition of Indigenous art on the world stage. As an artist who bridges the traditional and the modern, Naminapu Maymuru-White's work is a testament to the enduring power and relevance of Yolŋu culture in today's artistic landscape.

, 2024, earth pigment on stringybark, 201×95.5 cm. Right: Naminapu Maymuru White, 415 cm, dimensions variable, 17 panels

KERAMEIKOS THE POTTERS’ QUARTER

Idil Abdullahi Glenn Barkley Kirsten Coelho

Janet Fieldhouse

Juz Kitson

Monica Rani Rudhar Vipoo Srivilasa

Kirsten Coelho

Elegy for Twelve Maidens 2024 12 Porcelain objects

Satin Glaze - 35 x 60 x 60 cm

Photograph Grant Hancock

Look Contemporary Australian Portraiture

1 November 2024–12 January 2025

Featuring: Yvette Coppersmith, Julie Dowling, Graeme Drendel, Prudence Flint, Julia Gutman, Lewis Miller, Michael Vale, Peter Wegner and

Glen Eira City Council Gallery

Corner Glen Eira and Hawthorn Roads, Caulfield

Monday–Friday, 10am–5pm. Saturday and Sunday, 1pm–5pm. Closed public holidays. Free admission. www.gleneira.vic.gov.au/gallery

Marcus Wills.

Yvette Coppersmith

Seated portrait feeding cat 2024 Oil and sand on jute 113cm x 97.5cm

Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Melbourne and Sydney

Photo: Matthew Stanton

Portrait of Jemima Wyman in LA, 2024, photography James Naish

JEMIM A WYMAN ATMOSPHERI DISTURB AN ES

Text Anastasia Murney

Sunspots

by Anastasia Murney

In the 1920s and 30s, a Soviet historian and biologist named Alexander Chizhevsky theorised a connection between popular mass mobilisations and increased solar activity. He collected a huge amount of empirical data to support this idea, arguing the changing patterns of the sun impact the human neuropsychological apparatus, leading to excitability and sharpening people’s reflexes. Chizhevsky tracked this through the development of sunspots. Sunspots are like blemishes, dark spots on the surface of the sun. A sunspot is trapped light: powerful electromagnetic forces draw hot, inner materials from the core to the surface, creating a build-up of pressure. Sunspots are a warning, signalling the imminence of violent solar storms.

REVOLUTIONS, UPRISINGS, REVOLTS, RIOTS, AND WARS BREAK OUT. THEN, AS THE SUNSPOTS DECREASE, THERE IS A SENSE OF BELATEDNESS AND BREAKDOWN.

Sunspots proliferate and recede in an eleven-year cycle. In each cycle, Chizhevsky proposed four epochs with distinct sociopsychological characteristics. With a small number of sunspots, the masses are peaceful and pliable. He describes the signing of peace treaties and surrenders. As the sunspots increase, new social ideas emerge, collectives are formed. There is a worsening of international relations, conspiracies start to take root. When there is a maximum density of sunspots, leaders and influential orators arise, mass movements spread with speed. Revolutions, uprisings, revolts, riots, and wars break out. Then, as the sunspots decrease, there is a sense of belatedness and breakdown. People’s councils disperse and dissolve. Uprisings are suppressed. Fatigue and disillusionment set in.

A photograph is also the product of trapped light. Jemima tells me she makes photocollages in cycles of three to six months. She scours the internet for smoke emanating not from wars but protests. The wisps, plumes, and clouds of smoke are woven into a single image. In cutting and arranging the photographs, she accentuates the billowing effects of smoke as it expands. What is striking about the newest works in Jemima’s Haze series is their galactic, psychedelic qualities. In Haze 14, the smoke stretches and magnifies bright colours: yellow, lilac, blue, pink, orange. These artworks remind me of the Hubble Space Telescope’s slow exposure images of the cosmos, revealing deep, swirling patterns, stellar nurseries, and giant pillars of gas and dust. Sifting through the smoke, one might locate fragments of bodies and objects: a person in a balaclava, a high-vis vest, a riot shield, an arm hurling a tear gas canister. Little figurative spots fracturing the surface of the image. To me, it makes sense to think of sunspots as people under pressure. People who join with other people to express their anger and frustration on the streets.

Jemima Wyman, Haze 23 (detail), 2024, hand-cut digital photographs, 125 x 100 cm

It feels like Jemima is asking: what moves a movement? Is revolution a cosmic event? The earliest scholars of social movements interpreted the ‘irrational’ behaviour of the crowd as a contagion, unruliness is transmitted from one individual to another. Later, scholars attempted to understand social movements in terms of self-interest, how an individual weighs up the costs and benefits of participating. Others argued the success of a social movement comes down to how organisations mobilise and compete for resources. In the 1980s, a group of scholars sought to emphasise the specific political conditions in which a movement takes shape. In much of the literature, there is a persistent search for patterns, causal mechanisms, and formulas that can be used to predict whether a social movement will succeed or fail. The question that often occupies me as I look into the archives of radical struggle, at million strong marches and world-stopping general strikes, is why them and not us? Why there and not here?

Jemima is also searching for patterns. She creates a detailed index for each photocollage with captions sometimes spanning multiple pages. In Haze 18, for instance, there is smoke from a car bomb in Baghdad, smoke from burning tires in Dakar, smoke mixed with tear gas in Gaza, and coloured flare smoke from an Extinction Rebellion protest at COP26 in Glasgow. She is interested in the repetition of certain colours and tactical repertoires that travel across the political spectrum. We can track the use of smoke as weapon, celebration, and obfuscation. In Hong Kong, for instance, small teams of anti-government ‘firefighters’ would dart out from the frontline to cover tear gas shells with a traffic cone, redirecting the smoke upward. In this sense, to look at the artworks in Atmospheric Disturbances is like tilting a Magic Eye illustration in order to coax out a new logic for understanding the connections between social movements.

I read books about revolutions. I teach and talk to students. I look at art and write about it. I go to rallies and stand on pickets. I also read Tarot cards and it’s on this level that I resonate with Jemima’s psychedelic cartographies of global unrest. tarot cards are populated with feudal archetypes, astrological signs, and natural elements. The symbolic language of the Tarot offers an alternative approach to navigating crisis, stepping back from conventional methods of problem-solving or well-worn vocabularies that produce familiar ruts and dead ends. This is not about thinking in a straight line. Tarot, like Jemima’s photocollages, belong to an ‘irrational’ science that is willing to step into strange and experimental registers, to think in the direction of sunspots and air particles.

While researching Chizhevsky, I stumble on his second major contribution: the air ioniser, designed to filter air pollutants, such as dust, allergens, and smoke. It seems strange to reflect on the vast difference in scale between his grand, cosmic research linking mass mobilisations and sunspots and the invention of the domestic air ioniser. In Declassified 91, many of the subjects wear masks. Gas masks, surgical masks, hoodies, and helmets (private filtration systems of a different kind) are sprinkled across the Declassified series. Militant and playful forms of masking are recurring features in Jemima’s practice. In the context of social movements, a mask can dismantle formal barriers to participation, enabling a facelessness that is against the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ and in favour of the ‘we’. However, in the tenuous aftermath of the pandemic and amid ongoing climate catastrophes, the act of masking takes on a more apocalyptic tone. This is what Achille Mbembe describes as “the great chokehold” of the present. Asphyxiation is not a metaphor.

Jemima Wyman, Haze 21 (detail), 2024, hand-cut digital photographs, 125 x 100 cm

Jemima Wyman, Haze 20, 2024, hand-cut digital photographs, 118.5×158 cm, 122.5×162 cm (framed)

Jemima Wyman, Haze 23, 2024, hand-cut digital photographs, 125×100 cm, 129×104 cm (framed)

But the problem of sorting good air particles from bad remains. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, ‘we are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must.’ The root of the word ‘conspire,’ to plot and plan together, comes from the Latin spirare, which means ‘to breathe’. To join a protest, to speak and shout, to share breath and space with others is a cathartic ritual. Chants, prayers, poems, and songs are the lifeblood of movements. Jemima’s Declassified series captures the moments where activists fight to counter asphyxiation with resuscitation.

As I write these final sentences, I draw ‘The Tower’ from the Rider Waite Smith deck. It is the card with the ‘worst’ reputation, signalling chaos, disaster, and turbulence. Two figures are shot from a burning castle, their faces stricken with grief and shock. Flames lick the windows and bright flecks of fire spill out the sides. Once more, I think about the predictive pattern of sunspots, mapping the co-ordinates of the oncoming storm. Sometimes, there can be no controlled release of pressure. In this context, fascist and genocidal regimes must burn in order for new worlds to be born. We live in a time of explosions. Our task is to make sense through the smoke.

1 Alexander Chizhevsky, “The World-Historical Cycles,” from The Earth in the Sun’s Embrace, translated by Ian Dreiblatt. In Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.

2 Achilles Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47 (2021): 58–62.

3 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.

4 Charles Tilly and Leslie J. Wood, Social Movements, 1768–2012. London: Paradigm Publishers, 2013. e who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries.

OPENING

17 Oct – 9 Nov, 2024

Jemima Wyman: Atmospheric Disturbances Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney

Jemima Wyman, Declassified 93, 2024, hand cut digital photographs, 32.5×42 cm

28 Aug to 11 Nov 2024

Sophia Al-Maria (QT/US) , Peggy Ahwesh (US) , Daniel Boyd (AU) , Jessie French (AU) , and Jemima Wyman (AU/US)

Curated by Amelia Wallin

latrobe.edu.au/art-institute

Image: Jemima Wyman , Haze 16 , 2023 , Hand cut digital photo collage , 122 × 91.5 cm

MARION ABRAHAM

TEXT ALICE PROCTER

ARTWORK PHOTOGRAPHY AARON ANDERSON

PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY GRACE CHIA

OPENING

17 Oct– 9 Nov, 2024

Marion Abraham: Joyride

Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal Nura/Sydney

Marion Abraham, La Liberté (#1), 2024, oil and copper on wood, 100×100 cm

A panoramic painting is supposed to trick you, to make you believe you see a faultless, impossible view. It’s a surveilling genre, an entitled way of looking, smooth and without limits. The early panoramas of the 1800s were of cities, celebrations of the modern world and all its pristine little blocks; these panoramic scenes were vast, but the scale of the buildings in them made the viewers giants, let them possess the whole landscape. Visitors had to walk through a dark corridor to clear their minds before stepping into the theatre of the panorama, a perfect circle with no edges, always the same brilliantly cloudless noon, a picturesque scene. Standing in the hypnotically immaculate view, visitors experienced a kind of delusion, unsure where they really were: not in a windowless room surrounded by paintings, but on the roof of a building, or a hill above a city, somewhere far away. Transported by the fantasy, they became dislocated, unstable, lost in the dream of clean lines and no shadows.

These panoramas trained their viewers to see the world at a distance, to detach from its sensations and havoc, become serene. To call something picturesque is to kill it: a desire to fix the place in time, to hunt and catch and devour a moment, perfect for a fragment of a second. The picturesque landscape is not a thing to be in, but a thing to look at, as beautiful as taxidermy.

Marion Abraham’s Joyride panorama is not the usual kind. Spanning several panels, scenes overlap, fragments of the whole: the same sky, the same horizon, but broken apart. Verdant plains, long shadows, dawn and dusk and storm clouds all at once. Something is burning in the background. Figures lurch in and out of focus, a car is set alight, bonfires and houses become punctures in the green. Textures blur and bleed with the sickening vision of drunkenness or perhaps hunger. This landscape is in motion, a film reel with missing frames, moving slow enough to feel the jolt but fast enough that we can’t see the gap. The scale is different, too: bodies break the view, coiled and still, embracing and whispering to one another.

Light the Fume sees two people, faces covered, matching coats and masks, move in the synch of total understanding. Do the figures feel each other, across the frames? Is there time, here in the paintings? In Little Sister and Sweetness, that same yellow shirt appears twice, the girl wearing it growing older from one panel to the next, now

away from the fire, accepting an embrace. Strong arms and flashes of bright red lips appear beside small naked shoulders in I Will Not Be Daunted, downcast and unflinching.

But in the reeling, smoke-filled landscape there are moments of stillness, peace. Braided hair, a child: these are gestures of softness, of slow touch. Here are the small, quiet scenes, shared fruit and ornament. An overflowing table, a face turned the sense again that something is happening just out of frame, that there is a more private world somewhere else. Gentler light, a glow that is more holy than feverish, and still the same unmistakeable wild motion in the background.

The pure adrenal desire of fury is born of love. Here is La Liberté, in that burning yellow again, bare breasted, mouth screaming red. She is a guide and an ideal, the holy sister of the other women: here is that same low building in the background, the same clouds. She is a vision, but she is as real as anything else is.

Marion and I talked online, between Lenapehoking and lutruwita, sister colonies of invasive species and broken tongues. We spoke about frenetic, furious crowds and the creeping anguish of the same chants, the same marches. We talked about rest and sustenance, the desire to retreat into landscapes that have been violated beyond repair but are still somehow places of salvation; the need to be sublimely devoured by wildness, to be swallowed and feel no urge to bite back at it. We talked about uncertainty, the seduction of despair. External beauty and internal terror, horror and grief, the whirling desperation of living in a memento mori. Something is always burning in the background.

Violence is alchemical: it changes what is natural, refigures everything it touches. The only answer to outrageous cruelty is a more decadent abandon, a stolen joy that creeps through the ash and is made brighter and stronger by it. The antidote to the sterile picturesque is the profligate baroque, the dizzying outpouring of sensuality. The dispassionate surface is broken and its jagged edges become clear, all its vanity falls away; the panorama rips and something rougher, more animal, stands behind it. In the tumult, there is the stretching and loosening of possibility, the irresistible pull of revolution and rebirth. Within the turning and turning is the grain of sand that makes the pearl.

Marion Abraham, You Bury Me, 2024, oil and copper on linen, 111×183 cm

Marion Abraham, I Will Not Be Daunted, 2024, oil and copper on linen, 111×183 cm

Marion Abraham, Sadness In On Me A Moment, 2024, oil and copper on linen, 111×183 cm

Portrait of Irfan Hendrian in the studio, 2024

IRFAN HENDRIAN

Incognito

Text Tan Siuli

Portrait courtesy the artist

Irfan Hendrian, Unearthly Matter 4, 2024, Risography and dye cut on layers of paper, 56.2×68.5×7.8 cm

An artist and printmaker by profession, Irfan Hendrian has consistently explored and pushed paper’s formal qualities as well as its sculptural potential. In Hendrian’s hands, paper is no longer merely a planar support for representation; it becomes both pigment and canvas, shaped into objects and installations which have grown in intricacy and scale over the course of Hendrian’s artistic practice.

Hendrian’s work has of late taken a more personal turn, reflecting on his ambivalent identity and position as a Chinese Indonesian. Hendrian identified as ‘Indonesian’ and Javanese throughout most of his life, until long conversations with his family members during the pandemic lockdown brought his Chinese ancestry to the fore—an aspect of his identity that he and his family, like many others in their position, tried to deny, having come of age in an era where being Chinese was closely associated with Communism or collusion with the Dutch, and often invited discrimination and persecution. Government policies in the Suharto era promoting national integration and assimilation, in effect mandated identity and cultural erasure, as Chinese schools and press were closed down, and it was forbidden to celebrate cultural festivals such as the Lunar New Year. Perhaps the most injurious measure of all was the legislation of 1966 that required all Chinese Indonesians to change their Chinese names to Indonesian ones. This rupture, a form of violence enacted in legislation, would later erupt into full-blown physical violence against the Chinese community in the searing riots of May 1998 that tore through Jakarta and several other cities in Indonesia.

In this new body of work Hendrian works through facets of his personal experience as well as the collective trauma that has characterized the coming of age of many Chinese Indonesians, and by extension, the wider Chinese diaspora. The motif of the wall or gate takes precedence throughout this solo presentation, foregrounding the idea of a façade or a barricade. A charred and corrugated wall recalls the makeshift barriers hastily erected in front of Chinese homes and shops during the 1998 riots. Also present are evocations of temple gates, bearing images of traditional guardian animals like the fu dog or lion, a quintessential signifier of Chinese culture. The semblance of a house, perched precariously on makeshift stilts, alludes to present-day legislation that makes it near-impossible for Chinese Indonesians in Yogyakarta to own property, while images of charred shophouse facades, found in the Chinatowns that dot Indonesia, are reworked into abstract ciphers, further concealed behind cylinders of rolled paper that suggest shutters or blinds.

One of the centrepieces of the show takes as its subject the 1966 name change legislation. On a monumental wall, Chinese family names are faintly visible under a scarred and abraded surface, suggesting marks of violence as well as a gradual erosion or wearing away. At the same time, these images could be read as a kind of palimpsest, compacting layers of history and identities. This wall is at once a monument to past traumas, as it is a nod towards the future, as the weight of history slowly wears away to make way for other possibilities: a scraping of the slate to write anew.

OPENING

18 Oct – 26 Oct, 2024

Irfan Hendrian: Incognito Arts House Singapore

Irfan Hendrian, Unobtainable Build V, 2024, Risography & dye cut on layers of paper, 44×96×5 cm

Irfan Hendrian, Incognito 2, 2024, Offset lithography and dye cut on paper and wood, 220×136×24 cm

Irfan Hendrian, Unearthly Matter 7, 2024, Risography and dye cut on layers of paper, 62.4×95×8.5 cm

An Entertainment

Text Rosemary Hawker

Portrait by James Caswell

Entertainment is Natalya Hughes’ response to fashion and costume illustrations by Erté (Romaine de Tirtoff), a celebrated fashion and theatre designer of his day. She first encountered his work in a saucy and humorous novel, Ermyntrude and Esmerelda: an entertainment, written by Lytton Strachey, doyen of the Bloomsbury group in the early 20 th Century and illustrated by Erté.1 As with many of Hughes’ earlier works, she takes Erté’s representations of women as a provocation and stepping off point for her own works.

While Hughes’ earlier confrontations with Ukiyo-e, de Kooning, Kirchner, and Freud, follow this strategy, with Erté there is a different tenor to the visual dialogue she enacts, one that is unambiguously celebratory but no less critical. This dialogue returns us to some of her earliest work and makes themes and outcomes across her practice more apparent and readable. Her approach continues to underscore the construction of gender through representation and the role of key moments in art in our understanding of the placement of women in broader culture and history. Even more fundamentally, An Entertainment takes us to her abiding insistence that beautiful forms can combine with critical content and be a force in contemporary painting. This risks being heavy and laboured but in Hughes’ hands it is playful, engaging, and deliciously disorienting.

While Hughes responds to multiple and diverse sources of Erté’s copious representations of women in fashion and theatre and beyond, I’m struck by the influence of Ermyntrude and Esmerelda. Hughes’ copy of the book was a childhood gift from a grandmother oblivious to its racy content. It takes the form of a correspondence between two seventeen-year-old girls, one in the city and one in the country, exploring their sexuality and trying to understand the confounding connections between love, sex, gender, baby making and marriage. Strachey’s story relies on the girls’ innocence and daring in equal measure. His adult male account of the sexual preoccupations and experiences of two girls, as if leaning over their shoulders as they write their titillating reports, can be irksome. However, Strachey’s contempt for the sexual mores of his time, when paired with the diversity of Ermyntrude and Esmerelda’s catalogue of sexual possibilities and Erté’s meticulous illustrations shift this unease to the often-complex questions of sexual identity we continue to face today.

But it is Erté’s illustrations, at once solemnising and making play of the girl’s observations and experiences, that drive Hughes’ imagery. Here and elsewhere, his controlled yet sumptuous treatment of costumes and styling prove irresistible to Hughes given her fascination with material, form, flatness, line, abstraction, and movement. The playing card-like appearance of Erté’s punning illustrations for Ermyntrude and Esmerelda —cartouche framing, doubling and symmetry of figures, the repeated symbolic function of cat and dog forms—represent the sexual liaisons played out in the girls’ minds and households. Figures and forms connect or miss connection by the slightest of margins heightening the sexual and visual tension. They remind us of Hughes’ captivation with the visual style of Aubrey Beardsley, Kara Walker and Ukiyo-e and her enduring fascination for dress, costume, pattern, and billowing swathes of fabric combined, surprisingly, in a flattened picture plane. While she engages with excess in diverse ways across her oeuvre, it’s easy to see Hughes’ childhood encounter with the playful voluptuousness of Erté’s forms, coupled with his breathless precision and poise, as formative to her art.

Like Erté, Hughes is committed to a roiling excess of line and colour, unafraid of the decorative and able to use it towards disquieting abstract effects. Hughes’ forms are strangely evocative, their titles referring us back to the girls’ sexual encounters, Erté’s broader oeuvre and to great moments in art history involving the female body (“Under the Bed”, “Fully Clothed Women Ascending a Staircase”). Like Erté she makes puns, she champions, and she chides her strange subjects, and we are never quite sure where we’re being led, but we are compelled to follow as befits a dangerous liaison.

Roland Barthes described Erté’s Alphabet series, where he makes letters out of exotically costumed female bodies, flattened in space as “an indissoluble mixture of body and dress, in such a way that the body cannot be undressed, nor can the dress be abstracted.” 2 In extending Erté’s visual expression Hughes makes the merest allusion to the female body yet we read it automatically, even as we search for and fail to find it. It is as Jean Louis Bory writes, “Erté clothes some volumes which are no longer the volume of bodies; he decorates some movements, which are no longer gestures: he sets in space the disembodied figures of a motionless ballet”. 3

Right: Natalya Hughes,

Natalya Hughes, La Bergère de France and Her Significant Feelings, 2024, acrylic on polyester, 198×299 cm

Natalya Hughes, The Performance, 2024, acrylic on polyester, 112×86 cm

Natalya Hughes: An Entertainment

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

Hughes’ clothed forms are far more overtly abstracted and ungraspable than Erté’s. Their floral vulval forms unfurl in open stage-like, empty space. The are voluptuous and yet disembodied. They are organic and animated and yet flattened against the picture plane like a pinned botanical specimen. They spring from the sexual tension Erté sets in train and push this tension into an excess of figuration in costume and line that implies bodies and their intersection and yet refuses the human form. It is the magicians’ sleight of hand that would see the fabric, folds and ribboned tendrils fall to the floor, flat and empty. These conjured evocations of the female body arrive at a sexual anticipation and visual tension based in extreme decorative figuration harnessed to a grotesque formlessness that delivers abstracted vanishing women. The flatness of Hughes’ illustrative style is strangely risky territory for a painter. It’s a curious conservatism that holds onto the idea of painting as necessarily pastose, as expressing a physical materiality of its own even as it represents something else again. Hughes’ use of digital imaging as process sketching for her paintings suggests a further removal from the manual materiality that has characterised painting for much of its history. But Hughes does not resile from any of this, instead emphasising flatness and the staginess of her work with empty areas of canvas. Yet almost all canvasses are flat, and all representations are staged, and no painted canvas is ever empty.

Hughes’ dexterous understanding and control of her medium is demonstrated with characteristic cool when she pulls sculptural objects into her exhibition space. Downward Daschund arrives with an almost audible and pleasing pop into three-dimensional space. Surrounded by Hughes’ riposte to Erté’s two-dimensional storybook illustrations, this beetle black, bizarre shoe-like, dog-like, form is more bodily than anything we see on the paintings but acts as proof of what they allude to: Ermyntrude or Esmerelda’s dropped slipper, a bowwow, a phallus, a stretching pussy cat? All and everything in a glorious excess of visual entertainment.

1 Lytton Strachey, 1969, Ermyntrude and Esmerelda: An entertainment, Introduction Michael Holroyd, illustrated by Erté, Anthony Blond, London. The novel was writtenin 1913 but not published until 1969.

2 Roland Barthes, 1972, “Literally” in Erté (Roman de Tirtoff), trans W. Weaver, Franco Maria Ricci Publisher, Parma, p.26.

3 Barthes, 1972, p.80.

Lara Merrett fathom and feet

Artwork photography and portrait

Text Dr Prudence Gibson

Jessica Maurer

A fathom is a watery depth. It is a depth that can be measured through sound. It has an old-fashioned meaning of encircling something with outstretched arms. To fathom is to make sense of the world. When regarding the work of Lara Merrett, a fathom is the point at which the artist can create a seemingly effortless symphony of cutting, mixing, marking, composing, editing and installing.

Merrett’s work is immersed in materiality; her cotton canvas, her myriad paints, her brushes are all tangible. The work smells. The work spills. The work stains. Her paintings are consistently informed and inspired by the bush at Manyana on the NSW south coast, the forest at Kangaroo Valley and the intertidal zones of Bondi beach. Yet, there are other insouciant or other-worldly elements at play, such as a random breeze through the studio or the luck of the perfect drying day. These earth, air and water elements are energetic parts of the artist’s ecology.

But first, the work starts in the studio. Merrett throws her cotton canvases onto the studio floor to paint. She walks on them with bare feet. She cuts. She pulls old paintings from her archive of ten-years and stitches them into new paintings. This is the fathom mark, where she hovers over

Yet, there are other insouciant or other-worldly elements at play, such as a random breeze through the studio or the luck of the perfect drying day. These earth, air and water elements are energetic parts of the artist’s ecology.

her huge canvases and then starts to conduct colour. Merrett has worked with water-based paints since she was in art school. This was partly because she is Bondi born and bred, with a childhood legacy of beach tides and endless summer swims coursing through her bloodstream. Perhaps her interest in water-based colour is related to her being a regular ocean swimmer. She dons wetsuit and swims across the surface of the Pacific Ocean, soaking up the light, the horizon, the sky and the clouds, absorbing it into her physical form. She swims from one point to another, across the arc of Bondi, or from Coogee out past Wylie Baths. The plumbed ocean has a significant effect on her work – such a vast body of water that holds skeins of octopuses, jelly blubbers, blue bottles, gropers and seals. Her watery palette is softer when the subject is the ocean.

Merrett says, ‘we can’t make sense of colour unless it’s alongside other colours—it doesn’t exist on its own.’ Colour structure, continuity, composition and ambiguity are Merrett’s bag of tricks. She also reads widely on the history, coloniality, affect and psychology of colours. The colour green, for instance, has a significant history. In 1775, the Swedish apothecarist Carl Wilhelm Scheele began isolating chlorine and experimentally adding arsenic until he had isolated a green compound copper arsenite which he manufactured as ‘Scheele’s green.’ This green was used by William Turner in 1805 and by Edouard Manet as late as 1862. The copper arsenite green was soon replaced with copper aceto-arsenite, which created brilliant green crystals by dissolving verdigris with vinegar, white arsenic and sodium carbonate. Emerald green, as we know it. Toxic.

57 Lara Merrett, Meadows, 2024, ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 28.5×30.5 cm

Lara Merrett, small oceanic feelings (detail), 2023, ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 106×168 cm

60 Lara Merrett, Urchin Palettes, 2024, ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 38.5×33 cm (framed)

Merrett is familiar with these dark toxic histories, which are sometimes associated with extraction, enslavement and biopiracy. It both horrifies and inspires her to conduct a sustainable approach within her own art practice, a lighter touch. She uses water-based non-toxic paints. She has regularly experimented with natural dying processes from her local environments. These small changes contribute to an ethical approach.

Merrett’s studio practice radiates vibrancy. This dynamic activity throbs with life. It is a source, a power that happens in the studio. However, Merrett is not confined to the white walls and often collaborates across disciplines, such as with marine biologists. She has co-designed with fashion designer Romance Was Born, and she participates in major activist campaigns with the Dirt Witches, Rising Tides and Manyana Matters.

Merrett has an allure that is deep and adrift. Full fathom five. There is a mystical quality that follows her, like a trail of oxygen bubbles. It is connected to that barefoot process in the studio. The quiet strength of that time, in that place, where the creativity happens. In effect, she enacts a feminist practice, by ignoring stereotypes of the ‘big painting syndrome’ and rejecting the ‘masculinist mastery’ characterisation of the painter.

Merrett’s studio practice radiates vibrancy. This dynamic activity throbs with life. It is a source, a power that happens in the studio.

Consequently, her new body of work engages with flecks of iridescence and a new quality of colour thinness. To thin is to water down, to dilute. Rather than mistaking this kind of thinning as a weakening of colour, it is a rejection of impasto maximalism. It is also a way to move closer to the water. A thin surface of watery paint is translucent and reveals what is hidden—the vivid life beneath the surface. She creates less saturated worlds, so that the viewer is afforded space to think about their own possibilities. OPENING

14 Nov – 14 Dec, 2024

Lara Merrett: fathom and feet

Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney

GLENN BARKLEY

TEXT Penny Craswell

To spend an afternoon with Glenn Barkley is to open your mind to all facets of humanity and objecthood, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to the ceramic remnants found in his local park, from the 19th century forgeries of medieval artefacts in a Sydney Museum to the vandalisation of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Glenn Barkley, visions!omens!miracles!highs!despair!, vessel with golden curl handles, 2024, earthenware, 77×17×16 cm

Glenn Barkley, politemeaninglesswords vessel with golden fern handles, 2024, earthenware, 83×18×16 cm

Glenn Barkley is best known for his exuberant, colourful, amorphous vases, pots and sculptures. Using vessel shapes, often inspired by ancient Greek artefacts such as the amphora, he then adds a layer of sculpted embellishment. These might be written words in oversized, crudely formed letters or they might be shells, birds or other “tokens” — roughly disc-shaped ceramic pieces decorated using moulds with coins, medallions, and friezes of famous works of art and architecture. Each of these tokens provides clues as to the wide-ranging interests and passions of the artist. Part of the inspiration for Barkley’s new body of work came while unpacking a box during a house move. There he found one of the first things he ever made in clay. He holds it up for me in his Annandale studio one cloudy afternoon in winter. Glazed in a uniform white, the piece is obviously old and a little worse for wear, but the form is distinctive — a series of simplified letters formed in clay coils and stacked on top of each other with a slab base to create a vessel. Barkley’s new pieces incorporate the same sausage-like clay letters in stacks to create a vessel with those same open forms. This time, however, the letters are interspersed with his tokens creating a jigsaw of symbols, images, and meaning. Each pressed clay token comes from a different time and place: an Egyptian Pharoah’s bust (the mould is a cheap souvenir he picked up while travelling), the Parthenon in Athens, a kookaburra, old coins. Some are self-explanatory and others have a longer story — a mould of the Sydney Cove medallion, a rare artefact originally made from dark grey clay collected in Sydney Cove in 1789 by Governor Phillip, who passed it to Joseph Banks, who passed it to Wedgwood, who made the clay into a series of limited-edition Medallions.

A recent exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing gave Barkley the chance to see behind-the-scenes of the collection, including items rarely seen by the public. He was particularly interested in a series of forgeries of medieval objects made by two 19th-century dockworkers, nicknamed the Billies and Charlies. These objects were made to look old and then tossed in the Thames to be found by mudlarkers and sold to museums. Recently, Barkley has been doing some mudlarking of his own — scavenging for bits of broken pottery and pipe in his local park. He shows me his findings, then starts to tell me about shell middens found all along the coast, including near where his father lives, in Sussex Inlet. You can see why his work has so many layers of meaning — his mind is ablaze with ideas and stories.

As for the words on his new series of pots, they reflect Barkley’s fascination with US politics and new terms coined in social media debate. One pot is emblazoned with the words ‘incel youtube adjacent’, a term that Barkley recently encountered online. Another, ‘false flag’, a term often used by conspiracy theorists meaning an act that appears to be perpetrated by someone else other than the person or group responsible. Others feature Donald Trump’s words, including ‘Hello how are you’, referring to the time he met with the Black Journalists Association and said, ‘You’re so rude, you don’t even say ‘hello, how are you’’.

1 A mudlark is someone who scavenges the banks and shores of rivers for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Glenn Barkley, Flat bottle with pox and golden balls, 2024, earthenware, 34 x 19 x 12 cm, photograph by Ainslie.Co

Glenn Barkley, Portland Lyrebird Vase with Sydney Cove Medallion, 2024, earthenware, 70×30 cm, photograph Aaron Anderson

OPENING

14 Nov – 14 Dec, 2024

Glenn Barkley: experimental idiocy Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney

… Realising that these vessels are not functional after all, he has embraced the denial of function completely.

Glenn Barkley, Dontgonowratcatremix stink (detail), 2024, earthenware, 24.5 x 23 x 7 cm

Tying in with his current obsession, the US election, (Barkley’s words not mine), Barkley was invited to take part in a recent project on US Presidents which resulted in him making moulds of US presidents’ ears. This included Donald Trump’s ear, which, by chance, was the ear shot in the assassination attempt. Since the assassination, he has reused this ear in new works, another addition to the patchwork of meanings.

For Barkley, embedding phrases into a clay sculpture is about making something ephemeral, like words, into something tangible; creating a record of what was said, ludicrous or not. The words are a way to explore concepts difficult to capture in a singular object. One work featuring the phrase ‘Laszlo Toth can you hear me’, is a reference to the Hungarian-Australian who, in 1972, attacked Michelangelo's Pietà statue with a chisel. Barkley wonders out loud, with shining eyes, whether Laszlo Toth’s act of vandalism was, in fact, the ultimate post-object artwork.

These new works, with letters of words forming the walls of the vessels, are also about Barkley embracing the nonfunctional nature of his works. Previously, although the works were rarely waterproof, Barkley made vases and other ‘functional’ shapes. Recently realising that these vessels are not functional after all, he has embraced the denial of function completely. The new open-formed vessels in this exhibition mark a shift, creating a new typology for the artist that is more closely aligned to sculpture than pot-making.

Spending an afternoon with Glenn Barkley is like a shot to the arm — his enthusiasm is infectious and his references diverse. Amongst it all is a fascination with humanity, including its dregs, and a preoccupation with material history, and the natural and ancient world.

Glenn Barkley, No Jug, 2024, earthenware, 9×8×6 cm

Glenn Barkley, Dontgonowratcatremix stink, 2024, earthenware, 24.5×23×7 cm

This Given Moment and The Garden of Hopes and Dreams

An exhibition of contemporary art informed by ideas of mindfulness, offering calm and contemplation to visitors. Bondi Pavilion Art Gallery Saturday 28 September –Sunday 3 November 10am – 5pm daily

Featuring artists Fiona Lowry, Giles Alexander, Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler, Tully Arnot, Alesandro Ljubicic and Grant Stevens. Grant Stevens, Horizon of Happiness, 2023

Xiaolong

A limited edition available through the National Gallery of Australia Proceeds from aquisitions of the collection support the National Gallery of Australia

A jewellery collection by Lindy Lee and Pallion

A BEACON UNVEILED

The following text is from a presentation made by Lindy Lee at the National Gallery of Australia in 2021, illuminating the conceptualisation, artistic rationale and commission intent of Lee’s groundbreaking new artwork Ouroboros. In 2022, Lee was commissioned to create this work — an immersive, public sculpture installed in the National Gallery forecourt — to celebrate the Gallery’s 40th anniversary. Its unveiling aligns with this occasion in October 2024.

LINDY LEE’S OUROBOROS

Ouroboros was fabricated at the Urban Art Projects (UAP) Foundry in Meanjin/Brisbane and measures over four metres high and weighs approximately 13 tonnes. A sustainable sculpture incorporating recycled materials, maximising renewable energy and measures to minimise its carbon impact, Ouroboros is one of Australia's first sustainable works of public art.

Lindy Lee within Ouroboros at Urban Art Projects (UAP) foundry, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photograph Josef Ruckli. Courtesy the National Gallery of Australia.

I am here to talk to you about Ouroboros, a magnificent creature of the cosmic eternal. You can blame Nick [Mitzevich], because he encouraged me to gather up all that I am and all that I’ve learned in my forty years as an artist, to create the most ambitious piece I possibly can dream of, and that can realistically be made. So here we are, Nick. We’re reaching for the stars.

The journey of my life, and my life’s work. The dualities were evident early. They were bound to being the only Chinese kid in my school in early 1960s Brisbane, when the White Australia Policy was still law. I was 21 when the Racial Discrimination Act put an end to that. My artwork began by examining identity, what it means to be non-European in a European culture, but once I began to practice Zen Buddhism I was drawn to the much more interesting question of self.

Identity is trying to define what you are, and this, for me, is inclined to be confining. Self is not about accruing a set of definitions about what you are; it’s a never-ending project of engagement with the world. That’s what’s more interesting to me. I don’t have to be shackled by issues of identity anymore.

There is no end to the creation of self: it goes on, it changes and even when we die it continues to go on. We still receive the light of stars that died millions of years ago. We are blessed by that light. Maybe it’s the same with our lives: even after we’re gone, the trace of our lives continues to ripple out, infinitely.

I’ve been exploring this in my work through what I call the Family of the Life of Stars. Forms that are the essence of simplicity and strength, denoting underlying natural systems and order, enlivened through the shifting patterns of light and shade, created through massive numbers of perforations. In these works, forms arise and simultaneously dematerialise. The work I’m proposing belongs to this family.

Ouroboros is of course the snake eating its own tail: an ancient symbol that crosses cultures and centuries. It represents eternal renewal, the cycle of life death and rebirth. The oldest known Ouroboros was discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun, in an ancient Egyptian funerary text called the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld.

While the symbolic shape of this mythic creature is ancient and eternal, the presentation of this Ouroboros, our Ouroboros, and the way its experienced changes with every passing hour, throughout the day and the night.

During the day, the mirror-polished stainless steel absorbs and reflects the imagery of life, of people, trees, passers-by, birds, clouds scudding across the sky, the rich yet transitory imagery of the floating world. Viewers engaging with the work can literally enter into it, a good four meters into the belly of the beast, where the perforations of the stainless steel skin bathe them in pinpricks of daylight entering the darkness.

At night, Ouroboros, internally lit, returns light into the world, a generous presence, vibrant, inclusive and benevolent. This, the National Gallery of Australia, is truly a great place. It contains so much truly great work. Yet, Nick tells me that people often drive past here, asking themselves, ‘where is the NGA?’ They see the building but don’t know what it is. So, what I’m presenting to you here is something that answers that question. Visitors will never drive past the NGA again without going: ‘There it is!’

[This work] is a beacon. Daytime or nighttime, Ouroboros pulses with light and energy. It announces something is happening here. It invites you in.

Coinciding with the unveiling of Ouroboros and her new exhibition, Lindy Lee, at the National Gallery of Australia, Lindy Lee has crafted Abundance, a pure gold sculpture crafted collaboratively by Lee and Pallion.

As part of the collaboration between Pallion and Lee, jewellery-maker Palloys has crafted the Xiaolong collection of gold and jade jewellery inspired by and launched alongside Abundance Representing the deep connection Lee shares with this stone and precious metal duo, the collection—comprising a ring, earrings, pendant and cuff bangle—is available in a limited edition quantity and attainable through the National Gallery Art Store from October 25.

Left: Fabrication of Ouroboros at UAP foundry, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photograph by Josef Ruckli. Courtesy the National Gallery of Australia. Left inset: Ouroboros with surrounding landscaping underway onsite at the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra. Photograph Sam Cooper, courtesy the National Gallery of Australia

Above: Sketch of Ouroboros by Lindy Lee from early conceptualisation. Courtesy the artist. Opposite top left: Sandblasting Ouroboros at Urban Art Projects foundry, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photograph Rachel See. Courtesy UAP. Opposite top right: Ouroboros on the road from Meanjin/Brisbane to Kamberri/Canberra, June 2024. Photograph Sam Cooper. Courtesy the National Gallery of Australia. Opposite bottom: Mirror polishing of Ouroboros at UAP foundry, Meanjin/ Brisbane. Photograph Rachel See. Courtesy UAP.

Perforations on the surface of Ouroboros on site at Urban Art Projects (UAP) foundry, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photograph Josef Ruckli.

Courtesy the National Gallery of Australia.

THE LAST WORD

Lindy Lee and Deborah Hart during site visit at National Gallery Sculpture Garden.

DEBORAH HART

Curator, Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria

Interview Claire Summers

CS The significance of the Ouroboros cannot be understated. It is a landmark in the career of artist Lindy Lee, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), in the landscape of the arts in this country. Can you speak about its significance to you specifically, as both Head Curator of Australian Art at the NGA and as someone who lives their life alongside great works of art?

DH It is wonderful for me to see Lindy Lee’s Ouroboros come to fruition. I’ve found it fascinating to consider the way that this work transcends time and place and yet is embedded in it. This large sculptural installation will welcome people to the specific site in Kamberri/ Canberra in the garden at the very front of the Gallery. It is a like a beacon that will draw people in, informing the stories of both Australian and international art. Australia is naturally part of the world and Lindy reminds us of this in so many ways. The concept of Ouroboros and the symbolism of the snake that swallows its own tail (embodying the idea of eternal return) has resonances with First Nations culture and the Rainbow Serpent, and it has been brilliant to see the dynamic exchange between Lindy and First Nations Ngunnawal Elder, Aunty Jude Barlow. The work also relates to Lindy’s Australian and Chinese heritage. Taking a broader view, the symbolic intent of Ouroboros is about uniting people —pointing to the fact that as humans we are all interconnected with each other and with the cycles of nature and the cosmos. Like the idea of ‘the river of stars’ that a is a title of a work by Lindy, she poetically brings together the intimate nature of personal experience with a deep sense of space and time.

CS The privilege of being an essential figure in such a significant institution and the country’s cultural heritage is to be a part of legacy. How does the Ouroboros and Lindy Lee’s coinciding exhibition fit into the legacy that already exists at the NGA and the one that you envision for its future?

DH Ouroboros was commissioned for the Gallery’s 40th anniversary, marking a new generation of artistic vision and excellence. It will be joining a significant group of works in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden, which is a core part of the Gallery’s identity and a much-loved site for visitors. It contains major site-specific works by both Australian and international artists, such as James Turrell’s meditative skyspace Within without (2010), Bert Flugelman’s iconic Cones (1982) and Fujiko Nakaya’s ethereal fog sculpture Foggy wake in a desert: An ecosphere (1982). With Ouroboros, Lindy Lee is now part of a legacy of artists and works that have been selected to inhabit this important site, which is a crucial link between the Gallery and its surrounding environment. Lindy Lee, which opened at the same time as the launch of Ouroboros, showcases recent and new works by Lindy. It provides a through-line from her public art practice to her studio work. It is an opportunity for audiences to appreciate how diverse her artistic practice is and how she transforms her materials through different processes, drawn from her Chinese heritage and Zen Buddhism, as well as from the natural environment. Lindy’s works are part of the National Gallery’s collecting history. We were one of the first institutions to acquire her works in the 1980s and have continued to build our holdings of her work over the past three decades. Both Ouroboros and Lindy Lee are also a part of a wider institutional legacy of championing women artists through the Gallery’s Know My Name initiative.

CS For you personally, what has thus far been the most profound moment in the making of the Ouroboros?

DH A momentous experience that has stayed with me was visiting Urban Arts Projects (UAP) in Meanjin/ Brisbane and seeing the work in the making. It was incredible to see Lindy’s profound vision coming to life with the talented team at UAP. It was the first time I really had a sense of the scale of the whole undertaking and the complexity of the work with the thousands of perforations across the stainless steel surface. I recall that Lindy stood in a section of the work which felt quite magical. There was the realisation of how it might be to enter it. This is a unique aspect of Ouroboros compared with her other public sculptures—that it has an architectural dimension in an organic way that allows the visitor to feel fully immersed in the experience.

Another inspiring time occurred when I was fortunate enough to witness a conversation between Ngunnawal Elder Aunty Jude Barlow and Lindy Lee in July 2023 as part of the Unchartered Territory Festival. Since then, the more conversations Lindy has with Aunty Jude, the more is revealed about how synchronous the symbolism of Ouroboros is with First Nations cultures and the history of Kamberri/Canberra and surrounds.

It was also a great experience to go with my wonderful colleague Deirdre Cannon who is co-curator of the exhibition and has worked closely on the whole project, to visit Lindy’s studio. It felt like a privilege and inspiration to be in that space with Lindy, surrounded by nature, talking with her about her work of the past and present, and to meet with her dedicated team.

It was amusing and exciting to receive a video from Lindy of herself eating a pie in Dubbo! She was travelling on the huge truck carrying Ouroboros from Meanjin/ Brisbane to Kamberri/Canberra. She was moved and impressed by the scale of the endeavour and the great skill of the ‘truckies’. By the time they arrived at the National

Gallery there was a real sense of mutual respect and friendship. It was wonderful to witness this. Of course, it was amazing to see Ouroboros reach its destination in the Sculpture Garden – like a homecoming and a cause for celebration after all the hard work that went into its creation.

CS The NGA has invested significantly in the celebration and collection of female artists. We see this in the gallery’s Know My Name initiative. Can you speak to some works recently acquired under your curation that have felt particularly moving to you as part of this effort?

DH There have been so many important acquisitions, from historical to contemporary and across all media. We are keen to retell the stories of this country through a greater inclusion of women in broader art historical narratives. The National Gallery acquired Ethel Carrick’s Esquisse en Australie, 1908, which will be included in a retrospective I’m curating of her work opening in December 2024. Depicting a scene in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, it was one of the first post-impressionist paintings to be created in Australia that was taken back with other works to the Paris Salon in the year it was painted, providing a transnational exchange. We also acquired Yvonne Audette’s works: Cantata No. 10, 1958-60, Windemere, 1957, and Undergoing construction, 1957-58. Audette, now 94 years of age, has made a major contribution to abstraction. She met Willem De Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s and made an impact on others through her correspondence and teaching, as well as through the example of her art.

We also acquired a group of Bronwyn Oliver’s sculptures from the 1980s including Mantle, 1985, Siren, 1985, and Hermaphrodite, 1984. These remarkable works provide the opportunity to understand the formative years of her practice working in diverse media such as fibreglass and paper before she started working with copper. The inventiveness and uncanny boldness of these works sat beautifully in a recent display with tapestries by American contemporary artist Kiki Smith including Earth, 2012, Underground, 2012 and Sky, 2012 (recent acquisitions in International Art). Like Lindy’s work The Unconditioned 2020, which was included in the first iteration of the Know My Name exhibition, our recent acquisitions and gifts to the national collection will be shown in diverse contexts across Australian and International art, as the past joins hands with the present.