SEP/OCT 2021
Kirsten Coelho Irfan Hendrian Joanna Lamb Lara Merrett Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Tim Silver Jemima Wyman Michael Zavros
Editorial Directors Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf Managing Editor Alex Pedley Senior Designer & Studio Manager Matthew De Moiser Designer Angela Du Proofreader Harriet Reid Production polleninteractive.com.au
SYDNEY
799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com SINGAPORE
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SEP/OCT 2021
Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Gadigal people of FRONT COVER: Micahel Zavros Palomino, 2021 oil on canvas 150 x 150 cm Photo: Michael Zavros
the Eora nation, the traditional custodians on whose lands the Gallery stands. We pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging and recognise their continued connection to Culture and Country.
E x p e r i e n c e a u n i q u e c u r at io n o f c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t , co unt r y life a n d l u x u r y a cco m m o d at io n .
Where Art Becomes Play Alone Together puzzles are works of art. Created in the artist’s studio, each puzzle’s vivid colours and bold lines provide the perfect number of clues to keep the keenest jigsaw lover searching for the next piece. These 1000 piece puzzles are produced to the highest level of quality and care, and are exquisitely reproduced works of art. Available NOW at Sullivan+Strumpf www.alonetogetherpuzzles.com.au
CONFLICT IN MY OUTLOOK_
WE METBE ONLINE DON’T EVIL
30_ JUL_2021 - 22_ JAN_2022
ZACH BLAS & JEMIMA WYMAN_ KATE CRAWFORD & VLADAN JOLER_ SIMON DENNY_ XANTHE DOBBIE_ SEAN DOCKRAY_ FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE_ KATE GECK_ ELISA GIARDINA PAPA_ MATTHEW GRIFFIN_ EUGENIA LIM_ DANIEL MCKEWEN_ ANGELA TIATIA_ SUZANNE TREISTER_ KATIE VIDA_
UQ ART MUSEUM
Image: Simon Denny, ‘Document Relief 19 (Amazon Worker Cage patent)’, 2020. Inkjet print on archival paper, glue, custom metal wall mount, 29.7 x 21 x 13.5cm unique edition Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney
Treasure Island Darren Sylvester
14 May – 31 October 2021 Darren Sylvester Stacey (detail) 2018, 240 x 320 cm, lightjet prints. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney and Neon Parc Melbourne
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am – 5pm | Free admission
artgallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au |
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On Balance Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf
Hands up who is sick of hearing those 11am updates full of numbers and urgency and generally bad news? Despite how weird and boring and frustrating lockdown is, the numbers are important because they give us an idea of the state of play, an objective aerial view of the situation. About 10 years ago, we were shown another set of figures. The figures that showed the gross imbalance of female to male representation in museums and commercial galleries (thank you The CoUNTess Report). We had smugly scorned the museums for extreme neglect of female artists, and yet, when our figures were shown, it was a shocking realisation that we were part of the problem. We were blissfully ignorant that only 30% of our represented artists were female. It meant that we needed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Today, we can proudly say that our numbers stand at 50-50 female to male representation. We were determined to not just take on female artists simply because they were female and simultaneously, not reject male artists simply because they were male. Calibre and potential had to remain key but we needed to check our blindspots and question our oversights. This magazine issue is full of some of these amazing female artists. Like Lara Merrett, a superstar who has recently kicked big project goals at Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, UQ Art Museum and Artspace, Sydney. There’s the sublime Kirsten Coelho who, with more than three decades of exhibiting under her belt, can truly be called a master ceramicist. We learn about LA based Jemima Wyman’s meticulous photocollages which focus on the aesthetics of global activism. Using thousands of images of smoke and gases used to break up protests from around the world, her work is, as curator Tim Riley Walsh writes, ‘a reminder of our power and our fragility.’
The fabulous Joanna Lamb, who has been with the gallery almost since our beginning in 2005, lets us into her Perth home and studio in the lead up to her November show and tells us why both a Peter Booth and a bicycle vie for her ‘most valued object’ status. We are incredibly excited and proud to be working with these talented artists and to be telling a genderbalanced story of contemporary art today. This, of course, embraces all our artists. Also in this issue, we proudly feature two very exciting contemporary visual artists—Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran and Michael Zavros, both of whom are busy preparing for their upcoming October and November shows. For Ramesh, it will be his first solo show since his acclaimed Avatar Towers project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last year. Over 70 works were acquired by the Gallery, surely one of the largest single acquisitions of work by a living contemporary Australian artist. His new show certainly doesn’t disappoint either, and Tai Mitsuji’s essay reveals some of the complexity in this new body of work. Michael Zavros’ cheeky essay reveals an irreverence to, and independence from ‘artworld pretence’. Amusing yes, but ultimately a red herring to the intensity and discipline of his work and life. Tim Silver has the last word—with our own Alexandra Pedley. A glass of red in hand, they cover lots of ground including Tim’s upcoming show, making art in the COVID age and the need for humility and understanding. So thanks for the numbers Gladys, Daniel, Annastacia and The CoUNTess Report. They keep things in perspective, and direct us to do the things we need to do, like have gender balance…. And get vaccinated. Enjoy, Urs & Jo. 7
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Studio view of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s Blue spiky head with gold teeth and Double headed horned figure, 2021 Photo: Elise Frederickson
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Contents
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Introducing: Lara Merrett
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Michael Zavros: Ten things this week
28
Kirsten Coelho: there on the other shore
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Clara Che Wei Peh & Kaushik Swaminathan: Appetite
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Jemima Wyman: Smoke Signals
54
Irfan Hendrian
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Divine Intervention
66
At home: Joanna Lamb
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Last Word: In-between Days of Tim Silver
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Quick Curate: On touch
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Up Next
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SEP/OCT 2021
Lara Merrett with her installation Paint me in, 2018, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art for the Jackson Bella Room. Photo: Anna Kučera
Introducing:
Lara Merrett By Peta Rake
I was first introduced to Lara Merrett’s artistic practice from inside her commission Paint me in, 2018, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Warrung, Circular Quay, Sydney). Three oversized canvas slings, attached to brackets, swung across a sunflower carpet, an array of hypercoloured pillows scattered around. Each coloured swing allowed a person to lie flat and slide multidirectionally throughout the space, the artwork being simultaneously soft sculpture and painting. For all intents and purposes, you were held groundless in colour— supported by and within painting. Later, at a raucous MCA Art Bar, which Lara had curated, my sister and I swung in one together, next to a giggly couple swinging through their first date.
“Audiences are invited as active participants in her work, painted surfaces are interchangeable, and able to be touched, walked among, cut through, and removed.”
I visited Lara not long after at her rambling shared studio on Parramatta Road. Entering through the mechanic’s in the back laneway, there was a convivial atmosphere, open walls, and in clear view a long table for lunch, conversation, or the odd card game. In that moment, Lara’s studio was both social space, haberdashery, and soft sculpture; linen canvasses were draped, pinned,
tucked, cut and grottoed into one another; some were stretched with fine painted detail, others had large swathes of colour that had been poured, pooled, and accidentally tipped; and bleeding into one another, all were residue and memory from past works. Music is heard from the studio next door, someone else was whistling. Merrett’s work has always been social and immersive, with painting as the departure point. It is an undeniable privilege to work closely with artists as a witness to the inception and development of their work. Increasingly, this witnessing occurs outside of the studio, in conversation, while walking nature-adjacent, with others, family, friends or lovers, on a drive, over a rowdy meal, or after a protest. These are the spaces in which art is first thought, where the latent becomes manifest and takes form. It is generally understood that this context and character is often distinct and invisible from what publics encounter in the gallery. Sometimes, artworks leave the biographical site, which is often collaborative, and enter the space of exhibition where new meanings are created. Merrett’s work adeptly unravels this relationship. Audiences are invited as active participants in her work, painted surfaces are interchangeable, and able to be touched, walked among, cut through, and removed. There is an enormous generosity and trust transferred to the audience when this happens. The works seem to say ‘it’s ok, come closer’. Naturally, Merrett’s work finds a comfortable home in the public sphere, outside of the gallery, complicating the painterly tradition of plein air. One such project saw Lara produce High Stakes, 2019, for UQ Art Museum
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Introducing: Lara Merrett
(Meanjin, Brisbane), in partnership with Sydney-based bamboo architects Cave Urban. Alongside Lara and her eldest son, UQ Art Museum staff harvested invasive bamboo at a commune called Crystal Waters on Kabi Kabi (Gabi Gabi) and Jinibara Country (Sunshine Coast). The bamboo harvested became the scaffolding for a temporary outdoor studio on the front lawn of the UQ Art Museum, where sixty students from all disciplines joined Lara to paint and pour colour on oversized canvases. For two weeks the work grew, the group pausing daily to eat lunch with one another and to reflect on the activity. The works then entered the gallery as aecho of community sculpture, spaces were created for repose, inhabitable by the audience.
and fauna. Merrett, along with a staunch group of locals have been lobbying local, state and federal governments through the campaign #manyanamatters. The wider artistic community was invited to visit the site, where they painted protest banners for the blockade in 2020. Huge canvases were hung along the entire length of the fence dividing the forest. One read ‘The Word for World is Forest’, the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal 1976 sci-fi novel, another ‘Our last minute…’.There are similarities in the collaborative nature of Merrett’s other works, the mobilisation of publics, economies of material, and distributed authorship. Manyana, however, stands apart as a message board of solidarity in the Pyrocene, uniting both human and non-humans alike.
Merrett is aligned with female artists unencumbered by the traditions of medium; Viviane Suter’s gigantuan unstretched surfaces painted in concert with the weather; the cast wire forms of Ruth Asawa; Phyllida Barlow’s precarious assemblages; and the soft forms in the works of Sheila Hicks. I am reminded as well of French collective Supports/Surfaces from the 1970s, that staged a series of ephemeral outdoor installations, beyond the reach of institutions. All with the intent to recast the die toward social and environmental justice, jettisoning the critical discourse surrounding the artwork beyond the pure concerns of medium.
This eco-advocacy continues for Merrett in her work with the group Dirt Witches, who most recently installed a micro-forest in downtown Haymarket. Barlow Street Forest, 2021, is a rewilding project for the City of Sydney that creates environments for the hosting of critically endangered native species such as stingless sugarbag native bees, or local banksia varieties. These interventions, among many, illustrate Merrett’s work as multifaceted and site-responsive, slipping between installation, painting, soft-sculpture and ecoactivism. Back in the studio now, coloured linen and drop cloth are scaled and pinned to one another. The multiple cascading frames are akin to a desktop, hyperlinking to place and biography. Colours? Deep greens of mature Manyana forests, peach tinges like endangered banksia, greys of morning swims, lime like invasive bamboo, the purpling of womanhood, blues of conviviality.
SEP/OCT 2021
Merrett spends considerable time at her family home in Bendalong. Days are broken up by swims across Washerwoman’s Beach, and time is marked with the light of sunrise and sunset. Just south of this beach, is the small town of Manyana, a hamlet spared during the devastating fire season of 2020. Manyana Matters, an eco-activist group—to which Lara belongs was formed to protect the last unburnt forest from housing developers. After the mass ecocide and loss of wilderness in the fires, Manyana has become a sanctuary for myriad flora
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY LARA MERRETT, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
Lara Merrett, Time After Time (Compendium of Gestures) (exhibition view), 2017, Superposition of three types, Artspace, Sydney, 2017. Photo: Jek Maurer
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Introducing: Lara Merrett
SEP/OCT 2021
LEFT: Lara Merrett Purple, purple, opposites attract, 2016 acrylic and ink on linen 90 x 95 cm Photo: Jek Maurer RIGHT: Lara Merrett What she said he said, 2021 acrylic and ink on linen 143 x 104 cm Photo: Chloé Callistemon
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Michael Zavros’ son Leo with Palomino, inspired by his son’s pony Huey. Photo: Michael Zavros
Michael Zavros: Ten things this week In the lead-up to Michael Zavros’ October exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, we steal a look inside his journal to see how preparations are going!
Exhibition: October 21 - November 13, 2021
+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW BEFORE OCTOBER 21
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01.
Mercy
SEP/OCT 2021
I think I’ve decided to buy the mother of my horse Thomas. She lives in South Australia and I’m getting a vet to check her out this week. He’ll put his hand inside to feel if everything is OK. Her name is Mercy. She has had four babies to four different dads and Thomas ended up being the best one although a bit crazy. Hopefully with us she will have some more and now we (my middle child Olympia and I) are stallion shopping. We will probably import frozen semen from Europe for artificial insemination. She sees stallions she likes, and I say ‘Mmm’, ‘no’ or ‘yes, he’s hot’ and now we have a shortlist. They have great names like Franklin, Revolution, Furst Love, Deniro and you always reference the stallion line in the name of the foal. Thomas’ fancy name is Royal Moment because his dad was called Royal Hit. When I was little, I bred chickens. They were a glossy green-black Japanese breed with feathered feet called Langshan. I would make little pens and pair up different hens and roosters. This annoyed my parents because we ended up with lots of chickens. The good ones I would take to shows, when we took our horses. One year, I won ‘Champion Cock’ at the Gold Coast Show, and I took my certificate to school.
Leo with new addition to the Zavros family, Mercy. Photo: Michael Zavros
02.
Thomas has a sore tummy Unlike a lot of animals, horses have only one stomach and are unable to vomit. Anything that a horse eats must keep going and so horses often have blockages and inflammation. This is called colic. A few days ago, Thomas had colic. It was a mild case, but this is the fourth time he’s had it which means I employ poor animal husbandry or Thomas is very delicate. Given none of our other horses get sick I believe it is the latter. When his tummy is sore, he paws at the ground and lays down and gets up again and turns his head to look at his stomach. It’s very frightening when this happens. One time, he lay down like big chestnut Pharlap in the movie and moaned and groaned and wouldn’t get up for 24 hours. I thought it was the end. The other horses come and stand by because they know something is wrong.
Michael’s horse Thomas. Photo: Michael Zavros
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03 + 04.
House plants My assistant is really into house plants and she’s bringing me some cuttings. I used to be very into them too. That was the 1980s and everyone had them in copper pots or wicker baskets. Mostly, they were glossy leafed vines growing up big chunks of black bark. I had such green fingers, which I’d inherited from my grandmother. She taught me how to make new plants from cuttings and the murky ethics around taking cuttings from other people’s plants. Sometimes the cuttings she pinched had roots on them. I grew up on a 2-acre property surrounded by bushland on the Gold Coast. There was a huge nursery through the bush behind our property and I’d regularly visit at dusk for cuttings. Eventually, whole plants in pots crept home with me and despite my parents’ delight at our verdant rumpus room full of ferns, Ivy and Maiden Hair, I do feel very conflicted about this today.
Dinner Conversation
SEP/OCT 2021
As the kids get older, our dinner conversation is becoming more fun and more intense. Often fierce debates rage over social, political, economic or environmental issues or the general hotness of someone. Although, the kids don’t consider themselves woke and inhabit a world where they see this as increasingly unnecessary. Our eldest, Phoebe, is 15 and thinks she wants to study Art History. She enjoys writing and making art about stuff she’s interested in and, having been brought up in the artworld, is often very astute about it. Tonight, we’re considering cancel culture, the demise of intellectual conversation, and the swiftness to turn to outrage and offence. We’re comparing identity politics to narcissism and stupidity.
05.
New House We are building a house. It’s right next to our current house, which we were going to renovate but it’s too far gone to fix. When the new house is done, we’ll just move next door. The builder and tradies are on site before 6am, so we finally got some curtains on the old house because they could see us sleeping or getting changed. I didn’t care but everyone else did. The young tradies all have moustaches, which are a thing again. They know I’m an artist. They’re friendly and polite, nodding their matey hellos as I come and go all day in a robe from the big building that they know is the artist’s studio. A few days ago, I was getting a delivery and I’d left the roller door up for a while and, during their smoko, the tradies could see right in. The selfie mannequin I’d made for my show last year was standing naked at the door vacantly staring out. Now, none of them look up when I walk past.
Michael’s studio, 2021. Photo: Michael Zavros
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06 + 07.
Olympia has lost her work. Olympia is crying because this school project she’s been working on hasn’t saved. These days, the kids save all their work to their various school mainframe hard drives, but it’s always glitchy. Olympia is an introvert and very good at school. She cruises through straight As and is fiercely independent. Now, she’s inconsolable. She can’t do it again. She can’t find the same magic. When I was little, my mum would give away most of my art. As early as about five or six, I could just draw stuff beautifully. And my parents loved it. It was like magic. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, friends of friends—all got a Zavros. Chalk pastels of Australian birds or drawings of horses would get framed and given away for Christmas presents, birthdays, thank-yous for having us…. Mum would always say to me, ‘you can do another one’, but I knew I couldn’t. Not a replacement one. I’d have to busy myself with something new because the magic was gone. As a young adult, when I’d moved out and gone off to art school, my parents divorced, and the family home was sold. My mother was angry about a lot of things and after a giant clean out of the old house, burnt anything that would burn including all my art. Baby stuff through to adult. Drawings, sketchbooks, a stack of unframed canvas boards of gumtrees or seascapes or clowns, and elaborately decorative school projects. All gone. It hurt but was formative. And nothing has changed. Everything I make is for someone else or a museum. While I’m making it, it’s all I can think about. I love it and it’s dear to me and then it’s finished, and I just let it go.
Phoebe gets a bad review
SEP/OCT 2021
Phoebe works in a cafe in the city on a Sunday. She catches the bus in. She loves making money, some freedom, some agency. She works hard and comes home tired, and I know she’s good at the job because I went in and watched her one day. The other day, she got a bad online review from a customer. It was a misunderstanding rather than poor service and it does sound like the customer was particularly unpleasant. Phoebe’s upset at a certain injustice and mostly at being disliked. She’s a Leo. So am I. So is Alison. Leos like to be good at things and love to be loved. It confuses them when they’re not. As an emerging artist, I began to feel a distinct art world/peer lack of love grow paradoxically with kicking any goal. Like a good Leo, I moved out of town. My work could join the art world, I didn’t really need to.
08.
Palomino
Leo is an extrovert. He’s always been all-singing, all-dancing, and a great mimic with comic timing. But if left to his devices he’d be quite literally on a device all day and night. Not doing anything. I convince him to join his big sister and get on a horse and he agrees on the condition it was a small pony. My riding instructor found us Huey and we got him on a lease. The pony is perfect for Leo, and they look alike. He’s a pretty palomino, golden with white hair cut straight like the blonde bowl cut I give Leo. It starts off well. Leo is a natural and listens to direction but he’s timid. He trots the pony happily around everywhere for a few weeks, but I insist it’s time to canter. He’s scared of getting hurt and Huey senses the power dynamic between them that I fail to shift. He bucks Leo off and that’s the end of that. I realise Leo wanted to like riding because I liked it and the very existence of the pony begins to make him anxious. He begins his campaign to get rid of the pony asking morning and night when Huey will go so eventually I arrange this. Before he leaves I insist on a photo shoot. I want to combine blonde boy and pony like the centaurs I used to paint but less Greek/uncanny/located somehow in fashion, more personal, emotive. And this time with the models at hand instead of finding source material I can control matching light, pose, weight distribution. Leo stares at the painting of him and the pony now perfectly joined. He hates the pony and he’s angry with me. Michael Zavros Palomino (detail), 2021 oil on canvas 150 x 150 cm Photo: Michael Zavros
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09.
Raffaella Carrà
SEP/OCT 2021
I wake up very early because there are animals to feed but, mostly, because I’m getting older and that’s what old people do. If I stay in bed, I’m not allowed to make any noise, so I quietly scroll through Instagram. When someone interesting or famous dies, I wake to a feed full of tributes and on Wednesday it was all about Raffaella Carrà, the platinum blonde Italian pop and fashion icon. I hadn’t heard of her, so the next hour was a rabbit hole of 70s glam disco. She died at 78, famously in a sparkling leotard and hooker heels—until the end. After a pretty successful acting career between Italy and Hollywood in the 60s, she changes her name from Raffaella Pelloni to Carrà, after the Italian futurist painter Carlo Carrà. I’m deducing that her greatest moment was the year I was born, there is a 1974 disco track entitled Rumore with an iconic music video that appears to be doing the rounds. It contains all the typical futuristic and psychedelic 70s disco tropes but unlike Americans or Brits from the era, this doesn’t look like a pastiche. It’s odd, mesmeric. I watch it again. And again. A troupe of clone dancers in pink are marching out this dance and being reflected and chopped through trendy new camera tricks, and some old ones too, all up against a mirror. They’re all muted and brunette to her platinum star in the centre of it all. It feels more Guru Rajneesh and the orange people moving to America, more 70s cult than 70s disco. How did I miss this? After today’s spattering of farewell tributes, will this truly be forgotten? Eventually lost? My kids go to school with other kids who’ve never heard of Madonna or Michael Jackson.
Screen shot of Rafaella Carrà music video Rumore, 1974. Photo: Michael Zavros
10.
Ursula is calling Ursula is calling. I have three rings to decide if I’m going to take the call. She wants to talk about the show that I haven’t made work for or to see if I have a writer for some content for the S+S magazine. Screen shot of Boss lady (Ursula Sullivan) missed call. Photo: Michael Zavros
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Kirsten Coelho Ginger Jar, 2021 porcelain, matt white glaze 24.3 x 15 x 15 cm Photo: Grant Hancock
Kirsten Coelho: there on the other shore For the past 14 years, Kirsten Coelho has worked in the same sundappled studio. A place that finds her dipping into a multiplicity of histories, poetry and stories that are absorbed into the glazes and shapes that culminate in the fluid, delicate forms of her ceramic practice. By Emma O’Neill
Exhibition: there on the other shore, September 2 - October 2, 2021
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SEP/OCT 2021
Kirsten Coelho: there on the other shore
The care and deliberateness with which she conducts discussions of deep feeling is the same that she applies in her studio practice. As I speak to her, the sun descends on scattered vessels of varying shape and colour, shadows elongate as our conversation moves between the prosaic and the personal. She holds a few of these pieces to the camera to capture the variations of colour, explaining at length the alchemy of the glazes. Behind her, pasted along a wall, are photographs from her visits to Greek ruins, internet printouts of artifacts from the British Museum, and, importantly, poems from the likes of Mary Oliver, Rilke and Emily Dickinson. The titles featured in her latest body of work take their name from the latter, while the exhibition title borrows from a George Sefaris poem, On Stage. Literature and art, in equal measure, hold a mirror to the human condition and provide a lens for the artist to view the world anew. Despite the mélange of rich cultural and historical influences, an austerity and tender sensitivity touch all Coelho’s work. The subtle colour washes and soft bends and curves of each porcelain vessel do not easily allow the pieces to be photographed. Because any single viewing distance belies a continuum of perceptions which belongs only to the work. In the latest show, a profusion of pale greys, chalky white and a sparkle of iron are punctuated
Kirsten Coelho Spindle, 2021 porcelain, matt white - pale blue sheen glaze, iron oxide 17 x 23.5 x 11 cm Photo: Grant Hancock
with cobalt blue: a clarion organ chord sounding amidst an ensemble of light, shape and colour. Cobalt blue is named for the silver-white metallic element which produces the colour, synonymous with Chinese blue-and-white porcelain (known as qinghuaci). Imported from Persia via new trade routes, its use can be traced back to the Tang dynasty (618–906) and proliferated later during the Yuan (1279–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. A far cry from the intricacies of the classic qinghuaci patterns, Coelho’s resplendent blue acknowledges this history while also ‘removing unnecessary information that may interrupt its power’. The potency of the indigo hue pieces is balanced by their cylindrical form. Similarly, the inclusion of copper-red is a result of Coelho’s engagement with the Korean Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). From the 17th century, white ware (baekja) decorated with iron brown became popular, especially during periods when the cost of cobalt was too high or its quality inconsistent. Iron-brown painted images on the vessels of the day were highly sophisticated in style and literary in subject matter. Coelho’s absorption of such histories culminates in lines of glittering red brown on the lips of several vessels.
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Kirsten Coelho: there on the other shore
“Literature and art, in equal measure, hold a mirror to the human condition and provide a lens for the artist to view the world anew.”
SEP/OCT 2021
Amidst the pressure of Coelho’s profound attentiveness, she leaves room for the less predictable outcomes of each carefully mixed chemical glaze: drab when brushed on, brilliant when it comes out of the kiln. Once the glaze is mixed, the final product remains at the mercy of the kiln— awaited and watched through a tiny spy hole, sometimes at hourly intervals, through to the wee hours and fired up to five times for the desired result. The downward pull of the ruddy, glittering iron glaze, for example, is only achieved with repeated firings. Patience and comfort with failure are vital for a ceramic practice as finely tuned as Coelho’s. It is sustainable because she is a romantic of the medium and because she manages the expansive possibilities of porcelain, chemical glazes and heat by working with a discrete vocabulary of shapes and colour. The artist’s oeuvre comprises just five different handmade porcelain bodies, including a newly introduced cylindrical form made possible by a particular type of porcelain. This focus on simplicity, directness, and a continual sense of the hand allows for a play of textures and an introduction of colour while preserving the serene visual chorus of each arrangement.
Once removed from the furnace, the works appear cold to touch, sacrosanct for their museum-like delicacy yet familiar for their semblance to quotidian, domestic objects. The varied shapes and textures grouped together mirror the incongruent pairings found in the lived-in home. Sharp modernist lines are nimbly arranged adjacent to vessels featuring looped bow handles, swelling curves, narrow spouts, and curlicue-lipped bowls. Indeed, much of the ancient classical Greek and Roman pottery they are drawn from was not made to be pedestalled as treasures in a museum, but rather to enhance the perception and feeling of everyday protocols. The modern home is a museum for the self. Born in Denmark in 1966, Coelho was transplanted to North America at a young age before emigrating to Australia. As an adult, she moved to the UK and found herself a stranger once again upon her return to Australia a decade later. Keepsakes of the home tether us to different personal eras, become signifiers of places that no longer exist as we remember them, abstracted by distance and time. The latest body of work engages with the cultural resonance of such everyday objects as well as their classical predecessors.
Kirsten Coelho Vase and Bowl, 2021 porcelain, satin glaze 24.5 x 22 x 22 cm Photo: Grant Hancock
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In parallel with her interest in domestic objects, there on the shore continues the artist’s preoccupation with architectural ruin. This engagement was made salient in Coelho’s recent showing Ithaca, presented at the University of South Australia’s Samstag Museum of Art and UNSW Galleries. There, an installation of luminous white ceramic bodies reimagined the lost island city of Ithaca in the artist’s own vision. The line of enquiry was deepened during Coelho’s 2018 Arts South Australia Fellowship, which took her to Pompeii, the Acropolis Museum, Athens, the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, and the National Archaeological Museum, Naples, among others. Far from being static remains, these sites are a result of the meaningful reinstatement of monumental space. For Coelho, above all the vestiges of history highlight the inevitability of change, a fundamental overarching theme which informs her process. The theatrical rise and fall of crisscrossing shadows across the current exhibition recall architectural ruins and lends itself well to the Sullivan+Strumpf space, abundant with natural light. A pair of pale-white cylindrical vessels are perforated to breathe light and shadow play extends each arrangement so that space and objects flow together. The presentation offers an expansion of a practice that is at once intuitive and academic. It sees Coelho carefully introduce exquisite variations to a rigorously minimalist oeuvre. The artist’s sensitivity to material, stylish restraint and consistent ‘editing’ allows for a confluence of rich aesthetic histories to emerge ever so elegantly.
Exhibition: there on the other shore, September 2 - October 2, 2021
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Kirsten Coelho in her studio, Adelaide, SA, 2021 Photo: Daniel Noone
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Kirsten Coelho: there on the other shore Watch how Kirsten glaze her ceramics.
LEFT: Kirsten Coelho working on one of her
ceramics, Adelaide, SA, 2021 Photo: Daniel Noone RIGHT: Kirsten Coelho
SEP/OCT 2021
Embark (detail), 2021 porcelain, matt white glaze, iron oxide 25.5 x 42 x 22 cm Photo: Grant Hancock
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Kirsten Coelho Stoa, 2021 porcelain, satin and matt glaze and cobalt glaze 24.8 x 45 x 18 cm Photo: Grant Hancock
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Clara Che Wei Peh & Kaushik Swaminathan:
Appetite
SEP/OCT 2021
The upper-level Listening Room contains over 3000 vinyl records, Appetite, Singapore, 2021. Photo: Appetite
As soon as you step inside Appetite, located on the second floor of a two-storey shophouse right at the heart of the central business district in Singapore, you will notice the artworks hanging along the hallway. Lindy Lee’s ethereal Reaching for the Moon in Water, 2018, and forgetting, remembering, 2020-2021, commanding you to come closer and admire the details of her liberating use of Chinese ink, fire and paper. To the left of Lee’s large paper works, Yang Yongliang’s Prevailing Winds, 2017, plays on loop. Both artists make use of, and play with, the tradition of Chinese ink and calligraphy, bending the rules and reinventing our understandings of ink paintings to reflect a contemporary understanding of materials. Up another narrow flight of stairs, the Listening Room. Mere minutes later, you have a cocktail in one hand and a spoonful of corn custard with uni in the other, as your gaze falls on the library of over 3,000 vinyl records: Yang’s The Streams from his series Time Immemorial, 2016, is nestled on the shelf behind you.
“Initially conceived as the research and development arm of Brehm’s successful Restaurant Nouri, Appetite brings together an R&D kitchen, a record bar and an art gallery, all under one roof.”
Such is the experience of being at Appetite, a multi-concept space opened by Michelin-star chef Ivan Brehm and his team. Initially conceived as the research and development arm of Brehm’s successful Restaurant Nouri, Appetite brings together an R&D kitchen, a record bar and an art gallery, all under one roof. Driven by their passions and belief in multicultural and transdisciplinary practices, the team learns from and works with elements across various art forms and fields of knowledge. As an exhibition centre, Appetite is one of the very few independent art spaces in Singapore with a regular exhibition programme and public events series. Its exhibitions eschew the white-cube display model and place art in a relational and lived setting, within which viewers are able to interact with artworks freely and comfortably as though in their own homes. Appetite’s curatorial efforts are supported by a global team of researchers with art praxis and art history students and scholars from Yale University, University of Chicago, Pomona College, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Yale-NUS College, to name just a few. Appetite street view, Singapore, 2021. Photo: Appetite
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Clara Che Wei Peh & Kaushik Swaminathan: Appetite
SEP/OCT 2021
Dawn Ng, Waterfall IV (exhibition view), 2020 4K video, 21 min 36 secs, Appetite, Singapore, 2020. Photo: Appetite
Since its opening in August 2020, Appetite has staged four exhibitions, working with gallery partners such as Sullivan+Strumpf, to introduce its diverse audiences to artworks by internationally-renowned artists. Its inaugural exhibition “She/Her” explored representations of the female form, working closely with Southeast Asian artists such as Pinaree Sanpitak and Yanyun Chen. Then, Appetite brought together the works of Haegue Yang, Rikrit Tiravanija, Jason Martin, Dawn Ng and more, for its second show, Chromatic Identities. An exploration into colour and its historical, experiential and anthropological lineage, the exhibition drew from research around the spice trade and the migratory routes behind pigments and chemicals used across food and art. In early 2021, Appetite presented We are closed on Sundays because it’s God’s day, which looked into the origin, function and subject matter of mythology. Featuring artists including Gonkar Gyatso and FX Harsono, the exhibition not only addressed poignant questions surrounding myth and narrative-making throughout time, but it was also a much-needed effort to offer an alternative to Western forms of abstraction.
Most recently, Appetite staged What Happened Here?, a meditation on land and memory, featuring the works of artists like Lindy Lee and Yang Yongliang, whose works ask us to consider our innate relationships with the landscapes we inhabit and imagine. As we roll into the second half of the year, Appetite looks forward to its next exhibition—a contemplation on urbanism and the urban condition. Inspired by the practice of Singapore-based artist, Kanchana Gupta, the exhibition will look into the works of artists who seek to uncover the hidden or less-visible dimensions of living in the city, who utilize and critique the materials and methods of how we have built up our cosmopolitan reality, and what have we forgone in the process. Appetite Tuesday to Saturday, 6pm - late 72A Amoy St, Singapore 069891 Appetitesg.com
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Jemima Wyman in her studio, Los Angeles, 2021 Photo: Tyler William Parker
Jemima Wyman: Smoke Signals Tim Riley Walsh ponders the history of smoke and its significance in Jemima Wyman’s new collages which are a reminder both of our power and our fragility. By Tim Riley Walsh
Exhibition: Fume, September 9 - October 2, 2021
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Jemima Wyman Plume 3…, 2021 hand-cut digital photos 142 x 141 cm Photo: Ed Mumford
Jemima Wyman: Smoke Signals
“As much as these collages acknowledge the troubled and complex air we breathe in the contemporary, they still foreground the importance of resistance against ongoing oppression.”
A miasma of red, yellow, orange, grey, white, and black emission. Plumes curl and eddy. Haze…, 2020, is a jostling, bubbling picture plane of suffocating fume by the artist Jemima Wyman. It looks like the end of the world. At points, its dramatic atmosphere recalls the biblical pandemonium of the late 19th century English painter John Martin. In Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1822, a natural disaster wreaks havoc on the Roman city: lava erupts, plumes of volcanic ash and earth blow skyward. At first glance, it appears as if we look upon a subterranean hellscape. Such is the density of the cloud that hangs in the air that the sun is obstructed. The light cast upon the ground, where human figures cluster, is an enforced dusk from the end of days. Martin’s work was hugely popular at the time as a producer of proto-blockbusters—a kind of painterly Michael Bay. The public queued (and paid) to witness the ancient world imploding in varying ways across his finely detailed canvases. These appetites that Martin’s audiences reflected— for fantasies of our world and its environments alight or in collapse—curious as they are, continue today.
Yet in recent years, these scenes of destruction, their sulphureous clouds, lightning, and flame, have crossed more firmly over some undefined threshold or tipping point. What once appeared as allegories (that we did not heed) are now increasingly realities. This world is ablaze. As viewers, we draw now from experiences of the sheer and pressing propinquity of global warming. Immolating marsupials on roadsides haunt the mind’s eye. However, beyond its unlikely congestion of images, Wyman’s Haze… is not a largely fictive scene like Martin’s. For one, they are constructed from documentary images: gleaned from the internet as part of the artist’s detailed process of witnessing. In this sense, they remain connected to some notion of truth and indexicality. Something about the colours is also familiar. The orange: that hue of light from the bushfire smog that descended on Sydney in late 2019—the smoke so pervasive it set off evacuation alarms in city office blocks. The red: the shade of Mallacoota lit by a sickly, sea flare iridescence. And above it all, the ominous pyrocumulus clouds of a Black Summer. Wyman’s new works are collages about breathing and persisting in dark times. 47
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Jemima Wyman: Smoke Signals
Jemima Wyman Plume 2…, 2021 hand-cut digital photos 120.5 x 150 cm Photo: Ed Mumford
Camouflet and atmoterrorism In early 2019, trails of smoke began to enter the work of the Los Angeles and Brisbane based Wyman. Wyman’s work to date has shown a consistent interest in the lineage and method of photo collage. Though it exists across varied media, the artist’s practice examines specifically the aesthetics of global activism. In a potent sense, Wyman’s work creates a multi-focal portrait of protest across the Earth as communicated through bodies, often en masse. They show what visually connects seemingly disparate demands for equality, justice, or retribution. And the retaliation against these actions by state agents of discipline and control. Of particular interest to Wyman’s earlier practice is camouflage as a method of concealment: of action, of intention, of identity. Though it emerged originally in the early 19th century, it was not until World War I that camouflage was more fully embraced by militaries. Though at first seemingly incongruent, camouflage and smoke are not unrelated. Smoke has historically been used as a means of concealment in conflict, though unlike camouflage it does not blend into its environment: it troubles the very atmosphere, making the invisible (air) visible. Physiologically, smoke also irritates the eyes: actively impeding the viewer’s capacity to see. Appropriately, the French etymological root of camouflage—camouflet—translates as ‘whiff of smoke in the face’.
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Jemima Wyman: Smoke Signals
For Peter Sloterdijk, attacks against or attempts at controlling the air are indicative of pertinent changes in our recent history. Sloterdijk calls this ‘atmoterrorism’, (1) the denaturalisation of the atmosphere as a means of assault on the environment that sustains our lives, as opposed to a typical attack upon a body. In the same trenches in which camouflage was more fully embraced, so too chemical warfare was born. The significance of the German chlorine gas attack on French forces on 22 April 1915 for Sloterdijk—beyond it being the first example of this new method of chemical conflict, which extended, as Anna Feigenbaum notes, to the development of ‘nonlethal’ (thus ‘acceptable’) applications of chemicals like tear gas for use in crowd control—is the fuller realisation of the necessity of the atmosphere for our existence. (2) This holds specific relevance to the current climate crisis. As Erik Bordeleau summarises, this event from Sloterdijk’s perspective ‘plunged the average human being-in-the-world into radical modernity where [the] environment can no longer be taken for granted’. (3) Over the course of the last century, this was reasserted on a much broader scale by humanity’s attritional, self-inflicted attacks against the vast living space it dwells within. A kind of slow and torturous kamikaze. As David Wallace-Wells notes, since the end of WWII we have burned around 85 percent of the Industrial Age’s overall carbon debt. (4) Wyman’s collages combine documentation of these varied fumes: the yellowed tear gas of riot police, the black smog from activist-lit fires, the white of smoke grenades—building to create a cumulative image of the precarious world of the present.
plumes echo in shape, says simply and powerfully: I am here. Though ambiguity remains a central part of Wyman’s collages here—the source of these trails is purposefully excised by the artist’s hand —by carefully reading the works’ accompanying titles, we learn of the protest actions from which they have emerged. This divorcing of the act from its effect suggests an important ambivalence to this scene: it is hard to orient or define oneself when the fog of war descends. The result, pointedly, is a vast, undefined expression of defiance. As much as these collages acknowledge the troubled and complex air we breathe in the contemporary, they still foreground the importance of resistance against ongoing oppression. Marijn Nieuwenhuis, writing in the aftermath of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, Turkey in 2013, sees the struggle for public space as ‘increasingly taking place in the air’. (5) Wyman’s work echoes this. Though the future’s visibility is poor, where a real desire for change remains, the promise of better persists too. Wyman’s atmoactivist collages are a reminder of our power and our fragility. Wrest back the knife at our throat and cut the sky.
Exhibition: Fume, September 9 - October 2, 2021
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REFERENCES: 1. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 2. Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the
A haze descends
Streets of Today (London: Verso, 2017). 3. Erik Bordeleau, ‘On Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air: The Book of
Beyond smoke’s capacities for concealment, disruption, destruction, lies a further one: as an indication of distress, and more positively, a demand for rescue and recognition. The arc of a flare, which Wyman’s
(Political) Air Conditioning’, Cultural Politics 6 (Nov 2010): 389–391. 4. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 9. 5. Marijn Nieuwenhuis, ‘Terror in the Air in Istanbul’, Society & Space, January 8, 2014, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/terror-in-the-
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air-in-istanbul.
Jemima Wyman Billow 2…(detail), 2021 hand-cut digital photos 122 x 123 cm Photo: Ed Mumford
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Jemima Wyman Haze 2…, 2021 hand-cut digital photos 127.6 x 198 cm Photo: Ed Mumford
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Irfan Hendrian By Megan Arlin
Irfan Hendrian spends most of his time in his studio in Bandung, meticulously crafting sculptures out of paper every day. Formerly a mosque, Hendrian’s studio is a constant work-in-progress. To Hendrian, his studio is perpetually ‘under construction’ and he makes upgrades to his studio annually, with a projected concept of how it will be in the back of his mind. At present, he describes his studio as ‘three-fifths’ completed, with a paper-processing centre, woodworking workshop, meeting room, and small backyard for monthly barbecues. His eventual goal would be to have an additional design studio and space for artist residencies, with the intention of having more artists, designers and architects to work together at his studio. As Hendrian once quipped, ‘I’ll lure them with my barbecue’. Hendrian’s formal training in graphic design and industrial printmaking is the groundwork for his craft. Since 2011, Hendrian has been mostly working with paper—applying an efficient and logical approach to creating works that reduce and subtract, drawing everything down to their most essential states. Since then, Hendrian’s works have evolved from small sculptures to large-scale ones, all the while retaining the use of paper as his primary medium. ‘Paper is a big part of my life,’ says Hendrian, and he plans to maximise the potential of this simple medium by using unconventional techniques not previously employed in traditional artmaking. Having recently been awarded the Deustche Bank Pacific Fellowship, Hendrian has the perfect opportunity to further his practice during the Leipzig International Art Programme. Starting November 2021, Hendrian will begin his three-month residency in Leipzig. He plans to expand his practice by
SEP/OCT 2021
Irfan Hendrian Rusted corrugated steel, wood slab, salmon wood, concrete slab & brick, 2021 sculpted paper 40.2 x 42 x 6 cm
exploring how economical, political and racial relations are negotiated through paper. His fascination with this idea lies in how people identify themselves and see the world through a medium as simple as paper. With his background in graphic design, he views himself as ‘an engineer’ of sorts, understanding the process and machinery involved in working with paper. He continues to apply the same methodology in his practice and, at the end of it, seeks to remove the obvious language of paper—its functional use—to understand its ‘ghost’. As he prepares to embark on his three-month residency in Leipzig, Germany, Hendrian has already begun closely examining the geopolitical landscapes of Leipzig in relation to his hometown of Bandung, Indonesia. To Hendrian, Leipzig and Bandung share a similar history in the print industry. After the economy crisis and fall of the New Order Regime In Indonesia in 1998, Bandung became well-known for being a pioneer in printing, supporting a range of other industries nationwide. At that time, ideas and research from universities were freely
Irfan Hendrian in the Studio. Photo Courtesy of the Artist
trasmitted in Bandung. In an uncanny parallel, Leipzig likewise faced a similar situation. After the reunification, Leipzig saw economic collapse that came after, but through the transmission of, ideas through paper, print and publishing. It helped them to look back at their rich history and helped both cities develop into major cultural centers. Hendrian’s next step is to continue to expand his studio and share its evolution with those around him. With many works-in-progress, Hendrian will show them as a pop-up exhibition before he moves to Leipzig. This pop-up exhibition will also be available for viewing online through Sullivan+Strumpf viewing room.
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran with his sculpture, Blue spiky head with gold teeth, 2021. Photo: Elise Frederickson
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Divine Intervention By Tai Mitsuji
The creation of life from clay is a common birth story found in many mythological narratives and religious creation myths around the world. The work of contemporary Australian ceramicist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is secular and unmistakably contemporary, yet there is something miraculous in the way he bestows raw earth with the ineffable qualities of life. Exhibition: The Guardians, October 14 - November 13, 2021
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Divine Intervention
SEP/OCT 2021
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Four headed seated figure (detail), 2021 earthenware 119 x 41 x 35cm Photo: Elise Frederickson
“These ceramics bear little resemblance to the human form. Instead, they move between rigid geometrical shapes and much looser, almost sprawling, structures.”
I am looking at a face, which is looking back at me. Or is it? Is this face really looking back at me? And, perhaps, more urgently, is it even a face? When I stare at Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s new works, I’m continually confronted by these questions and more specifically the unnerving effects of what psychologists refer to as ‘face pareidolia’. Despite its intimidating pronunciation, face pareidolia is a simple concept: it refers to the phenomenon of seeing human features in inanimate and everyday objects. If you have ever spied a face in the contours of a passing cloud, the char of some burnt toast, the holes of a bowling ball, or the knots of a wooden floorboard, you will understand me. However, this moment does not usually endure. At some point, life continues and we eat the toast, bowl the ball, and take a step forward. This is where Nithiyendran’s work radically differs. Nithiyendran’s new series of ceramics for his exhibition The Guardians, pulls at our inherent impulse to locate faces in things. Inspired by Japanese Nio guardians and Hindu Dvarapala door or gate guardians, Nithiyendran deploys a series of abstracted ceramic forms as the exhibition’s namesake. These ceramics bear little resemblance to the human form. Instead, they move
between rigid geometrical shapes and much looser, almost sprawling, structures. However, where other objects—our toast, bowling ball, and floorboards— relinquish their claim to human physiognomy upon a second glance and closer inspection, Nithiyendran’s works stake an indelible claim to this anthropomorphic territory. The artist takes abstract ceramics that bear little resemblance to the human form, and he enfranchises them with the ineffable qualities of life. His works stand between the inanimate and the sentient, allowing us to comfortably settle on neither. Like the guardians that sit outside a temple, many of the works seem to teeter on the edge of movement, as if to deny the very nature of their hardened clay bodies. Nithiyendran’s ceramics exist within the conventional setting of the art encounter— they sit and are inspected—yet they also threaten to rupture the assumed passivity of the art object and the unilateral nature of this relationship. In the simplest terms possible, we look at them, but they also look back at us. But Nithiyendran’s ceramic sculptures are more than mere avatars, as the artist plays with the very idea of construction and illusion in his work. ‘I was looking at the mythological and historical instances where guardians stand at entrances’, he explains. ‘They often produce fear
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Divine Intervention
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or are somewhat ominous, but I also wanted to introduce an ambiguous tone’. This ambiguity comes to the fore in Guardian Figure with Reptile Crown, 2021, where the central figure’s face is framed by a series of reptilian heads. Nithiyendran tells me that he wanted the viewer to question whether these monstrous appendages were part of his guardian or were simply an act of selfadornment or cultivation: ‘a hat to be taken on or off’. Of course, we are given some hints. The reptiles bare their teeth in an act of primal animus, they are speckled with traces of red, and suggest some past violence. By contrast, the central guardian sticks out his tongue, in a playful gesture that could not be more distinct. However, the answer as to whether or not this is one singular entity is less interesting than the fact that Nithiyendran makes us ask the question. He is both creating a believable fiction and undoing this artifice within the space of the same artwork. Part of the immediacy of the work has to do with how Nithiyendran layers and interweaves his painted glazes. In Double Headed Horned Figure, 2021, for instance, the colour seems to cascade over the ceramic head, as ribbons of blue slide and fold into areas of white, only to be covered by drips of yellow and underwritten by
piercing lines of red, which momentarily materialise where the other glazes are at their thinnest. The brilliance of the ceramic’s finish is that it still appears to be in progress—that it still appears to be alive, moving, and somehow able to shift before our eyes. Of course, we all know that the firing process has arrested these colours and permanently frozen them in place, yet, even so, the glazes’ fluidity threatens this knowledge and defies the certainty of this material dormancy. In other words, the impossible whisper of activity and sentience not only finds expression in the iconography of Nithiyendran’s guardians, but also in the chromatic play of their ceramic skin. Here, the conceptual power of the work migrates into its very materiality. While Nithiyendran’s ceramics are filled with a visceral immediacy, it would be a mistake to locate a lack of care in his free, neo-expressionist aesthetic. In fact, it is one of his quiet frustrations. ’I think when writers generally talk about my work they use a couple of clichéd words, like “wild” and “expressive,” without meditating upon what those words actually mean’, Nithiyendran tells me. ‘What I try and communicate rhetorically is this artistic process of being wild and uninhibited, but that’s actually an aesthetic. Wildness is a register rather than a part of
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Warrior with Helmet II, 2021 earthenware 69.5 x 34 x 22 cm Photo: Elise Frederickson
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Divine Intervention
RIGHT: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
Guardian figure with reptile crown, 2021 earthenware 74 x 38 x 28 cm Photo: Elise Frederickson
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LEFT: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Four headed seated figure (detail), 2021 earthenware 119 x 41 x 35 cm Photo: Elise Frederickson
the process’. This is the contradiction of Nithiyendran’s work, which traffics in an economy of intense symbols and kinetically charged marks yet does so with the most careful hands and thoughtful eyes. It’s surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Ceramics is a process characterised by protracted patience and high drama, as one begins by meticulously moulding clay only to later surrender it into a Promethean fire. ‘The actual techniques that I’m using are not dissimilar to the ones that people would have been using thousands of years ago’, Nithiyendran says. ‘There’s a lot of mythological narratives and religious creation myths where the core motif is breathing life into earth or clay’. Nithiyendran’s work is secular and unmistakably contemporary, yet it also mobilises a syncretic artistic vocabulary: from vernacular sculptures made by artisans in India to the horses that accompany the terracotta warriors. Upon reflection, the clichés that attach themselves to Nithiyendran’s work become a little more sympathetic— how else is one meant to navigate a practice that so effortlessly moves between seemingly diametricallyopposed positions, and eludes the compression and short-hand of the written word?
When I ask Nithiyendran about why he makes a particular artistic move or creative choice, he typically replies with a rich narrative that traverses the intricacies of different cultural and aesthetic histories. Sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes his explanation falters. ‘I guess some of my processes are somewhat beyond language or reason, as intuition forms a core part of my artistic process’, he tells me. ‘That sounds a bit weird and romantic, but I think once they start to come into being there’s almost a fight between the cerebral and non-cerebral elements’. While Nithiyendran is describing his artistic process, he could also be describing how a viewer receives the work. His ceramics present us with a series of intellectual provocations, yet they also move beyond this to strike at some fundamental part of our psyche. They move into the world of language and comprehension in one moment, only to depart from it in the next.
Exhibition: Guardians, October 14 - November 13, 2021
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in his studio with The Guardians, 2021 Photo: Elise Frederickson
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At home:
Joanna Lamb
SEP/OCT 2021
Joanna Lamb in her home, Applecross, WA, 2021 Photo: Joanna Lamb
WHERE DO YOU CALL HOME? DESCRIBE THE
WHAT IS YOUR MOST TREASURED POSSESSION AND
LANDSCAPE AROUND YOU.
WHY?
Joanna Lamb (JL)/ Home is in the suburb of Applecross, 8km from Perth. My house is an early 60s north-facing house on a corner block. The house is slightly elevated with conveniently situated windows from which to observe the comings and goings of neighbours and passers-by on the street. A voyeur’s delight! The streets are tree-lined with large jacarandas that draw busloads of tourists in spring when they flower. The suburb itself follows the southern curve of the Swan River heading toward the port of Fremantle. It is a very picturesque suburb. I am very lucky to live here.
JL/ It’s very hard to narrow it down to one thing. For a start, every artwork I own is a treasured possession. One of the very first artworks I bought was a small ink drawing by Peter Booth of three figures tussling in the landscape. At the time, I was an art student and it was a huge investment. I’m talking hundreds of dollars, not thousands. I probably couldn’t afford to go out for weeks afterwards, but I have never once had buyer’s remorse.
DO YOU HAVE ANY STRICT HOME RITUALS?
Over time, I seem to have unintentionally collected works which fall into the broad themes of either landscape or colour abstraction, mainly 2D works, either paintings or photographs.
JL/ Not really, and it’s probably my downfall. I’m very self-motivated and try to make the most of my time. I like to run about three times a week in the early morning. I run down to the river, along a path near the water. Winter is best, when it’s dark and no one can see my running style! It’s very quiet, the cold helps keep my heart rate down and it’s almost meditative.
Then there’s my Brompton Folding Bike. Such a beautifully designed thing. I first came across Brompton bikes in Singapore when I was there for an exhibition. They are the perfect size to store in small apartments and studios.
Each morning, I get the kids organised and off to school. A coffee is essential before I start work and while I check e-mails. Then I head out the front door a few steps and I’m at the studio. It’s not a long commute! My studio is in a purpose-built garage with a vaulted ceiling and a north-facing window overlooking the garden. School hours are my work hours and I try to not let anything intrude on this time.
JL/ I have used my home as a canvas to practice wall paintings, before exhibiting them in bigger gallery spaces. I also have artworks of mine (interspersed with the work of others) which would represent the changes I have made to my practice over a period of twenty-five years. My home is a slowly changing canvas.
WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU’RE SUFFERING FROM ‘ARTIST BLOCK’?
JL/ Really, what happens is that I make bad art. I find the best way to overcome it is to keep working. Artist block can be a good thing. It usually comes before a change in direction, or when I’m working through a new idea or process, developing a different way of doing things.
WHAT DOES YOUR HOME SAY ABOUT YOU?
Exhibition: One Long Moment, November 18 - December 21, 2021
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SEP/OCT 2021
LEFT: View from Joanna Lamb studio featuring
her painting Table Tennis, 2014. Photo: Joanna Lamb RIGHT: Joanna Lamb studio featuring her
painting Flatland Figure 14b, 2007, and Mary Tonkin Fallen Logs Werribee Gorge, 2001. Photo: Joanna Lamb
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Joanna Lamb Garden, 2020 acrylic on superfine polyester 92 x 122 cm Photo: Nicholas White
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Tim Silver in his studio, Marrickville, Gadigal Country, NSW, 2021. Photo: Jek Maurer
Last Word: In-between Days of Tim Silver
Alex Pedley (AP)/ What are you drinking? Tim Silver (TS)/ A little red. You? AP/ A little gin. It’s a Sunday evening. TS/ Let’s just try to keep it calm. What have you got up to this weekend? AP/ What do you think? Absolutely nothing. TS/ I feel like you’re not answering that question properly for me right now! It’s about finding the little joys that sustain you. Actually, a friend and I have this pact to share something that we do, some cultural engagement, every day. Including trash TV.
AP/ We often see time as unstable in your work, as something that cannot quite be grasped or controlled. Yet here you talk of suspension, the in-between. TS/ You know, the majority of my titles come from song lyrics and this one is from The Cure song Inbetween Days from 1985. It has been playing on me for some time now. It’s quite a perky song to listen to in the studio. Music you listen to in the studio can sort be about driving yourself along, often while you’re doing mundane activities. The act of casting is actually one that is quite methodical and has a degree of banality to it. The joy is at the moment of the reveal. Or the planning of it, rather than the actual doing of it.
AP/ Very true! So much trash TV. Speaking of little joys, you have a solo exhibition coming up at S+S in November.
AP/ Like the joy of what could be and learning to be ok in the getting there. Which we don’t often think about too much in the process of making.
TS/ Yes. Before getting to the new works, I’m actually thinking of drawing out a couple of works from the stockroom. I don’t have a problem bringing those pieces from the past back in, drawing those lineages, because not everything needs to be the next thing, or new, not all the time. Maybe it’s a way to push through some constraints, not waste—it feels important now.
TS/ Well, it is but it’s also one of those things, in The Cure song it’s about that moment when the guy is in a love triangle and he’s trying to figure out what his feelings are in relation to his situation, but, I mean, in a broader sense it’s about what was, what is and what could be. The ‘what is’, is often quite overlooked.
I often use material just as a blank canvas because I work in monochromes, in a monochromatic fashion. Part of that is to not implement detail, like in Close to me, 2020. Or in the Trauma series, beginning in 2011—their burls of blackness appear to portray the impact of bushfires, but the way I see it is that they are shadows of their former selves. So that’s why they exist in that black polyurethane state. An in-between state.
My interest in this comes from the continual desire to investigate overlooked objects, symbols or motifs and one of those is this moment in time of the ‘what is’. I’m not New Age-y, it’s just one of those little-considered things! The concentration on the ‘what’s next’ instead of perhaps taking the time to revel, enjoy, and to be content with ‘what is’ in its complexity without the binary of ‘what was’ and ‘what’s next’ is important.
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Last Word: In-between Days of Tim Silver
Inbetween Days is a sliding doors moment, it’s being on the precipice of a decision. There is a moment in that decision-making process where anything can be possible, you know. You haven’t made the decision, the decision that results in the consequences that are yet to be. So it’s this beautiful moment where you can imagine things one way or another, or all ways, without the burden of consequence. AP/ There are very few simple present states and we’re constantly caught between them, and for that we satisfy ourselves with a notion of the now. TS/ One of the reasons is that we can’t fully grasp, whether in language or physicality, what that concept of nowness is. Thinking back to 18 months ago, none of us knew what it was that we were living through or what the implications were. AP/ There was a lot of predicting (will it be 6 months, 1 or 2 or even 5 years?) but not a lot of living with (in a variety of senses). A lot of people found themselves adrift—of not knowing how to be suspended. Myself included.
SEP/OCT 2021
TS/ You’re not aware of the present when you’re actually in it. It’s only hindsight or in some speculative, or fantastical version or model of that time, that makes you understand what it is. There is, for example, in the exhibition, a pair of feet intertwined that cut off just above the ankle and we never get to know what the reality of that situation is. They have been depersonalised and yet it’s a moment we can all relate to. Even in that simplest decision-making capacity of ‘shall I get out of bed or stay in bed today’? Right now, I don’t think it is necessary that we bound out of bed each day, so to speak, and get on with the onslaught of productivity. Is staying in bed, or staying still, productive in a different sense? Remaining in that in-betweenness…?
AP/ Or rolling out of bed and onto the couch…? TS/ Maybe you fell asleep on the couch… AP/ This is the thinking of now, of the last 18 months, a new-found relevance or understanding of productivity, and perhaps compassion? TS/ The seeding idea (can be read in so many ways, epidemiologically, intimately…!) was when I was trying not to watch the news so much last year because of the group momentum that produces. It becomes a flood, it isn’t the same as the momentum of lived experience, of talking to your neighbour, of watching what’s happening on the street. Of course, there will be implications from a socioeconomic and cultural perspective also. However, there is a misstep of realities here. It doesn’t reflect or promote a healthy perspective on this whole thing. In my Instagram feed I saw this random post from a guy I’d slept with once in New York: a hand reaching out to touch another hand. This struck me as such a real, intimate moment of what life was probably like in my ex-home of New York city where I lived briefly. This image struck me much more than anything I had seen in the news. A hand caressing another hand is such a universal motif, it’s invested with the personal and it is such a visceral experience. It felt very real, on Instagram— the least visceral of mediums. This seeded the idea of Inbetween Days. It triggered my thoughts of these intimate and modest moments, of not making giant statements about this time, rather reflecting upon this time with humility and taking pause. When the current settings of this predicament were taking form last year, I will say I was disappointed, I thought we were going to have a revolution. I have slight fantasies and tendencies towards revolutionary activities but to see that it was just more of the same when the
Tim Silver, Inbetween Days, 2021, copper-infused Forton MG, 17 x 52 x 45 cm Photo: Jek Maurer
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Last Word: In-between Days of Tim Silver
world turned upside down…I was extremely disappointed. Deliveroo-type drivers that had to keep on delivering. There has been no real thinking about how we might reconstruct our societies. From our governments, all we still hear in the press conferences is how we can get back to ‘normal’, back to the way things were. AP/ Again, our discomfort with understanding the realities of now. Maybe this is exactly where we are supposed to be? TS/ I’ve been losing you, 2015, featured the remnants of stumps of a bushfire that tore through my family home back in 2013. Regrowth happens quite quickly in the Australian landscape. One minute it’s decimated, and the next there’s rebirth. It’s kind of a really beautiful thing to witness. Which I’m not sure our own western culture has the capacity to imitate.
SEP/OCT 2021
AP/ We don’t like death, we don’t like unhappiness, it is entirely antithetical. Well-being will out. TS/ Yes, let me wallow in my own misery! This was said to me by an artist colleague of mine, speaking of the current crisis: we just need to lean into the experience, this is what we have, let’s not remake it into anything else but what it is, and actually live through it. The idea of getting out of this situation as quickly as possible, while necessary for a whole variety of reasons, including health (preserving life, social, physical, mental health) and economy, doesn’t allow for actually living. People are sick and dying, and we need to protect the vulnerable, beyond this imperative, however, the getting-out-of-this-thinking doesn’t allow us to live through this time. When else have we ever had this time to pause? I think this is an amazing thing to get to experience in this sense. Inbetween Days, works of body parts which are censored in the classic sense (to be removed of their faces and identities) to become universal symbols or motifs, represents this for me.
Within the hysteria or hype of the last 18 months, my own included (as in ‘where did the revolution go?!’), these small moments of physicality and intimacy are so important. Now stigmatised in a similar way to the HIV/ AIDS pandemic of the 80s and 90s, it has been interesting to watch this iteration of stigma unfold, in a way. It is also interesting to note the binary illogic of the last twenty or thirty years, really, where fear of proximity and intimacy expresses itself. Muslims being vilified for covering up for religious purposes in the name of security in, say, banks, and now we are totally covering up in those places and its mandated—for instance. When this crisis descended upon us, the presence and enduring legacy of these moments in history came rushing back. Even though I was in-between two stages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (the crisis and the post-AIDS era including the responses to being able to live with it), its influence was still huge for me through artists such as Felix Gonzalez Torres, Robert Gober and others. Then post9/11 and again now, we are being told to fear each other, to fear touch, the idea of belonging—terms like ‘social distancing’ have infested our vocabulary without anyone questioning the health of the terms themselves. AP/ I can’t help but think about the long-term impact of this time. On everything. Not just our material culture, what we leave behind, but all of it. As if we would need verification (!), but in twenty, thirty or even 100 years’ time, this moment will be one viewed in stark relief. TS/ I think this will be a time we look back upon to rediscover the works and the practices, just as with these other major moments of history, which showed a level of modesty and humility in the face of the times. That weren’t made as part of major public gallery shows to ‘mark the moment’, we will be looking for those voices who were seeking understanding rather than displaying Understanding, with a big, capital U. At least, we can hope so.
100 YEARS
Presenting partner
Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes 2021 and Archie 100 On now
OF THE ARCHIBALD PRIZE Archibald Prize 2021 finalist Natasha Bieniek Rachel Griffiths (detail) © the artist
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Quick Curate:
On touch
SEP/OCT 2021
Lindy Lee Open as the sky, 2020 mirror polished bronze 193 x 215 x 150 cm Price upon application
Alex Seton Less talking, more listening, 2020 Moolong marble 81 x 17 x 23 cm $26,400
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Gold Figure with Elephant Legs, 2017 24k gold plated bronze 50 x 38 x 15 cm $15,400
Sanné Mestrom Nyatamori (Reclining Nude), 2021 65 x 170 x 115 cm Concrete $55,000 Bronze $88,000 Clockwise from bottom right: You Stand/We Carry, She Seeps/You Ripple, We Leak/They Hold, You Drift/I Spill, 2021 Dimensions Variable Bronze $16,500 Concrete $14,300
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Up Next
KIRSTEN COELHO THERE ON THE OTHER SHORE 02.09.21 - 02.10.21
JEMIMA WYMAN FUME 09.09.21 - 02.10.21
RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN THE GUARDIANS 14.10.21 - 13.11.21
MICHAEL ZAVROS 21.10.21 - 13.11.21
SEP/OCT 2021
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 18.11.21 Joanna Lamb 25.11.21
Tim Silver
“HEALTH AND HAPPINESS” 22 JULY-28 OCTOBER Verge Gallery City Rd, Jane Foss Russell Plaza, University of Sydney, Sydney verge-gallery.net “Other Languages” (detail), oil on canvas, 183 x 244cm, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist. Seth Birchall is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
Jemima Wyman Billow 1..., 2021 hand-cut digital photos 122 x 123 cm Photo: Ed Mumford
SYDNEY 799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com
SINGAPORE P +65 83107529 Megan Arlin | Gallery Director E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com
Australasia’s Premier Art Fair
sydneycontemporary.com.au
