15 minute read
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND
Arthur Streeton Australia 1867–1943 The purple noon’s transparent might, c.1896 Oil on canvas Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
WORDS
What’s it like to be a keeper of cultural heritage in Australia’s leading art museums? Anabel Dean speaks to three Trinity alumni who have carved out careers as some of the country’s top curators.
It isn’t the pickled platypus, or fossilised Frenchman’s finger, but a painting that best encapsulates Jane Clark’s (TC 1977) love of her career as a curator.
Seeing The purple noon’s transparent might for the first time, lifted out of its frame at the National Gallery of Victoria, was like watching Arthur Streeton actually paint the work.
Observing daylight on brushstrokes, unpicking the mythology, Jane was immediately transported to the banks of the Hawkesbury River where, in 1896, Streeton claimed he’d painted the masterpiece over two days in temperatures of almost 40 Jane Clark, curator at the degrees. Museum of Old and New Art
‘The work went from being a (Mona) in Hobart. sort of square, handsome, chocolate-boxy picture to an astounding work of art – one of Australia’s great paintings – and it transformed my way of thinking about the physicality of art objects,’ Jane remembers.
The work was just one revelation in a richly rewarding career that catapulted the University of Melbourne Fine Arts Honours graduate into curatorial roles at the NGV, Sotheby’s in Australia, and finally, in 2007, to Australia’s largest private museum, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart.
Curators are now influential tastemakers with farreaching impact in the art world. Dreaming up groundbreaking exhibitions can be close to an art form in itself for curators who act, not only as the custodians of historic reliquary, but as protagonists launching artistic careers, injecting new life into the art scene, giving voice to a range of practitioners and, sometimes, advocating for change in the merger between art and politics.
Jane came to the cavernous interiors of Mona from Sotheby’s, having worked through the booming art sale years from 1994 to 2007, when nearly every auction brought forth never-before-seen objects of awe. There were sales for Sidney
Nolan’s estate; the Foster’s and Sir David Davies collections; and extraordinary discoveries such as the 9 by 5 cigar-box ‘impressions’, Charles Conder’s Australian sketchbooks and a French flower market by Ethel Carrick Fox.
‘It was the era of the highest price paid at an Australian auction and there were amazing thrills in handling the works all the time,’ Jane says. ‘You just never knew what was going to happen next.
‘Every day, somebody had an artwork in the boot of their car and sometimes we’d literally get the screwdriver out to peel the backing off a painting, hoping to find some wonderful piece of information that would double the value of the work.’
Before Sotheby’s, Jane was curator of Australian art at the NGV, where Monday afternoons were regularly spent with a conservator in the storage area, unearthing the secrets of works that, in some cases, had not been closely examined for more than 40 years.
Times have changed, though, and now there are questions about whether some objects should be kept in museums. ‘At Mona, for example, there are ancient Egyptian mummies, and some people may ask if we should be displaying human remains at all. I think I probably struggle with this sort of question more than some of my colleagues because I’m the one that’s most often dealing with the “old” stuff.’
Jane is one of the few museum curators in the world who will blithely declare they write ‘art wank’. The moniker for the pithy electronic tablet essays used at Mona, instead of wall labels, is intended to be ironic but it is also unapologetic. This is a museum of ideas: a place of cabinets filled with curiosities, of things and of minds. It’s a perfect fit for somebody with Jane’s ‘endlessly inquisitive fascination for objects’.
The question of who speaks from the podium is another element that has changed. Does a curator of European extraction have more historical expertise about an object in their care than an Indigenous Australian descendant of the people who made it? It wasn’t so long ago that men in periwigs considered Aboriginal culture a stagnant science rather than a living and constantly evolving culture in existence for thousands of years.
Shonae Hobson (TC 2015) is a southern Kaantju woman from the tiny community of Coen, on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula, who first came to Melbourne for an exhibition by her artist mother Naomi Hobson.
She returned, in 2014, to study art history and anthropology as a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate at the University of Melbourne.
‘I just really fell in love with this city and knew that this was a place that I wanted to pursue my studies,’ she says. Trinity College nurtured personal growth while providing access to opportunities and friendships with like-minded individuals who were also a long way from home.
Shonae became a curator of Indigenous art at the NGV in March this year. She had spent the previous two years as the inaugural First Nations curator at Bendigo Art Gallery where she brought Australia’s first major survey of contemporary Indigenous Australian fashion to life in an exhibition titled Piinpi: Contemporary Indigenous Fashion (2020).
‘This is not just a job for me,’ Shonae explains. ‘It’s my everyday lived experience. Being a First Nations person, telling the history of my people, and working in collaboration with First Nations communities, it’s an integral part of who I am. It’s important to recognise that our people have a very different way of working, which doesn’t always align with the Western way of thinking.
‘I feel that I have a very important responsibility to ensure that our voices are represented in the museum space. The role of an Indigenous curator is an important one, as we are the conduits between our community and the public. My role is as much about educating as it is about opening the door for other Indigenous voices, to challenge dominant narratives and reinforce powerful messages of representation and visibility within the colonial landscape.’
SHONAE HOBSON
The belief in education leads back to the University of Melbourne with Associate Professor Alison Inglis (TC 1977), who is coordinator of the Master of Art Curatorship program. Her curatorial experience began at Trinity, assisting the celebrated art academic and Senior Common Room member, Professor Sir Joseph Burke, in cataloguing the College art collection which was, then, scattered throughout the building.
‘Looking back, I realise it was a terrific thing to sit at breakfast every morning in the Dining Hall, looking at these different and remarkable moments in history presented through the artistic style of the portraits on the walls [at Trinity],’ Alison says. ‘It was a reinforcement of the enormous pleasure I derived from doing an undergraduate art history degree that sharpened the sense of the possibility within the subject.’
After she completed her degree, Alison was offered a university teaching job, and the die was cast. Academia turned out to be a vibrant and energetic space in which to learn, interpret and communicate ideas about art.
A combination of interests in history, collecting and conservation led to invitations to serve on museum boards (including the NGV, Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Duldig Studio and Museums Victoria), and to her appointment as Emeritus Trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria in 2010.
Working with these remarkable collections only reinforced the power of curating.
‘If you love art, it’s a great challenge to bring objects together in a visual conversation that communicates in a more powerful way than, perhaps, words alone can,’ says Alison. ‘To open that excitement up to others is a really wonderful thing.’
Ultimately, what does it take to make a good curator?
‘Curiosity,’ says Jane. ‘And I think there’s something almost performative in sharing your passion for created objects: objects that pose questions about how we see the world, from artefacts that have long outlived their human makers to brand new artworks created on your watch. It’s probably worth understanding from the outset that you’ll never know all the answers.’
OPPOSITE: Shonae Hobson, left, Curator of Indigenous Art at the NGV, and Associate Professor Alison Inglis, coordinator of Melbourne University’s Master of Art Curatorship program. BELOW: Installation view, Piinpi: Contemporary Indigenous Fashion. Courtesy of Bendigo Art Gallery.
Three Trinity alumni reflect on their journeys as business leaders and what it takes for women to get a strong foothold in roles and industries traditionally dominated by men.
BY EMILY McAULIFFE
In 1987, Leonie Valentine (TC 1987) tried her hand at coxing one of Trinity’s rowing teams and steered the boat into a pylon on the Yarra. ‘It was terrible,’ she recalls. ‘Those early morning starts weren’t really for me.’
This ‘hard knock’ would become a metaphor for the early stages of her career, when she had her sights set on becoming a geologist. While at Melbourne University, she went to an industry networking function and distinctly remembers a mining representative handing out business cards, pausing to say, ‘Oh, no, you’re a woman’, and saving his cards for the gents.
Apparently the ‘wrong’ gender for a geology career, Leonie took an advertising role with BP, and addressing gender disparity in the workplace became a deep-seated passion of hers. She never forgot that averted business card.
The view from the top
These days, Leonie works for Google as the Managing Director for Melbourne and Government, looking after the company’s largest advertisers. She recently returned to Australia after almost 10 years working as Google’s Managing Director in Hong Kong.
Having pushed through the glass ceiling of the tech industry, she now tries to help other women avoid gendered exclusion, and was involved in committees and programs in Hong Kong dedicated to supporting women in business.
Though Leonie was taken aback by her early taste of discrimination at that university event and became acutely aware of gender inequality as her career progressed, she admits there was a period of accepting that was ‘just the
way it is’. She had grown accustomed to being one of only a handful of women in maths and science classes at university, and, when questioned by a senior leader while working at Telstra as to ‘where all the women were’ at a C-level event, she remembers looking around the room and shrugging it off. It was simply a reflection of her everyday life.
Later, however, having made headway on the career ladder in the tech industry, she asked herself: Where did all the women go? ‘I realised I’d never bothered to ask where everybody went, so that was a bit of a wake-up call.’
She coined the expression ‘tech trapdoor’ to describe the competing priorities that women often face when they hit their 30s, which may see their careers stall. Elderly parents, pregnancy, child-rearing, even marriage. ‘The demands of tech industries are pretty high,’ says Leonie. ‘People run fast, they work ridiculously hard. Probably too hard. And it’s not an environment in which women can thrive, because the expectation for you to be there and to put the hours in often doesn’t align with a lot of personal aspirations.’
Leonie says ‘getting to the top’ was made possible for her because her husband is a stay-at-home dad, and childcare was also affordable in Hong Kong. ‘In Australia, one of the things that holds us back is the unaffordability of childcare,’ she says. ‘Because, if you contrast that to Hong Kong, they have very high representation of women in the upper ranks of management. I’ve never met so many female chief executives of banks and venture funds
and lawyers and all these sorts of things, in part, because childcare is super affordable there.’
Shi Mei Chin (TCFS 2008), Chief Financial Officer of Singaporebased B2B foreign exchange trading platform Spark Systems, says Asia has traditionally espoused stereotypical gender roles, but the paradigm is shifting – and she’s playing an active role in pushing it further.
Shi Mei’s passion lies in helping women get into the traditionally maledominated financial technology, or fintech, industry, which she says is experiencing rapid growth and is full of opportunities.
A chartered accountant, Shi Mei entered the fintech industry in 2016 while working at PwC in Singapore, where she and her then-director – a woman – pioneered a fintech team within PwC, offering services and advice to financial technology start-ups. Spark Systems was one of those start-ups, and, since being invited to join the team in 2018, Shi Mei has watched the company grow to 50 people and cemented her passion and aptitude for the industry. (In 2019, she won the Top 50 FinTech Leaders Asia award and the 30 Under 30 FinTech Leaders award.)
Formerly on the Women in FinTech subcommittee in Singapore, and now treasurer of the Singapore FinTech Association, Shi Mei aims to enable other women to follow her lead. A key challenge she sees in hiring for technology start-ups is that most coders and developers are men, but it’s not as simple as hiring more women, because there aren’t many women applying in the first place. ‘It actually goes all the way down to
education,’ she says, stressing that women need to be encouraged to study science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects to, in turn, drive up applications from women for tech-based jobs. Shi Mei also believes that finding a mentor or role model is important, referencing her former director at PwC, who inspired her to succeed.
Someone who agrees is Amy Tennent (TC 1996), who is a fourth-generation Director of the Cripps Foundation, as well as Director of Minsmere, Executive Vice-President of Chartwell Industries, and Chair of VIL Limited, which encompasses the Velcro group of companies. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Trinity College Foundation (ECOF) and the Trinity College Council. Amy climbed the ranks of the family businesses (all the above are run by Amy and her family and funnel profits into the education-focused Cripps Foundation), and credits her father for playing an influential role in guiding her career from the ground up.
The view from the top
Leonie Valentine
‘Dad was great, but I recognised a few years ago that I really needed to get out of just having family mentorship,’ she says. Amy subsequently joined the Young Presidents’ Organisation, made up of people of a similar age who are running their own companies or leading family businesses, and uses members as a sounding board.
‘For women wanting to move into leadership roles, I think it’s important to reach out if they find someone they really admire or think they can learn a lot from, as people are happy to help,’ she says. ‘Then, if they don’t know the answer to the experience that someone needs assistance with, they actually might know someone who has been through that and can connect them.’
Reaching out for help is something Amy has done herself, having recently engaged a professional coach to help guide her decision-making and challenge her thinking. She has also hired an executive assistant, acknowledging that leaders don’t have to know it all or do it all. ‘I am learning. I think we’re always all constantly learning. We never know everything and we’re never, ever doing anything the right way all the time. I think I was very hard on myself by trying to do everything on my own.’
While working on herself, Amy, in collaboration with her fellow company leaders, is determined to ensure her family businesses champion equality. The Velcro leadership group, for example, now has an even split of women and men – something Amy says has created a more empathetic culture, which has broken down some of the barriers employees reported feeling when it came to speaking up. And across businesses, diversity of all kinds is being embraced. ‘It’s not just about gender. It’s about race. It’s about religion. It’s about ethnicity. It’s about people who are disabled in some way. It’s about ensuring that everyone feels really comfortable and that we’re providing a work environment that encourages people from diverse backgrounds to come and work for us.’
Something Leonie, Shi Mei and Amy all agree on is that success in business doesn’t come without hard work. For Leonie, it’s about resilience and being comfortable with failure – traits learnt from her Shanghai-born, Hong Kongraised mother who migrated to Australia at the tail end of the White Australia policy. Shi Mei references her ‘grit’, the motivation drawn from a driven peer group, and pushing through the cycle of feeling invincible one minute and defeated the next. Amy says it’s about working hard to build relationships, taking responsibility for yourself and working out who you want to become – something she says Trinity encouraged her to do as a young adult.
The drive for change needs to come from many angles on both a micro and macro level, but, encouragingly, things are shifting. Women don’t just have a foot in the door of business now – increasingly, they have a seat at the table.
Shi Mei Chin Amy Tennent
