Antonia Perricone-Mrljak

Ahead of her upcoming exhibition with James Makin Gallery, Melbourne, Erin McFadyen spoke with Antonia Perricone-Mrljak about the labours of painting and planting, the mechanics of memory, and the importance of continuing cultural traditions from around the world in modern Australia.

Physical labour – especially the stubborn and repetitious kinds, like digging, planting, and painting – has a way of impressing itself down into the musculature of those who live through it. Perhaps this is even more the case with those who “make a living” through it, and who depend on it, in both literal and more ineffable senses, for their survival. In Antonia Perricone-Mrljak’s new suite of paintings, Harvest Day Night, the painter’s memories of a childhood spent in a backyard farm fall down her arms, through the tendons and the joints, to her new tools: no longer the spade or the stake, but acrylic crayon and vessels for pouring paint. 

Perricone-Mrljak says she didn’t realise that she was Australian until she was about ten years old. She grew up in the suburbia of Western Sydney, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. The family built a close-knit circle not only of those recently arrived from Sicily, but of new Australians from the world over, aided by the small farm that they tended behind their home. While popular imagination might still often pin suburban communities as conservative, middle-class zones of cultural deficit, Perricone-Mrljak’s childhood was testament to the contrary. The family farm, which supported both animals and a vegetable harvest, was a clever way of continuing cultural practices from Sicily in their most holistic sense, while gathering a new community around the garden and the table in Sydney. 

The farm was also a method of survival for Perricone-Mrljak’s family, and with parents often out working, the artist as a young woman was called into a cycle of living dictated by the garden: anticipation, long labour, and delight in the treasures that would turn up at harvest. This is the story which underpins Perricone-Mrljak’s new work – with its chapters and protagonists, its conflicts, (ir)resolutions, and world entire. 

Importantly, it is also a story with “movements,” in two senses. Harvest Day Night has two distinct colourific moods. One is of deep greens, blues, and purples punctuated deftly by a white at once ghostly and of our own bones (her father farmed by the moon). The other is a shock of oranges, reds, and deep pinks like the bruised clouds of a summer storm. These palettes, the artist tells me, correspond directly to the days and nights by which she worked on the farm. There is the heat and the cold, the dryness and the effulgence of these periods rendered starkly. Importantly, one does not come “before” or “after” the other. Perhaps this is closer to the nature of our memories, after all: sequence melts away, leaving the shining and enduring moments to be held in our hands.

The other “movement” of these works is the movement of the artist’s body, both across the canvas and across the studio. Perricone-Mrljak works on a whole series of canvases at once, placing them throughout her studio space and moving between them as she drifts through the remembered (and often written) narrative that she is painting about. In her expressive, gestural marks with crayon, we can trace the movement of her hand. But, we must also see her pouring paint over the canvas, in layer on transparent layer, reminding us that not all work is so easily seen, quantified, or explained. 

Though it operates on the canvas through a vocabulary of painterly abstraction, Harvest Day Night is, in many aspects, a work of performance (and Perricone-Mrljak is has also often been a more conventional “performance” artist, including at Sydney Contemporary in 2019). It is a suite that happens on and through the body, grounding memory, cultural tradition, and history in the very matter of our lives. 

EXHIBITION 
Harvest Day Night
22 October – 6 November 2022
James Makin Gallery, Melbourne