Author Archives: Artist Profile
Not a Chameleon
Not a chameleon, but a gecko. Insides visible, just a touch opaque. The gecko gets moved around in your suitcase belonging somewhere, elsewhere, not here. O, gecko in exile. You with your translucent identity. It’s not your fault customs refuses to give you clearance to go home. This poem was originally published in Artist Profile, […]
Posted in Poems
Tagged not a chameleon, poem, sacintya mohini simpson
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Amos Gebhardt
You have a substantial history working in both film and contemporary art. How do you find traversing the two fields? Video art and film pose different challenges, mainly in the distinct architecture of the viewing experience and the way meaning is made. Mixing techniques from both fields is really exciting to me. I began my […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Amos Gebhardt, night horse, Tolarno Galleries
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Donald Laycock
The sociopolitical context Laycock was working in, from the post–World War II period onwards, witnessed Australia’s shifting alliance from England to the US. Laycock was one of the first Australian artists to take up the American influences of abstract expressionism, gaining a direct influence via the American artist Charles Reddington, who settled in Melbourne in […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Charles Nodrum Gallery, donald laycock
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American Knife: A Jog and Black Crosses
One time in Chicago I went on a quest for a serrated bread knife. Shop attendants looked at me with fear in their eyes, shaking their heads when I told them what I wanted. I finally found one in a locked cabinet at a hardware store. Two security guards were sent to unlock it and […]
Posted in Ukraine
Tagged George Gittoes, MOMA, Poland, Ukraine, US politics
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Clifford How
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent border control measures have abruptly severed Tasmania’s connection to the mainland, temporarily suspending that sense of not-so-far-awayness. With our parks now closed to day walkers and campers, your unpeopled landscapes seem more relevant now than ever. You can feel like the only person on earth in Tassie. This cut-off has […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Arthouse gallery, Clifford How, Wild State
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Straight Herd
Artists are non-conformists and, from childhood, society tries to force them to conform. The most original are accused of madness. I am here using the term artists for all creatives – painters, musicians, poets, writers, dancers, photographers, actors and filmmakers. The herd has found a way to flog artists and feel ethically superior to them […]
Richard Goodwin
As we walk into the up-cycled meatworks where Richard Goodwin lives, the first impression is of a cabinet of curiosities splayed horizontal. On one table stands an intricate balsa wood model for a newly commissioned house, its elliptical roofs nestled upon each other like interlocked carapace. There are paintings with mechanical equipment jutting from their […]
Posted in Profiles
Tagged Australian Galleries, Richard Goodwin, Turbulence
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Sera Waters
Sera Waters’s significance as a leading South Australian artist was firmly cemented in 2022 with two major projects exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). Her series Storied Sail Cloths, 2021, was included in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State, curated by Sebastian Goldspink, and in November her solo project Sera […]
Posted in Reviews
Tagged Art Gallery of South Australia, Future traditons, Sera Waters
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Harrison Bowe
Bowe’s art may at first recall the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. We discern mist glazed heavens that offer visual cadences with Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). As with Friedrich, Bowe approaches his subject as a sort of temple, describing the cliffs as “quartzite cathedrals.” But unlike Friedrich’s Wanderer, there is no […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Despard Gallery, Harrison Bowe, Passing through
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Claudia Greathead
What is the importance of painting for you? By painting, I’m trying to understand or identify something, and in doing so it can be a release. Painting helps me understand, see and feel, and help resolve trauma – I don’t necessarily want to go anywhere with it. Art is a language for me to explore […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged chalk horse gallery, claudia greathead, landscapes of the heart
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Neil Frazer
Sea/Sky is named accordingly, with many of his exhibited works blurring the distinction between the sea and the sky, leaving his viewers questioning where does one end and the other begin. The sky in works such as Only Ocean, 2022, Rolling Blue, 2022, and Cloud Catcher, 2023, seems to mimic the ocean below, wisps of […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Martin Browne Contemporary, Neil Frazer, sea/sky
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Odette England
Dairy Character has been described in various statements as a “reflection” or “chronicle” of your experience growing up in a rural farming community in South Australia. There are archival photographs used in the project, but also new images. I’m really interested in this autobiographical mode of photography which happens at a temporal removal – the new […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged centre for contemporary photography, Odette England
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Issue 61
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work. EDITOR’S NOTE Australian artist Michael Butler asked nearly twenty years ago, “Why do people treat people the way they do? – the machinations of human interaction. My interest is neither prurient nor glib. Simply, I cannot comprehend […]
Posted in Back Issues
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Go Figure: The Germanos Collection
Relationship. Joanna Braithwaite’s portrait of loved but departed Pepper, wearing a carrot, is in the “family portraits” section, with the recent Caroline Zilinsky Weimar Republic–referencing double portrait of Max and Gaibrielle Germanos and Huxley. The artist Euan Macleod has curated the Macquarie University Art Gallery’s current exhibition from the Germanos collection. Macleod has selected others […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged 3:33 Art Projects, Brent Harris, Caroline Zilinsky, Clara Adolphs, Gaibrielle Germanos, Ken Whisson, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Madeleine Pfull, Max Germanos, Pierre Mukeba
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Emily Wardill
How would you present Night for Day, 2020, to those who would like to see it, but haven’t yet? Night for Day uses the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Emily Wardill, Samstag Museum of Art
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Elyss McCleary
My upcoming show, at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne, is a presentation of new paintings that explore the sensation of luminous colour with a focus on intimacy. Its title, A Tender Anchor, recalls how formal elements create different harmonies and relationships in paintings, just like we do in our own human interactions. Colour, marks, and […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Process
Tagged Elyss McCleary, Nicholas Thompson Gallery
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Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖
Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 is an artist and researcher who asks many questions, and understands the transient nature of identity. She not only applies institutional critique to her practice, but draws from an inherent need to comprehend the complexities, binaries, and liminalities of her surroundings. She majored in Studio Arts and minored in Educational Studies and […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Dorcas Tang
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Danelle Bergstrom
Innately fuelled by emotional response, whether a portrait or landscape, Bergstrom’s work is always a fusion between an empathic approach to the environment and the artist’s own emotional turmoil. It should immediately be noted that there is no small talk with Bergstrom, who steps straight out with her heart on her sleeve. Painting with a […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Arthouse gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Danelle Bergstrom
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The Torres Strait 8: A Sacred Fight
For over sixty thousand years, Torres Strait Islanders have maintained ongoing connections to their lands, seas, skies, and culture. However, without immediate action, this will soon change. As greenhouse gas emissions accelerate global warming, Torres Strait Islanders find themselves on the frontline of rising sea levels, flooding, unpredictable winds, and coastal erosion, to name but […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Biennale of Sydney, IMA, Institute of Modern Art, Torres Strait 8
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ROOM by James Thierrée’s Compagnie du Hanneton
As a director James Thierrée is a Dadaist, enamoured of nonsense and delighting in the disorientation produced by a profusion of discontinuous images, sounds and actions. But this Dadaist is also a consummate mime, slapstick man and vocalist whose collaborators each seem to have mastered as many demanding disciplines as he has. On stage they […]
Posted in Reviews
Tagged James Thierrée, Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney Festival
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Ave Libertatemaveamor
I discovered German Expressionist artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, George Groz and Otto Dix at high school and immediately felt they were like what I wanted to become. But I would need a time machine to be among them. I imagined what it would have been like to sketch at the same café table […]
Posted in Ukraine
Tagged Ave Libertatemaveamor, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian art
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Reconciling Disruption in Graham Lang’s Finding Form
Entitled Finding Form, Graham Lang’s upcoming exhibition searches for primal encounters through paint and sculpture. The elusive title gestures to many things at once, perhaps setting the stage for a type of origin story, or a juxtaposition between modern and pre-modern mythologies and ways of being. But Finding Form could signal an emerging form, and […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Despard Gallery, Graham Lang
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Tom Alberts
Firstly, welcome back to Melbourne Tom! In early discussions about your work, Kate Nodrum told me that you’ve spent the past few years working in Paris, having moved there “short term” just before the pandemic. Did you find yourself making different kinds of work, or working differently, in a new setting? Thanks Erin – it’s […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Charles Nodrum Gallery, Tom Alberts
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Pink Sensibility
The outside walls of the Wollongong Art Gallery are clad in several panels of different shades of pink, from Pantone 7422C to Pantone 1767C, held up like a mother trying to decide what colour paint to choose for her child’s room. It signals the exhibition inside, Thinking Through Pink, by curator Dr. Sally Gray, which […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Albert Sherman, Brooke Boland, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Deborah Kelly, Frederick McCuccin, Iain Whittaker, Jan Fieldsend, Jess Johnson, Joan Meats, Marie McMahon, Pat Brassington, Paul Yore, Simon Ward, Thinking Through Pink, Wollongong Art Gallery
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