Author Archives: Artist Profile
William Kentridge
Cartography, topography, even choreography: so much of what William Kentridge’s work does is graph. Thinking about his work like this, with an emphasis on the kinds of knowledge and the kind of story made possible through different modes of writing, also calls attention to the hand that does all this sense-making. Printed matter, books, and the process […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Annandale Gallerires, Australian Galleries, Australian Galleries Melbourne, Melbourne, William Kentridge
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Lee Bethel
Everyone remembers epiphanies. They’re epiphanies! Whether they hit you in the mind, or in the body (or spirit), they are undeniable moments, sustained or fleeting, of deep connection to everything at once: every cog clicks, every synapse sparks. Revelatory. On my first day of art school the tutor gave everyone a sheet of paper and […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Lee Bethel, The Egg & Dart
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Amber Koroluk-Stephenson
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings have always provoked the question of “where are we?,” with liquid boundaries between domestic and exterior domains, patchwork perspectives, and conspicuously constructed mises en scène. Throughout A Hopeful Mirage, however, a heightened emphasis on “where are we going?” emerges. The exhibition is a tragicomic meditation on the psychic inertia of a world in flux. Responding to […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Bett Gallery
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Robert Malherbe
There is a cloud cluster pressed into the left of the frame in Afternoon Lake 4, 2022; it’s wound around the body of the tree canopy next to it, which shines with bright autumnal colour. Both the body of the leaves and the body of the cloud are ful and vital in this picture, rendered […]
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Clara Hali
Rendered any less quietly, the surfaces in Clara Hali’s Hip Hanger I might appear to slide across each other, or even to flit and slip, mercurially. Surface is abundant in this work, where five discrete forms – each something more complicated, and more multiple, than a perfect cube – jostle around a centre of gravity created […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Clara Hali, Defiance Gallery, sculpture
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Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices
Perhaps I should not have been surprised by the number of pets present at UNSW Galleries for the opening of Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices. Associations between textiles and the domestic sphere – and attendant notions of the feminine, the soft, the sweetly corporeal, and the “low” – are key points of departure […]
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Tagged UNSW Galleries
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Unspoken
You know, we know We know the pain feel the pain see the pain […]
Dr. B. Marika AO
Dr. B. Marika was a very great Australian, a premier artist and fierce negotiator. She came from Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, the home of the Yolngu peoples. She pioneered Yolngu women’s art in many fields and by the time of her death in July 2021 had left a legacy that expressed her passionate commitment […]
into the moonlight, away from me
you stepped into the moonlight away from me smoke curling around […]
Posted in Contents, Poems
Tagged Jazz Money, Poetry
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D Harding
A Brisbane-based artist of the Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal peoples of Central Queensland, Harding’s work has a kind of interlacing historical consciousness that is hard to pin down. Temporality has long been a major theme considered in relation to Australian Indigenous contemporary artists’ practices, with historians and writers reaching for terms to describe complex temporal […]
Arash Chehelnabi
Visually and conceptually compelling, Chehelnabi’s deceptively simple paintings subconsciously play with the mind. Executed in a raw, almost childlike style, his practice involves a surrealist method of combining disparate motifs within the composition in order to unsettle or perplex the observer. Against the black walls of Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre’s exhibition […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Arash Chehelnabi, Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre
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Guan Wei
It may not seem obvious that paintings – produced by the artist’s hand, and using his instantly-recognisable personal vocabulary of symbols and characters, and displayed at one of our most prominent commercial galleries – would be a medium particularly suited for working through the state of digital image production and circulation today. Guan Wei’s Interface proves, then, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Guan Wei, Martin Browne Contemporary
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On Common Ground
In my studio in the Hawkesbury, I work in almost total solitude and I love it, so I’m sure these feelings were exacerbated by the lengthy lockdown, but I felt really disconnected from people, especially other artists. We keep chatting away, all things art, and we start absolutely gahh-ing over the new paintings that Candy […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Candy Nelson Nakamarra, Dan Kyle, Edwina Corlette, Edwina Corlette Gallery, Miranda Skoczek
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Letters from Ukraine: 27/07/2022 – Summertime Sadness
March 2022 in Kyiv, when the city was empty except for soldiers and volunteers and the tall gothic buildings stood like frozen giants with empty-eyed windows staring mindlessly, I was invited unexpectedly to a gig with an all-female group called Folkulaka, who turn traditional Ukrainian folk songs into dark fairy-tales of werewolves and headless women […]
Letters on Ukraine: 25/07/2022 – The Gates of Gare de l’Est
Arriving in a stifling hot Paris – my first visit in a few years – I was taken by the generosity of volunteers I had heard about at the historic train station, the Gare de l’Est. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Red Cross has received thousands of Ukrainian refugees at the […]
Posted in Ukraine
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Lauren O’Connor
Lauren O’Connor’s Twin Falls (Wodi Wodi Country), 2022, is tremulous: energetic, almost rapturous movements of the paintbrush across the canvas capture the vibratory energy of the landmark in the work’s title. The vertical logic of the painting is punctuated by occasional horizontal movements – both surprising and totally inevitable – as a deep, beating red emanates […]
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Tagged Arthouse gallery, Lauren O'Connor
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Grace Burzese
Grace Burzese’s energetic abstract work Cocoon, 2013, layers cobalt blue against wine red and white. The brushwork is gestural. The application of paint to the canvas is spontaneous and layered, simultaneously offering both depth and light. It’s this contrast of intensely cool and sedately warm that animates Cocoon, which, like so much of Burzese’s work […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Grace Burzese, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery
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George Kennedy and Harrison Bowe
Across George Kennedy’s Skyline Trespass, 2022, something topographical is happening. Shadow and light shift across the picture plane, as if tracing the ridges and gullies of a landscape seen at once from above and within – or even below. Where, we might wonder, are we in this painting? At the front of the field, a […]
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Dale Frank
There is an argument to be made that his work is a by-product of his very remarkable life; or that his paintings exist to support a range of other, very diverse, passions and projects. I could write about the way his multi-coloured pigment is poured like liquid toffee, and how the pull of gravity creates […]
Mel O’Callaghan
Mel O’Callaghan’s new exhibition art Sydney’s Carriageworks is titled with a capacious, and kind of porous, claim: All is Life. The very openness of this idea, and its ability to hold lots of different specificities – and possibilities – inside it, seems to be exactly why it is useful and interesting for O’Callaghan. It’s a […]
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Deborah Klein
In an artist’s statement accompanying the exhibition of this body of work at Queenscliff Gallery, Klein writes that the show “addresses a particularly divisive period in our history, when our state of disconnection – from ourselves, from each other and from the natural world – seems greater than ever before.” Her work’s engagement with ideas […]
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Tagged Deborah Klein, Queenscliff Gallery
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Naomi Hobson: Adolescent Wonderland
In Girlfriends, 2022, two young women stand shoulder-to-shoulder on a track running through a field of lush vegetation. They gaze directly into the camera. Their even eye levels pierce through the print paper, operating as the puncturing moment of affective connection between the viewer and the subjects of the image. Under the brims of wide sun hats, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Arthouse gallery, Cement Fondu, Naomi Hobson
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Suzanne Archer
Throughout her forty years of making art, Suzanne Archer has honoured the death of animals and the natural decay of life through her paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Whether it be bird carcasses, native marsupial corpses, or horse cadavers, her subject matter has corporeal significance and spiritual possibilities in common, all accompanied by heartfelt compassion. She […]
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Tagged Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Suzanne Archer
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Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka, Japan in 1972. Her parents came from the rural prefecture Kochi. In the summer they would take Shiota and her two brothers to her grandmother’s grave, which she would tend by removing the embedded weeds whose entangled roots were enmeshed in the soil above the body. It was a […]
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Tagged Chiharu Shiota, goma, QAGOMA
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