Author Archives: Artist Profile
Letters from Ukraine: 7/5/22 – Azog the Destroyer
A few years ago, some pictures appeared of Putin topless, riding a horse. They seemed to be photoshopped to make him resemble Conan the Barbarian. His behaviour is classic “toxic male.” The most prominent movie available on Ukrainian Netflix is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. When the war started, and lockdown curfews kept everyone inside, people […]
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The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
First impressions can be deceiving. The impact of this tenth version of The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (the APT) was less of a bang and more of what initially seemed like a whimper. Where were the big names? Where were the familiar biennale/triennale tropes? Where were the instagrammable icons? Yet during the weeks […]
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Tagged APT10, QAGOMA
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Marina Strocchi
The points of intersection between skyscraper windows in Manhattan sunset III, 2020, are live; they ring with a vibrant, almost spiritual, blue. Between them, white spaces where the lives of others would be are subtly under-painted with this same blue – underpinned by its electric energy. The painting sees Manhattan from the swaying vantage point of a […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Australia Galleries Melbourne, Australian Galleries, Marina Strocchi, painting, printmaking
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Amrita Hepi
First Nations choreographer and dancer Amrita Hepi writes about her life and practice, in her own words.
Donna Green
Donna Green’s beautiful Bacchanalia, 2022, is slung low beneath the weight of its own ripe fulness. Bulbous forms – at once like stone fruits, breasts, or camp confections in a storefront window – tumble over each other, enfolded in a high-gloss glaze. Aptly named for the privately funded, opulent Roman festivity known as the Bacchanal, the title […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged ceramics, Donna Green, painting, Utopia Art, Utopia Art Sydney
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Letters from Ukraine: 1/5/22 – Book Market and Satire – Odessa
Odessa is the most art-oriented and art-friendly city I have ever visited. The people all look super cool, switched on, bohemians. There are free concerts in the streets with world-class musicians, and the kind of coffee shops and bars you could imagine Modigliani and Picasso enjoying back in Montparnasse in 1907. I could not imagine anything more […]
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Craig Tuffin
While he may not be a household name, Craig Tuffin is a well-known identity in photography and teaching circles. Alongside two decades of practice as a commercial photographer, his work with nineteenth century photographic techniques and processes has led him to be a popular speaker on the topic. His photographs have been collected by numerous […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Tweed Regional Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre
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MONUMENTAL (working title)
If you’d like to know what MONUMENTAL (working title) is about, perhaps Malcolm Whittaker can tell you. In three thirty-minute sessions over the course of this weekend, Whittaker will tour audiences around the Art Gallery’s Grand Courts, discussing MONUMENTAL (working title) and its aims, interventions, and concerns. The structure of this performance itself, entitled Dirty Work, already gives a few signals towards […]
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Tagged Art Gallery of New South Wales
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Sally Walk
Sally Walk has spent over twenty-five years in clay: working (with) it, shaping it, and sounding the outer reaches of its formal and expressive potential. Often, her work has comprised intricate, richly glazed, and delicate forms. They have been occasionally “organic” in their shape and pattern, but with a distinct kind of perfection about them: completeness, wholeness, […]
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Tagged ceramics, James Makin Gallery, Sally Walk
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Letters from Ukraine: 21/04/22 – Punisher
Climate change was doing the job of destroying the planet slowly, but now we are on the brink of nuclear apocalypse. We don’t want this, but don’t know how to stop those doing it. I wonder what children are thinking about the failures of their elders, and how many are suffering from doomsday nightmares? I’ve always […]
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A Bird in the Hand
How quaint these issues seem now, in a tentative post-Covid landscape. Because when the world locked down, the dubious, kitsch, compromised, and highly efficient marketing machine of a social media art world became a matter of necessity rather than choice. Museums could not block-bust. Artists could not show. Dealers could not open stock rooms. Magazines […]
Bill Henson
Bill Henson is preparing for an upcoming show. He says that “new pictures grow out of old pictures. With these recently completed works there has been a twenty-two year gestation period.” Particular modes of figuration, themes, and textures have remained interesting to the artist over his career: young people in the fragile dawn of their […]
Posted in Contents, Profiles, Uncategorized
Tagged Bill Henson, Melbourne, photography, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
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Radical Slowness
Kirk and Mitsuji share a vision of slowness as a many-splendored thing: as a poetics, as an aesthetic and a political sensibility, a way of paying attention to works of art, and even, in some ways, a medium. Mitsuji explains that “for us, slowness is more than just a negation of pace. It is an […]
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Marikit Santiago
During my last years of art school, at a critical point in my studies, on the verge of establishing my practice, a respected lecturer and accomplished artist told me I can’t sustain a practice on autobiographical themes. I was totally and utterly dejected. If I couldn’t make work about the only thing I have complete […]
Salvatore Zofrea Box Sets
“I think Zofrea achieves the power of his paintings to stay with the viewer by remaining true to his child-self. This is, as he says, ‘not to be confined to any formula,’ to see ‘that magic of colour and creation,’ so as to experience the world for the first time” – Kon Gouriotis, Artist Profile […]
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Mindscapes and Feminist Utopias
A mindscape, by definition, is a panorama created within a person’s imagination. A mental landscape. But also importantly, it’s one that is capable of being viewed by someone else. This begins a convergence of two perspectives: the creator whose mind it represents and the person whose mind is making meaning of it, which makes the concept […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Graham Blondel, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Zanny Begg
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John Olsen
In what he has previously described as a “cutting of the umbilical cord,” the young Australian painter John Olsen travelled to Europe in 1956, setting in motion a cascade of experiences that would significantly shape his world view and trajectory as an artist, none more so than his experiences in Spain. It was at the […]
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Tagged John Olsen, National Art School, Ngununggula
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Tracy Sarroff
With a self-proclaimed interest in science, Sarroff’s series Cyber Plants, 2017-21, examines the proliferation of growth in bioluminescence science, focusing on methods of genetic and fluorescent protein cloning from cellular organelles spliced into animals and plants to glow in the dark. With a haunting display of lit tentacles, and colourful celestial glows, the hybrid plant forms provide […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged ARC ONE Gallery, Installation, photography, Tracy Sarroff, video
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Amber Hearn
Some of my earliest memories are of the landscape. I moved around a lot as a child – six cities, ten houses and six schools by the time I was eleven years old. We lived in Papua New Guinea (PNG) for my primary years where I was home-schooled by my mother. Being home-schooled allowed me […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Process
Tagged Amber Hearn, Curatorial+Co
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Letters from Ukraine: 15/04/22 – Russian Bear
A fat, stuffed bear sits above a pile of rubble on the only remaining floor of a destroyed building, between two gutted apartment towers. This soft bear wears a smirk. A slit has been cut between its legs and a piece of masonry placed to cover it. At the bears foot there is the rotting […]
Letters from Ukraine: 15/04/22 – The Children’s Room
We drove back into Borodyanka today. A ground-floor window of one to the most fire-gutted buildings had a Ukrainian flag draped across the window and something else. A little girl’s white lace and satin fancy dress was swaying in the wind, next to it. Many of the bullet-riddled cars had “CHILDREN” painted across their doors in […]
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Letters from Ukraine: 14/04/22 – Guernica Village
Kate, who is our assistant on this project, is a horse and animal lover. Before the war she was a show-dog trainer. Her passion is dressage. The horse she rides, Chestnut, is stabled at an animal centre in the village of Lukyanivka. When Kate told us that the stables had been attacked by Russian missiles, […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Ukraine
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Issue 57
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work. Centuries of close and prolonged studies of artist’s objects have shown there is an activist in every artist’s expression. Whether for or against the status quo, they’re making a statement. Some artists’ protests are subtle, camouflaged in […]
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Heidi Yardley
Let’s start from the beginning. When did you realise that being an artist was the career for you? I was always drawing as a child, and when I was in high school I focused mainly on art in Years Eleven and Twelve. I didn’t think much about what a career meant; I just knew that […]
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Tagged Heidi Yardley, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, painting
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