Author Archives: Artist Profile
Pippin Drysdale
Drysdale’s The Patterning of Light: Breakaway Series II is both an observation and an observance of the natural world around the artist’s base in Fremantle, WA. It is an observation in so far as it comes from looking – but also from feeling, from remembering, and from attachment to – the landscape and its multi-species inhabitants. Even […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged ceramics, Linton and Kay Galleries, Pippin Drysdale
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Robert Malherbe
Robert’s objects are still, but somehow immediate. They’re still, but they are alive.
UNHEIMLICH: Tarryn Gill, Katt Osborne & Theo Costantino
When theatre director Katt Osborne encountered Tarryn Gill’s Guardians series of sculptures created for the 2016 Adelaide Biennale, she was drawn to their sense of duality. “ … playful and fun, and then, unsettling and surreal at the same time. I have always loved surprising and complex imagery in my own work, and I think […]
Posted in Contents, Reviews
Tagged Katt Osborne, performance, Performing Lines, Perth, PICA, Tarryn Gill, Theo Costantino, Unheimlich
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Teena McCarthy: Spit Hood
Oh, such a pretty picture this Kingdom of the Crown A dark room wearing a costume packed in tight — light horsemen hanging around. Aching bodies, tormented souls like vultures on a cloud — Night becomes day, day becomes night; where time has no meaning time slows down. Oh, it’s getting dark in here, there […]
Posted in Contents, Poems
Tagged Bush Mary, Saskia Wilson, Teena McCarthy
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Paul Davies: Belvedere Loop
In a previous essay for Artist Profile, Andrew Frost took recourse to Joan Didion when thinking about Davies’s relationship to place. “The great chronicler of Southern California,” as Frost describes Didion, is so deeply bound up with the West Coast of the US that she might be thought of as a constituent part of it, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged abstract painting, Olsen Gallery, painting, Paul Davies
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Hellen Rose
In 2011, George Gittoes and I were invited to speak at the World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression at Oslo about the Yellow House Jalalabad. ‘All That is Banned is Desired – A World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression.’ There I met one of the escaped women of the group Pussy Riot. We […]
Posted in Contents, Process, Profiles
Tagged Casula Powerhouse, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, George Gittoes, Helle Rose, Soul Crime, Yellow House Jalalabad
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John Bokor
In recent months, video footage of empty CBDs – especially Melbourne and Sydney – has been circulating through my varied social media feeds. Populating this footage are shopping strips empty of foot traffic, six-lane motorways with a solitary Uber delivery person being blown through on a bike, and huge multi-million dollar stadiums full of silence. […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged John Bokor, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, painting, Still Life
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Darren Munce
Melody Willis, who contributes catalogue text for this exhibition, attributes Munce’s interest in painterly abstraction in part to a residency in Leipzig in 2014, supported by the Australia Council and Creative Victoria. There are several striking elements to Munce’s practice of abstraction – his thinking about it in terms of “language” or a “vocabulary” key […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Darren Munce, painting, The Egg & Dart, the egg and dart
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Covid U-Turns
In 2012 in Bali and Java, Australian–Indonesian artist Jumaadi began collecting small one hundred–year–old vernacular timber houses. Some were decorated with ornate carvings; others were lightly ornamented with painted panels that had gradually faded in the damp Indonesian climate. His mission was to rescue the decaying houses and move them to his compound in Surabaya […]
Posted in Contents, Essays
Tagged Ah Xian, Covid-19, Danelle Bergstrom, Desmond Lazaro, Guan Wei, JUMAADI, Khadim Ali, Michael Young, Nike Savvas
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Ballarat International Fotobiennale
What comes to mind when Ballarat, the regional Victorian town in the Central Highlands northwest of Melbourne, is mentioned? The gold rush of the late 1850s that swept this fledgling colonial outpost, and curiously Australia’s only attempt at a revolution: the fairly timid blink-and-you’d-miss-it Eureka Stockade uprising. Rebellion is a pretty neat thing to be […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Alix Marie, Ballarat International Fotobiennale, Linda McCartney, photography, Steve Arnold
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Peebles Print Prize
Now in its third iteration, the Peebles Print Prize was established by Queenscliff Gallery with Graeme Peebles, a Queenscliff local and exhibiting artist with the gallery. The award seeks to recognise technical and conceptual excellence, and innovation, across the broad field of intaglio printmaking, in a gesture to Peebles’s longstanding work in mezzotint printing. Having […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Peebles Print Prize, Queenscliff Gallery
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Fiona Foley
Fiona Foley is an artist from the Wondunna clan of the Badtjala nation, whose acclaimed arts practice has been widely exhibited across Australia and internationally for over thirty years. Now a distinguished academic at Griffith University, her latest book Biting the Clouds (2020) weaves rigorous research with art to examine legacies of harmful legislation, disrupting […]
Posted in Contents, Profiles
Tagged Aboriginal art, Art, ARTIST PROFILE, Biting the Clouds, Fiona Foley, painting, Premier's Literary Award, Queensland, sculpture
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COVID-19 and Commercial Galleries
In space, they say, no-one can hear you scream – which is just as well because a lot of us feel like doing just that – or just rolling up in a foetal ball. The feeling is captured in David Bowie’s iconic song Space Oddity: “For here Am I sitting in a tin can Far […]
Jess Hall
Hall began her artistic life in oil painting, training first at the Queensland College of Art. At this early stage of her practice, her interest in scientific illustration began as a fascination with visual modes of logging, and indeed of creating, knowledge of the natural world. This work explored the early colonial imaginative experience in […]
Posted in Contents, Discoveries, Exhibitions
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Robert Ryan
The box of paints in question was found by Ryan while moving out of the print studio at Barebones Gallery in Bangalow. As such, it is an object reminder of a period in the artist’s life when he was on the move from Queensland to north-east Tasmania, where he now resides. This title also gestures, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged anthea polson, Anthea Polson Art, Robert Ryan
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Martin Thompson
You wouldn’t believe it, after arriving at Dunedin International Airport at 1:30am on a drizzling dark March morning in 2018, what strikes me immediately about Dunedin (Otepoti) is a lot of its Edwardian colonial architecture has been retro-fitted with Film Noir-esque steel fire escapes that zigzag up and down the exterior of buildings in the […]
Posted in Contents, Profiles
Tagged Brett McDowell Gallery, Martin Tompson
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Emma Walker
As a girl, I was fascinated by my mother’s hands. I would trace their veins and tendons with my fingertips, following them like roads on a map. I was captivated by their grace and how she used them while speaking, to provide emphasis and give visual form to her words. A few hours before her […]
Issue 55
In This Issue EDITOR’S NOTE Perceptions do count. Throughout this 55th issue of Artist Profile our writers reflect on many views, stances, attitudes and situations. The works and the life of John Olsen have been examined ever since his first exhibition in 1955. After his comprehensive ‘The You Beaut Country’ survey at […]
Posted in Back Issues
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Chanelle Collier and Joe Wilson
Joe: For our AP piece let’s try an email exchange. It has to be about our process. I think failure has been instrumental in shaping where we are at in our practice and career, so let’s talk about that. Also, we should address the themes in our work and some of the projects. Chanelle: Thanks […]
Posted in Contents, Process
Tagged Chanelle Collier, Joe Wilson
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Chuck Close
Close is a central artist to any telling of art made in the last 50 years. Although singular and dedicated for the most part to depicting faces, his works embody a rigorous conceptual drive that has had a pervasive influence on the act of painting and image making more broadly. As a person Close has […]
Josh Foley
Foley’s most recent body of work responds to the state of hyper-saturation which characterises our informational and affective lives in the present. Many of these paintings respond to distinctly contemporary stories, perceptive experiences and technologies; this is, in a sense, post-internet art, with the added irony of being carried out in the ‘analogue’ medium of […]
Louise Zhang
The visceral artworks of Louise Zhang are animated by a dynamic tension between desire and repulsion. Through lurid, eye-catching paintings, blobby, bodily sculptures, and, more recently, VR and immersive technological works, her practice navigates a complex interplay of histories, forms, and cultural references. Rich in both Chinese and Western symbolism, Zhang’s art expresses a curious […]
Posted in Contents, Profiles
Tagged Arterial Gallery, Louise Zhang, National Gallery of Victoria
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STILL: National Still Life Award 2021
Silent Cop, 2021, was awarded the $30,000 prize by guest judge Elizabeth Ann Macgregor in a live-streamed ceremony, only one hour after the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales went into lockdown on Saturday 14 August. Macgregor, speaking on her selection of Douglas’s work for the award, noted especially that ‘the gallery will do a lot […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, STILL 2021
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