Author Archives: Artist Profile
Helen Eager
In the early days of the pandemic, Helen Eager works in a routine seemingly unaltered by a disruption that is tearing at the fabric of what many understand to be daily existence. From the beginning of this period of isolation, artists quipped that they had be preparing for social distancing their entire lives – the […]
Madison Bycroft
Since 1991, the annual Samstag Scholarship has awarded 146 Australian artists the opportunity to study overseas. It provides the space for artists to explore new ideas, expand creative boundaries and build significant networks. South Australian artist Madison Bycroft was awarded the scholarship in 2013 and undertook a Masters of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart […]
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Tagged Madison Bycroft, Samstag Museum, Samstag Museum of Art
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Micke Lindebergh
When looking at Swedish artist Micke Lindebergh’s recent paintings, it is difficult not to feel a sense of joy. Relying on a carefully chosen palette of his favourite acrylic paints, Lindebergh is heavily influenced by the block colours and floral motifs celebrated by Scandinavian design houses like Marimekko and 10-gruppen. Growing up in Stockholm in […]
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Tagged MARS Gallery, Micke Lindebergh
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In Miniature
From Paleolithic Venus figurines, whose creation dates from 26,000 to 21,000 years ago, to the Marian relics of contemporary Catholicism, childhood toys, and the kitsch of the souvenir shop, sculpture at a small scale is embedded in the material and psychic fabric of our lives. Sometimes, as in the totemic object or the religious relic, […]
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Tagged Defiance Gallery, Miniature Sculpture Show
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The National 2021: New Australian Art
‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ is a celebration of contemporary Australian art that connects Sydney’s key inner city cultural precincts and brings together thirty-nine artists, collectives and collaborative ventures. It offers a resonant and aware collection of ideas, and significantly, now has the stellar commitment from its three supporting institutions to continue beyond this, […]
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Tagged AGNSW, Carriageworks, MCA, The National
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Zoe Grey
I grew up on Peerapper country, in Marrawah, a tiny town on the western edge of lutruwita/Tasmania. Isolated and exposed, Marrawah has a rugged environment – the trees bend in roaring winds and the swell rises high out of the Southern Ocean. Time spent within this unique landscape guides my painting practice and my process observes […]
Clifford How: Takayna – The End of the World
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 […]
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Tagged Arthouse gallery, Clifford How
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William Robinson: Lyrical Landscapes
You couldn’t practise full-time as an artist until you were 53. Would it have changed your practice to have more time to paint earlier? Shirley and I have been married 59 years this year and we had six children – so that was not an option. I believe an artist has to get a life […]
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Tagged HOTA, Lyrical Landscapes, William Robinson
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Peter Poulet
In one of Peter Poulet’s recent untitled paintings, something which could be a star sits in a space which could be a window to the night sky. These things could also be a yellow asterisk shape, enclosed within a circle, painted on a patch of deep blue which is itself framed into a rectangular field by other fields of […]
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Tagged Peter Poulet, Rogue Pop-up Gallery
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Fiona Lowry
Fiona Lowry’s artworks are contemporary renderings of conventional portraiture and landscape painting. Although she cites locations such as Belanglo State Forest and loosely references actual events including the Ivan Milat ‘backpacker’ murders and the infamous Ned Kelly crimes, Lowry’s airbrush technique depicts the sites of these histories through somewhat abstracted, hazy aesthetics. This is part […]
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Tagged 3:33 Projects, Fiona Lowry
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James Tapscott
Humans have devised ways of creating sculptural forms out of almost any known or available materials at hand. Stone, metal, timber, glass and plastics. Hair and bone, mud and bark have all been put to use. Even light and fire have been conquered via fireworks through to lasers over the millennia. But water has proven […]
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Tagged James Tapscott, MARS Gallery
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Savanhdary Vongpoothorn
In Fire Sutra II, 2021, two waves of light stream diagonally across the canvas. Modulations between light and dark on the whole, in this work, take on different intervals: there are the two strips of light yellow against the pink ground, the marks of Lao-Pali text puncturing these yellow fields, lines which mimic the patterns of scribbly […]
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Robin White
Robin White (Ngãti Awa) first came to prominence in the 1970s with her distinctive figurative representations of the landscapes and people of New Zealand. The clarity and figurative concentration of her paintings from this period, such as 1974’s Fish and Chips Maketu, translate the local specificity of an apparently mundane subject into something both talismanic […]
Issy Parker
Having recently graduated from the National Art School, majoring in ceramics, Parker is searching for her own frames of beauty. As a young artist of Australian and African American heritage, she re-examines the ostensible ‘primitivity’ of the ceramic mode – one of humanity’s oldest artforms. Experimenting with textures and patterns on functional forms, Parker playfully […]
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Ashley Frost
In Escarpment Study 1, 2021, cold blue light permeates the eucalypts. We are left to speculate as to whether this is shade or simply the cool light of a sunrise or set, our view of the scene delimited by the tight packing of tree trunks into the middle ground. Brightness falls on a central trunk as a […]
Doors of Perception
Curated by Pippa Mott, the show brings a distinctly contemporary context to bear on Debord’s psychogeography. Where Debord was concerned, primarily, with the urban environment and its bearing upon subjective experience (and vice versa), Mott is interested in how the global health crisis of the past year has brought different spaces, and different psychic experiences, […]
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Tagged Doors of Perception, Visions Gallery
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Jacqueline Hennessy
In The Vigil (Nocturne), 2021, a set of fingertips emerge from a lace cuff, reaching across the painting’s frame to shine the light of a candle onto the scene. These fingers are declarative, deliberate in their gesture. They’re also demure, though not in the sense of being compliant to the demanding interrogative gaze of the viewer. Rather, […]
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Tagged Jacqueline Hennessy, Tweed Regional Gallery
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HOTA Than Hell
Surfers Paradise: an amalgam of Florida, Las Vegas and Disneyland, it’s Australia’s playground for everybody, a sunny retirement destination for the well-heeled from southern states, and a surfing mecca that’s produced five world champions. Sin also appears to be popular here. From between the high-rise monoliths, sand, and kitsch tourist tack oozes surf, sun and […]
Earth Canvas
In 2007, Gillian Sanbrook bought Bibbaringa, a 950-hectare property located in Wymah Valley on the south west slopes of New South Wales. At the time, the land had suffered from overuse – too many livestock led to the degradation and reduction of ground cover and, as a result, soil quality was poor. It needed new […]
Amber Wallis & Kylie Banyard
In response to Amber Wallis’s Women, shown at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in 2020, Amanda Maxwell wrote: ‘I’ve never seen a ghost And won’t But if I was to I know it would be the ghost of a woman I don’t know why Is more of a woman left? Did she touch more? Hold more?…’ Wallis’s paintings in this […]
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Tagged Amber Wallis, Kylie Banyard, Nicholas Thompson Gallery
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Troy Emery
Troy Emery’s practice is imbued with tactility that points to the role of animals and their forced complicity within contemporary life. Situating the works within the murky juncture of art and craft, Emery plays with colour, texture and material to create life-like animalistic figures. Emery’s life-size sculptures of animal forms include the usual domesticated subjects […]
Kelly Manning
Since she started making art, Manning’s subjects have included colonisation, sexual abuse, the intergenerational impact of the Vietnam War around the world, feminism and personal security. They are expressed via the mediums of drawing, printmaking, painting, installation, sculpture, and soon will be explored with animation. The Melbourne-based Manning is also a tattooist, app developer […]
Harold David
Having been known primarily as a photographer for most of his practicing life, Harold David has turned more and more to painting since 2017. Even with photographs, an interest in the fields of flat colour and expansive non-representational form indicated David’s inheritance from Abstract Expressionism. As a painter, Ohio-born David works within this heritage even […]
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Tagged Fox Galleries, Harold David
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