Author Archives: Artist Profile
Mathew Simms
It’s a studio visit like no other. I pull over on a dirt road just outside Westbury in Northern Tasmania and do a U-turn before reading the instructions again: ‘After the willow trees, then across the creek.’ On my second attempt to find Simms’ camp – his home and studio – I spot the artist […]
Lessons in Loss: The Juukan Gorge
In May this year we lost a precious thing. We did not know that we would mourn it, and many of us did not know how important it was until after it was gone. Now, months on, we are united in our grief, and we are resolute that it should never happen again. On 24 […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Uncategorized
Tagged Juukan Gorge, Rio Tinto
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Stephen Bird
In his new exhibition at Olsen Gallery in May, Stephen Bird uses both paint and clay to explore the imaginary voyages of the mind; how far the narratives of real-life extend into mystic journeys. ‘Mare Incognitum’ captures the inner workings of a human mind, layered with Bird’s own experiences navigating the far-reaching corners of the […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Mare Incogitum, Olsen Gallery, Stephen Bird
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Cameron Hayes
The scholar Thomas Jessen Adams, in an article for Overland, draws an apt line of connection between Cameron Hayes’s paintings and the open-ended dystopias of Breughel. Take the polyptych In the South Pole the explorers were so afraid of not having enough food for winter that they starved to death in summer, 2001-2, for example. Across the work’s four […]
Posted in Contents, Profiles
Tagged Australian Galleries, Cameron Hayes
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Belle Bassin
In a thoughtful, peripatetic catalogue essay for Belle Bassin’s ‘A Form Arriving,’ Jasmine Proust reflects on the feminism adhering to art by women, even when it is not overtly feminist in its subject matter: making art, she claims, is ‘a miracle, no less than bringing life into the world, and it is met with the […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged A Form Arriving, Belle Bassin, MARS Gallery
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Marian Crawford
Although now based in Melbourne, I spent my childhood on the Central Pacific Ocean island Banaba, part of the nation of Kiribati. In between bouts of study – including Melbourne University, Victorian College of the Arts and RMIT University – I lived for almost two years in Northern Italy. I’ve been trying to identify why […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Process, Profiles, Uncategorized
Tagged Marian Crawford, Queenscliff Gallery
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Guy Warren
Marking the Bend in the Track 2 (2020) is a new watercolour work on the program in ‘From the Mountain to the Sky: Guy Warren Drawings’. Looking at it, we follow an ochre path through the space of the picture, up and away to the right, the colour becoming only more insistent about itself as […]
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Tagged Drawing Gallery, From the Mountain to the Sky, Guy Warren, National Art School
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Brendan Huntley
Your Mum and Dad are artists – did you grow up knowing you’d follow this path? Yes, it was the only way for me. My parents made their living making pots and selling them at craft markets and teaching pottery, sculpture and painting. Every year they’d have an exhibition of their higher-end pieces. They would […]
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Tagged BrendanHuntley, Tolarno Galleries, Without Within
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Georgia Morgan
While vessels hold, portals gesture ceaselessly to elsewhere. When we look at any ceramic vessels, we look at an outside, an exoskeleton. Morgan’s glazed exoskeletons themselves, though, direct their own gaze outwards, taking in iconographical detritus from a wide range of sources. The hollow vessel has eyes, here, and they look back out at us, […]
Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized
Tagged Bett Gallery, Fermented Preserves, Georgia Morgan
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Tree of Life
There are ‘testaments’ in the Biblical sense: statements of belief which emerge from the experience of individual speakers or writers. In this sense, the testament elides between small, experienced events and larger truths. The testament works, in this respect, as a folding together of subject and object: an enveloping of the whole object world within […]
Victoria Reichelt
There is some irony in the term ‘endangered artefacts’ given that Victoria Reichelt’s work appears to be a painted photographic facsimile. The style itself is another near-redundant form used to dazzle the untutored and too often, in less capable hands, that’s all it is. But at its best the quality that stops this type of […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Tweed Regional Gallery, Victoria Reichelt
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Charmaine Pike
‘Rituals of the herd’ marks Charmaine Pike’s first Sydney exhibition since 2017. Moving to the next body of work after a successful exhibition, the artist found her work was ‘getting too tight and a little hard edged.’ She was losing the looseness of line that she is known for and decided to take some time […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles, Uncategorized
Tagged Charmaine Pike, Defiance Gallery, Rituals of the Herd
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John Scurry
John Scurry’s new works in oil and watercolour are most obviously ‘about’ landscape: a life lived within it, the artist’s attachments to it, and the way that light shifts through it at different hours and latitudes. Though Scurry is known just as much for his interiors and other genre work, these landscapes speak of his […]
Yhonnie Scarce
Suspended in plume-like formations, hundreds of icicle-shaped glass forms are looming. Was that a sound? They’re alive in the otherwise silent space, swaying slightly in your wake. Carrying life that was literally breathed into them by their makers. Carrying the life of those who were affected by nuclear plumes at Maralinga. A precarious movement, they […]
Defiance Award
Willemina Villari’s work responds to landscape — that is, both the genre of painting and the artist’s own surrounds, soaked with feeling and memory as they are for her. Villari’s response to these art-historical and personal landscapes, precisely, is to break their forms down, and play variations on their themes. Colours become saturated, gently modulated, […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Kyle Murrell, Nock Art Foundation, Paddington Art Prize, Willemina Villari
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Daniel Jenatsch
The Close World (2020) was built from conversations with GPT-3, and for the project, you fed the model with foundational texts on the philosophy of language. Which texts did you use for this, and why did you make the selection that you did? What do these texts teach us, and how do they speak to and with […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Daniel Jenatsch, John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries
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Ling Ang
Ang’s new photobook will be released as part of Melbourne Art Book Fair and Melbourne Design Week, in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria. The project emerges from a three-year incubation period, during which Ang collected photographic images of the uncanny, eerie, and weird as she came across their fields. Over this period, she […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Profiles
Tagged Alex Theatre, centre for contemporary photography, Ling Ang, Souvenirs of Sleep
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Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary
The show’s Australian curators have been meticulous in thinking through the relationship of the British designer to Australian domestic audiences, both in the mid-twentieth century and the present. One hallmark of Quant as a designer is the international reach of her brand; she’s marked out, in this show, as one of the earliest global fashion […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Bendigo Art Gallery, Mary Quant, Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary
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Tim Johnson
The works in this survey show span the last three decades of the twentieth century; they function as an historical record of Johnson’s involvement in interdisciplinary arts and political movements of the period, as well as telling the story of his development as a thinker, painter, and arts worker. The earliest work in the show, Che, dates […]
Vivienne Shark LeWitt
What has influenced your approach to art? It is hard to say, you are what you are and other things affirm what you are. Because I was interested in art history, most of the things that I liked were pre-Renaissance. If I liked anyone, any artists, from the 20th century it was usually because they […]
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Tagged Anna Schwartz Gallery, Vivienne Shark LeWitt
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Eugenia Raskopoulos
Representations of women in visual art have historically defined female experience through difference, weakness, passivity, sexual availability, domesticity and, perhaps most unintelligent, an object to be represented in art rather than a maker of art. For centuries these assumptions have dangerously masqueraded as normal; however, successive generations of artists have worked to rebut this putrid […]
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Tagged ARC ONE, Eugenia Raskopoulos
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Jim Turner
Many of Turner’s works can be understood as documents weaving the artist’s personal history into broader socio-cultural narratives from twentieth-century Australia. The print of Turner’s painting The Battle of the Bismarck Sea, for example, bears the traces of a number of periods in the artist’s and the country’s lives. On one hand, it is a fascinating – […]
Kate Florence
The designation of textiles and other ‘craft’ as women’s work is, by now, well-worn. Though the works that Florence presents, here, are paintings, they emerge from a textile-based practice that the artist has been interested in since youth. Free machine embroidery, with its fast-paced, improvisatory energy, and its resistance to planning, informs Florence’s painterly method. […]
Geoff Dyer: Selected Works from the Artist’s Studio
In 2019, Dyer told Lucy Hawthorne that, in remission from cancer treatment, ‘what’s important is being here and getting on with your work…the exterior things fall away.’ The landscapes from Dyer’s later life which are currently on show with Despard attest to just this devotional ethic: energetic, painterly, and vital in their textured rendering of the sensate […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Despard Gallery, Geoff Dyer
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