Issue 49
EDITOR’S NOTE
It may be tempting to situate this issue of Artist Profile within a feminist framework, adding to the growing discourse surrounding gender inequality within the arts. Indeed, the trope of the male genius suffuses the canon of Western art like a lurid light that has too-often relegated female practitioners to the shadows. Though the interviews, essays and reviews on these pages do address this imbalance of exposure by spotlighting female practitioners, they are not gendered in tone or content. No; this issue is simply a celebration of art today.
Many of these artists engage with the politics of representation, creating a space where perception and convention collide to form new modes of seeing. In a world where imagery is currency, disseminated and consumed en masse by a visual culture that teaches us to see rather than think, the question arises of what this means for art(ists). The artists on these pages slow down the way we consume imagery. They rejig the process of looking by giving agency to imagination, poetry to process and power to intent.
Our cover artist Justine Varga subverts the conventions and connotations of the photographic image with her camera-less photographs etched with the materiality of light and the machinations of time; like a physical memory. These works foster expanded ways of seeing and thinking, pushing down the feeble fences that delineate artistic mediums.
Yvonne Koolmatrie’s virtuosic weavings speak of both innovation and tradition, reminding us that the umbilical cord connecting us to the past is a source of nourishment for the future, never to be severed.
Much of the art in this issue reveals a sensitivity to global afflictions – environmental, political, historical. Artists such as Susan Norrie and Cornelia Parker probe the human culpability at the heart of environmental crises like climate change, while technology is interrogated as both agent of ruin and harbinger of hope.
In this issue artists stretch boundaries and stay true to themselves whilst maintaining a profound orbit of our current moment.
– Elli Walsh, Deputy Editor
COVER FEATURE
JUSTINE VARGA photographed by Stephen Oxenbury
ISSUE
THE NUDE NOW by Erin McFadyen
PROFILES
ATONG ATEM by Nur Shkembi
NICOLE KELLY by Eleanor Zeichner
JUSTINE VARGA by Kirsty Baker
YVONNE KOOLMATRIE by Louella Hayes
SUSAN NORRIE by Saskia Beudel
LINDA MARRINON by Kim Guthrie
CORNELIA PARKER by Rose Vickers
JAN KING by John McDonald
IZABELA PLUTA by Kathleen Linn
SALLY M NANGALA MULDA by Louise Martin-Chew
INSIGHT
PROCESS Madeleine Pfull
PROCESS Amrita Hepi
PROCESS Jelena Telecki
POEM ‘Bush Wanderings’ by Suzanne Archer
TRIBUTE Helen Marshall by Jane Eckett
ESSAY Feminism in Australian Art by Janine Burke
ESSAY Lisa Roet by Judith Pugh
PREVIEW Evelyna Helmer by Tanya Schneider
PREVIEW Meagan Streader by Soon-Min Shim
PREVIEW Julie Davidson by Elli Walsh
PREVIEW Karla Dickens by Kevin Wilson
PREVIEW Tracey Moffatt and Hayley Millar-Baker by Courtney Kidd
PREVIEW Melissa Egan by Bella Chidlow
PREVIEW Brenda L. Croft by Nikita Holcombe
REVIEW Nike Savvas by Ben Curnow
REVIEW Prue Venables by H. R. Hyatt-Johnston
FILM Davida Allen: Feeling Sexy by Nicholas Nedelkopoulos
DISCOVERY ANNA LITWINOWICZ by Emma Finneran