Issue 56

EDITOR’S NOTE

Isn’t it interesting how the meaning of words can change over time? Very recently the word “naughty” has caught my attention. “Naughty” in the visual arts. Who can possibly be “naughty” in the visual arts? What would naughty look like in this century as opposed to centuries past? Surely only an outsider to the visual arts would use the word “naughty” to critique an artist’s work. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the adjective naughty as “disobedient behaviour.” How can this apply in the visual arts? Some case studies are necessary here.

In this issue of Artist Profile, with Noonuccal and Ngugi artist Megan Cope on the cover, you will once again discover the wonderfully mysterious world of the visual arts. I want to thank you all for your support and trust. We’re proud to present the magazine’s largest issue since it went on sale in 2007. There are more pages for larger articles, with extra writers and photographers.

Megan Cope has already had a busy and terrific year of exhibitions with her solos ‘Fractures & Frequencies’ at UNSW Gallery and ‘Unbroken Connections’ from her 2020 residency at Canberra Glassworks – and the group exhibition ‘OCCURRENT AFFAIR: proppaNOW’ at the University of Queensland Art Museum. ‘Fractures & Frequencies’ installations and performances of Untitled (Death Song), 2020, evoked moving memories of Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham’s installation Building a Nation, 2006, at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Hannah Donnelly’s essay on Cope unpacks the artist’s reliance and focus on themes that interrogate colonial histories, language, space and time. Donnelly also looks at Cope’s multifaceted work and announces her 2022 exhibition at the end of the article. Cope says to Donnelly, “White people build their drinking sites over our community sites.” In this century, this is more than “naughty.”

Wolfgang Zumdick celebrates Joseph Beuys’s one-hundredth birthday, in this century not naughty.

When Belinda Mason’s The Last Supper, a portrait photograph of Australia’s first excommunicated Catholic Priest, Fr. Peter Kennedy, in a Christ-like pose, was a finalist in the 2009 Blake Prize , Cardinal George Pell as described it as “. . . a deficient expression of religion.” What Mason expressed isn’t naughty.

So, when Judith Pugh went to the National Gallery of Australia’s second presentation of ‘Know My Name,’ to find a warning sign directed at Justene Williams’ Given That/You put a spell on mine/Uterus, 2014, by an art insider, protector and champion of artists and their works, in this century that is a more than “naughty” act.

There are many more opportunities throughout this issue of Artist Profile to agree or disagree with our interpretation of “naughty” in this century. If you wish you can send me you thoughts at kgouriotis@artistprofile.com.au

Kon Gouriotis
Editor

CONTENTS

ISSUE

NFT Art by Barry Keldoulis

Anonymous

COVER FEATURE

Megan Cope by Hannah Donnelly

PROFILES

Madeleine Peters by Peter Hill
Michael McHugh by Emma-Kate Wilson
Megan Cope by Hannah Donnelly
John Young by H.R. Hyatt-Johnston
Kristian Burford by Rose Vickers
Reuben Paterson by Pippa Mott
Del Kathryn Barton by Tai Mitsuji
Belinda Mason by Kon Gouriotis
Matthew Cheyne by Louise Martin-Chew
Tricky Walsh by Andrew Harper

INSIGHT

POEM Louis Klee
PROCESS Emma Walker
PROCESS  Hellen Rose
ESSAY Skirts by Erin McFadyen
TRIBUTE Sam Fullbrook by Leonard Brown
ESSAY Beuys Alive by Wolfgang Zumdick
ESSAY Her Light Materials by Anna Johnson
ESSAY Covid U-Turns by Michael Young
PREVIEW Danelle Bergstrom by Erin McFadyen
PREVIEW Bill Brown by Courtney Kidd
PREVIEW Ballarat International Fotobiennale by Kim Guthrie
PREVIEW Patrick Hall by Lucy Hawthorne
REVIEW Know My Name by Judith Pugh
REVIEW Hilma af Klint by Kathleen Linn
REVIEW WARWAR by Madeleine K. Snow
REVIEW Surrealists at Sea by Julianne Pierce
BOOK Buried Not Dead by Brooke Boland
DISCOVERY Harrison Riekie by Ted Snell