Innholdsfortegnelse for 32 i Artist Profile

THE AP TEAM EDITOR Owen Craven artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au ART DIRECTOR Kim Gregory kgregory@nextmedia.com.au EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Lucy Stranger artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith CONTRIBUTORS JOHN MCDONALD is the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review. www.johnmcdonald.net.au ASHLEIGH WADMAN is a South-East Queensland based arts writer, curator and founder and author of www.cultgc.com CAMILLE NOCK is an arts writer. She is a graduate of Art History and Theory from the University of Melbourne. LUCY STRANGER is an arts writer and Art History Honours student at the University of Sydney. She is Editorial Coordinator for Artist Profile magazine. SONIA LEGGE has worked at Watters Gallery and Legge Gallery since 1989. GAVIN WILSON has since 1993 forged a successful career as an independent curator and author. In that…

Tamara Dean’s photographs capture moments of transition that can happen in a split second or over a lifetime. Beautifully crisp, still, dreamlike scenes set against the grandeur of nature, from the Australian bush to upstate New York, convey what for Dean is fundamental – an appreciation of being alive in a world as majestic and awe-inspiring as ours. The young people that inhabit her photographs create fleeting moments from broader narratives, illustrating both the vulnerability and indestructibility of people in nature, and importantly, the paths of discovery taken to conquer these feelings. YOUR WORK IS CONCERNED with the relationship between humans and nature, particularly young people. While growing up, did you spend a lot of time in nature? For the first seven years of my life I lived on the…

GAZING ACROSS the nation’s landscape, artists have referenced the past, the future and the ever present, to identify and give a sense of place to the space they occupy. The experience can be grounded in the physical reality of a site, along with its deep, often-elusive spiritual associations. Country & Western: landscape re-imagined brings into focus the contrasting insights and cultural imperatives, both Indigenous (country) and non-indigenous (western), that have given shape and substance to our evolving attitudes and perceptions of the national landscape over the past 25 years. To grasp an appreciation of the enterprise a timeframe was established: the 65 works assembled for Country & Western are all post-bicentennial pieces. With the focus back on the national landscape in all its complexity, now is the time to assess…

IN ABSTRACT ART, reality is subjective. Its language comprises non-illusionistic space combined with non-objective bands of colour, intersecting shapes and graphic lines. These features collide into one permanent form, allowing the viewer to experience an act of ‘pure’ viewing. This is evident in the work of Melbourne-based artist, Melinda Harper, one of Australia’s most significant contemporary abstract artists. Her investigation of colour and form stem from intense optical and psychological responses to lived experiences, embodying what Harper has described as “the act of looking, the obvious, the precise and the precious”. Harper has developed an impressive oeuvre over the past three decades, producing works of stylish, rhythmic designs and clarity of colour. Curated by Sue Cramer, Colour Sensation: The Works of Melinda Harper at the Heide Museum of Modern Art…

From a young boy filling up handmade sketchbooks in country Victoria, Greg Creek has gone on to do great things for the medium of drawing. At the University of Melbourne he completed a PhD on the topic of Manifesto Drawing: cartooning, political observation and its relationship to art. Creek has shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world and is currently represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne. As a painter and a draughtsman primarily, Creek continues to re-evaluate the world around him and his works provide a platform for alternative voices to be heard. He is installing an exhibition at the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) that will offer a significant survey of some of his accomplishments. So I would have multiple long tables in the studio with these scrolls…

Living and working in London, David Noonan is a Victorian-born artist whose career has developed over the last 20 years to growing international acclaim. Working across the mediums of painting, video and installation, Noonan has come to be recognised for his unique collage-based screen prints that allow him to create a visual dialogue between the abstract and the figurative. His most recent exhibition, a self-titled show at Roslyn Oxley9 earlier this year, presented a continuation in the progression of Noonan’s oeuvre. Drawing on an archive of visual imagery, he merges layers of textiles and photography onto a single visual plane to create new meaning. In doing so Noonan produces artworks that invite interpretation, providing the viewer with a wealth of information that they must delve into and decipher, rather than…

I BELIEVE INTUITION and expression to be an intrinsic part of my art-making practice. This idea drives my process of observational abstraction, where examination of a stimulus allows a relationship to develop between gesture, form and subject. Working from naval ship models, I let my eye deconstruct the object, drawing shapes and structures that translate to an image often divorced from its true physical form. I feel this process gives my work an air of spontaneity, energy and movement where my passion for painting as a physical action or release is conveyed strongly to the audience. Playing with the distinction between representational abstraction and pure abstraction, my aim is to compile a diverse body of work from a single stimulus. My most important impetus is the passion for painting as…

MY NEW PAINTINGS, In Flagrante Delicto, are the most explicitly political works I have done. I have had a slow, simmering anger over many years about the men in power, the businessmen, bankers and politicians –the men in suits and the chaos they create – apparently on our behalf. For several years prior to these works, I was creating mythological works but last year I felt it was time for a radical change. No more angry fairies and middle-aged muses. I needed to add my voice to the chorus of criticism about the behaviour of those at the top. For the paintings I do, research is really important at both the gestation phase and prior to the execution. At first the research is wide-ranging … more inspirational and oblique. Once I…

KEVIN CONNOR has had a wonderful 60-year career in Australia, making a name as one of the country’s most respected artists. Known for his gestural landscapes and the expressionistic figures and forms that haunt his works, he observes the human condition with a soulful and incisive eye. It’s a style that harks back to great German art traditions wrapped up in social realism and detached observations of daily life, seen in the work of artists such as Beckman, Kirchner and Dix. His recent show at Liverpool Street Gallery was one of the few commercial exhibitions of his drawings en masse in which works have been made available to collectors. With more than 200 drawings, hung salon-style, the exhibition was a fantastic opportunity to view a master’s work up close. You’ve…

“It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Émile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our attention is Cézanne’s anxiety – that’s Cézanne’s lesson.” Pablo Picasso PETER GODWIN takes heart from Picasso’s famous line about Cézanne’s anxiety. It seems to justify his own late-blooming career as an artist who only began to exhibit regularly after the age of 50, enjoying instant success. He once explained his reluctance to show his work by saying he wanted it to be like a brick wall. “That wasn’t just ego talking,” he explains. “I was trying to say that I didn’t mind people interpreting the work…

YOUR TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER heritage informs a major part of your cultural vernacular. Tell me about your experience growing up on Thursday Island and how it affected you creatively. Just like any other kid growing up on Thursday Island, the entire island was our playground. We were always out fishing, diving, hunting and playing sport, and some of these were seminal experiences growing up. Combined with cultural practice, learning the in and outs of my traditional heritage, I led a very exciting and active life. Even though I was a child growing up in the Torres Strait, I was still influenced by television, comic books and other publications. I used to sit at the kitchen table for hours on end sketching from imagination and memory, comic books (Spiderman, Superman and…

I’ve been drawn to making works that convey impermanence and yet are timeless ... working in opposites YOUR WORK DRAWS ON very dense and cerebral themes such as cosmology and phenomenology. Can you tell me about how these concepts inspire your practice and how it manifests in your work? They may seem like dense themes but to me they are a great source for whimsical and poetic approaches to making art. Why not use our natural world as a springboard for ideas? It seems perfectly natural to me – I am very comfortable with maths, science and physics in so far as how they provide an inroad to understanding our magical universe. For me, an artist, I don’t think one has to try to be the mathematician, scientist or physicist,…

GARDENS ARE TRANSITIONAL spaces that lie between the domestic and the wild. They can be meeting places where you engage with others, or somewhere you go for private reflection. Vivienne Ferguson is an artist and a gardener. She is showing me some botanical sketches before we go up to her studio, via the bush-rock steps she built herself. “I didn’t imagine when I enrolled in the horticulture course at TAFE how much I’d love it, or what effect it would have on my work,” says Ferguson. “We designed gardens, drew plant forms and leaf margins – I love leaf margins!” (They’re the shapes of the edges of leaves). “Look, it was the best thing I’ve done since going to the National Art School (NAS) “Basically the NAS was anything you…