Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 60 i Artist Profile

Archibald Prize winner Del Kathryn Barton ventures beyond the artist’s studio to direct her first full-length film that takes us into the real and imaginary worlds of twelve-year-old Blaze in a harrowing coming of age tale. I really wished I had not heard Sydney artist turned filmmaker Del Kathryn Barton’s introduction to her first full-length feature film, Blaze, at this year’s 69th Sydney Film Festival. The film was in part informed by her own experience of violence. Her preamble shepherded me in an overtly prescriptive way into how I should view the film. Her introduction made me recall US art critic Jed Perl’s words in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts: “The idea of the work of art as an imaginative achievement to which the audience freely responds…

All elections bring forth a tumultuous change in the Australian society, as the old order is thrown out like confetti from a departing ship of fools and a new course is set for a journey charting turbulent and dangerous waters of the minds, hearts, and spirit of all of us in our Country, in the nation-state of Australia. Over some forty years, Gordon Hookey has crafted and defined meaning to this juggernaut of Australian reality, which has shaped his life and generations before him. A juggernaut that demands the submission and acquiescence of First Nations Peoples in its merciless and destructive path. In challenging this juggernaut of the colonial movement, Gordon has become one of the most inspiring, extraordinary, political artists of our generation alongside his peers, as he deconstructs…

In 2017, Angus and his wife, artist Liz Linden, decided to leave New York and move to California. “It was a period of consolidation, and I didn’t make a lot of work. I started a fairly intense renovation of a beautiful but terrifying Victorian house in Berkeley and set up some studio spaces, so everything is now under the same roof,” he relates. “My wife and I wanted to create a situation where we would have the best chance of focusing on our work, and so far I think we’ve achieved that.” The famously mild weather in California allows Angus to work outside for long stretches of the year: between benches in the garden, an adjacent studio building, and storage. “I generally like to keep my studio situation nimble and…

Early summer in Norway, at present, is pleasantly but uncharacteristically balmy. The Brisbane-born artist Kirsty Kross has taken up residence in an old church hall by the sea in Portør, where she is developing an installation for Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet. Not far away in the town of Kragerø, a walrus named Freya is causing a ruckus due to her enthusiasm for sunbathing on speedboats that cannot handle her 700-kilogram frame. Although the public is delighted by her antics, her journey southward has caused alarm amongst marine biologists who recognise the vagrant walrus as a harbinger of an accelerating climate crisis. Kirsty has spent the past decade assuming the avatar of a coral trout within a European context as a vehicle to examine climate change, and Freya’s presence and penchant for chaos…

Ken Whisson, who died at his Sydney home in the final week of February, seemed in recent years to be defying the natural course of ageing, creating pictures that conveyed an undimmed enchantment with life. Giving no indications of ill health, the ninety-four-year-old spent his last days absorbed in work, putting a pause on all outside engagements so that he could attend fully to his current batch of paintings. Their colourful depictions of faces, bizarre automobiles, and birds soaring into close range were the glorious last products of a disciplined life, given wholly to art. From his emergence in the mid-twentieth century, Whisson related to his audience not as compatriots in need of a national story, but as human beings capable of refashioning their own perception and, he hoped, transforming…

Michael Snape is probably best known as a sculptor. But he is, in fact, an artistic polymath – a painter, a writer, and an assiduous blogger, writing articles, reviews, poetry, and opinion pieces. His new exhibition Here at Australian Galleries, Sydney in September focusses on painting supported by some, mainly domesticscaled, sculptures. One might expect some parallel concerns between the sculpture and the painting. This is not immediately apparent. However, there is an underlying shared credo – namely, that in making art nothing should be taken for granted. For Snape, every artistic move has to be framed by an accompanying interrogation: What is art, what does it do, and how does it justify itself? To coin a phrase: Is your art really necessary? For his last show of sculptures at…

One of Australia's pre-eminent landscape artists, Mary Tonkin's practice is centred around Kalorama, located on the outer-eastern fringe of Melbourne, adjacent to Mount Dandenong. Her grandfather established a farm there in the 1930s that still supplies rare bulbs and cut flowers. She knows the environs intimately, having made it her artistic focus for the last twenty years. Tonkin works en plein air, a process documented for the first time by the National Gallery of Victoria for their web series inspired by the exhibition She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, 2021. The stereotypical notion of the smock-wearing artist perched imperiously on a hilltop, or ponderously surveying a vista, is anathema to Tonkin's robust practice. “I'm right up in it, I need forms to be within my physical space, the closest forms I…

The 59th Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, opened this past April with a year’s delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The biennale, which includes exhibitions in national pavilions and an all-important central exhibition, takes place across two main locations in Venice: the Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale, with additional national pavilions – usually by countries that have joined in more recent years – presenting inside palazzos all around the City of Bridges. Traditionally, the thesis-driven central exhibition reflects and pushes forward dominant conversations in the art world, and indeed, Cecilia Alemani, the Italian, New York–based curator of this year’s international exhibition, presented a captivating and alluring premise that synthesises several such themes. Titled The Milk of Dreams, the central exhibition – which takes its name from…

Audrey Newton delves into the subconscious. Her creative process, she tells me, often begins with “extracting ideas from altered states, such as dreams, meditation, or any trancelike state, and giving them a physical form.” This may be as an installation or as creative writing; she works across both practices. A pivotal moment occurred while on a writers’ residency at Can Serrat in Barcelona in 2018, when Newton met a fellow writer who pointed out the elements of magical realism at play in her work. This new awareness allowed growth, and provided a conceptual frame to bridge her installations and fiction writing. The literary genre of magical realism brings personal or everyday experiences into a fantastical realm, while still being grounded in reality. I visit Newton in her studio at Our…

Without compromise, for the last forty years Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey has held a metaphorical mirror to himself and his work. Hookey makes work about the past and the future. His drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, and installations speak to inhumanities, atrocities, violations, and injustices everywhere, especially those perpetrated against Indigenous Australians since the invasion of Australia. In interview with Lydia Miller, he compares experiences in Germany and Israel that changed him and his work. He invites us to make up our own minds: as he says to Miller, “I am an example of one person, and it has a familiarity with other blackfellas, I don’t represent anyone, we speak for ourselves.” His voice will undoubtedly contribute to the approaching constitutional referendum for First Nation Australians to have a Voice to…

Here we are. Backwards or forwards in time to a moment when we slip through the teeth of the world us humans have made, and feel a relaxed sense of place and connection with the nonhuman. I went to the desert once, and while trying to drink up its glorious vastness found myself crouched over, obsessively curating the perfect collection of pebbles in my palm. What a joke. There I was, alone, in kilometres of wander, focussing in on 0.5 millimetres of it, trying to make a home in my hand. I was so small. It was too big. Sometimes I feel like this when looking at paintings. Who am I and what am I doing here? Maybe it’s the painting that feels uninhabitable, or maybe it’s me and my…

In 2015, Park made Garden, a site-specific mixed-media installation which fused an imagined archaeological site with a consideration of the histories embedded in material culture. Free from the constraints of the gallery environment, Park embedded Garden into a grassy landscape, first removing a section of turf and then breaking up and turning the topsoil. Digging into the exposed dirt to create shallow depressions, she partially buried a sequence of vessels within this earthen site. Groups of elongated gourd-like and semi-figurative forms were clustered upon the surrounding grass, strewn across the broader site like fragmented relics of some unknown history. The fertile soil into which Park dug lies on Waiheke Island, the second-largest of the islands spread across the once-abundant waters of the Hauraki Gulf. The waters and earth of this…

When pondering the form of opera, the collective imagination conjures resplendent images of a chorus dressed in gold tassels, and vast crinoline vitrines enveloping a soprano soloist who is a third of their size. However, this is a depiction arising from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and pre-WWII twentieth centuries. Contemporary music has since explored new territories, opening its limits to voices that were once marginalised – including to women and to non-Western practices. It has expanded across disciplines and sonically plastered itself in the in-between spaces of the weird and unexpected. It is from this brilliantly undefined region of experimentation and interdisciplinary practice that Melbourne-based artist Mia Salsjö emerges. Born in 1977 of Albanian-Swedish descent, Salsjö’s career has blossomed across several continents, from residencies in Havana to Bali, before finding her…

In Australia there is an ongoing tradition of landscape painting that goes back for more than two centuries. There is also another tradition in Australian art that can be termed “painting country” that goes back millennia and is still thriving today. The Western European landscape tradition, that was imported to Australia, involves observing and recording a view in front of the artist, or a view as imagined by the artist. It can be a record of mood, a response to the sublime or the beauty of the scene, or an expression about the ownership of the land, the wealth that it harbours, or even a plea of concern for its threatened ecosystems. The landscape is something that is outside the artist that the artist captures through the chosen medium to…

Clad in uniform sheets of fibrous cement (fibro) arranged as a grid, with a surface trim that clearly defines the framework, the reduced form of the fibro house has long been a favoured subject for Australian artists including Christopher Zanko, John Bloomfield, Reg Mombassa, Howard Arkley, and Joanna Lamb. Facilitating reduction, with a squint, the fibro grid is broken by windows and doors, to form a Mondrianlike framework for geometric abstraction. O’Donnell further reduces the elements identifying the subject as a house by eliminating extraneous details, such as roof and foundations. On occasion she may retain the guttering. Or, as with her Rome drawings, it is only the power boxes and their shadows that remain. Exploring, as she says, “the everyday-ness of the urban environment,” her work is engaged with…

I squint at my creased map from a clearing in the Karlsaue Park. In an attempt to escape the sting of the sun, I’d decided to take a shortcut to the “compost heap” – the location of La Intermundial Holobiente’s installation – but there are more tracks through the forest than marked on the documenta fifteen map. Of course there are. It’s an art map, after all: minimal, beautiful, not always helpful. I’m on a strict schedule, having covered a thirteen-kilometre loop from Kassel’s centre to the eastern ex-industrial venues and back again in the stinking heat: compost heap by 3:00 p.m., the Stadtmuseum by 3:30, leaving me enough time to attend Richard Bell’s Tent Embassy conversation at 5:00 p.m. For extensive events like documenta, the planning, the walking between…

Before the premiere screening of Blaze at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, Del Kathryn Barton stood on the stage of the State Theatre and offered a framework to interpretation: that this was, amongst other things, a film about the generative power of female rage. The audience applauded; some (including me) cheered. Rage has a certain proximity to shock – to outrage, perhaps – in the way that it strikes our nervous systems, running freezer fluid through the veins of the person possessed by it. It can feel like some external force taking the wheel from the body, which then takes the wheel from the mind, an experience at once of total self-alienation and a new, alarming self-possession. Blaze begins with series of luscious shots across Barton’s five-panel painting sing blood…

Amber Wallis is in the middle of preparations for her upcoming exhibition at Sydney Contemporary with Nicholas Thompson Gallery. She works quickly and lightly across three large artworks in her small studio in Northern New South Wales. A few images are tucked discreetly down the side of one canvas, photographs from a real estate listing Wallis found online and printed out. When I ask about them, she says it’s a house on Great Barrier Island in New Zealand, where she spent a lot of time while growing up. “For me, they hold a lot of energy, they can provide a beginning point to then move on with the painting,” Wallis says. Wallis is keenly interested in domestic space, particularly women in domestic space. She says the structure of her work…

Paul Yore’s solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) this September, Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH, has been conceived as an early-career survey, covering about fifteen years of output, and including over one hundred textile works, from intimately scaled embroidered needlepoint works, through to wall-sized appliquéd quilts. A major monographic publication is being produced to coincide with the exhibition, presenting critical readings of the work by a group of distinguished Australian and international writers. “The large-scale installation I am creating for my ACCA survey show will feature many text-based elements,” Yore tells me from his studio in Gippsland. “This will be most pointedly in the form of neon and LED light works emblazoned with found text from song lyrics, idioms, proverbs, colloquialisms, political slogans, and exclamations. I’m…

Ryan Presley’s work is full of symbolism, but I also like to think of it as testing the line between iconography and insignia, directing viewers to consider rank and responsibility, status and standing. Presley, who has both Aboriginal and Scandinavian ancestry, is fascinated by official/unofficial roles and jurisdictions, creating works of a predominantly illustrative bent that hinge on their capacity to be decoded. His particular penchant is for standalone objects – uniforms, banknotes, tasers, welfare cards, gavels, detention centres, boats, CCTV systems, graffiti tags, mining equipment – which are used to thematise situations of postcolonial sovereignty, or lack thereof. Like many Aboriginal-identified artists who have at one time been inspired by Gordon Bennett, the question of power – actual, symbolic, and imagined – pervades everything he does. When I caught…

The owners of Moss Vale’s newest accommodation, Moss Manor, Louella and Tony Grattan-Smith, first met Defiance Gallery director Campbell Robertson-Swann at a dinner years ago, where they began an enduring friendship. Moss Manor is the result of this shared passion for the arts, featuring fifty-five of Defiance’s artworks which have been intuitively curated by both Campbell and Louella. The art at Moss Manor is given its sense of place not only by the interiors and textiles but by the architecture itself. Behind the haughty Victorian-era council chambers building extends a jet-black pavilion containing a luxurious light-filled living space overlooking the garden. Inspired in part by Glenn Murcutt’s Berowra Waters Inn, architect Luke Moloney saw Moss Manor as an opportunity for simple and interesting architecture, bridging the gap between an historic…

“Look, I hate opening up like this,” Peter Godwin says. “It’s not that I find it difficult, but it’s like Matisse said: ‘Painter’s tongues should be cut out at birth’.” I’m glad that Godwin still has his tongue. I’m glad because, while the artist may wish his work to speak for itself, Godwin also has an undeniable ability to narrativise his practice and infuse it with a sense of the personal. In telling me about his forthcoming exhibition, Studio and Mountains, at Defiance Gallery, Godwin pulls stories from across several decades, lending a weight and context to each of his artistic moves. In the first part of the exhibition, Godwin presents still lifes that he has painted from his studio in Brisbane Water, on the Central Coast of New South…

In 2017, Dani McKenzie’s work was imbued with a strange nostalgic melancholy. She was undertaking a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and her paintings, which were based on found photography, were infused with mystery as neither the artist or viewer could know the history or the context of the images. They were depicted with a slightly out-of-focus fuzziness, memories becoming lost in a fog of time past. In 2022, the melancholy remains, but the memories are suddenly sharp and concise. Upon returning to Australia, McKenzie changed tactics. Rather than acting as a resurrectionist for other people’s faded memories, she turned to her own photography as a base. However, even here, McKenzie chose a tactic that served to skew our immediate interpretation of her “memories” – for…

To bring together the work of Aboriginal, diasporic Australian and international artists is a formidable task: How to give visibility to the complexity of lived experience without homogenising or universalising? Cementa was founded in Kandos in mid-2012 by Dr. Ann Finegan, Georgie Pollard, and Alex Wisser, and perhaps inspired in part by the closure of the cement plant in the town in 2011. A biennial event, its name a play on Manifesta and documenta, both major exhibitions of international contemporary art held in Europe. Kandos is located at the base of Combamolang Mountain, home of the Dabee mob of the Wiradjuri people. It was established in 1913, after the NSW Cement Lime and Coal Company purchased one hundred acres from local farmer John Lloyd for £2000. The plan was to…