Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 63 i Artist Profile

Some readers of Artist Profile would know that since the industrialisation of photography in the early nineteenth century, debates continue around painting versus photography — even whether a painter should reveal or conceal their reliance on photography. Clara Adolphs, Artist Profile cover artist does something else. After graduating from the University of New South Wales art school ten years ago she has used old black and white photographs to inspire paintings that are devoted to the idea of light. Naomi Hobson is careful to give her paintings, photographs, and ceramics a specific role. Naomi told Lydia Miller her ceramics are for “for ceremony and ritual, representing our stories,” her photography is focused on unsettling, fixed views about her Coen community in Far North Queensland and her paintings spiritually map her…

Behind the bright veneer of Emma Coulter’s abstract compositions is a deeply considered understanding of space, perception, and the interplay of colour. Coulter’s wide-ranging works, which span painting, sculpture, installation, and public art, are boundary defying explorations that expand the traditional understanding of paintings beyond self-contained works on canvas. One of the most defining features of Emma Coulter’s work is her choice of colours, with the artist preferring to work with a limited palette of pre-determined hues and shades sourced from existing synthetic paints. Where other artists may find the limited colour palette restrictive or even repetitive, in Coulter’s hands her choice to work with “ready-made colour” (pre-mixed colours that are commercially produced) creates dynamic opportunities for exploration and experimentation. For Coulter, this considered selection of hues “connects my visual…

“The hand that rocks the cradle, is the hand that rules the world”William Ross Wallace, 1898 A Great-Grandchild caressing the hands of her Great-Grandmother, reveals a life journey of profound strength and resistance to the cruelty and burden of colonial history, a burden carried by generations and scarred on their bodies. As a Great-Grandchild traces and massages the welts and legacy of colonial cruelty on her Great Grandmother’s tiny frame and through this intimate journey of touch, traverses a landscape of valleys and crests interwoven with criss-crossing, intersecting lines – knows that it offers solace and love. The final chapter in the chronicle of harsh punishment and beatings her Great-Grandmother endured is replaced by a Great-Grandchild’s nurturing touch and a seasonal ritual of Wunkumanu "Grandmother’s time" where women once again…

Fiona Somerville was born in Adelaide, where nineteenth century European settlers built a stately colonial city on the fertile coastal plain, surrounding it with a formal ring of parks, the town plan emphasising the cool of the Torrens River. The city climbs up its surrounding hills; it seems every citizen is a gardener. But however domesticated, europeanised – the place is circled by the South Australian desert, and the light of the city is the clear bright desert light that bleaches colour. How to convey that relentless light, its effect on perception? The problem remains with artists from South Australia, wherever they go: Jeffrey Smart took the glare of the coastal plain to Italy, Hans Heysen gave us the mists and shifting light of the hills; Clifton Pugh’s South Australian…

I have spent more than three decades working with artists and communities both in and outside gallery contexts. I find this work profoundly invigorating and relevant. However, I have seen so many awful murals, ceramic projects and the like, made in the name of community art that the term is anathema to me. Since I started at Arts & Cultural Exchange (ACE) in 2020, I use the term community arts (note the plural). Community art in Australia has a distinguished history. Responding to political action, and ongoing demand for social and cultural change, community-based artistic practice – known variously as community art, community cultural development, and community art and cultural development – has continued to develop from the late 1960s through to the present day. The 1970s saw the establishment…

The National 4: Australian Art Now features exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Campbelltown Arts Centre (C-A-C), Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia). The National’s five curators: Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, Freja Carmichael, Jane Devery, Beatrice Gralton and Emily Rolfe offer a selection of works in line with the webpage’s description, displaying “artists across Country, generations and communities.” However admirable, there is something presumptuous about the term “the national.” No survey can do justice to the art of a particular country or have enough foreknowledge to encapsulate the elusive “now.” And surprisingly, only a few of the chosen works explore Australian nationalism head-on. That is not to say that myth and politics are absent. There are no male curators, and that seems softly…

Occupying the North Gallery of the newly expanded Orange Regional Gallery, Archer’s work is both monumental and domestic, and though the size of her work is large, there is a compatibility of scale that comfortably locates the work within the space. Moreover, the vast expanses of gallery white walls lend Archer’s highly physical work a certain lightness. There is a density to the painting work of Archer that conjures the visual depth and richness of tapestries, where colour and texture is simultaneously impermeable, sharp, fractious and amplified. Contrasting tones intensify colour, while the quick sharp brush strokes lay a staccato-like textural rhythm that traces line and give the works a drawn quality. Add to this the artist’s subject matter, which leaps from the essence of the impenetrable bush surrounding her…

Growing up the youngest of three sisters in the northern parts of suburban Sydney, Clara Adolphs was largely left to her own devices. With fertile imagination, she hatched a fictitious world – what she named her “natural game” – as a place to escape and explore. Today, it seems, Adophs is still playing her “natural game,” creating painterly portals that sweep us into worlds near and far. Clara’s inspirations are diverse, from Chantel Joffe, Salman Toor and David Hockney to Vincent Namatjira, Patti Smith, Edouard Manet, and Henry Taylor. I spot cadences of these artists – the fluid strokes of Manet, the agile figuration of Joffe, the candid poetry of Smith – but Adolphs’s artistic vocabulary is expressly her own. For over a decade, she has carved out a singular…

Across her varied disciplinary approach, Jess MacNeil’s works bear the hallmarks of her visual style – slippages of light and depth, stillness and movement, resilience and fragility, shifting viewpoints of both natural and built environments, and our interaction with them. MacNeil has been making and exhibiting her work, both in Australia and abroad, for at least two decades. Presence and absence occur regularly; her paintings bear areas of dense, carefully worked colour juxtaposed with spaces that are monochromatic or “empty” – open for others’ imaginations to fill. In some works, she makes three-dimensional frames of coloured acrylic – translucent blues, reds, and pale viola – whose paint-worked surfaces appear like skins. The spaces in between allow us to see beyond the painterly surface, through to the structural planes and junctures.…

Tim Page died on the 24th of August in the house that he and his partner, Marianne Harris, built in a clearing on the edge of Bellingen Forest. The house is homely, hung with prints of Tim’s photographs and lined with his Buddhas and books. From the verandah where he sat each morning, the view down the clearing is of stands of towering grey gum and ironbark. It is a place of peace, but it took Tim a long journey to arrive there. The obituaries that appeared in the days after his death, online and in newspapers from London to Los Angeles, mostly focused on when he was a combat photographer during the Vietnam War, on the fact that he was wounded four times, on the drugs and sex and…

Ten years ago, the National Gallery of Victoria presented the first iteration of Melbourne Now: a “blockbuster” summer show featuring over 250 works across the NGV’s two venues. The exhibition aimed to affirm the city’s status as one of the cultural capitals of the world, demonstrating to a broad public the ways in which Melbourne is significantly shaped by its artists, designers and architects. Melbourne Now has returned a decade later, somewhat smaller and more focused, presented across all levels of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Federation Square. Its aims also seem humbler, posited as a “snapshot” of vibrant creativity embedded within the city. The exhibition is multifaceted and dense. Some works are thematically clustered and some galleries are dedicated to particular art or design forms. But overall,…

“Flight”is a compelling title for an exhibition. The word suggests transcendence. It calls to mind a kind of ideal: the half-formed notion that we could leave the earth, with all of its terrestrial concerns, and float off into the clouds. Weightless. Yet the latest show at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre does not float away. In many ways, it does the opposite, bringing us down to the ground. Within the walls of the Powerhouse, flight is more often than not embedded within the realities of the earthly: our politics, our histories, our futures. In this sense, the exhibition presents a bifurcated gaze, which not only looks to the skies above, but also scrutinises the ground below. Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s imposing sculptural installation, Journey to the West, 2023, immediately stages…

It is surprising to think this is the first full length documentary feature on the iconoclastic Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang Gurang artist Richard Bell, whose career now spans thirty plus years. Knowing Richard’s practice, and his flair for satire, it’s a wonder that Bell has never produced his own mockumentary. Still, this new documentary entitled You Can Go Now, 2022, shows us that there are more layers to a complex artist who has always avoided being pigeonholed. The film is directed by Eualeyai/Kamillaroi academic, writer and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt, who produced the critically acclaimed 2019 documentary In my blood it runs. You Can Go Now succeeds as a documentary because it largely puts its main subject in the background for the length of the film and dedicates much screen…

Jørn Utzon was guided by the ideology that architecture is not an external form, but a frame enclosing a collection of ritualised events. For Mika Utzon Popov art can also be a ritualised experience. He emphasises that the most profound encounters are designed and experienced as a procession where art, architecture, atmosphere, and environment conspire to afford transcendence. Utzon Popov cites examples such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace placed on the pinnacle of the monumental Daru staircase at the Louvre Museum, and the experience of rounding a corner at the Musée d’Orsay to be “punched in the guts” by the splendid reveal of Van Gogh’s L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet, 1890. Sometimes the procession and the reveal can be softer. Our conversation drifted towards Richard Serra’s The Gate in…

“I have lived on or in proximity to Ngunnawal country most of my life, but I know that I will never have the detailed knowledge born of a culture that has lived in communion with land in the way our first custodians did. It is with this awareness that I acknowledge elders past, present and emerging on Ngunnawal country.” Jenny Bell. At Gina Mobayed’s urging, Jenny Bell and I met over strong coffee and Philip Hodgins’ poetry, in her studio at “Bohara,” the Bell-Edwards’ family property near Breadalbane on the New South Wales southern tablelands. Hodgins’ invocation in his poem Getting through a strained fence, 1991, begins, “Approach it as you would a work of art,” a prescient introduction. This prosaic homily to the proverbial is a meditation on transition,…

Up until recently this process was applied almost exclusively to copies of the book “Aboriginal Words and Place Names.” whereby I would tear, pulp, weave and burn the pages, healing and transforming them into new objects of cultural beauty and pride. The homogenising of books filled with words ripped from their connection to people and place would have a second life, one that I, as a proud Gulumerridjin (Larrakia) woman could determine the form and in doing so, determine how they are read. Recently after much reflection, my focus has shifted, my process is absolutely concerned with the deconstruction and reconstruction of source material, but I now look to translate the recordings of the language of my ancestors. I have turned my attention away from homogenous books to the focused…

The anniversary of Utopia Art Sydney is a moment to reflect for the founding director who was, in the early days, one of many young artists in Sydney working multiple part-time jobs to support their exhibiting career. “In the late eighties I saw artists who needed a hand” he explains, with the same purposeful succinctness he gives to all the topics we discuss. “The first artist’s work I ever sold was John R Walker, who was showing at a gallery and had been owed money for a long time. I just put some of his work in a folder and sold it to friends and collectors who I knew.” “I was helping a mate,” he continues. “I didn’t intend to have a gallery, but I bumped into somebody from Central…

Fox is clearly nourished by her practice, with a love of making that permeates and is influenced by all elements of her life. This can be seen in the wide range of techniques she has perfected, the multiple references informing each work, and the deep connections she has made with others through her art. To Fox, “all those disparate and small pieces add up to my career to date,” and this progression can be seen in Add It Up, opening at Mildura Arts Centre in June. This is an exhibition in two parts: a survey of selected works from the past twelve years, and the “collage room,” a homage to Mildura including existing works from the Gallery’s collection and two exciting new pieces made with the local community. The diversity…

Around the same time that Daniel Boyd’s exhibition RAINBOW SER-PENT (VERSION) opened at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, marking the multidisciplinary artist’s most comprehensive solo show in Europe, a news story about London’s National Portrait Gallery’s last-ditch efforts to prevent a painting by Joshua Reynolds from going into private hands was making headlines. Described as “one of the most important portraits in the history of British art,” Reynolds’s 1774 Portrait of Omai – now renamed Portrait of Mai, to reflect the subject’s correct name – shows Mai, the first Polynesian man to visit Britain. He travelled from Tahiti to England with Captain James Cook. His imposing 7ft-high portrait has been described by The Guardian as “both spiritually breathtaking and, as the country’s first grand portrayal of a non-white subject, culturally important.” (Remaining…

Working the Waters is a collection of immersive videos and installation works that reveal the resultant aftermaths of water and human activity colliding. The imagery, covering geography ranging from the Americas through to the Indo-Pacific, illustrates how water is either worshipped to the point of being adored to death, as with the River Ganges, or abused, like the damage done to the Queen River in Tasmania by copper mining. In the East, the contamination continues with the poisoning of waters around the islands which housed smelters, and their waste in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Sue Pedley’s Copper Ships, 2011, consists of three works. Two are large-scale video projections: At the confluence of the King and Queen Rivers, Tasmania, following the mining of copper ore in Queenstown, Tasmania; and View of…