JUL/AUG 2021
Michael Lindeman Lynda Draper Yvette Coppersmith Jemima Wyman Kirsten Coelho Seth Birchall
Editorial Directors Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf Managing Editor Harriet Reid Senior Designer & Studio Manager Matthew De Moiser Designer Angela Du Proofreader Alex Pedley Production polleninteractive.com.au
SYDNEY
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JUL/AUG 2021
Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Gadigal people of FRONT COVER: Lynda Draper Here comes the dawn, 2020 Ceramic, various glazes 95 x 63 x 63 cm Photo credit: Docqment
the Eora nation, the traditional custodians on whose lands the Gallery stands. We pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging and recognise their continued connection to Culture and Country.
100 YEARS
Presenting partner
Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes 2021 and Archie 100 On now
OF THE ARCHIBALD PRIZE Archibald Prize 2021 finalist Natasha Bieniek Rachel Griffiths (detail) © the artist
CONFLICT IN MY OUTLOOK_
WE METBE ONLINE DON’T EVIL
30_ JUL_2021 - 22_ JAN_2022
ZACH BLAS & JEMIMA WYMAN_ KATE CRAWFORD & VLADAN JOLER_ SIMON DENNY_ XANTHE DOBBIE_ SEAN DOCKRAY_ FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE_ KATE GECK_ ELISA GIARDINA PAPA_ MATTHEW GRIFFIN_ EUGENIA LIM_ DANIEL MCKEWEN_ ANGELA TIATIA_ SUZANNE TREISTER_ KATIE VIDA_
UQ ART MUSEUM
Image: Xanthe Dobbie, Cloud Copy (detail) 2020. Virtual reality installation, 4:50 mins. Courtesy of the artist.
Kirsten Coelho, ‘Ship’ 2021. Courtesy: the artist, and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Photograph: Grant Hancock
KIRSTEN COELHO —THE RETURN 7 May – 31 July 2021 UNSW Galleries unsw.to/galleries
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021
Michael Lindeman Crime Committed, 2021 Colour prints of Australian impasto paintings, clear vinyl 130 x 175 x 12 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Michael Lindeman Cheese (detail), 2021 Acrylic on canvas, rat traps 265 x 730 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Risk/Reward Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf
We are sitting on a plane, coming back from a lightning trip to Brisbane for the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) annual gala. We are dashing home to Sydney, before any new COVID-19 warnings or the border closes – such is the state of travel these days. It was a beautiful evening, full of excitement, expectation and genuine support for the institution, the oldest independent art space in Australia. The team did a great job, raised lots of money and honoured two great Queensland artists. All in all, a good night. Pre-Coronavirus, these sorts of events were a regular occurrence. But in the pandemic era, the very idea of organising a large event for hundreds of people, flying in from all over the country becomes a risky business. This, of course, makes it all the more fun for those attending, and all the more stressful for those organising. Covid aside, taking risks is something that artists do every single day of their lives. For Lynda Draper, who creates impossibly large and elaborate sculptures from intricately woven strands of clay – risk seems ever present. A master ceramicist for over three decades, these brilliant works seem to teeter on the edge, defying the limits of the medium with each sculpture taller and more complex than the last. Up close, it is their interconnectedness that gives them their inherent strength, allowing Draper to dare risk taking them to ever greater heights. Risk is also an inherent part of Michael Lindeman’s work – shining a light on the contemporary artworld and examining his own place within it. Even though he relies on humour to soften the blow, he doesn’t shy away from
the big questions – questions about class, taste, and power that are confronting and, at times, uncomfortable. The centrepiece of his upcoming exhibition, will be Cheese, 2021, a text-based painting surrounded by dozens of rat traps installed directly on the gallery walls and set to snap shut at any moment. It is a work full of tension and primed with danger. Like much of his work, if we’re not careful, we all risk getting caught. In this issue, we enter the ever-changing inner world of Yvette Coppersmith, who recently joined the S+S family; we preview Seth Birchall’s latest exhibition Health and Happiness, for the University of Sydney’s Verge Gallery – a stunning meditation on nature; we go home with Kirsten Coelho to learn a little more about her collecting habits; and travel, if only in these pages, to Downtown LA, to the studio of Jemima Wyman where she is busy chronicling images of smoke relating to protests for our September exhibition. Last Word goes to Dr Paul Donnelly, on the University of Sydney’s exquisite, newly minted Chau Chak Wing Museum, and on their first exhibition Object/Art/ Specimen – which braves six complex themes with over 300 objects pulled from the three very different collections that now make up the new museum. Risk has never been so clearly apparent in our lives. While we understand the necessary constraints required for the health and safety of all, we still feel the desire to live intently, deeply and connect with others. It’s a precarious balancing act, but one for which we can look to artists for inspiration.
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Contents
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Introducing: Yvette Coppersmith
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Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow
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Michael Lindeman: Screws It Up Again
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At home: Kirsten Coelho
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Seeing Trees: Seth Birchall
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In the Studio: Jemima Wyman
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Last Word: Dr Paul Donnelly
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Quick Curate: Nocturn
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Up Next
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Introducing:
Yvette Coppersmith By Alex Pedley
For over twenty years, Yvette Coppersmith has played with the limits of figurative painting, defying strict categories of not only the medium but of the portraiture genre itself. Over this time, she has created a style that is highly textural, tender and very much her own. Blending her subject matter and approach, Coppersmith emerges as a subtle and poignant contributor to broader contemporary artistic and political landscapes.
JUL/AUG 2021
Her Self-portrait after George Lambert, which won her the 2018 Archibald Prize, gave the artist the chance to showcase the important historical, practical and creative place the self-portrait has occupied in not only the artist’s practice but in the practice of so many artists that have come before her. With a proclivity for an early modernist aesthetic, Coppersmith weaves into her portraiture the histories and sensibilities of not only her sitters, both real and impersonated, but so too her formal approach whether it be in the style of George Lambert, Rah Fizelle, or earlier Giorgio Morandi, with nods to Cubism or Dadaism amongst others. Importantly, she uses this process of stylistic costume change, as it were, in both content and form to investigate the female gaze in a historically maledominated field of artistic practice. Her work Nude Self Portrait, after Rah Fizelle, 2016, currently on show in the landmark National Gallery of Australia exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Coppersmith understands that historically the power of image-making has not resided with women. She poses the important question, both directly and through her portraiture, ‘whose language
are we using?’. For the artist, ‘if it is the language constructed by men for men’, then can ‘an image of a body be anything but conforming to or reacting against the existing framework’? This investigation applies not only to the position of the painter but to the hierarchies of painting, of image-making, and beyond. If there ever seems a tension in historical portraiture as to who the true subject is, sitter or painter, then Yvette Coppersmith subverts the question, situated as it is within historically hierarchical forms of male spectatorship. There is no better time to reflect upon the power of the image either. While ‘there are more important things than painting’, the artist says, amid climate and pandemic concerns, ‘we rely on images to understand ourselves, and to see where we have come from’. As a child, having always drawn faces and forms of especially female figures in costume, her process has always been an exploratory and revelatory exercise — and one that the artist shares with us. A six-time finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, a five-time finalist in the Archibald Prize, and its winner in 2018, Coppersmith has also won the Inaugural Metro 5 Art Prize. Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, runs until 26 January 2022.
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY YVETTE COPPERSMITH, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS.
Yvette Coppersmith in her Melbourne studio, 2021 Photo credit: Eleanor Louise Butt
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Introducing: Yvette Coppersmith
Yvette Coppersmith Nude Self Portrait, after Rah Fizelle, 2016 Oil on linen 91.5 x 66 cm Photo credit: Tim Gresham
Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait with red and ochre abstraction, 2018 Oil on linen 51 x 41 cm Photo credit: Tim Gresham
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JUL/AUG 2021
Introducing: Yvette Coppersmith
Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait after George Lambert, 2018 Oil on linen 122 x 101.5 cm Photo credit: Tim Gresham
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Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait with black bird, 2020 Oil on linen 61.5 x 51.5 cm Photo credit: Matthew Stanton
Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait, ochre shirt, 2018 Oil on linen 107 x 87 cm Photo credit: Matthew Stanton
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Lynda Draper in her Thirroul studio, 2021 Photo credit: Paul Higgs
Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow A week of sleepless nights gave Naomi Riddle unexpected insights into the strangely familiar work of Lynda Draper — work that seems to somehow exist at the threshold of daylight and dreams. By Naomi Riddle
Exhibition: Flowers of the Night, July 15 - 31, 2021
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Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow
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A confession: the week before writing this essay, I began to have trouble sleeping. Every night I would stare at the ceiling, listening to the cars passing outside the bedroom window, cataloguing the difference in sound between a four-wheel drive, a sedan, a truck, a bigger truck, and the recycling pickup, which sometimes arrived before five thirty am. Now I can tell the time of night by the pace of the traffic. If a car goes past at three am, I want to know where it’s been or where it’s going. Sometimes a person will start talking by the curb, or a front door will slam, or there’ll be a shout, then a laugh. Someone who lives on my street goes to work between the hours of four and five am. Two nights in a row, a siren sounds, but only briefly, as if the driver has changed their mind and decided it isn’t an emergency after all. One morning I open the blind, and a pair of sunglasses has been left, perched, on top of the railings.
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“A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding. The gap left by things which have already happened. Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do. But that.” - Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes (2012)
Lynda Draper Midnight, 2021 Ceramic, various glazes 90 x 50 x 50 cm Photo credit: Docqment
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Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow
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When I spoke to Lynda, she told me that she often wakes in the early hours, that sometimes she goes for long walks, in the bush, or along the ridgeline near her home. But Lynda’s waking hours are different from my waking hours, which are just a crotchety inability to relax. Hers are gentle and still. Far from being buffeted by the noise of a lorry or a passer-by, Lynda finds herself ambling amongst the branches of trees. No people, no noise, just a trunk or a garden bed or a possum, each with their own shape and shadow. We have all sensed how the outline of a thing can change when it is cloaked in darkness. A hedge will be all the more present and mysterious when it is only lit by the light of the moon (Is that a figure? A streetlight? A ghost?). Night, then, for Lynda, is not a time of not sleeping, but a time for wandering and making. It is a time of solitude and reflection, of rolling, pinching, and building structures in clay. “Day doesn’t fall: night does. Light is slick and fluid, darkness is heavy and can grow heavier,” writes Anne Boyer, in The Fall of Night. “Everything we know about the night inspires catalogues but defies dissection, for the night, despite how it gets thick, brings no body. Night has no anatomy, just inventory. Night contains.” The works that make up Flowers in the night can only be thought of as sculptures made by night—inspired by the forms in the darkness—even if you are viewing them by the light of day.
JUL/AUG 2021
When I first saw Lynda’s sculptures, I instinctively thought of them as crowns, but, having looked at them more closely, now I think of them as traps, or interlocking branches, or roots, or hallways, or webs. They can wink at you sideways, or be alluring, or make you feel uneasy. What all these traits have in common is that they are bridges between states—they are gateways to somewhere real and imagined, somewhere enticing and frightening, somewhere strange and familiar. Lynda is fashioning clay in the same way our brain pulls threads out of our unconscious as we dream, or the way Scheherazade spins out words so as to be able to keep the story going, so as to be able to make it through another night.
Lynda Draper Dracaena, 2021 Ceramic, various glazes 115 x 70 x 70 cm Photo credit: Docqment
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Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow
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Is Lynda awake or dreaming when she is making? A tricky question to answer, and I would equivocate and say yes and no. In the same way that a lucid dreamer knows when they have slipped inside a dream and can walk around its rooms, so does Lynda give herself over to intuition and rhythm and the shape of the clay. She is exploring what Malcom Godwin describes as the ‘threshold between dreams and awakening, that twilight area where illusion, imagination, and reality meet’, the place where we discover the ‘dream and visionary states which allow us glimpses of the real world.’
JUL/AUG 2021
But I also like to think of Lynda’s sculptures as mementos to the types of assignations or moments that always happen in an in-between time. With her predawn reverie, Lynda is attending to the hours when many of us might still be up or just waking, those of us who live in an upside down world where night shadows make their presence known: mothers of newborns, nurses, shift workers, uber drivers, bartenders, lovers, plotters and tricksters.
Lynda Draper Moon song, 2020 Ceramic, various glazes 94 x 50 x 50 cm Photo credit: Docqment
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Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow
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Another confession: I wrote most of these words while my head was resting on the pillow. I wrote most of these words by thinking of them as strings, while also trying to will myself to go to sleep, getting annoyed at the way the sentences kept circling around and repeating themselves, so I couldn’t go to sleep after all. Also, I was trying to make sure I wouldn’t forget the sentences, trying to be careful to snatch them up, because I know and Lynda knows that it is during the tricky half-state between waking and sleeping that those things vanish, and that phrases or images that feel crucial to remember at midnight can seem strange and unnecessary by morning. Make a note to find that book with a paragraph about the author who could only write between the hours of four and six am. Become convinced I read it in Moyra Davey’s Index Cards but can’t find mention of it anywhere. Think about this with my head on the pillow. Think about how it is either one am, or two am, but choose to avoid looking at the clock. Think about Lynda in her studio, or out walking, or quietly pressing her hands into clay. Think about Lynda’s work, silent in the gallery, awake too.
Exhibition: Flowers of the Night, July 15 - 31, 2021
JUL/AUG 2021
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Lynda Draper in her Thirroul studio Photo credit: Docqment
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Australian Contemporary Art Magazine
I AM A HEART BEATING IN THE WORLD DIASPORA PAVILION 2
Presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and International Curators Forum in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre Artists Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Lindy Lee, Leyla Stevens, Zadie Xa and Daniela Yohannes Curated by Adelaide Bannerman, Mikala Tai and Jessica Taylor Exhibition dates 22 May - 25 July 2021 Venue Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales 1 Art Gallery Rd, Campbelltown NSW 2560 4A.com.au | c-a-c.com.au | internationalcuratorsforum.org
Located on Dharawal land, Campbelltown Arts Centre is proudly owned by the people of Campbelltown. A cultural facility of Campbelltown City Council, assisted by the NSW Government through Create NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Campbelltown Arts Centre receives support from the Crown Resorts Foundation and the Packer Family Foundation and the Neilson Foundation. Image credit: Lindy Lee, Blossoms of the Floating Wind, 2020. Chinese ink, fire and rain, 316 x 139.5 cm. Photography by Aaron Anderson.
Campbelltown Arts Centre One Art Gallery Rd Campbelltown Open daily, 10am – 4pm 02 4645 4100 C-A-C.com.au
Michael Lindeman Judge Lives Here, 2021 ‘Art Review Power 100’ profiles, clear vinyl 180 x 102 x 12 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman: Screws It Up Again By Martha Farquhar
Michael Lindeman does wry institutional critique like no other. Via absurdist dialogues struck up with the viewer about the hierarchies of financial and cultural value, within the artworld and beyond, Lindeman calls into question the role of the artist and artwork, playfully inverting structures of power all the while. In his latest exhibition, the artist’s text-based painting and installation works extend well beyond the confines of the gallery, communicating through and in print media to expand the impact and implication of all parties to the facts and fictions of perhaps all creative industries today.
Exhibition: July 8 - 31, 2021
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Michael Lindeman Farewell cultural cringe (October 26, 1993), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 15 x 127 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman SHY GENIUS KEPT PAINTINGS HIDDEN (February 14, 1965), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 99 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman ART THAT’S NOT THERE (August 13, 1970), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 13 x 128 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman Art gallery punch-up (August 1, 1993), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 21 x 126 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman Controversial contemporary practices (September 18, 1992), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 51 x 85 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny Michael Lindeman Much more than hamburger art (June 16, 1990), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 15 x 129 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman INVEST EXCESS PROFITS IN QUALITY ART (June 4, 1978), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 21 x 101 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Michael Lindeman: Screws It Up Again
Scandinavian philosopher and celebrity restaurateur, Erik Walter Johansen, once described Michael Lindeman’s art practice as “a fizzing colostomy bag of myriad ideas and simmering provocations intermittently shooting forth emergency flares to illuminate a visual culture that is fast going blind”. What Johansen cryptically refers to in the latter part of this statement is the seeming inability of contemporary artists, curators, museum directors, art critics and viewers (as we are all guilty) to see, compute, act upon and/or comment about what is directly in front of us. Put a slightly different way, he is describing a collective loss of vision and self-induced apathy finely harnessed as a strategy to cruise through life without upsetting anyone or turning oneself into a target. In essence, it’s the absolute opposite of what art for the past century and a half has set out to achieve.
JUL/AUG 2021
Michael Lindeman’s work unapologetically forces us to address the elephant(s) in the room and urges us, with some urgency, to question whether the contemporary elephant has lost weight, or whether we are simply losing the ability to see it?
There’s no hiding for the proverbial anorexic elephant in Lindeman’s latest set of sculptures produced for his upcoming exhibition, Art Habits, at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. The sculptural forms have been made using transparent vinyl, allowing the content (both literal and conceptual) of each sculpture to be closely inspected. In a previous related work, Thanks (2018), the artist constructed the word THANKS in giant threedimensional clear vinyl letters which he then stuffed with rejection letters accumulated over the course of his art career. Cathartic counter-punches are part of Lindeman’s arsenal, as are carefully considered ego-popping pot shots.
“Cathartic counter-punches are part of Lindeman’s arsenal.”
For the new series of sculptures, Lindeman adopts esoteric street symbols developed by hobos on the American railroad scene during the post-Civil War era. The title of each work relates directly to the meaning of the chosen secret symbol. Judge Lives Here 2021, is a looping snake-like form; Easy Access or Resistance 2021, is more like an arrowhead; whilst Crime Committed 2021, looks like a corrupted hashtag symbol. The sculptures are filled with a carefully curated selection of crumpled magazine pages and printed matter. The meaning of each work starts to slowly unravel as information is gleaned from the screwed up paper, visible through the transparent vinyl skin. It’s hard not to feel like you are seeing something to which you shouldn’t be party.
Michael Lindeman, portrait, 2019. Photo credit: Zan Wimberley
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Michael Lindeman Cheese, 2021 acrylic on canvas, rat traps 6 panels, 90 x 641 cm, (265 x 730 overall) Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Michael Lindeman: Screws It Up Again
“A fizzing colostomy bag of myriad ideas and simmering provocations intermittently shooting forth emergency flares to illuminate a visual culture that is fast going blind.”
Lindeman has been busy painting too, with two new groups of paintings titled New Types of Art and Art Headlines. Both suites can broadly be described as art about art. The former adopting a fauve colour palette and art studio tools and paraphernalia to offer up an alternative taxonomic interpretation of current art practices and trends; the latter reappropriates newspaper headlines to create a kind of ‘cut-and-paint’ abbreviated and absurd art history.
Also planned for the Sydney exhibition is Cheese 2021, a 4.6m long text painting in six parts in a customised Swiss-cheese cartoon font surrounded by an orbit of charged ‘readymade’ rat traps. When Cheese was previously installed earlier this year at The Guggenheim, New York, as part of the exhibition Why Is Broccoli Always Orange in Film Noir Movies?, alongside artists including Mel Bochner, Sarah Lucas and Maurizio Cattelan, one of the rat traps crushed the nose of an inquisitive labrador guide dog, much to the distress of museum staff and the dog’s owner. This resulted in the temporary closure of the museum and the artwork eventually being pulled from the exhibition on the grounds of animal cruelty and danger to the public. Undeterred by this experience, to coincide with the Sydney exhibition opening, Lindeman has commissioned an aerial flyover by a Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18A Hornet fighter jet, fully laden with laser-guided bombs and air-to-surface missiles. Titled The Battle of Waterloo 2021, the work turns the gallery into a giant rat trap of sorts. As the fighter jet roars overhead, less than 20 metres from the gallery roof, exhibition visitors will be hoping this is just a dummy run.
Exhibition: June 10 - July 3, 2021
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Michael Lindeman New Types of Art (Self-Promotional Painting), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 100 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Michael Lindeman: Screws It Up Again
JUL/AUG 2021
Michael Lindeman New Types of Art (Cerebral Ceramics), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 100 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman New Types of Art (Sensible Abstraction), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 100 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman New Types of Art (Jesus Vibes), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 100 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Michael Lindeman New Types of Art (Speculative Chunks), 2021 Acrylic on canvas 150 x 100 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Michael Lindeman Crime Committed (detail), 2021 Colour prints of Australian impasto paintings, clear vinyl 130 x 175 x 12 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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At home:
Kirsten Coelho
DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A COLLECTOR?
IS THERE A MOST PRIZED POSSESSION?
KC/ I would say I do consider myself a collector, I love to live with artworks. Many things I have were given to me by friends and other pieces that I feel lucky to have been able to buy. Mainly, I am surrounded by a lot of ceramic works from many parts of history. Each piece teaches me so much but also makes me ask questions about use, purpose, history, and context.
KC/ It is so hard to choose any one thing but some of my favourite things to use are the pots of Richard Batterham. An English potter, now retired, who trained at the Leach pottery in the late 1950s. I use his tea pot and bowls every day and each time it feels new and joyous. I’m a nut who gets excited about breakfast (I’ve had the same breakfast for years!). Toast with tea and the tea made in the Richard Batterham teapot. His pieces are thickly potted and generous and coated often in green ash or Tenmoku glazes. A real nexus of the sculptural and the useful.
For more contemporary pieces or pots made within my lifetime — I just love living with them and the visual and tactile pleasure they give me. The English ceramic artist Elizabeth Fritsch once said that a domestic object is like architecture for the hand. I have always loved that statement. WHEN DID COLLECTING BEGIN FOR YOU?
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KC/ I probably began collecting when I started making things at art school in the 1980s. My friends and I would often swap or give each other our work and things have progressed from there. I lived in England for many years and was fortunate to visit many ceramic galleries during my time there. Also, I had a studio in the Jam Factory in Adelaide which houses up to 40 artists at any one time. So, I was lucky to collect a lot of pieces then.
I am so lucky to have a seat, made by Khai Liew, in my studio. Khai has taught me so much and been such a wonderful mentor. I so love using this seat in my studio every day. I also have many paintings and ceramics by the artist Helen Fuller. Helen constantly astounds me with the way she translates the world around her. A remarkable artist in every way. Some of my oldest friends are jewellers — Julie Blyfield, Sandra Naulty and Leslie Matthews, and it is remarkable to be able to wear their artworks. As I am writing this, I am reminded of how much any day of my life is enhanced by the very good fortune of living with all these wonderful things.
Kirsten Coehlo Studio Wall #1 Photo credit: Kirsten Coehlo
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At Home: Kirsten Coelho
The artist’s Mantlepiece Collection containing collaboration with Stephen Bowers and Kirsten Coehlo (right) and collected historical pots. Photo credit: Grant Hancock
HOW IMPORTANT ARE BOOKS TO YOU?
TRAVEL
KC/ Sometimes I wonder if our house will get to the point of impenetrability because of the number of books we have. We have SO many but I LOVE books. I love the smell of the paper, the potential and all they contain. I have a favourite bookshop in Adelaide called Imprints Bookshop that I often go to with my friend Robyn, who I have known since I was eight. Rob and I give each other books every Christmas and birthday. We have kept up our long tradition of reading books together and I have many that Robyn has given me.
KC/ In 2019, I was fortunate to receive a research fellowship from the Government of South Australia. This enabled me to travel to Greece and Italy and experience first-hand the archaeological collections housed in museums in both Athens and Naples, particularly, but also ancient architecture and many ruin sites. This initial research has fed and continues to influence so much of my recent work. These experiences have had a profound effect on my art practice and given me a vast library of resources to draw on into the future.
Literature and writing hold such an important place in my work. Poetry, in particular, has had a large influence on my most recent body of work. I have many books that I always draw from for my work. Books about artists and books written by artists are often an inspiration to me. One of my favourites at the moment is a catalogue raisonné of sculptures by CY Twombly and I have just ordered Island Zombie by Roni Horn, which I can’t wait to read.
DOES THIS ENABLE YOUR COLLECTING HABITS?
KC/ I always bring back something from travelling even if it is just a postcard. Sometimes a postcard gives you so much information and triggers memories. I have so many of those cards pinned on my studio wall. I always make a beeline for a museum bookshop!
Exhibition: September 4 - October 2, 2021
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TOP LEFT:
Studio Wall #3 Photo credit: Kirsten Coelho BOTTOM LEFT:
Richard Batterham Bowl Photo credit: Grant Hancock BOTTOM:
Kitchen: Works by Richard Batterham, Yuri Weidenhoffer, Bill Samuels and unknown artists, Japan. Photo credit: Grant Hancock
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Seeing Trees:
Seth Birchall By Tom Melick
I am walking to my friend’s studio down a street lined with London plane trees. They must be over one hundred years old. At this time of year, their sycamore-like leaves turn brown, fall, and carpet the footpaths, and their fuzzy fruiting globes break apart and disperse, causing those with allergies to cough and sneeze. Today, their thick, silvery-green and yellowish trunks are wrapped in hessian and surrounded by wooden boarding as if prepared for battle. New road is being laid, and steaming, shiny-black bitumen is shovelled from a truck by workers in hi-vis vests. How many roads have these trees seen laid?
Seth Birchall Dancing Across the Water, 2021 Oil on canvas 183 x 153 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
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Seth Birchall Other Languages, 2021 Oil on canvas 184 x 244 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
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Seeing Trees: Seth Birchall
Odd, perhaps, to think of trees that see, sessile witnesses to all the life that flits by. But then again we tend to forget the senses of everything that isn’t human, including trees. From signals of scent and colour to the less obvious ways they communicate with each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi below the ground, trees lead very busy social lives. When they are not muzzled by monocropping and selective breeding, they are transferring nutrients, carbon, and water, exchanging information, and are capable of producing different compounds to ward off an attack by herbivores big and small. It all suggests a certain kind of sight beyond the optical. To my human eyes, these London plane trees (the name almost says enough) express a grandeur that no doubt motivated their planting, and it is easy to imagine they were chosen to make the unfamiliar familiar, to turn land into landscape, fill-in what was perceived to be empty or replace what was unwanted. After all, the architecture around here is Victorian, and the neighbourhood was built next to, and for, the navy. Although ‘the invaders hated trees,’ as the historian W.K. Hancock once said, and went about cutting and ringbarking them by the millions, clearing the land for European agriculture and a pastoral economy of wheat and sheep, trees eventually became valuable not only for the global timber industry but also for place-making, a way of growing into and on top of a legal fiction.
JUL/AUG 2021
There are trees in my friend’s studio, too; paintings of them that are not at all orderly like the trees I have just passed to get here. In these paintings, trees do not fill-in or frame the landscape, they appear front and centre. In some paintings they are more like obstructions, blocking the view of a radiating brushworked sky. Or the trees lean into the picture from the edges, like interlopers, or seem to be growing out towards the edge of the canvas,
disobedient to the confines of the picture. I do not say it at the time to my friend, but the trees in these paintings make the pictorial space strange, even awkward, or maybe it’s simpler than that? The paintings take pleasure in the inherent strangeness of trees, and call us into it. Look at a trunk, the branches, and the way a tree resembles—I’m not the first to say it—the peripheral nervous system of the human body. Look at how trees— in these paintings, and wherever else you can find them—are never the same, their form growing in and around and over their circumstances. This is one reason why trees always exceed and confuse the rules of linear perspective; though motionless, their bodies are lawless, and so require a loosening of sight and a slowing of mind. To look at trees, as so much moves around them, as so much calls on us to look away, is to consider what it must be like for time to pass through you, rather than you passing through it. And maybe we are compelled to look closer at trees these days, knowing that the privileging of a certain kind of looking, a certain kind of economisation of life forms, has created conditions antithetical to health and happiness. It is the slowness of their complex forms, their variance and persistence, the memory they keep but do not disclose, that make trees strange. I see my friend’s paintings as one way into this—like daydreams they lead us deeper into the world, not away from it. Health and Happiness at Verge Gallery, Sydney, will run from 22 July – 28 August, 2021
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY SETH BIRCHALL, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS.
Seth Birchall Health and Happiness, 2021 Oil on canvas 155 x 122 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
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JUL/AUG 2021
LEFT:
Seth Birchall Quiet and Beautiful, 2021 Oil on canvas 153 x 122 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer TOP RIGHT:
Seth Birchall Of Light, 2021 Oil on canvas 155 x 122 cm BOTTOM LEFT:
Seth Birchall Soar Like an Eagle, 2021 Oil on canvas 46 x 41 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
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JUL/AUG 2021
“In these paintings, trees do not fill-in or frame the landscape, they appear front and centre. In some paintings, they are more like obstructions, blocking the view of a radiating brushworked sky.”
Seth Birchall Turned Out, 2021 Oil on canvas 183 x 153 cm Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
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JUL/AUG 2021
Portrait of Jemima Wyman in her Los Angeles studio, 2021 Photo credit: Tyler William Parker
In the Studio:
Jemima Wyman
WHAT IS YOUR STUDIO SET-UP LIKE, IS IT AT HOME OR
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PROCESS OF MAKING IN
JW/ My studio is large and feels like an industrial space (3.5 metre high ceilings and about 110 square metres) but is located in the backyard of our Victorian house built in 1887. The neighbourhood is called Lincoln Heights, just east of Downtown Los Angeles. There is an alleyway behind the studio and in the past this has allowed for businesses to operate out of the space. The space was used for fruit and vegetable distribution in the 1930s and more recently as an automotive repair shop as it can easily fit 5 cars — this is the little bit of history I know.
JW/ I’m working on a bunch of collages at the moment, made from hand-cut digital photographs. I have three large white tables that I can lay all the pieces out on plenty of clean wall space. I sketch directly on the walls with notes and then tape the collage pieces up — this allows me to compose on a vertical surface. Often, I use a stepladder or stool to get up close and high. Usually, you can tell how busy I am from the number of off-cuts on the floor.
OFFSITE?
INTERVIEW
Our backyard has a bit of a commune feel with vegetable gardens, an old avocado tree, and a total of five artists living and working here (plus a dog called Hollywood). So even with the last year and the ‘stay-athome’ orders, it hasn’t been too lonely.
THE STUDIO?
There are a few stages to making the collages. Fortunately, I could do some of them while Zoom homeschooling my son over the last academic year. The whole process goes something like this: searching for images online or selecting them from my MAC-archive then digitally editing and filing them, then printing, cutting, composing, and tacking the photo pieces in place, then finally taping it all together (front and back). This is followed by editing the titles that list information related to each individual piece of the collage. Once all of this is completed, I ship the work to Australia for framing.
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Jemima Wyman in her studio, 2021 Photo credit: Tyler William Parker
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In the Studio: Jemima Wyman
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?
JW/ I’m researching the history of collage and all of the works chronicle smoke in protest as a signal of past, present and future distress. These new collages have a painterly feel as the smoke (although representational) reads as an abstract mark. Some of these works have been translated into large-scale curtain works that operate like smoke screens. While developing these works my online scrolling has filled with smoke near and far from the Black Summer Bushfires to BLM [Black Lives Matter] protests to the storming of Capitol Hill, as well as wildfires in California. By September 2020, the smoke had leaked from the screen and photos into my studio. The sky was an eerie orange and I could smell smoke from the Bobcat fires while I worked. My small geographic pandemic radius had become even smaller, shutting myself in to keep the air ‘fresh’ while I worked. Around this time I asked my son what he thought of the collage curtain? He said, “It looks like the end of the world”. I was taken back by the comment and saw the work afresh. It was a smoke-filled landscape but he had tuned into the explosive, volcanic-like qualities, articulating the mood of our time brought on by the surging coronavirus deaths, the registering of climate change and increasing social inequities. Sometimes the current rumblings of a period unintentionally bubble up into artworks, pushing at the surface to be seen.
Exhibition: September 4 - October 2, 2021
JUL/AUG 2021
+ REGISTER FOR PREVIEW BEFORE SEPTEMBER 4
Jemima Wyman Haze (detail), 2020 hand-cut photo collage 124.5 x 183 cm
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Last Word:
Dr Paul Donnelly Dr Paul Donnelly, Deputy Director, Chau Chak Wing Museum
Dr Paul Donnelly, Deputy Director, Chau Chak Wing Museum, portrait, 2021 Photo credit: David James
I came to the University of Sydney nearly six years ago as Associate Director, Content. I was to lead the curators in the development of the exhibitions for the new Chau Chak Wing Museum, which opened at the end of 2020 in our brand new, five-level building, designed by JPW Architects. The project brings together under the same roof the Nicholson Museum of antiquity, Macleay Museum of natural history, science, and Indigenous and Pacific cultures, and the University Art Gallery. I feel extremely fortunate to have played a significant role in the design and development of the new structure and its sixteen opening exhibitions . . . and there was to be an unforeseen bonus. I had come to the University from the Powerhouse Museum where I had been a curator in the Decorative Arts and Design department. I loved being a curator, sharing collections with visitors through meaningful arrangement and the presentation of stories in exhibitions and programs. Objects and their connections to people, places and events have always fascinated me. From the age of 12 when I was old enough to catch the London Tube independently, I would regularly visit the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. Eventually, I would add the British Museum to the itinerary. This clearly left an impression as I went on to specialise in Mediterranean Archaeology at university.
Passion became a career but after 22 years as a curator, the prospect of helping to build a new museum at the University of Sydney was irresistible, even if it meant participating in exhibitions from a more removed and strategic perspective. Or so I thought. Enter the introductory exhibition! Prior to my arrival there had been an expectation of a ‘highlights’ display introducing Museum visitors to the history of the collections. However, I felt uncomfortable with a conventional ‘treasures’ or icons display discussing objects in isolation rather than in thematic exhibitions where they would be better contextualised. There was also the issue of what constitutes a ‘treasure’? Such a subjective term inevitably privileges traditional (and frequently) western art and culture. It was especially important within the intellectual environment of the University to subvert the traditional canon and in so doing contribute to a decolonising approach within the institution. I felt the exhibition also had to be a visually splendid celebration while at the same time demonstrating the interdisciplinary potential of our new combined identity. With my role working broadly across the collections it made sense that I would curate this opening show.
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Art/Object/Specimen (Install view), Chau Chak Wing Museum, 2021 Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Last Word: Dr Paul Donnelly
Object/Art/Specimen was the eventual outcome – an introduction devised around six triple-barrelled existential and philosophical themes beginning with Sex, Love, Death and progressing through Chaos, Pattern, Order among the six. Placed in the Power Gallery space at the Museum’s entrance, Object/Art/ Specimen presents objects from across all the collections to demonstrate the Museum’s diversity, depth, and breadth. As the title suggests, objects, art and specimens are interchangeable depending upon context and the background a visitor brings to them. The exhibition is dominated by four enormous red cedar cases which (as the impressed stamps at each end record) were made in 1890 specifically for the Macleay Museum. Placed end-to-end on a plinth the length of the gallery, they have become objects in themselves as well as receptacles for objects. They add warmth to the new building and are a respectful nod to our past. Featuring as diverse a range as a bowerbird’s bower, to 5th century BCE Athenian red-figure vessels, or Grace CossingtonSmith’s painting of the Ballets Russes, to a half-million year-old Acheulian hand axe – the cases are the canvas for an intriguing array of material that also provide a contrast to the modern design elements sharing in the display of the 300 objects, art, and specimens.
JUL/AUG 2021
Object/Art/Specimen celebrates the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum – a transformative project for the University of Sydney. I am thrilled that despite the expectation of not curating an exhibition I have been responsible for the strategic display that shows where we have come from, and the many places we can go. Happy days!
Alex Seton The Ghost of Wombeyan (a History of Forgetting) (Installation view), 2019-20 Wombeyan marble 110 x 110 x 226 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorney
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Quick Curate: Nocturn
JUL/AUG 2021
Darren Sylvester Overnight Web, 2020 Lightjet print 120 x 90 cm AUD $13,200
Angela Tiatia Metamorphoses of Narcissus II, 2019 Pigment print on cotton rag 80 x 58 cm AUD $3,850
Michael Lindeman Saturday Night Syndrome, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 56.5 x 85 cm AUD $3,500
Dane Lovett Night & Day, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 61.5 x 61 cm AUD $4,400
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Up Next
MICHAEL LINDEMAN 08.07.21
LYNDA DRAPER 15.07.21
SAM JINKS 12.08.21
OCTOBER
SEPTEMBER 04.09.21
Kirsten Coelho
04.09.21 Jemima Wyman
07.10.21
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
14.10.21
Michael Zavros
Lynda Draper Sprite, 2021 Ceramic, various glazes 140 x 46 x 46 cm Photo credit: Docqment
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“HEALTH AND HAPPINESS” 22 JULY-28 AUGUST Verge Gallery City Rd, Jane Foss Russell Plaza, University of Sydney, Sydney verge-gallery.net “Other Languages” (detail), oil on canvas, 183 x 244cm, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist. Seth Birchall is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
SYDNEY 799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com
SINGAPORE P +65 83107529 Megan Arlin | Gallery Director E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com
Treasure Island Darren Sylvester
14 May – 31 October 2021 Darren Sylvester Stacey (detail) 2018, 240 x 320 cm, lightjet prints. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney and Neon Parc Melbourne
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am – 5pm | Free admission
artgallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au |
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