SUMMER 2020
Alex Seton Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Angela Tiatia Barbara Cleveland Lynda Draper Maria Fernanda Cardoso
ARCHIBALD PRIZE
Kirsten Coelho
Kirsten Coehlo creates functional forms and vessels of otherworldly perfection. In Kirsten Coelho, the first major publication on a practice spanning thirty years, author Wendy Walker traces the evolution of Coelho’s textured practice, in which an ever-expanding framework of art historical, literary and cinematic references has driven a succession of formal shifts – a shaping of changes. This beautiful, lavishly illustrated book of 176 pages will be released in September 2020. For pre-orders and enquiries, please contact publisher Wakefield Press at info@wakefieldpress.com.au or phone +61.8.83524455.
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COVER: Alex Seton, The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting), 2020 (detail)
Wombeyan marble, 110 x 110 x 226 cm. Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Contents
08 10 20 34 44 48 54 60 70 76 78 84 85
Forver and a day Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Gods who walk among us Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome Podcast: Alex Seton with Sebastian Goldspink Maria Fernanda Cardoso: In the Garden of Earthly Delights Barbara Cleveland: Thinking Business Angela Tiatia: The Golden Hour Lynda Draper: Home and also somewhere else very far away Quick Curate: Festive Last Word: Neil Hobbs+Karina Harris 2021 Program Upcoming Exhibitions
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Angela Tiatia and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
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Alex Seton in his studio. Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Forever and a day Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf
Who can believe that we are almost at the end of this continually surprising year?! At the start of this year, Sullivan+Strumpf magazine didn’t even exist? Closing out 2020, John McDonald takes us back in time, into Alex Seton’s childhood with his exhibition, Meet me under the dome. This poetic and heartfelt show traces personal histories and is very much a love letter to the area where Alex grew up – the Wombeyan Caves in the Southern Highlands of NSW. Childhood memories are brought to life through sculptures, made almost exclusively in Wombeyan marble and photographs of the old quarry, decommissioned and now reclaimed by nature. But most haunting is the major work in the exhibition, aptly named, The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting) – a life-sized figure of the artist, concealed under a gentle rumpled sheet. Our state institutions are hitting home runs with some major projects. At Art Gallery of NSW we have the innovative Archie Plus program featuring Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s impressive installation Avatar Towers, and Angela Tiatia’s The Golden Hour. Both ambitious, enormous projects, Ramesh brings together over 70 works, most of which have been created this year, responding to the gallery’s Asian art collection and filling to the brim the traditional architecture of the Gallery’s vestibule. Angela’s engaging new work spans an epic 32 meters, responding to portraiture and a sense of being on the edge of transition. While it is a work that asks us for
reflection, it also carries a strong message of optimism, and is nothing short of sublime. Both Ramesh and Angela are Sidney Myer Fellows, so its great to see them making these milestones. Angela, along with Tony Albert, also feature at the National Gallery of Victoria’s long awaited Triennale which opens later this year. Moving on to Canberra, we explore the National Gallery of Australia’s ground-breaking exhibition Know My Name. This is more than an exhibition, it is a bold statement, a call to action and a celebration of the work of women artists in Australia. We were lucky enough to have a sneak preview last week, and is it unmissable. Some of the artists in the show (which will run in two separate exhibitions for almost a year) we have also profiled individually including Barbara Cleveland, on their survey exhibition at Goulburn Regional Gallery and new artists to the gallery Lynda Draper, and Maria Fernanda Cardoso. And finally, staying in the nation’s capital, we give the final word to the fabulous Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris. Founders of Contour 556, Canberra’s public art biennial, passionate collectors and all-round good people. They give us their highlights of the last 6 years and tips on how to buy art as a couple (and stay together)! So, relax and enjoy the summer (issue). Jo and Urs xx
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Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember By Elspeth Pitt
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As we celebrate Australian woman artists with an expansive new exhibition, curator Elspeth Pitt explores the historical narratives of gender in art.
Sanne Mestrom Me & you, 2018 cast bronze overall 166.0 x 50.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2019 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia
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Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember
LEFT: Lynda Draper
Black widow, 2019 ceramics, glazed hand-built earthenware 120 x 96 x 86 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Sidney and Fiona Myer Family Foundation Fund 2019 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia RIGHT: Ethel Carrick The market, 1919 private collection, courtesy of Smith & Singer Fine Art
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now My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now brings together work by women artists. But there are other, deeper aims—to isolate moments in which women led progressive practice; to identify points at which their experience, unique to gender, facilitated new forms of art and cultural commentary; to suggest stylistic and intellectual relationships between artists through time; to inflect extant history with women’s living memory. In these ways the project aims to enrich the linear, male-dominated narratives we’ve typically known.
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While predicating an exhibition along the lines of gender is in many ways a complex undertaking, it represents in this instance an opening up, not a closing down, in that its aim is to enrich and at times overturn the dominant narratives. To do so is necessary, still, as the work of women even now remains lesser known and is by implication lesser valued. One has only to look at the collections of Australia’s cultural institutions to understand that the art of women is not represented to the same depth or degree as that of men. This is not the first exhibition dedicated to women’s art held in Australia, and it draws on the remarkable scholarship of those who have dedicated their professional lives to the advocacy of women’s work. However, while the reach of this exhibition is historical its impetus is contemporary. The Me Too movement may have originated as a campaign against sexual violence but its cultural impact has been equally significant, inspiring many projects focused on women’s art, and compelling the kind of critical review undertaken by women and feminist art historians of the 1970s who ‘recovered’ artists of the early twentieth century neglected in general histories and public collections.
Now, curators are considering work made by women in the latter part of the twentieth century, some of which, given its performative and materially fluid nature, was collected infrequently or partially and now risks being neglected—even forgotten. In recognising the cyclical nature of forgetting and remembering, this essay considers some of the circumstances that have impacted the development of women’s art, and the related production of history and discourse, since the 1970s. Any exhibition in its impermanent drawing together of works of artist an action that marks a moment in time; this one, too, is a gesture made against neglect, an appeal to remember, and to keep remembering. An Artistic Tradition In the catalogue for The women’s show, an exhibition of work by women artists held at venues across Adelaide in 1977, a list of figures was given. Neither Jansen’s History of art (1962), recommended by the New South Wales Board of Senior Studies for years 11 and 12, nor Gombrich’s The story of art (1950) included a single woman artist. In Larousse’s Encyclopedia of modern art (1965) 134 women and 1796 men were referenced as having produced art after 1900. For women who aspired to be artists in the mid-to-late twentieth century it was often through projects like The women’s show which were underpinned by collective work and knowledge sharing that a life in art became possible. But it was also by looking back and re-writing the dominant histories that women recognised they were part of an artistic tradition that was not new but continuing.
In an Australian context, the process of re‑writing narratives that had excluded or diminished women occurred in a sustained manner from the 1970s, pioneered by curators and academics including Janine Burke, Julie Ewington, Joan Kerr and Kiffy Rubbo. Like revisionist and feminist art historians internationally they often employed two approaches in their work. One involved retrieving ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ artists and placing them within pre‑existing art historical narratives. The other, in recognising that these frameworks were inherently flawed, disregarded them wholly to develop new ones. Although these methodologies were sometimes regarded as antithetical, with the insertion of women into existing narratives regarded as a concession to prejudiced histories, some projects evidenced the value of combining both approaches. One of these was Janine Burke’s Australian women artists: one hundred years 1840–1940 which opened at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries in 1975. The first such undertaking of its kind in Australia, it predated comparable international surveys including Ws: 1550–1950 (Brooklyn Museum, 1977) and the ’78 Hayward annual (Hayward Gallery, 1978). Assembled by Burke at the age of 23 in little over six months, it brought together 71 works from collections across Australia. While its catalogue now seems modest (slim, glue‑bound, monochromatic) its then unusual format combined art historical essays that drew from and critiqued existing histories by William Moore and Bernard Smith, and long‑form artist recollections by Grace Crowley and Margel Hinder, with each given equal weight. Embodying the delicate interplay of history and living memory, Burke suggested the pliancy of the former and the
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Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember
evident richness of the latter as a resource for further enquiry, and in doing so produced a document at once grounded, formative, burgeoning and perhaps most importantly, generative.
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Her partial focus on women modernists made it one of several projects of the 1970s that facilitated the restoration of women artists including Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black into the histories of modernism, and resulted in the acquisition of their work into public collections. But it is something different to understand the practices of artists outside of more familiar frameworks, even if it had been a struggle to initially place them there. The painter and printmaker Dorrit Black, for example, has become closely aligned with the story of modernism but her work of the mid-1930s and 1940s eschewed its earlier dynamism in favour of efforts to portray a resonant and archaic energy evident in paintings such as In the foothills 1942 and The olive plantation 1946. Similarly, the work of photographer Olive Cotton, which from its inception was finely attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, set her practice apart from more typical iterations of modernist photography emphasising architectural pattern and vertiginous perspective. Although curators and academics have rightly argued for Black and Cotton’s recognition as key modernists, their art frequently operated outside of its more obvious tenets, compelled instead by distinct individualism. A quality that grew as their work matured, it was one also forced by personal circumstance and their exclusion — chosen and otherwise — from galleries, societies and artistic networks. Combined with continual economic uncertainty and the demands made on them
by family, their practices were frequently drawn inward rather than outward, into the realm of idiosyncrasy and, often, originality. The experiences of artists such as Black and Cotton suggest the inadequacy of art historical models that rely on ever forward moving trajectories of clearly defined, collective movements. Given this, it is unsurprising that subsequent generations of art historians have relied less on narratives based on groups and manifestos, and have turned to biographical and literary approaches that allow the retracing of their subject’s movements, permit speculation and imaginative conjecture, and facilitate the full integration of a subject’s art and life as opposed to their being obliquely referenced within self-reflexive art histories. Helen Ennis, Jennifer Higgie and the American writer Quinn Latimer are some of the authors who have in recent years forged and refined these approaches. A dependence on advancing a history according to conceptions of outwardly avantgarde practices is also problematic in so far as these exclude more traditional artforms. As argued by Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, there are certain types of progressive work that developed within tradition. The figurative portraits and interiors of artists including Ethel Spowers, Agnes Goodsir and Janet Cumbrae Stewart, for example, may not seem radical, but they are pioneering in their evocation of women’s sexual desire and same‑sex relationships. In her essay on Cumbrae Stewart in this volume, Juliette Peers considers the discomfort often implicit in discussions of the artist’s work, her early
LEFT: Agnes Goodsir
Girl with cigarette, c.1925 Bendigo Art Gallery Bequest of Mrs Amy E Bayne, 1945 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia RIGHT: Grace Cossington Smith Study of a head: self portrait, 1916 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with funds from the Marie and Vida Breckenridge bequest 2010 Photo credit: National Gallery of Australia
critics downplaying its keen sensuality, her later ones smarting at its seemingly complicit use of the academic idiom of the nude study, typically employed by men. En Intime (The Intimate) Corresponding with the advances of feminism in the 1970s, a specific collection of art practices inspired by women’s domestic experience emerged. In one sense, this work may be seen as a continuation of still life and interior painting produced by artists earlier in the century, which, in counter to en plein air—an approach to painting in nature often associated with male artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— was described as en intime. Carrol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s A book about Australian women, published by Outback Press in 1974, undertook to document the lives of a diverse group of women—from artists to activists to sex workers—many of whom were photographed and interviewed in their homes. Jerrems’ remarkable ability to elicit connections with her subjects is perhaps bestevidenced in the beautiful sequence of photographs of the actress Sylvanna Doolan who over the course of four frames is clear-eyed but cautious, then guarded; collapses into candid laughter, before arriving at a forthright and relaxed kind of openness. The interviews that accompany the 129 photographs are characterised by a similar sense of candour. One woman describes the first time she was raped, another speaks of her abortion; others detail their feelings about marriage, and their relationship to the then burgeoning women’s movement. But while
the photographic subjects are named, the interviewees remain anonymous. The congruence of the personal and private emerges and recedes, and an evident complication between the clarity of the photographs and the anonymity of the accompanying text is arguably used on some level to suggest implicit, shared experience. A sense of intimacy, its connection to domesticity, and the ways in which these qualities could operate at once in tandem and in challenge to the cool detachment of the art gallery was the focus of Micky Allan’s first solo exhibition Photography, drawing, poetry: A live-in show, held in 1978 at the Ewing and George Paton and Watters galleries, in Melbourne and Sydney respectively. For both presentations Allan brought the domestic space in which her work had been conceived into the realm of the gallery, and, in doing so, encouraged viewers to experience her art in a comfortable setting over a prolonged period of time. Coinciding with an approach to presentation that coalesced lived and performative aspects, the work she exhibited encompassed ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, including hand-coloured photographs which she described as demonstrating her interest in ‘synthesising’ and ‘crossing borders between media’. Allan’s democratic, iconoclastic approach to both presentation and media are defining characteristics of her work and that of other artists of the era including Bonita Ely and Jude Adams. The frameworks and collecting policies of state and national galleries, however, which tacitly rely on the accrual of objects by curatorial
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Know My Name: I Remember, They Remember, We Remember
LEFT: Barbara Cleveland
Bodies in Time, 2016 (still) single channel HD video (13 minutes 46 seconds) RIGHT: Lindy Lee Seed of a new moon, 2019 flung bronze 120 cm diameter Photo credit: Aaron Anderson
departments arranged by media (painting, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints) has entailed that their materially fluid and performative art has rarely been acquired in depth or at all. Whereas one might suppose that the representation of women artists increased in institutional contexts as the twentieth century progressed, it remains that the most radical work of the period— involving spaces, performances, actions, challenges to the sacrosanctity of individual media, and approaches to material combining high and low art—have in many cases not been holistically or even partially preserved. Furthermore, the documentation of these works has at times been dismissed as ephemera and deemed unworthy or irrelevant to collections predicated on the idea of unique, valuable objects.
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The original documentation for Bonita Ely’s Murray River Punch 1980, among the first examples of a performance work that combined feminist and environmental strategies, influential and often cited, remains in the artist’s collection. Given that the institution has not always been open to, or capable of, collecting these works forces the question of whether it can adequately represent forms of art that exist outside of narrowly defined and self-referential art histories. While one of the great subjects of western art, the Madonna and Child, has been revered and endlessly repeated, women’s own experience of mothering as distinct from religious evocation or aesthetic ideal is a
subject that has seldom appeared in conventional histories or presentations of Australian art, but is one that occurred with increasing frequency as the twentieth century advanced. Initiated by Vivienne Binns at the University of New South Wales and continued in Blacktown, Mothers’ memories, others’ memories 1979–81 involved a diverse group of women who recalled, discussed and gave visual expression to their matrilineal heritage at a time when women’s personal histories were not widely valued or recorded. One of the eventual forms of Binns’ collaborative work comprised postcards in vitreous enamel, each screenprinted with an image drawn from a participant’s family album. Outwardly, the work is charming, moving, homespun, but the way in which its method of production corresponds with its subject is also significant. The evident tension between the postcard as something momentary and ephemeral, and vitreous enamel which is delicate then strengthening, embodies the transition of an individual’s personal memory into a collective history. The work also challenges the idea of history’s apparent primacy over memory. Mothers’ memories, others’ memories invited multiplicity, participation, touch and discussion, and drew attention to the necessity of memory when enriching histories that can so often seem immutable. Despite the continuing proliferation of works that have made mothering their focus, there is not (to my knowledge) a comprehensive study exploring the
aesthetics and approaches, common or otherwise, of this subject in recent Australian art. There is, however, ample material. Jude Adams recalled that, ‘since having a child, floors and household fixtures have assumed a different significance for me…My perspective is directed downwards’, her subsequent work revealing this descendant looking as, ‘a contemplative, creative gaze’. On the birth of her first child, Mazie Karen Turner spoke of becoming accustomed to the ‘scatter’ of things which she translated into a manner of working and a characteristic aesthetic, gathering toys and household items into tumbling arrangements that she recast as sweeping blueprints. Elizabeth Gower’s Found images series 1984–89 discloses a domestic impetus for abstraction, its ostensibly nonfigurative forms revealed, with sustained looking, as the outlines of bottles, prams and chip packets. Barbara Hanrahan’s fractious linocuts portray an imagined childbirth that coalesces the cutting of the linoleum block with the painful opening of the body. Even these few examples give a sense of the richness of this work for iconographic, material and broader art historical study. Elspeth Pitt is curator Australian Paintings and Sculpture (20-21 Centuries) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and is co-curator of Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900-now which opened at the NGA on the 14 November. 17
ex de Medici The wreckers, 2019 (detail) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2020 Š ex de Medici
Michael Zavros Dad likes Thomas, 2020 lightjet print 172.7 x 122 cm
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+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY RAMESH MARIO NITHYENDRAN, ACCESS
THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
Portrait of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in his studio. Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Gods who walk among us Set against the stark reality of a pandemic and a pressing desire to understand who we are, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran has created a monumental five-meter high tableau of seventy bronze and clay figures located in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ entrance vestibule. By Micheal Do
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Installation view, Art Gallery of NSW. Photo credit Mark Pokorny
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Gods who walk among us
LEFT: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
Bird Human Fertility Figure II, 2020 earthenware, glaze, porcelain and apoxie 109 x 40 x 35 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny RIGHT: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Multi Armed Bi-head, 2020 bronze 180 x 120 x 30 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
As English theorist and writer John Berger reminds us in Ways of Seeing (1972), in the secular age, sacred art is considered more in terms of its provenance than its message. Yet despite this, sacred art — artworks with religious content or spiritual connotations — have significant currency in our contemporary world. Perhaps a rather corporate analysis, but sacred art examines how societies negotiate shared space and identity — and how these formulations are defined and defended. It is against our tumultuous coronavirus realities, and this desire to understand collective identity and ask, ‘who are we?’ that artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran has created his latest project Avatar Towers (2020) for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The concept ‘avatar’ from which the project’s title borrows is derived from Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism. First appearing in the English world in the eighteenth century, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity, and is closely associated with Vishnu, a principle deity. Hindu belief holds that his ten incarnations — which include a fish and a half-man and half-man-lion — would restore order on Earth when humanity descends into chaos. From these celestial beginnings, the concept has since been absorbed into the language of the online, including multiplayer computer games like Second Life and platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and Slack. Founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale defined an avatar as "the representation of your chosen embodied appearance to other people in
a virtual world." In this way, virtual avatars exist, appear and behave at the complete discretion of their users — enabling online users to embody the role of god. Located in the gallery’s entrance vestibule — its main entrance — Avatar Towers comprises of a monumental tableau of seventy bronze and clay figures organized within and around a five-meter roughly hewn together structure topped with a ceramic stupa — a mound like structure that holds relics used for meditation. Taking over this threshold space, these avatars, rendered in Nithiyendran’s recognisable punk-queer-maximalist aesthetic, are ceremonious in their monochromatic and polychromatic mystery. They appear turbocharged with glaze, contorted into impossible proportions, pummeled by the artist’s hands and fired by the kiln — characteristics which hint at the cacophony of internal stories held within each figure. Veering back and forth between fantasy and reality, these characters function as a sort of portal: a hall of mirrors that distorts and transforms meaning, sparking of rushes to the imagination as we explore Nithiyendran’s universe. Within the installation, Nithiyendran has selected two stone sculptures drawn from the gallery’s collection: a stone Javanese Ganesha — a deity which personifies wisdom and intellect — and a stone Gandharan Buddha — which represents the ideal state of ethical and intellectual perfection attained through kindness. The
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Gods who walk among us
inclusion of these sacred objects provides a powerful locus for the project — highlighting the parallels and differences in sculptural languages used to portray deities throughout Asia, while connecting Nithiyendran’s contribution to the field of figurative religious sculpture. Today, where religion has seemingly been overtaken by less lofty dogmas — including the cult of the celebrity, wanton consumerism and a desire to shock — their inclusion in this installation reminds us that contemporary art, despite however untraditional can hold the old fashioned aura of spirituality, a quality largely relegated to the fringes of art criticism and production today.
“I want art that reflects the social, technological and philosophical developments and concerns of our time and place.”
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The work will be placed in the vestibule of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The placement of the work in this location (where all visitors must pass) reflects a growing desire for public institutions to open their traditionally conservative doors to new cartographies of practice outside of dominant Western narratives. By manifesting and exhibiting an installation which can be read as a quasi-religious non Judeo-Christian shrine, Avatar Towers re-territorialises the cultural and physical space of this sandstone institution — and arguably its most important space, its entrance — from the dominant white narratives that have marginalised and misrepresented categories of difference. This spirit of cultural intersection and hybridity has long formed the bedrock of Nithiyendran’s engagement with ceramics. He notes, it is a “medium burdened with a history of politeness and good manners … as a contemporary artist, I want more. I want to be challenged and encouraged to engage with the world in critical and uneasy ways. I want art that reflects the social, technological and philosophical developments and concerns of our time and place.”
In continuing this spirit, Nithiyendran has experimented with industrial automotive spraying processes to create rich monochromatic finishes. He explains, “I was thinking about painting as a language, philosophy and a gesture and thinking about glaze in relation to that. The auto spray mimics glaze in this way and I wanted to experiment with this technology. It’s not possible to get these sorts of finishes from traditional kiln processes and I’m unwilling to confine myself to these glazes.” Of the sprayed avatars is a monochromatic hot pink fertility figure. Fertility figures — which exist all throughout antiquity across different cultures — have historically been represented as women. However, Nithiyendran has decided to render this figure, among several, as gender neutral or multigendered. This dissolution of longstanding binary understandings of gender speaks to Nithiyendran’s desire to reimagine structures, histories and aesthetics to create space for multiple voices, readings and realities. Ultimately, Nithiyendran’s chorus of characters exist to lure and entrance audiences into his technicolored ceramic world pregnant with counter-narratives for our current pandemic-related uncertainty. Through the metaphor of the avatar, Nithiyendran manages to both recognize the aesthetic, political and spiritual dimensions of art and spirituality, without reducing the project to either. In this way, Avatar Towers engages in a discussion of collective identity, raising questions of what divides and unites us. How do we negotiate separation and intimacy? And ultimately, who are we and what is our collective place in the world? How we choose to answer these questions will ultimately shape new forms of togetherness — and isolation. Michael Do is a Sydney-based writer and curator.
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY RAMESH MARIO NITHYENDRAN, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
1. Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran [online]. Journal of Australian Ceramics, The, Vol. 57, No. 1, Apr 2018: 44-[45]. Availability: https://search.informit.com.au/ documentSummary;dn=529057343940793;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1449-275X. 2. Interview with artist
Installation view, Art Gallery of NSW. Photo credit Mark Pokorny
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LEFT: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Double Sided Blue Figure, 2020 earthenware 69 x 54 x 23 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny TOP: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Terracotta Figure 8, 2020 (left) Terraacotta Figure 6, 2020, 19 x 12 x 11 cm (right) Photo credit: Mark Pokorny BOTTOM: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Two Sided Figure with Purple Crown, 2020 earthenware 121 x 40 x 37 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Turquoise Figure with Pyramid Head, 2020 earthenware, glaze, crystals and apoxie 118 x 44 x 38 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Watch Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in the studio
Portrait of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran in his studio. Photo credit: Mark Porkorny
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Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
In The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting) Alex Seton has created a life-sized marble figure that lies prone on a slab beneath a heavy shroud. Should we see it as a body, or merely the impression of a body preserved in solid marble? Either way, the piece has a strong funereal connotation. The ‘ghost’ is a childhood memory of a special place – a marble quarry near Wombeyan Caves, where the artist’s family had a home from the late 1980s. It’s where the artist became interested in stone carving, being given his first hammer and chisel at the age of eight. By John McDonald
Alex Seton The Sure Footed Ladder, 2020 Wombeyan Marble, stainless steel 235 x 58 x 60 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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LEFT: Alex Seton
The Sure Footed Ladder (detail) Wombeyan Marble, stainless steel 235 x 58 x 60 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
RIGHT: Alex Seton
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The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting), 2020 (detail) Wombeyan marble 110 x 110 x 226 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
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eton often structures his solo exhibitions around a particular theme or story, but Meet Me Under the Dome is his most personal to date. It includes effigies of a favourite toy rabbit; a ladder built by his mathematically-minded father using the golden ratio; four mattocks with differently coloured marble blades; and even an organic toilet in resplendent green marble. He places a marble carving of a Besa block on a marble swing, changing a primitive weighing device into an off-beat monument. He takes the pattern from a found soft-drink bottle and reproduces it in shallow relief. The results are simultaneously remniscent of those Wunderlich pressed metal ceilings - once a common feature of stylish Australian interiors, and the weathered walls of an ancient tomb. The dome in the exhibition’s title refers to the Garden Palace, built in 1879 for the Sydney International Exhibition. Meet Me at the Dome was the caption of an etching published in a newspaper on opening day. This colossal building dominated the city skyline until it was destroyed by fire in 1882. Today, scarcely a trace remains: neither material remnant nor memory. It took Jonathan Jones’s remarkable Kaldor Public Art Project of 2016, Barrangal Dyara (Skin and Bones), to bring the Garden Palace back to life, as he mapped the outlines of the building with rows of small Indigenous shields made from plaster.
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Alex Seton The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting), 2020 Wombeyan marble 110 x 110 x 226 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
Seton has a longstanding interest in the Garden Palace, for many of the same reasons as Jones. The building was full of Aboriginal artefacts that had been gathered from across the state for the big event. The fire was not simply a tragedy for the citizens of Sydney, but for Indigenous people – then and now – who lost invaluable items of cultural heritage. Seton sees it as a rare example of a shared or common loss between black and white Australians.
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The dominant feature of the Garden Palace was a central dome, 30.4 metres in diameter – which compares well with the diameter of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, at 31 metres. The dome of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, which opened in 1898, is 19 metres in diameter. No wonder the dome of the Garden Place became a popular point of rendezvous – it was big enough to be the nucleus around which the city revolved. Over the following century the Palace’s role as a unique meeting place for European and Indigenous culture would not be taken up by any other civic space, unless we count the display areas of the Australian Museum. Was there much marble involved in the construction of the Garden Palace? I haven’t been able to find out, although it utilised vast quantities of bricks, timber and iron in emulation of Joseph Paxton’s famous Crystal Palace in London which opened in 1851. Marble, in all its local variations, would be extensively used in other Sydney public buildings at the turn of the century. Stone masons, the Melocco Brothers, opened their business in 1908, offering Australia’s first terrazzo service. The brothers drew their coloured marble from a quarry in Wombeyan, for which they secured a 100-year lease – the same quarry Seton frequented as a boy. It would cease operation in 1998, and has now been reclaimed by the State Government.
When we pull all the threads together, The Ghost of Wombeyan (A History of Forgetting) emerges as more than an elegy for the artist’s childhood, it is a memento mori of a lost – and largely forgotten – convergence of two cultures. In pre-colonial days the Wombeyan Caves were an important site for the Gundungurra People. The natural beauty of the place was recognised by settlers as early as 1856, when 650 acres were set aside as a nature reserve. The Melocco brothers represented another kind of culture, bringing Italian expertise in marble and mosaic to the developing urban fabric of New South Wales. Seton looks back on Wombeyan as a kind of adventure playground that launched a hobby which would turn into a vocation. Over time he has begun to explore the greater history of the area. Seton’s own story is but one chapter in the evolving annals of Wombeyan. His recollections would be of little import if he did not memorialise them in stone, using the power of art to transform humble objects into symbols that prompt reflection on the nature of time and memory. One of the ways he does this is to take an ephemeral object such as a soft toy or a ladder, and immortalise it in marble, giving it a new identity. Another strategy is to borrow an apparently trivial detail such as the pattern on a soft-drink bottle, and expand it into something grand and ceremonial. Seton’s work thrives on the multiple associations only the artistic mind can make, finding relationships that are poetic rather than purely historical. He has fleshed out the show with photographic images that create a more vivid sense of place, and included a soundscape by cellist James Beck and composer Charlie Chan that captures the Wombeyan atmosphere.
Alex Seton A History of Forgetting, 2020 pigment print on cotton rag 170 x 113 cm
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Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
With the closing of the quarry and the ravages of last year’s bushfires, Wombeyan is a different place to the wonderland of Seton’s childhood. As the bush recovers its vigour, nature is reclaiming the sites of human industry, turning the abandoned quarry into a ruin that may one day be of interest to the archaeologists.
SUMMER 2020
Perhaps the “dome” of show’s title should not be seen solely as the dome of the Garden Palace, but the great dome of history and memory that draws so many disparate impressions together. Under that dome we discover connections between the Indigenous past and the colonial era, between ancient geology and modern public art. In his own words, Seton has brought us “a history of forgetting”. It’s a lament for the ease with which we let go of a past that is not set in stone.
John McDonald is art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald & film critic for the Australian Financial Review. www.johnmcdonald.net.au Alex Seton, Meet Me Under the Dome opens November 26 - December 23 at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney.
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LEFT: Alex Seton
Dad, I dug a hole!, 2020 Wombeyan marble and pine handle 89 x 10 x 42 cm (each) Photo credit: Mark Pokorny RIGHT: Alex Seton
The Sawdust Short Drop Throne 104 x 110 x 110 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny
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Podcast: Alex Seton with Sebastian Goldspink
There is an intrinsic link between place and identity - who we are, is to a large extent determined by our environment. Alex Seton’s unusual upbringing around a marble quarry not far from the Wombeyan Caves in New South Wales, Australia has shaped him at least as much as he has shaped the marble that comes from it. In this podcast, recorded in the lead-up to his latest exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf gallery, Meet Me Under the Dome, Seton chats about his work and his upbringing with 2022 Adelaide Biennial Curator, Sebastian Goldspink. As Seton says, “there are things that form you and shape you...”
SUMMER 2020
+ LISTEN TO PODCAST
LEFT+RIGHT: Alex Seton at Wombeyan Quarry, NSW Photo credit: Vasili Vasileiadis
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Australian Contemporary Art Magazine
SUMMER 2020
Maria Fernanda Cardoso in her garden. Photo credit: Ned Mulhivil
In the Garden of Earthly Delights: Maria Fernanda Cardoso Ahead of her upcoming Sullivan+Strumpf solo debut in May 2021, Colombian-born artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso gives us a tour of her garden and an insight into her inspiration as an artist.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso is a Colombian-born artist who lives and works in Sydney. Her practice reveals the wonder, beauty and astonishing complexity of other life forms. Using research as the basis of her work, she collaborates with scientists, cinematographers, microscopists, videographers, sound-artists, industrial designers and landscape architects to express inspirations from the natural world in unconventional ways. And she is a keen gardener.
CAN YOU PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOUR GARDEN?
Maria Fernanda Cardoso (MFC)/ Gardening has been the most dynamic and rewarding project I have ever done. When we first arrived at this house, the existing garden was a desert (a suburban lawn). There was no real beauty and nowhere to shelter from the glaring summer sun. It was basically dead. Nowadays, my son Jupiter says “We don’t have a garden, we have an ecosystem”. There is so much life in it that I don’t feel alone in the garden anymore. My studio is at garden level. I knocked the walls of the studio down so I can feel the breeze, see the plants, the birds and the insects. On our ground floor there is vegetation all around, life where there was none before. The garden is the secret to our family’s wellbeing.
HOW DID YOUR SWIMMING POOL BECOME A POND?
MFC/ It was never my dream to have a pool, but the house came with one, which my kids and their friends enjoyed tremendously. Because I had to supervise the kids so they wouldn’t drown in the pool, I started to do gardening around the pool so I wouldn’t have to go into the water with them. Once they grew up and stopped swimming in the pool, it just became a chore: scooping out the leaves every week, replacing pumps and adding chemicals. I found out about a “Pool to Pond Conversion” program offered by Kuringai Chase Council. They made a little brochure and explained exactly what to do, which is basically to do nothing. Stop using chemicals, wait until the water is full of insect life, then plant some water plants in a shallow area of the pool. That’s what I did and now it is totally wild, especially as friends brought me more native water plants to grow there. In summer it becomes a theatre for mating blue damselflies. At night, I conduct “Frog Concerts”, and we sit around the pool and listen to 4 or 5 different species of frogs that just turned up on their own. I also added a dozen silver perch fish, who are thriving. And of course there are lizards eating all over the garden, snails, and lots of other small creatures. It is heaven for me. What I have enjoyed more about the garden was not the plants themselves, but all the other life they brought in.
Interview
HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN A GARDENER?
MFC/ When I was a kid, my father used to stop on the side of the road to pick up seedlings from the cloud forests in Colombia. We would plant them at home, slowly transforming a suburban garden into a mini cloud forest. But all we did was plant the seedlings and wait. Nothing else. As an adult I didn’t have a garden for decades as I lived in apartments. My first years as a gardener in Sydney were a comedy of errors. All the native species I planted died. I over-pruned all the bushes and killed them. So I started collecting plants from around my neighbourhood and I brought home a lot of weeds! For example, Mother of Millions, Prickly Pear cacti, Yucca plants. I had to remove them all later. But I also started to collect and propagate cacti and succulent cuttings which gave me more confidence as they are so easy to care for.
HOW IMPORTANT IS THE GARDEN TO YOUR ART?
MFC/ I planted a bottle tree at home as a 30 cm seedling and I was watching it grow really quickly and wishing I had planted more. So I proposed planting many Brachichyton rupestris as a piece of public art and I won a commission from the City of Sydney. It’s called “While I Live I Will Grow”, (just 5 min walk from Sullivan+Strumpf on 118128 Portman St, Zetland NSW 2017). I built a spiral of sandstone blocks that becomes a stage for seven bottle trees to display their growth into magnificent trees over the next 100 years. It is a long duration performative and observational artwork between the trees and the community. My garden taught me that time is a wonderful thing, where age and maturity are not to be feared but to be admired.
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In the Garden of Earthly Delights: Maria Fernanda Cardoso
SUMMER 2020
“Time is a wonderful thing, where age and maturity are not to be feared but to be admired.�
BEST TIPS?
MFC/ Compost. I have never seen anything more alchemical than a compost heap steaming. I understood that the foundation of my garden were its small inhabitants. Grow a little bit of food, a little bit of herbs, and a lot of food for the eyes. Gardening is all about observation. Feel the breeze, the sun’s direction, the sounds, the insects, the textures, the temperature, the seasons. It’s a daily lesson that brings a lot of joy.
LEFT: Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s garden, Sydney. RIGHT: Maria Fernanda Cardoso in her garden. Photo credit: Ned Mulhivil
Figure out where is north. Based on that observation base all your decisions on where and what to plant. Test your soil. I learnt why all my natives have died, and why my veggie patch was unproductive: my soil had the wrong Ph for them and it only had 3% organic matter: basically it was a sand dune! Fix your soil. After my composting efforts didn’t make a dent in my garden I went nuclear and bought 15 tons of pure compost, on the advice of my friend landscaper Sue Barnsley. Mulch. Nothing gave me more satisfaction than turning over my lawn and covering it with tons of mulch. After heavily mulching, my garden started singing as all the roots interconnected. The soil is now rich and black. Plant wind screens first’ That’s the secret to create a microclimate. Propagate first, then decide where to plant. It will save you thousands of dollars and they will be healthier than plants you buy from a nursery. Plant seedlings. Don’t bother with expensive bigger plants. Start small and watch them grow.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s first solo exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf will be in May 2021.
Interview
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ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
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Maria Fernanda Cardoso Actual Size IV Maratus Harrissi, 2019 deep focus microscopy, archival backlit transparency print on long life LED lightbox 162.5 x 206.8 cm
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Thinking Business:
Barbara Cleveland Amelia Wallin reflects on career highlights of the Barbara Cleveland artist collective (Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, and Kelly Doley) ahead of their survey show ‘Thinking Business’ on now at Goulburn Regional Gallery.
The year was 2010, or maybe 2009, and you performed at Serial Space or possibly Carriageworks. It went for hours, it was violent and uncomfortable, and I can’t recall any specific details, just murky lighting and dark humour. There might have been hecklers. How much of this memory is influenced by documentation I can’t say. I’m thinking of those iconic photos of you in homemade costumes, spotlit against a red curtain. Back then you went by the name of Brown Council and, as well as these live feats of endurance, you created durational performances for the camera. Your choice of costume, props and actions was deliberately citational: they became tools through which you situated your practice within the genealogies of performance art and feminist activism. Your early video works focused on the completion of a set task, drawn out over an unnaturally long time, but without the slipperiness of being “live”. Which is to say, without an audience other than the rolling camera, you maintained control of how these actions were recorded or remembered.
The year was 2013 and Performance Space turned thirty.
SUMMER 2020
In the twelve months prior I had been working on Performance Space’s archives with Julianne Campbell, sorting and cataloguing ephemera from Sydney’s experimental performance scene, some examples of which were included in the catalogue for You’re History, the anniversary program that celebrated Performance Space’s legacy and “the future of performance in Australia”. For this program, you presented an ode to a forgotten figure of Australian performance art, in the form of a video portrait titled This is Barbara Cleveland. Like you, I was thinking about the archive, its gaps and omissions, and what the future of performance might be when so much of our local art history remains unrecorded (as you have pointed out, Anne Marsh’s seminal book on Australian performance extends only to 1992). Barbara Cleveland never really existed, but to labour that misses the point. Through reenactment and restaging, your multifaceted and multi-year investigations into Cleveland radically rethought how one might approach performance archives, proposing alternatives to the “traces” of performance typically held within archives. Performance does not disappear or vanish as I had been led to believe in art school: it lives on in memories and bodies, no matter how unreliable.
LEFT: Barbara Cleveland
Performance Art (15 Actions for the Face), 2014 (still) dual channel HD video (15 minutes 35 seconds) RIGHT: Barbara Cleveland,
One Hour Laugh, 2019 (still) single channel HD video (60 minutes)
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Thinking Business: Barbara Cleveland
The year was 2016, and it was the 20th Biennale of Sydney.
The year is 2020 and I’m in Melbourne and I have been in lockdown for almost six months.
At artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal’s invitation, Barbara Cleveland participated in You Imagine What You Desire for the Sydney Biennale. You became BC Institute, and I was employed as venue manager. I helped deliver the program of performances and lectures, in what was a former gallery. The range of events focused on the cultures of performance and feminism, particularly those which some might refer to as “minor”, which had been marginalised or minimised. Contextualising, theorising, historicising, learning, embodying, absorbing, doing, practicing, reflecting—these were just some of the modes of engagement that unfolded over the three-month program. I took part in I Remember, a performance in which a microphone was passed around a circle of participants who shared memories of performances, beginning each time with the refrain I Remember. As the memories accumulated, a history was shaped: one which was shared, local, multidirectional, specific, and entirely relative — a clear reminder that history is constructed by those privileged enough to be in the room.
Your invitation to write has me thinking about friendship. “Maintenance is a drag,” Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote in 1969, “it takes all the fucking time”. To maintain friendships over a decade is a process requiring dedicated commitment and a lot of invisible labour, and sustaining a creative collaboration over a decade is a similar feat. Friendships slip into work, and work slips into friendship. It is precisely this entanglement of emotional, affective, creative and productive labour that This is a stained glass window evokes. Under cognitive capitalism, our friendships can be exploited to make us work faster, harder, more efficiently, to keep us at work longer, to trick us into thinking that work is our second family. Friendship, along with cooperation, relationality, networking and sharing, becomes co-opted as an immaterial asset upon which productive labor depends. However, friendship is a labour process that reproduces itself both for and against the dominant capitalist culture. Friendship is political and sacrificial. Revisiting your works and watching This is a stained glass window from my home in Melbourne, I am witnessing the cumulative output of an enduring, interdependent collaboration, sustained through negotiation, improvisation, affinity and care.
SUMMER 2020
The year is 2019, and you made a new work and titled it This is a stained glass window. It is mesmerising. The close-ups of hand gestures, the intimacy of a voiceover, and the feeling of watching something very private unfold. Here, we witness constant negotiation, endless preparation, perpetual discussions of lighting states, and the mother of all questions: “how to begin”. It was uncomfortable to watch, excruciatingly familiar for anyone who has experienced a creative collaboration, particularly one attuned to embodiment practices, but not in the same way as your early endurance works. What emerges in this work is a shared language, an intimate shorthand, a profound sense of trust that comes with fifteen years of working together. “I really hate this,” one of you says, “because usually I like to be in control,” but you keep going and the coloured gels move in front of your faces and hands like so many moments of illumination.
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY BARBARA CLEVELAND, ACCESS THE VIEWING SPACE BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: ‘CARE’, 1969”, https://feldmangallery.com/ exhibition/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969.
TOP: Barbara Cleveland
This is a stained glass window, 2019 (Still) HD single channel video, (13 minutes, 30 seconds) MIDDLE: Barbara Cleveland
Work in progress: Dawn til Dusk, 2010 (Still) single channel HD video, (8 minutes, 51 seconds) BOTTOM: Barbara Cleveland
Bad Timing, 2017 (still) single channel HD video (7 minutes 28 seconds)
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Now showing, Free entry mca.com.au
Exhibition Strategic Sponsor
A major survey exhibition by influential artist Lindy Lee. The artist’s meditative and thoughtprovoking works explore art history, cultural authenticity, identity and the cosmos.
Exhibition Major Partner
Exhibition Supporting Partner
Exhibition Patrons
GRANTPIRRIE Private Susan Rothwell
SUMMER 2020
Government Partners
Supporting Exhibition Patrons
Publication Sponsor
Gutman Family Foundation Jennifer Stafford & Jon Nicholson
Front to back: Open as the Sky, 2020, mirror polished bronze; Under the Shadowless Tree, 2020, synthetic polymer paint, beeswax, oil on Alucabond, installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2020, image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, © the artist, photograph: Anna Kučera
Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands towards an ocean GRANT STEVENS art.uts.edu.au
Date 2020 Location UTS Broadway Screen commission
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The Golden Hour:
Angela Tiatia Angela Tiatia reflects on her colossal 32-metre long photographic collage commissioned for the Art Gallery of New South Wales entrance court.
I
was honoured to be invited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create a work for the 32-metre wall of their entrance court. I have always loved this space. I remember spending many visits to the gallery just standing here, marvelling and learning from the Colin McCahon that hung there. The Golden Hour was conceived, designed, shot and built with this specific space in mind and for this specific time. Both in terms of how it relates to The Archibald, but in a larger sense to grapple with ideas that relate to the time we are all living in.
“The Golden Hour is the magical time between day and night. It is neither day, nor is it night. It is a period of transition between the two. And it feels to me like we are living in a time of transition.”
I have seen the word ‘unprecedented’ in more headlines in the last 6 months than I have in the rest of my life. But beyond Covid, there are a series of fundamental changes whose waves are all cresting at the same time: ecological, economic, social, cultural, racial and political. And rather than being separate and independent, they are chorusing together and amplifying their impacts.
SUMMER 2020
These themes have been a driving force behind much of my work. It has been my means of trying to make sense of many of them, especially their impact on the disempowered. However, for this work I wanted to zoom
out from these issues directly, and instead acknowledge the landscape of our time that these changes are washing over. And it felt that the golden light of dawn or dusk was the perfect setting. The 19th-century German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also drew upon the metaphor of a time between night and day when he noted that, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." I'm no philosopher, but my understanding is he was observing that we don't tend to understand a time until it is passed. We live through it, but can only make sense of it in hindsight. With all due respect to Hegel, I'm not sure I agree. My belief is that art can help illuminate our situation and make clear the options we have in front of us while we still have them. In The Golden Hour, the characters are burning their own portraits. This is a motif I revisit from an earlier work, The Fall, which was a 2017 Australian War Memorial commission. As part of this commission, I was resident in Singapore to study The Fall of Singapore that happened 75 years earlier. While reading through accounts of survivors I came across descriptions of how people were burning their family portraits. They did this to erase connections between them and their loved ones, so as to protect themselves from invading forces looking to persecute relatives of people they saw as dissidents. But where this was an act of erasure of their connections to others, in this work the people are burning their own images. I was drawn to this visual idea in response to several contemporary dynamics, but in particular the selfcannibalization of social media. That in a world where you have more control than ever of how you curate
Angela Tiatia in front of her new photographic work, The Golden Hour 2020, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
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The Golden Hour: Angela Tiatia
how the world sees you, rather than it being a boon for self determination, it is instead an arms race of unachievable expectations. We become commodities in the marketplace of attention and affection. And in the face of this organised self-destruction an act of turning our own images to ash seems like the most self affirming. But clearly the work also includes references to portraiture in general, and it is worth touching on this in the context of this being shown at the same time as the Archibald Prize - not only Australia's, but one of the world's most important celebrations of portraiture. I both admire and struggle with portraiture. As I perceive it, it is intended to record a person - not only in physical appearance, but also in essence - not only what they look like, but what they are like. That's a big ask.
SUMMER 2020
And it always strikes me that portraiture is an odd tool for this task. For one thing the subject is usually alone studied in and of themselves, devoid of greater context except the condimental visual cues of the subject's status. And yet we don't exist in a vacuum of other people. I was brought up in a culture where the collective is more important than the individual - so I struggle with the idea that we can be understood in any way that is of interest without considering those around us. So for this work I wanted the portraiture to be collective and for there to be conversations and tensions between the people and their surroundings.
These tensions touch on another point of the work. Like many artists, I hope my work makes people feel something. To be moved. However, in this work I don't want to shepherd the viewer to a particular emotional response. Instead I hope everyone connects to different parts and lands on their own feelings. I want to draw the dots, but not join them. And in this work, the dots are the interactions, the points of tension between the individuals, their place, and themselves. Thank you to Justin Paton, Isobel Parker Philip and Danielle Earp for the opportunity to create this work. And thank you to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the contribution they made that went towards its creation.
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY ANGELA TIATIA, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
Angela Tiatia The Golden Hour, 2020 (detail) pigment print on cotton rag dimensions variable
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Angela Tiatia The Golden Hour, 2020 (detail) pigment print on cotton rag dimensions variable
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Angela Tiatia The Golden Hour, 2020 (detail) pigment print on cotton rag dimensions variable
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Angela Tiatia The Golden Hour, 2020 (detail) pigment print on cotton rag dimensions variable
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Home and also somewhere else very far away:
Lynda Draper Lynda Draper’s skeletal ceramic constructions evolve intuitively like 3D drawings. New to Sullivan+Strumpf, Lynda has over 35 years of focussed studio practice and is recognised as a ceramic artist who constantly pushes the technical limits and conventional aesthetics of the medium. By Sonia Legge
In 2018 Lynda Draper was offered a three-month residency in the former music pavilion of Madame Elisabeth, sister of King Louis XVI. This was an invitation to live and work in Versailles and to exhibit the body of work that evolved at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils in Paris. It may come as no surprise that the sculptures created in this fairytale scenario conjure topiary, white marble, faces on urns, decorative ironwork and confectionery. Lynda wrote about this experience:
SUMMER 2020
Unlike my home environment, this surreal, strangely familiar, haunting landscape prompted me to consider my European heritage and question the complex character of early European cultural settlement within the Australian natural landscape. It made me aware of how on a subconscious level my world view and art practice has been informed by being raised on European rituals, history, parables and legends. Tales of kings, queens, princes and princesses, dark forests and wintery Christmases so alien to the Australian environment. However, far from being romantic, Draper’s sculptures tap into the broader human collective unconscious: universal mythologies linked to spirit images, masks, darkness and ghostlike forms.
For, while her sculptures glisten and shimmer and, as she herself reflected, look as if they might be made from bubble gum or paper-mâché, Draper’s work is also decidedly of the earth. Clearly we see the marks her fingers made pushing into the clay, pinching and encouraging it to achieve its final form. And despite their vivid, ‘unnatural’ colours, nature is in the arcing forms alluding to motion: splashing waves, ascending bird song; or to stasis: bones, ice. Thoughts about the flesh are also present in the tactile fragility of the clay and the sensuality of the fresh paint. Altogether Lynda Draper’s ceramic sculptures invite contemplation of some other realm. Paraphrasing the Australian surrealist artist James Gleeson, she sculpts what we know is there but we don't yet have the perception to see. She makes the intangible tangible. Lynda Draper was born in Sydney in 1962. She studied arts education/ceramics at UNSW, then at the National Art School. Now recognised as one of Australia’s finest and most revolutionary art practitioners working in the field of ceramics, she is considered to be an inspirational teacher and is currently Head of Ceramics at National Art School. She was included in Phaidon’s landmark 2017 book Vitamin C - Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, a global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists.
Lynda Draper in her studio. Photo credit: Robin Hearfield
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Home and also somewhere else very far away: Lynda Draper
“If she doesn’t have access to clay she will work from preliminary sketches, however, her most successful pieces evolve organically, often from a state of subconscious reverie.”
It would be fair to say that since graduating Lynda Draper has been drawn to the domestic uncanny. The coastal farmhouse built in 1880 she and her partner moved to thirty years ago contained traces of generations of people’s lives through objects that remained in the house and sheds. Partly in response, Draper made a series of large floor installations consisting of tenderly wrought ceramic and wax objects inspired by the metal washing basins, buckets and hand-made funnels from her new/old bathhouse. Another series was based on kitchen utensils carefully fused together - objects with an individual/ collective dreamlike identity. Devoid of colour, these ceramic sculptures had the visual fragility of paper or wax but the resilience and permanence of fired clay.
SUMMER 2020
Humans widely believe that inanimate objects have supernatural powers, and souvenirs (in the sense of objects collected on life’s journey), particularly their relationship to thoughts of lack and impermanence, have featured in Draper’s art practice. Home Altar, an earlier series of work, was based on childhood figurines rescued from her family home just prior to it being sold and demolished. Draper wrote: From the impact my childhood objects had on me, I can understand how cultures have worshipped inanimate objects - particularly their power of embodying the spirits of the departed.
These artifacts reemerged into my life as extraordinary: familiar yet strange; generating a peculiar conflation of past and present, memory and emotion, self and other; triggering an overwhelming nostalgia that crept into unease. In the ‘portrait’ series, 2012-2013, she returned to earlier ways of working, reintroducing colour and pinching and coiling the works. With its instinctively positioned coloured blobs and short sticks, Annette 2013, was inspired by a real person, but came about from a subconscious doodle Draper made in response to a souvenir owned by her and so, through a kind of double-pike magical thinking, Draper created an embodiment and disembodiment of her subject. Since then, forms in Draper’s work have moved closer towards those we recognise in her sculptures today. Totemic and ceremonial, the lovely fine lines in the attenuated arms in this work from her 2015 genie bottle series seem to herald her later cage/crown-like arabesqueing structures. In 2019 Lynda Draper won Australia’s most prestigious ceramics prize, the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, with the multi-piece work Somnambulism. Acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, a piece from this series will be included in the upcoming exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now at the National Gallery of Australia, 14 November 2020 – 31
Lynda Draper Somnambulism, 2019 ceramic and various glazes. Installation view, Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, Shepparton Art Museum Photo credit: Lynda Draper
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SUMMER 2020
Home and also somewhere else very far away: Lynda Draper
January 2021, and is to be featured in a major associated publication celebrating 150 Australian women artists. Lynda Draper uses many different glazes, lustres and enamels; hand-building, pinching and building up her work with coils, sometimes building complex works straight onto shelves that can be placed directly into the kiln, often firing works multiple times. If she doesn’t have access to clay she will work from preliminary sketches, however, her most successful pieces evolve organically, often from a state of subconscious reverie. I’m a huge advocate of daydreaming. I’m interested in the relationship between the mind and material world and the related phenomenon of the metaphysical. Creating art is a way of attempting to bridge the gap between these worlds and of mastering reality through fantasy. Her most recent series partly evolved from her interest in pareidolia and the phenomenon of universal mythologies linked to the spirit image.
Lynda Draper Spring, 2019 ceramic and various glazes 80 x 55 x 50 cm Collection Shepparton Art Museum Photo credit: Robin Hearfield
The skeletal constructions evolve intuitively, they are I suppose 3D clay drawings. There is a freedom in working in clay this way, the forms grow and unfold. Often there is no intention that they will become anthropomorphic, the collaging of coloured ceramic pieces onto the skeletal constructions seems to give them life; sometimes they are read figuratively, sometimes not. In a Hansel-and-Gretel type way, Lynda Draper’s ceramic sculptures are delicious. At once enchanting, light-filled, spun-sugar fantasies and dark, earthy folk tales, they are both intensely personal and collective; inevitable-seeming and surprising: clay bodies with soaring spirits. Sonia Legg is a Sydney-based writer and valuer of art and archives.
+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY LYNDA DRAPER, ACCESS THE VIEWING SPACE BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
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Quick Curate:
Festive
POLLY BORLAND Untitled XXXV, 2010 chromogenic print 44 x 38.5 cm Edition of 3 plus 3 artist’s proofs (PB Smudge Small XXXV) AUD $4,500
LYNDA DRAPER Melancholic Boy with Blue Ball, 2015 glazed ceramic 76 x 63 x 80 cm AUD $8,000
SUMMER 2020
KAREN BLACK Gone World, 2020 oil on canvas 46 x 61 cm AUD $6,600
JUDY MILLAR Blue Star, 2012 oil and ink on canvas 90 x 70 cm AUD $6,800
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO Four Wives and Ten Husbands, 2014 digital print on glossy paper. Acrylic face mounted on 2 mm aluminium backing 45 x 30 cm Edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs (#1/3) AUD $3,300
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Last Word:
Neil Hobbs+Karina Harris
SUMMER 2020
Landscape Architects, Art Collectors and Founders of Canberra’s public art biennial Contour 556, Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris have the last word on public art in the National capital.
LEFT: Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris
Photo credit: Georgia Hobbs RIGHT: Richard Lewer in front of his work
l can’t run away all my life sometimes I just have to stand and fight’!, 2020 acrylic on found flag, 360 x 730 cm
TELL US PLEASE A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR AMAZING PROJECT CONTOUR 556. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO START A PUBLIC ART BIENNIAL – WHILE YOU ARE RUNNING YOUR DESIGN CONSULTANCY?
Interview
Neil Hobbs+Karina Harris (N+K)/ Contour 556 started as Neil’s research project for a creative practice PhD. I came up with the name, which references the Australian Height Datum (metres above sea level) of Lake Burley Griffin, which is the organising element for central Canberra’s wonderful public realm. Canberra has had a peripatetic history of public art events, some Commonwealth funded (sculpture 75), but mainly as a result of an individuals or groups initiative: (Acts I, II, and III 1978-1982, and National Sculpture Forums in 1995 and 1998). We wanted to bring those events back, and try to cement a public art biennial in Australia’s capital city. We had some advantages, in that we are landscape architects, so we know how to go about approvals for use of public space, and we know a lot of artists, locally, nationally and internationally, so content would not be a problem, assuming we could fund it. It started as a project run through our office, using our time and staff time. At the time we were employing a graduate architect, who had also worked as an exhibition designer as an intern at the National Gallery of Australia. Jordan knew all the best companies to source printing for signage and catalogues, so again we had inside running knowledge.
Things have moved on, we received some capacity funding from Arts ACT, and incorporated as a board in late 2019. We have a board of seven, Jordan is still with us, and we added some skills in media, legal and connections with building owners in Canberra City. We also were very well supported by an intern from ANU School of Arts and Design, Rachel Turner, who took on all the graphics production and website development. Each event has grown artist numbers and event footprint. From a 2.5 km essentially lake side walk with a few detours in 2016, in 2020 we occupied an island near the National Museum, and extended fully into the city, including Civic Square, a new collaboration with Canberra Museum and Gallery has a very large Richard Lewer painting on a ‘retired’ Parliament House flag – 7.6 x 3.3m. The 2020 event also saw a move into smaller gallery spaces, in the suburbs and industrial areas, making use on new and continuing in-kind supporters. Funding is always key, and we have been generally successful with funding bids, 2 out of 3 through the Australia Council, and always very strong support from the ACT Government. We have built up great support from individuals and donors from Canberra and Sydney and Melbourne. Visiting an art biennial in Canberra is logistically almost easier than attending Sculpture by the Sea, and in normal years it is a good weekend break for our Melbourne friends.
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Last Word: Neil & Karina Hobbs
LEFT: Alex Seton
The Golden Calf, 2018 polyethylene road barriers and printed vinyl 350 x 191 x 191 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny RIGHT: Megan Cope Walangala, 2020 perforated concrete and native swamp reeds dimensions variable Photo credit: Sarah Vandermark
WHAT ARE YOUR CONTOUR HIGHLIGHTS?
N+K/ There have been many highlights, just a few: We had a triple 000 call in 2018, thanks to Gary Deirmendjian’s floating plastic gloves Reach tethered slightly below the lake level, to be fair looking very much like a dead hand reaching up. His companion piece Breach was a very poetic work of 27 ropes linking the carriageways of Kings Avenue, and forming the shape of the hull of a boat.
SUMMER 2020
Archie Moore’s Crop: Reap/Sow in 2016 was an installation of 17 lineal metres of encyclopaedias set spine up in the ground. They surrounded a 7m2 plot of Yam Daisies. It was sited beside the lake, probably quite close to former plantations of Yam Daisies by the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, next to the banks of the now flooded Molonglo River. The 17 lineal metres of encyclopaedias had no mention at all or the existence of Indigenous agriculture pre-white settlement in Australia. When people made this connection, the change was profound. Alex Seton’s Golden Calf, 2018 sited on the midpoint of the land and water axes ruffled a few feathers. Gary Carsely’s One place in another in 2016 was also a great piece. In 2020 Megan Cope’s Walangala installation is just the kind of work we like to see and like to help realise.
Similarly with Connie Anthes Untitled (Solidarities), both large scale works, really interacting with and transforming the landscape that they inhabit. In a different setting, a granite paved building forecourt in the City, Bonita Bub’s Scissor Lift, at 5.3m high was another impressive largescale realisation. The best of 2016 was Katy Mutton’s In plain sight, marine grade vinyl and marine grade paint, applied to a 30 seat electric boat in dazzle camouflage pattern. It plied the lake as a tourist boat in Katy’s livery for the 2016 and 2018 iterations. (The friendly boatman Jim Patterson continues to assist – helping to transport James Tylor/ Samantha Rich’s The Dwelling and Glen Hayward’s Y Love to Springbank Island for the 2020 edition. Each iteration of Contour 556 has also included events and performances. Too many to talk about, but we have enjoyed Ham Darroch’s reprise of Slow Walk for London 2010, presented as two Slow Walks for Canberra, recognising the gift of the UK Government of the Carillon on Aspen Island in Lake Burley Griffin in 1970. AS WELL AS RUNNING A PUBLIC ART BIENNIAL, YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING COLLECTORS AND SUPPORTERS OF ARTISTS. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST PURCHASE TOGETHER? WHAT KEEPS
Interview
YOU COLLECTING? DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO AGREE ON AN ACQUISITION?
N+K/ The first work we bought together was a triptych by Margaret Morgan, Love is.. from Mori Gallery in 1986. A large charcoal work on paper flanked by two smaller oils on canvas. We do start each year with a resolution ‘NO MORE ART’, but that is broken by the end of January. We typically would agree on a work, but sometimes one or other isn’t available when a stunning work pops up on your screen or on a visit to a gallery that compels purchase. WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T AGREE?
N+K/ We have only ever bought what we like. If we don’t like it, we don’t buy it. Weirdly, we have always agreed. Although there is one piece in 35 years that Neil bought that lives in a cupboard, enough said! LAST WORD?
N+K/ We have gotten so much joy from collecting. Meeting the artists and gallerists (like Urs and Jo). We consider many to be friends and it has been a wonderful journey. We have no room in our home (literally, it is what one might call a ‘Baroque’ hang) and our garden is fast filling, yet we continue to buy and collect. We are lucky that we have two children that now have homes with walls that are being filled! 81
SUMMER 2020
Photo credit: Paul Jurak
installation on Lake Burley Griffith
Katy Mutton, In plain sight, 2016
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JANUARY Summer Annual 21, Annual group show, 01.28.21
FEBRUARY Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire
MARCH Tony Albert: A Conversation with Margaret Preston
APRIL Glenn Barkley
APRIL Sanne Mestrom
MAY Maria Fernanda Cardoso Sullivan+Strumpf debut solo
JULY Lynda Draper Sullivan+Strumpf debut solo
JULY Michael Lindeman
JUNE Yang Yongliang
2021 Program AUGUST Sam Jinks
SEPTEMBER Kirsten Coelho
SEPTEMBER Jemima Wyman
OCTOBER Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
OCTOBER Joanna Lamb NOVEMBER Tim Silver
Upcoming Exhibitions
ALEX SETON MEET ME UNDER THE DOME 26.11.20
ANNUAL GROUP SHOW SUMMER ANNUAL 21 28.01.21
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THIS SUMMER SEE THE WORLD THROUGH ART AND DESIGN OVER 100 ARTISTS & DESIGNERS FROM 33 COUNTRIES FREE ENTRY
Aïda Muluneh Seed of the soul 2017 (detail) from the A Memory of Hope series 2017 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2018 © Aïda Muluneh The NGV warmly thanks Triennial Major Supporter Bowness Family Foundation for their support.
SUMMER 2020
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Artist Meagan Pelham at work on Love owls and mermaids singing in the rainbow pop, a mural by Mathew Calandra, Emily Crockford, Annette Galstaun, Lauren Kerjan, Jaycee Kim, Catherine McGuiness and Pelham of Studio A. Commissioned by the AGNSW in 2020 for Archie Plus. Generously supported by the Anita and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis Foundation Š the artists
Celebrating people, portraiture and the power of community Art Gallery of New South Wales Until 10 Jan Free entry Includes new work by Adrienne Doig Cherine Fahd L-FRESH The LION + Nardean Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Mathew Calandra, Emily Crockford, Annette Galstaun, Lauren Kerjan, Jaycee Kim, Catherine McGuiness and Meagan Pelham of Studio A Angela Tiatia Amanda Williams William Yang togetherinart.org
