Satiating artists and audiences: ‘SIMMER’ at MAMA

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The verb simmer describes a liquid substance bubbling gently, just below boiling point. The Oxford English Dictionary also defines simmer as ‘to be in a state of subdued or suppressed activity’. Collectively, we simmered away during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns: trapped inside, cut off from family and friends, worlds reduced to the interior of our respective homes. When we were finally freed, joy bubbled to the surface. We gathered around picnic rugs, sharing food and drink in a burst of frenzied activity. ‘SIMMER’ at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) embodies these sentiments. According to its website, the exhibition aspires to consider ‘how food can bring us together, break down barriers and open us up to new experiences’. This is a well-rehearsed line of enquiry in studies of food-related artwork. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud applied the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe practices emergent in the 1990s that reintegrated social contact into art encounters. Bourriaud theorised that such work could repair social bonds weakened through feelings of alienation or isolation. Following a period of fractured social relations from the enforced separation caused by the pandemic, ‘SIMMER’ similarly addresses the ways food can engender kinship and bonding.  

Many of the artworks selected by curator Nanette Orly explore the cultural significance and social relations implicit in preparing and sharing foodstuffs. Singaporean-Australian artist Nabilah Nordin’s installation Domestic Dough Facility (2021) involves sculpted dough mixers and conveyor belts devoid of their functionality alongside an assortment of oddly shaped, rock-hard bread. The latter is a highly symbolic foodstuff; we say to ‘break bread’ to describe kinship practices involving food. American artist Eva Aguila’s Comida a Mano (2019) frames tortillas as a tangible link to her Mexican heritage, and British artist Navi Kaur’s Mērā Ghar (2021) involves deeply personal familial rituals linked to food, culture and faith. Both films consider how food production and consumption can serve as a method to maintain social and cultural ties, especially for individuals who resettle in a new country.  

Australian artist E. J. Son’s T tree (2021), an assemblage of fleshy nipples, abstracts the forms of capsicums and tomatoes to appear like the soft petals of a flower. Son casts the produce’s rounded ends in flesh-toned silicone and inserts a replica of a human nipple in the middle. Son’s titillating tree entwines the ripened reproductive organs of flowers (or fruits) with a part of the female anatomy that is both sexualised and a source of nourishment for infants. The work speaks to our earliest experience combining eating and social interaction – breastfeeding – an act of care that forms social bonds between child and mother. 

‘SIMMER’ offers audiences a global survey of food-based customs and presents a veritable feast to a travel-starved population. It relates to a seemingly similar show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, ‘The Way We Eat’, a display drawn mainly from the museum’s Asian art collection that explores food consumption by way of vessels, tableware and banquet scenes. As we start to reconnect with our family and friends, MAMA’s exhibition reminds us of the role foodstuffs play across cultures in cementing social bonds and in bringing into sensorial focus the essential relationship between artist and audience.  

Megan R. Fizell, Albury 

Curated by Nanette Orly, ‘SIMMER’ is on display at the Murray Art Museum Albury until 13 February 2022. 

Alexa Malizon: Navigating the in-between

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‘Being part of a culture should bring a sense of belonging,’ Canberra-based artist Alexa Malizon says, ‘but being part of a diaspora means feeling like you’re constantly living in two worlds, and belonging to neither.’

This sense of cultural dissonance is the motivation behind Malizon’s work, which shows at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in her first solo exhibition, ‘Diversitea Talks’. As a Filipino woman born in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Australia, her work reflects her own personal struggles with identity. ‘Since there is such an absence of ethnic minorities in popular culture, I wanted to represent a body that doesn’t exist within the standards of both cultures, and for people to be exposed to it through my works,’ she says.

Malizon has also noticed that a substantial superiority complex exists in the art world when it comes to pop culture – social- and mass-media forms are often treated facetiously in comparison to ‘serious’ art displayed in public galleries, but in reality these platforms define an entire nation’s identity through the sheer scale of their coverage. When ethnic minorities are absent in mass media, however, racial stereotypes prevail, fuelled by prejudice and the lack of genuine experiences with that specific group. Australia, which prides itself on its diversity and multiculturalism, still has a culture of excluding the voices of people of colour from its mainstream discourse. ‘This was the inspiration for my project,’ Malizon says. ‘The title “Diversitea Talks” speaks about diversity, or rather the lack thereof, and “spills the tea” on growing up in a western-dominated world.’

Malizon’s recent works reflect on her self-proposed question: ‘In what ways can the photographic medium explore cultural difference?’ The result is a series of experimental videos that focus on post-production techniques such as video-layering, cropping and karaoke-like subtitling. Through the five works exhibited in ‘Diversitea Talks’, Malizon pulls the audience along as her alter egos experience the embarrassment that being a second-generation immigrant brings to mundane activities like starting at a new school or singing karaoke.

Alexa Malizon is navigating the in-between spaces that are often uncomfortable to talk about and, as a result, are usually brushed under the rug. Her work challenges the binaries of mainstream culture, reminding us that important conversations take place in the infinite shades of grey between polarities of pure black and pure white.

Zeta Xu, Canberra

‘Alexa Malizon: Diversitea Talks’ is currently on display at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra, until 16 December 2021. All artist quotes in this article are taken from a conversation with the author that took place over Zoom on 8 October 2021. Zeta Xu is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

A single drop: Wu Mali’s ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project

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The Sydney Asian Art Series (SAAS), a collaboration between the Power Institute of the University of Sydney and historian and curator Olivier Krischer, gathers leading voices from all over the world to engage with critical issues in Asian art. This year, the SAAS presented a four-part series titled ‘Art and Environment’, which aimed to discuss the interrelationships of art, environment and eco-political flows. The final event of the series took place on 25 October over an online Zoom webinar, led by Taiwan-based artist, writer and curator Wu Mali. Titled ‘Mending the Broken Land with Water’, the talk explored Wu’s ongoing ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project (2010– ).

Wu began with a series of questions: What can art do in and for the public sphere? How can art practitioners play a role in the context of a capitalised urban space? And how can we rediscover an old land and work towards a new universality? Wu’s work draws much inspiration from the work of post-truth philosopher Bruno Latour’s ideas of a new universality, which refers to a democratised way of acquiring scientific knowledge not by cognition but as an embodied cultural practice.

The ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project takes place across the Danshui River in Taipei, which has been polluted due to overpopulation, industrialisation and mass agriculture. Wu took on the mission to heal the land from a grassroots cultural perspective, using three key initiations to rediscover, reimagine and reinvent the river. First residents of hyper-urbanised Taipei gathered once a month to collaboratively cook and eat a breakfast using produce from local farms. Next, in collaboration with the local Bamboo Curtain Studio, Wu organised for a number of art practitioners to work with schools in public art projects across the river, highlighting the point that immediate surroundings can teach just as much as textbooks. Finally, Wu worked with Professor Huang Jui-Mao to stage a pop-up museum by the river to create dialogues between different demographics in the ways they have engaged with the waterway.

‘There has been a significant impact,’ Wu explained, ‘we have catalysed local grassroots initiations, and the creek has received a lot of attention from both public and private sectors. Also, the residents have gotten to know each other, so the place becomes a so-called home place. Finally, this project has redefined the artist’s and art practitioner’s role in contemporary society.’

These initiations may seem idealistic and insignificant, but they have begun an environmental revolution in the area. Ultimately, the ‘Plum Tree Creek’ project demonstrates how every individual, no matter their age, education level or income, has something to offer.

Zeta Xu

This year the SAAS also featured Patrick Flores (1 and 8 April), Furuhata Yuriko (6 May), and Sugata Ray (16 September). Zeta Xu is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

 

Capturing Country: ‘Art Centres on Screen’

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Desart is a non-profit organisation supporting the Central Australian Aboriginal art community representing 35 Indigenous-owned community-based art centres. From 1–8 November, Desart is hosting the ‘Art Centres Online’ event featuring the ‘Art Centres on Screen’ film series, followed by the online ‘MarketPlace’ (which takes the place of this traditional showcase as part of the annual Desert Mob festival at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs).  

The program emerged from the successful 2020 Desert Mob symposium which was held online for the first time as a response to the pandemic. In addition to the virtual marketplace and exhibition, the event launched a series of short films made in collaboration with Northern Territory art centres. This year, the initiative was extended to celebrate 14 stories from additional Desart members, including artists from the Minyma Kutjara Arts Project, Papunya Tula Artists’ remote studios and the Uluru Cultural Centre. Filmed on Country, the captivating series highlights the unique stories and influence of culture and community behind a diverse range of contemporary art practices. 

The series includes sisters Norma Bryant and Eva Baker’s accounts of the profound cultural and familial significance of the ‘Two Women’ Dreaming story – a recurring theme in their paintings – while reflecting on their own connection to Country. The films are intended to support the participating art centres and will be featured on their websites and screened at relevant exhibitions.  

Selected shorts are currently screened at the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi festival to complement works from the Minyma Kutjara Arts Project. Following the ‘Art Centres Online’ program, the films will also be presented in Perth at the 2021 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial  in November. The ‘MarketPlace’ offers the opportunity to support Desart members through its online shop, with the profits going directly to the artists and their communities.  

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Canberra

Desart’s ‘Art Centres on Screen’ will take place from 1–4 November before the online ‘MarketPlace’ from 5–8 November 2021.

 

The land’s disquiet: Julia Roche’s ‘Under a Winter Moon’ at MAMA

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Julia Roche’s paintings in ‘Under a Winter Moon’ capture the sublime qualities of the environment. There is an emotional tethering that is immediately felt when encountering her work, elicited from her sustained connection to the land. Roche created this series on Wiradjuri country, working plein-air under the cover of night at her family property ‘Wooroola’ near Mangoplah and the regenerative farm ‘Bibbaringa’ at Bowna, both situated in the Riverina district of New South Wales.

The crisp winter climate experienced by Roche is captured in the serene beauty of her paintings, depicting hazy waves of rain, glistening frost and coverings of evening mist. The dark ink-blue sky is an omnipresent element throughout the series, shrouding the undulating valleys and hills, as shadowed delineations of trees, shrubs and dams punctuate the landscape. Barely discernible in the dark, they have been manifested by the artist through the recollection of memories and the evocation of feeling. In Night Lit (2021), it is as though the trees have developed buoyancy, floating above a cloak of rain that envelops the valley, illuminated by a radiant wash of silvery moonlight.

Underlying the beauty is a sense of uneasiness in the landscape’s disquiet. With her immediate family working in farming, Roche is no stranger to the perilous nature of the environment. Experiencing devastating droughts and bushfires, she intimately understands nature’s power for destruction which is becoming amplified with the world’s changing climate. ‘Under a Winter Moon’ is an ode to the fertile nurturing brought by vital winter rains and a celebration of the life that water sustains.

The dense overlaying of pigment in the mixed-media paintings Under a Winter Moon I, II and III (all 2021) mirror the abundance of texture and layers of vegetation. Created over multiple sittings, Roche uses a variety of mark-making techniques and materials, including oil paint, pastels and charcoal sourced locally following the recent bushfires. The dense microscopic elements of the bush are magnified and elevated, capturing the gestural feelings of the landscape. By exposing her canvases to the ecosystem, there is a weathering that completes each painting, solidifying its physical connection to the land and, in the words of the artist, ‘serving as a time- and site-specific record of the natural world’.

Roche’s paintings move beyond simply depicting her surrounds and reflect the atmospheric changes and emotive qualities of the land at night. Her surety of touch reveals her empathetic relationship with the environment and deep understanding of the power of nature.

Rebecca Blake, Albury

‘Julia Roche: Under a Winter Moon’ is currently on display at the Murray Art Museum Albury until 28 November.

Beyond museology: ‘The National 2021’

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A curator’s role when working with living artists in a commissioning context is to encourage artists to create the best possible work for the given circumstances. If that is achieved with consideration, sensitivity and rigor, it is not only apparent in the exhibition’s staging, but in increased audience impact. For a biennial exhibition like ‘The National: New Australian Art’, we can assume that – perhaps unlike an international biennale – local audiences have seen at least some of these practices before. Therefore it is not simply about making an artist’s practice visible, but the focus of the exhibition needs to be on high quality artistic support and presentation. With this particular lens in mind, let us look at this year’s final iteration of ‘The National’. As has been the case with the previous two editions, the 2021 exhibition was presented across three venues, a massive institutional collaboration between the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), all in metro Sydney.

The Carriageworks component was curated by Sydney-based independent curator Abigail Moncrieff. She presented a refreshingly agile and relational curatorial staging for audiences which was demonstrated, in particular, by her sensitivity to exhibition design. Moncrieff exploited sightlines to ensure that careful micro relations were developed between particular works depending on the audience’s viewpoint within the space. An example of this was All the violence within this (2019–21) by Alana Hunt, a video which was viewable from both the front and back of its three screen panels, and which created a dynamic connection with Wamba Wamba/Latji Latji/Wadi Wadi woman Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s Narrbong Galang (2021) through a shared exploration of memory, erasure, violence and country. New staging of works in the main exhibition space rounded off with A Day in the Life (2020), a five-channel installation by the brilliant Karrabing Film Collective. Moving beyond the many museological trappings of classifications, Moncrieff presented a show that flowed together through seemingly effortless and natural connections between works.

The MCA section of ‘The National 2021’ was curated by the museum’s then-longstanding Chief Curator Rachel Kent. With this experience she brought a certain astuteness and awareness of how artists could best traverse the museum spaces and make the most of ceiling heights, natural light and audience flow. A major focus was on female-identifying artists, with work developed to explore shared concerns. Successful installations included Maree Clarke’s Jacob (2020), a multidisciplinary work of photography and glass that was presented liminally (as the light source in a largely darkened space), and Lauren Berkowitz’s Plastic Topographies (2020–21), with the work of suspended recycled plastic strategically placed near one of the only windows in the gallery, providing the opportunity to see both the materiality of the work enveloped by natural light and the world outside the gallery (where plastic pollutants are unfortunately still a common sight at Circular Quay). Engaging installations by Caroline Rothwell, Sally Smart and Judith Wright also made the most of their spaces.

The AGNSW component was curated by the gallery’s Curator of Asian Art, Matt Cox, and Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Erin Vink. Despite exhibiting some of my favourite artists working in Australia today, including the talented Justin Shoulder, Leyla Stevens, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Abdullah M. I. Syed, the curatorial decisions of space and context unfortunately let down the presentation of these artists’ work. Other disappointments included Fiona Hall’s installation work EXODUST, which was completely lost in the entrance foyer (such a shame for one of Australia’s most important senior female artists), and Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler’s sound sculpture Regenerator (also 2021), which felt drowned out by its large thoroughfare space. Perhaps instead of curatorial mistakes, these examples demonstrate how exhibition architecture must stay dynamic to respond to a changing world, and I hope that with the new build of Sydney Modern these concerns are addressed in future exhibitions.

For a national survey exhibition in 2021, we need curatorial vision and exhibition spaces that allow artists to showcase their work in ways that challenge the scope of their practices, pushing them to ambitious new heights. Audiences also need to see Australian art performing to international standards, and to do so requires time, budget, curatorial sensitivity and attention to detail. Some of this is the responsibility of the curator, but wider discussions surrounding funding allocations and institutional spaces need to be considered too.

Tess Maunder, Sydney

This is an edited version of a longer review that appears in the Spring 2021 print edition of Art Monthly Australasia. ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ opened on 26 March 2021 and was shown across Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 5 September; at Carriageworks until 20 June; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 22 August 2021. 

 

Returning the gaze: Angela O’Keeffe’s 'Night Blue'

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At the height of the Me Too movement, the question of how to deal with the legacies of violent and misogynistic male artists reached its apogee. In a 2018 article for Marie Claire magazine, Roxane Gay wrote that it is ‘quite easy for me to think nothing of the supposedly great art of bad men’, when she remembers ‘all the silence, decades and decades of enforced silence, intimidation, and manipulation, that enabled bad men to flourish’.

As emotionally satisfying as this sentiment may be, it is also a way of sidestepping the question, particularly when it comes to the collections of major institutions. What does it mean to ‘think nothing’ of venerated artworks? Should the National Gallery of Australia, for example, encourage us to ‘think nothing’ of Blue poles (1952) because Jackson Pollock was violent towards his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, and others?   

The American artist Michelle Hartney, conversely, sees the historic juncture of Me Too as an opportunity to expand the art historical record. As part of her guerilla project ‘Correct Art History’, Hartney devises alternative wall labels for artworks hanging in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions that acknowledge the misogyny of their artists. Her revised wall label for Balthus asks: ‘Censoring artists is out of the question, but what is the responsibility of the art institution to educate viewers and turn the presentation of an artist’s work into a teaching moment?’ 

Angela O’Keeffe’s novel Night Blue is another creative correction. Told from the alternating points of view of a PhD candidate and, in a beautiful feat of writerly imagination, the painting itself, the story traces the artwork’s journey from conception in a Long Island barn to Australian cultural icon without shying away from the disturbing behaviour of its creator. Reflecting on its first home away from Pollock, in a private abode, the painting muses: ‘I could have died in that house had I not been sold again. You might ask how a painting can die when it is not in physical danger. But that is a misunderstanding of how a painting lives.’ The painting is nourished by stories; indeed, it only learns about itself by absorbing information from those who gaze upon it. Perhaps this is why, despite spending much of its life in the public eye, it characterises its trajectory as ‘the outer workings of something far more private’. This private thing is not an essential fixed core, known only to itself; nor is it solely the creative and cultural visions of Pollock and the painting’s political champion Gough Whitlam. Rather, it is a kind of collective biography. It longs to be gazed at, but also returns that gaze. 

Night Blue challenges the idea that an artwork only has one story, expanding the record without being didactic. A work of art in its own right, it makes space for the emerging legacy of our current cultural moment – our decision to no longer vanish violence against women from our national story.

Amy Walters

Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe: Transit Lounge Publishing, Melbourne, 2021, 143 pages, AU$27.99; Amy Walters is a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, which is a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Contemporary adaptations and future rituals in Cairns

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In an eclectic grouping of renowned creatives at Cairns Art Gallery, ‘Ritual: The past in the present’ features work by contemporary Indigenous art stalwarts alongside artistic practices crisscrossing the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting myriad First Nations cultures from New Zealand to Taiwan. Each of the 125 works encapsulates contemporary adaptations, alongside documentation of old ways, of both religious and practical rituals.

The exhibition is a visual treat, spanning two gallery floors. Great swathes of tapestry and weaving, painting, sculptural installation, photography and film (as well as soundscapes) create a complex and immersive experience which offers significant commentary on the present, insights into the past and glimpses of the future (in terms of evolving cultures). 

Marking the eons of human cultural and societal evolution, meaningful rituals to the artists are explored with new mediums. Or, in the case of Janet Fieldhouse’s ceramic and woven works, they are transferred to new modes of expression. Fieldhouse’s sculptures broach subjects traditionally explored in dance, re-framing the stories told via the artefacts themselves: artefacts which would have been incorporated as instruments, props or dress. Important is this display, highlighting the enveloping qualities of traditional dance and storytelling as a holistic expression of artistry and lore. 

Pieces by Brian Robinson and Heather Koowootha are reminiscent of old-time anthropological and botanical fieldnotes and sketches. Their detailed drawings and watercolours tell of custom, design, ecology and the preparation of food and instruments – an ingenious presentation of artefacts and native plants in a way that the earlier studies of Joseph Banks, in hindsight, ought to have (but could never have) included.

One key film, by Dr Christian Thompson AO, breaks away from his usual tableau photography to present an emotive and moving triptych (Berceuse, 2017), in which he chants, sings and evokes the spirit of his Bidjara ancestry. The film is in fine company with several others – further emphasising the encroachment of new media in reimagining old ceremonies, habits and meditations.

‘Ritual: The past in the present’ rethinks the space for collaborative showings of traditional and traditionally inspired contemporary works by Australia’s Indigenous artists and their Asia-Pacific counterparts – all of whom form the rich tapestry of Australia’s evolving postcolonial culture and, through creative exchange, forge the rituals of the future.

Jack Wilkie-Jans, Cairns

Curated by Julietta Park, Teho Ropeyarn and Kylie Burke and presented in partnership with the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), ‘Ritual: The past in the present’ is on display at Cairns Art Gallery until 22 August 2021. The exhibition can be toured virtually online. Jack Wilkie-Jans is an artist, writer and Marketing and Communications Manager of CIAF.

Sparse yet strong: Tate Modern’s ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’

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London’s Tate Modern threw open its doors in mid-May 2021 to culturally deprived crowds. The winter lockdown of 2021 was long and grim. In a world of newly opened exhibitions, none was more anticipated by Australians stranded far from home than ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’, unveiled 8 June.

In 2015 Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia established the International Joint Acquisition Program (IJAP). An AU$2.75 million corporate gift from Qantas made the five-year program possible, and was established to grow the global reception of Australian art. Nine of the 26 works on display derive from the IJAP. 

In 1992 the High Court of Australia overturned the ‘terra nullius’ doctrine in favour of Eddie Mabo and his co-plaintiffs. Works in the exhibition orbit around Mabo’s pioneering land rights case. Highlighting Australian art before and after 1992, the exhibition seeks ‘to examine debates around land rights and the ongoing legacies of colonialism’. Selected works by artists such as Gordon Bennett, Bonita Ely, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Tracey Moffatt are strong and indicative of Australia’s vibrant visual art scene.

Dale Harding’s The Leap/Watershed (2017) is particularly striking. The artist uses ochre pigments and acrylic paint to tell the story of around 200 Indigenous Australians who, in 1867, jumped off a cliff in the Mackay region to escape capture by the Queensland Native Police Force. Standing in front of Harding’s piece, audiences can hear native birds calling out from Ely’s Jabiluka UO2 (1979) installation in another room. The birdsong further evokes the tragic scene Harding paints. His emotional work sits opposite captivating pieces by Kngwarreye that also tell stories of the land. Tightly positioned dots over linear strokes represent animals, vegetation and landscapes that characterise Anmatyerre creation stories. 

Despite displaying a strong suite of works, the physical display of the exhibition is somewhat sparse and thin. Vernon Ah Kee’s video installation tall man (2010) is buffered by two empty rooms. The exhibition’s introductory space is similarly spare with small images and spread-out wall texts. The result is a feeling of missed opportunity to create visual connections between artists, regions and stories. However, where the exhibition lacks in display, it makes up for in the frankness of its explanatory texts and wall labels that acknowledge the trauma of history both past and present. 

Claire Dalgleish, London

 Curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, Valentina Ravaglia and Tamsin Hong, ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’ is on view at London’s Tate Modern until (European) Spring 2022.

 

 

Connecting artist, object and audience: Lincoln Austin’s ‘The Space Between Us’

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Video of the public activation of Lincoln Austin’s Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln (2020– ) invites audiences through the doors of the Ipswich Art Gallery and into a tightly curated survey of his last 20 years. In the video, a lightweight and colourful hexagonal ball, a geometric ‘kite’, freewheels through an urban landscape, and is described in the catalogue by exhibition curator Samantha Littley as ‘a prop, a costume and a performance’. The most recent and personally informed work in the exhibition, its joy pervades the whole experience. Titled ‘The Space Between Us’, the survey inside the galleries otherwise explores the optical, spatial and geometric qualities of Austin’s sculpture, requiring the viewer to move around every work to fully appreciate their visual liveliness.

Austin’s early training was in theatre set design in Adelaide. Driven to explore making something a little bit more universal, he looked to geometry and mathematics, using process and set parameters to find a generative model. Austin’s earliest interests, visible in Held by Logic (2000), express a consistent concern with engaging viewers physically.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, grouped by mood and materials rather than chronology, and describes his deep engagement with space and pattern. Austin’s geometric methodology is an iterative model that, as Littley identifies in the catalogue, ‘establishes a connection between artist, object, and audience that is central to Austin’s aims’.

Layers of materials are used to evoke memory, reinforced by titles such as None of That Matters Now (2016). Shadow Boxing #7 (2013) requests that we move like the title suggests to appreciate the nuance in this optical mix. And Deep Space uses cut flyscreen to recreate the depths of perspective through ocular melding. Hang on to Yourself (also 2017), a maze-like installation, captures the viewer as participant and subject with projected light in a darkened room.

The joy in Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln is, in some ways, a revelation of the personal impetus that Austin rejected some 20 years ago, channelled in previous works into mathematical investigations. However, in its more private reality (as a gay man loath to express too much joy), it provides the most poignant entry and epilogue to this survey.

Louise Martin-Chew, Brisbane

Curated by Samantha Littley, ‘Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us’ is on display at Ipswich Art Gallery until 8 August 2021.

Flipping the bird


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‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’ is a major undertaking for artist Wart and a long time coming. Back in 1993 she visited the Ngorongoro Crater in Northern Tanzania where she first witnessed flamingos in the wild – a flamboyance of flamingos, to use the collective noun. Much later during a European trip in 2018, Wart learnt about the flamingos that had migrated to the swamplands of Venice. 

In this exhibition at Sydney’s Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Wart posits that the flamingo – once at home in pre-colonised Australia over a million years ago – finds its unlikely contemporary equivalent in the ibis. Since the early 1980s Wart has resided in the inner-city of Sydney, where one constant within the flux of aggressive, relentless gentrification is this much-maligned species of birdlife that has increasingly thrived in Australia’s coastal and inland cities. Introduced by conservationists in the early 1970s, the ibis has adapted to the harsh urban environment it finds itself in by being ‘nourished’ from what humans reject as waste: food scraps and other debris sourced from curb-side garbage bins. Nicknamed the ‘bin chicken’ or ‘tip turkey’ for good reason, its very life is dependent on an endless supply of what is dead to us. 

For the exhibition, Wart presents this ultimate ‘outsider’ bird en masse – a wedge of ibis, to use the collective noun – and contrasts it with its superficially superior counterpart, the flamingo. Wart’s series of images playfully reveal the way our conventional, highly gendered norms of beauty are not value-neutral, but rather they speak directly to how appearances and identities are deemed either socially acceptable or are rejected, marginalised and stigmatised. The pink flamingo has accumulated a multitude of meanings associated with its so-called beauty. Pretty in pink, the flamingo has been regarded as exotic and rarefied, decorative and ornate. Inevitably over time, this has gendered and to an extent queered its cultural connotations. Muddied by its proclivity for dumpster diving, the monochromatic ibis has not fared as well in the beauty stakes. 

A longstanding champion for the underdog – or underbird in this case – Wart takes the piss out of the flamingo and sides with the ibis – celebrating the ostracised bird for not conforming to conventional ideas of what is beautiful. This is especially pronounced in one room where Wart presents an ominous ‘wall of eyes’ comprised of multiple paintings of ibis eyeballs gazing at the viewer. In comparison, Wart’s ‘Flamingle Cluster’ of works in the adjacent room, garishly spotlit with pink gels, are anthropomorphised to suggest vanity and self-absorption. 

There is a deeply personal reason for Wart’s attraction to a stigmatised outsider like the ibis. For Wart the multiplicity of bird eyes suggests paranoia and speaks to the mass monitoring we experience in everyday life. As a person living with mental illness since her schizoaffective diagnosis in the late 1980s, Wart likens the eyes to the surveillance and scrutiny patients are subjected to when under constant observation in psychiatric wards. But while the ibis’s outsider status may mirror Wart’s lived experience of mental illness, her work cannot be framed as outsider art. Wart is not an outsider artist, having formally trained at art school in the late 1970s with a stellar four-decades-and-counting career exhibiting and performing in Australia.  

Despite its dark undercurrents and anthropomorphised critique, ‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’ is a witty and accessible tribute to Wart’s current obsessions, her unique take on life and her singular place in the world. Thinking about the feathers she ruffles with this new body of work, I am taken back to when I first encountered Wart around 2008 when she had plastered missing posters around Chippendale for her pet parrot, Fingers. Captioning a photo of Fingers perched on her shoulder in her unmistakable handwriting, she wrote: Gone Missing – The Bird! Very cheeky. Contact Wart ph 93182328. 

I am happy that Wart has finally found her bird.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Sydney

This text was originally commissioned to accompany Wart’s exhibition ‘Eye See Pink, Black and White’, on view at Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney, until 11 July. Daniel Mudie Cunningham is Director of Programs at Carriageworks.


Working through ‘The Dark Side’

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The conflation of mental illness with artistic ingenuity, and suffering with compelling artwork, have permeated much of the complicated history connecting art and mental health. While awareness of the latter seems to have grown significantly over the last ten years, especially since the pandemic, it is an issue that can still be very challenging to understand and to talk about.

It was against this complex backdrop that ‘The Dark Side’, a recent Perth exhibition spread across Gallery25 at Edith Cowan University and There Is in Northbridge, offered a refreshing new lens to reflect on the connection between art and mental wellbeing. Curated by Ted Snell (Honorary Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University), ‘The Dark Side’ brought together a multi-generational group of 14 Western Australian artists for whom artmaking can be a means to work through pain, difficulties and the shadows of the psyche.

The resulting artworks were as varied as each individual artist. Sharyn Egan’s Our Babies (2019), a series of around 100 doll beds fashioned from sardine cans, fabric and gravel, was created in response to the artist’s experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations. Installed in two orderly rows across both venues, the work used repetition alongside a minimalist aesthetic to powerful and solemn effect. Mary Moore’s etchings with mixed media from 1976 used a similarly restricted palette to explore the artist’s grief surrounding the loss of her sister. The works carried a diaristic tone with cryptic white marks on chalkboard-like black, giving them a sense of private interiority.

Mysterious symbols also surfaced in Tyrown Waigana’s expressive gestural paintings. With A Nice Place to Hate Yourself (2021), the artist employed vibrant magentas, yellows, oranges, blues and browns to create a surrealist scene of shifting perspectives and unease. At each venue, the works were positioned behind a mythic-looking creature shaped from polymer clay, a seeming guardian of the otherworldly spaces of Waigana’s paintings.

Mystical beings also abounded in Tarryn Gill’s seductive soft sculptures of beguiling cats and flying creatures, contortionists and grinning moons. These ‘Tricksters’ (2018), with their lush textures of fur, sequins and darting LED eyes, beckoned viewers into a world that appeared mischievous and playful yet potentially perilous and unsafe.

This allure of darkness – the pull between death and desire – appeared in a number of works, such as D’Arcy Coad’s ‘Morbid Curiosities’ (2020–21), a series of collages that juxtaposed fashion photography and film-noir stills with macabre imagery of post-mortem examinations and car crashes. In Roderick Sprigg’s painting Chicken (2019), two cars appeared frozen in time amid a head-on collision, recalling feelings such as shock, guilt and shame that can surface on reflection of difficult moments in the past. In her woven portraits of men whom she had jarring encounters with on Tinder, Carla Adams similarly spent time visually manifesting a source of pain or fear, seeming to wrest control to give it a life that she had agency in directing.

By contrast, Anna Nazzari’s tender watercolours grappled with the legacy of climate change and envisioned moments in the future. ‘The Harbingers’ (2020–21), a series of small drawings, depicted close-up details of bruised and diseased dolphin eyes, while Immersive (2020) showed a man all but swallowed up by the sea. In their delicately rendered details, the profound sadness and plausibility of Nazzari’s drawings felt all the more harrowing.

By placing emphasis on the artist’s process, ‘The Dark Side’ encouraged deeper reflection on the relationship between the artist and their artwork and, in turn, a more empathetic reading. The exhibition could have easily veered into voyeuristic territory or down the well-trodden path that pairs suffering and creativity. While at times ‘The Dark Side’ walked a tightrope through this terrain, it explored the topic with respect, nuance and commendable complexity.

Megan Hyde, Perth

‘The Dark Side’ was shown at Gallery25, Edith Cowan University, and at There Is, Perth, from 27 May until 17 June.

Constructing a national narrative: The NCPI in Taipei

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The National Centre of Photography and Images (NCPI) in Taipei opened in March this year after months of construction delays that coincided with COVID-19 concerns. The highly anticipated new institution is the first of its kind in Taiwan, and the fruition of persistent lobbying for over 15 years.

Housed in a restored Japanese-era colonial building, the centre aims to develop a Taiwanese history of photography through research, exhibitions and a growing collection. This effort was inspired by a conference held at the fourth Taipei Photo Festival in 1994 that called for the establishment of a photography museum in Taiwan to preserve the ongoing cultural contributions of the medium to Taiwanese society. Recognising the value of images as a cultural heritage and asset, Taiwanese photographers and academics continued to advocate for a dedicated institution, forming the Society of Photographic Museum and Culture of Taiwan in 2006, an association that began to lobby the Ministry of Culture.

By 2014, the restoration of the centre’s building had begun, and the National Taiwan Museum alongside the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts were both involved in organising and developing the collection archives, publications and preservation practices. The government support and effort highlight the ways in which art institutions construct national narratives. For the NCPI, the emphasis on a national photographic history is seen through its inaugural collection exhibition, ‘Hold the Mirror up to His Gaze: the Early History of Photography in Taiwan (1869–1949)’, a large-scale display of 600 images highlighting the changing sociopolitical contexts they were produced in. As the centre seeks to further place Taiwan internationally, it has also hosted the longtime touring exhibition ‘A Handful of Dust: from the Cosmic to the Domestic’, curated by David Campany, as part of its opening program. These objectives, with the establishment of the NCPI, provide a formal framework to promote and advance the photographic medium in Taiwan. The ambitious scope and impressive calibre of the opening exhibitions are promising, as the centre evolves to increase engagement with the public to inspire experiments in contemporary practice.

The NCPI exemplifies a long-term commitment to photography, and its opening came at a time when the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) had gone into several months of ‘hibernation’ due to financial losses and funding cuts over a difficult few years. A leading photography arts organisation operating since 1974, the ACP has supported some of Australia’s most prominent artists. It is imperative for independent cultural spaces like the ACP to survive and, hopefully, its restructuring (said to be announced by July) will allow it to continue contributing to photography in Australia in meaningful and sustainable ways.

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei

Unpacking the ‘wunderkammer’: The 2021 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize

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Described by judges as ‘a poignant, beautiful and major work’, a painting that examines the historical idea of a wunderkammer (or cabinet of curiosities) for contemporary eyes has won the 2021 Ravenswood School for Girls Australian Women’s Art Prize, the country’s highest value art prize for female artists. Vault (2020) by Sydney-based Caroline Rothwell (Yavuz Gallery), which was also a finalist in last year’s Sir John Sulman Prize, looks at what the artist has called ‘a Western disconnect from nature’ at a time that ‘a battle rages to recognise the value of traditional knowledge and the natural world’.

The emerging artist prize was won by Symone Male from Brisbane for Contagious, a timely and joyful painting depicting a woman in the act of ‘performative cleaning’ during the pandemic. Notably, Bulgul artist Imelda Wood Melamurrk from the Northern Territory won the Indigenous Emerging Artist Prize for her painting My Sister’s Birth on a Full Moon. The works of the 102 finalists are on display in Sydney, until 30 May.

For more information, click here or, to watch the announcement of winners for 2021, click here.

Through lines: ‘2021 Adelaide//International’ at Samstag Museum of Art

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The iterative exhibition series presented by Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art – centred on the curatorial premise of past, present and future – was, in its third and final instalment this year, poised to deal with the difficult (and current) challenge of looking ahead. Curator Gillian Brown prudently shifted things away from projection towards process. Across four bodies of work a fractal pattern of exhibition-making emerged – an exhibition inside an exhibition inside an exhibition – with subjects and through lines that proved timely yet timeless.

In Irish artist Jesse Jones’s Tremble Tremble (2017), a central figure apparated in the room, a white-haired Celtic giantess summoning the words of women who were murdered for practising witchcraft. At the time of viewing, Adelaide artist Eleanor Amor was charged with evoking the talismans of Jones’s expanded cinematic installation: an etched portal on the wall; a ring of hewn wooden tools; the scaled-down relics of courthouse architecture wrapped umbilically in beeswax.

Although Tremble Tremble was conceived against Jones’s own political backdrop – in 2018, Ireland repealed the eighth amendment in an historic referendum allowing for abortion – it is equally resonant on Australian shores. As #March4Justice took over Australia’s public and virtual domains, triggered by allegations of rape and women’s (lack of) place in the halls of power, Tremble Tremble reminds us that the history of witchcraft is also the history of women and the law.

Systems of law are taken up in Taloi Havini’s Tsomi wan-bel (2017), a three-channel video depicting a living practice of restorative justice in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. From the opening shots looking out from the island’s edge and the tight, direct gaze of the film’s three subjects – the perpetrator, the mediator and the victim – Tsomi wan-bel unfolds as a culturally coded model of reconciliation, its hybridised title meaning win-win.    

The significant act of Tsomi wan-bel is its omission. Havini’s directorial eye leads us to the peripheries of the village court rather than the dispute itself. In focusing on the objects and practices of kastom – preparation of pig, taro and sweet potato; chewing betel nut; reactions of community members on the sidelines – she carefully avoids the (often uninvited) scopophilic lens of the documentarian. Instead, Havini symbolically captures the people, place and processes of an embodied judiciary system. 

The presence of absence is also palpable in James Tylor’s The Darkness of Enlightenment (2021). In Tylor’s case, absence is physically scored into the 18 photographs and 31 blacked-out carvings that make up the installation – an archive of memorialisation. Tylor works hard to scrutinise Adelaide’s founding premise of ‘settlement’ in his depiction of Kaurna cultural sites (material and geographic) marked by this untruth. Of course, where there is void there is space. And, The Darkness of Enlightenment artfully occupies; Tylor rewrites redacted histories through living language and cultural continuity.  

In the final turn of ‘2021 Adelaide//International’, Fayen d’Evie’s Endnote: The Ethical Handling of Empty Spaces (2021) left us with a proposition: how might we transmit our stories into the future? D’Evie’s reply is found in the material properties of language. Drawing on her experience of blindness, her speculative texts are driven by tacit, embodied knowledge – ‘essays’ scribed in marble, stone and wood, signs transcribed into printed typography. As dancer and choreographer Benjamin Hancock performed between D’Evie’s suppositional works, he iterated a single phrase through motion – an arm held, a body poised, a gesture echoing into the future.

Belinda Howden, Adelaide

Curated by Gillian Brown, ‘2021 Adelaide//International’ was on display at Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, from 26 February until 1 April 2021.

The rabbit in art: ‘miffy & friends’

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To mark the end of a year marked by anxiety, introversion and isolation, the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum in Brisbane organised an uplifting, joyous and celebratory exhibition focused on the Dutch artist and author Dick Bruna’s widely influential creation Miffy. ‘miffy & friends’ (which continues at the south-east Melbourne gallery Bunjil Place until 13 June) is the first Australian exhibition of this internationally acclaimed illustrator (1927–2017), born Hendrik Magdalenus Bruna in Utrecht. His distinguished and varied practice is given local agency by the inclusion of a group of Australian artists whose practices engage with or were in some way shaped by Miffy, a small female rabbit invariably drawn by Bruna with a continuous, regularised dark line.

The characteristics of Bruna’s distinctive graphic language of economy and clarity were formulated in the mid-1950s in a synthesis of successive early twentieth-century European modernities: in particular, the refinement of Matisse and the economy of Léger, whose name in French revealingly translates into English as ‘lightweight’ – a pejorative term often and somewhat hypocritically applied to artists whose work, like Bruna’s, manages to be popular and accessible. Miffy’s interiority is, however, quite complicated in contrast to her ostensibly simple exterior. For more than 60 years, she has been open to multiple and increasingly complex interpretations, while more recently her transcultural agency has been cited as prescient.

This makes ‘miffy & friends’ consequent to exhibition-making in multicultural Australia, particularly for institutions seeking to reach out to non-traditional audiences and build a more diverse engagement with their programming. Miffy is also the greatest influence on the development of an artist similarly known only by a mononym (Nell, as noted in conversation with the exhibition’s curator Vanessa Van Ooyen in the catalogue). And it is the way in which this young rabbit has seemingly manifested herself in the works of Australian artists as different as Nell, Brian Robinson and Vipoo Srivilasa that makes ‘miffy & friends’ such a seductive project in art-historical terms. Additionally, works by Stephen Bird, Sadie Chandler, Nadia Hernández and Carla McRae are on display in an adjacent space. This ensemble of disparate local artists gives ‘miffy & friends’ a surprising but compelling relevance, evidencing an alternative creative lineage for a contemporary Australian art.

‘miffy & friends’ includes not only the finished artworks for more than six decades of Miffy, who first appeared in print in 1955, but, importantly, the larval stages of Bruna’s exacting, time-consuming process. These include numerous preparatory drawings on transparent paper, subsequently transferred to watercolour paper and the completed gouache or poster paintings.

Miffy’s abiding cuteness is part of Bruna’s continuing legacy in our region, attested to by her echo through the graphic language of kawaii, most notably in characters such as Hello Kitty. Indeed, it is rare to find exhibitions in which challenging, more culturally fluid frameworks such as this are elaborated for and around familiar Australian practices.

Gary Carsley, Brisbane

Curated by Vanessa Van Ooyen, ‘miffy & friends’ was exhibited at QUT Art Museum, Brisbane from 21 November 2020 until 14 March 2021; it is currently being shown at Bunjil Place, Melbourne, until 13 June 2021.

Ash Keating’s metaphorical flames

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It was in the infancy of the pandemic last year, before reality was stripped of all illusions, when I took myself out of the house on a stroll through Carlton Gardens to Little Bourke Street. The city’s buildings towered above: cold and brutal, dense and tall. The restaurants of Australia’s oldest Chinatown were empty. In the streets, idle taxi drivers stood hunched over on pavements, smoking or scrawling on phone screens. I forced a reckoning by photographing some of Chinatown’s signs (written in one of the world’s oldest continuously used systems of writing). I captured an empty lazy Susan; the hum of empty aquariums; unopened letters scattered across shopfront entrances. I took my phone camera around the narrow lanes, with garbage bins and graffiti-covered surfaces stained by air pollution and cooking oil sludge.

As I approached the Shark Fin Inn, I felt an ominous force hovering out of eyesight and tilted my head to look across an empty block, once a carpark – now PARK, an open-air garden bar – to find a high wall draped in luminous paint. I noted the soft pinks and blues, lavender hues, bleeding and sliding. Perception itself is slippery. It seemed like a hallucination.

Baracco+Wright Architects were the driving force behind PARK’s design. The concept was inspired by Linda Tegg’s Grasslands Repair, part of the Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, which recreated Melbourne’s indigenous habitat using more than 10,000 plants. PARK was to spearhead the role vacant sites could play in activating the urban ecology of a city, foregrounding earnest commercial and artistic partnerships combating the political issues presented by colonialism and climate change.

The painted wall held my attention. The beauty of abstract painterly forms served as the perfect backdrop to the native tree and shrub planter bags: the vegetation that would have grown in pre-colonial Melbourne. The artist’s enchantment with the universe evoked Helen Frankenthaler’s exuberance. Almost whimsical if it was not for its scale, nevertheless utopian, there was an interplay of colour, an airiness and breathing quality, revealing a method intuitive and accepting of chance. It assimilated all external contexts. A firmly manipulated painterly effect suggested emotional serenity, a powerful evocation of poetic tranquillity.

Positioning my camera, I reflected on all the laboured intensity required to achieve such an effect in a world where anything designed to evoke sensual beauty in public space is quickly demolished in favour of expediency. I did an online search and discovered the installation was by Ash Keating (born 1980, Melbourne). I posted an Instagram picture and tagged him.

Nine months later, in January this year, I received a message from Keating about a second iteration of his Chinatown intervention. I invited him for dim sum and found myself walking back to the same location to check out his new work. Entering through the archway, I wondered whether meandering in urban space for pure enjoyment was still possible: battery-operated feng shui lucky cats waved through shopfronts; BBQ ducks and char siu pork now hung in windows; crammed shellfish were again suffocating in aquariums bubbling with the hum of neon light, while ornamental buddhas laughed away notions of eternal prosperity. And there it was: Keating’s new towering installation covered two adjacent walls, splattered in fiery red and yellow.

Over a simple lunch upstairs at the Crystal Jade, we discussed the artist’s developing oeuvre – from waste assemblage installations to large-scale wall and canvas paintings – as he repeatedly searches for the essence and purity of forms in colour, paint and application. To enter the world of Keating’s imagination, one should first think of him, not as a graffiti artist, nor as a muralist. His overarching aim is to take the ethos of abstract expressionism off the museum walls and into the streets. He is a painter pursuing a form of spectral and textual autonomy for the image. He blows paint using a fire extinguisher, a type of action painting requiring sheer power and muscular physicality.

‘Silence is so accurate,’ Rothko once remarked. Unlike Pollock, whose paint dripped over canvas across the floor, Keating blasts it onto walls, paying homage to the American action painters, and the artists of the colourfield tradition who explored the limits and potentiality of paint as it related to flatness or two-dimensionality.

There was something deliberate in Keating’s choice of red and yellow. These are the primary colours of Little Bourke Street, and Australia’s Chinese population were among the first to feel the effects of COVID-19. From the moment the media began to report news from Wuhan, the virus became ethnically tinged. Keating turned 40 during Melbourne’s bleak second lockdown in July 2020, and in the Chinatown intervention’s new iteration this year, he told me, he wanted to scorch all the hysteria around a culturally constructed virus. The colours and method of application invoked a cataclysmic furnace. It was as if the 2019–20 bushfires were now inside the city and, in an ironic twist, Keating’s fire extinguisher was transformed into a flamethrower, searing all in its wake.

PARK closed for renovations early last year. More than a year on it lies ramshackle, with planter bags overturned and ripped, decomposing rubbish, and native grasses becoming tumbleweeds. The native trees of pre-contact times have shed their leaves. Pigeons fly from exhaust pipes and air-conditioner vents to dying branches, enclosed by Keating’s bonfires.

As predictions about climate change, pandemic infection and disruption become our daily reality, we find ourselves amid a danger of biblical scale. The pervading paranoia exposes our vulnerability. Realising that history never really ended, however whimsically or earnestly we tried, Keating’s metaphorical flames torch all prevailing illusions that the world as we precariously knew it has survived.

Koulla Roussos, Melbourne

The artist recently completed a new public mural in St Kilda, commissioned by the City of Port Phillip, which accompanies ‘Ash Keating: Duality > Aerial’, an exhibition at Linden New Art, Melbourne, on display until 16 May 2021.

Shapes of ongoing fascination, shapes of ongoing dismay

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With a practice based around mapping and collecting (including, most recently, Australian fruit and vegetable cartons for ‘The National 2019’), the Brisbane-based artist Sean Rafferty began amassing his ‘Australias’ collection in 2010, pulling examples of the country’s iconographic geographic shape from anywhere and everywhere – milk bottles, socks, company logos, billboards and so on. ‘It started from a curiosity and affection,’ Rafferty tells me over the phone. And grew into a fascination for how the form of Australia ‘has been burnt into our collective retina’, shaping our national consciousness – a concept he credits to artist Philip Brophy. Scrolling through the Instagram @girt_by_sea, where Rafferty collates his substantial collection, it feels like a joyful, whimsical celebration of Australia’s outline and, by extension, Australia as a nation.

Recently, however, Rafferty has started to use his collection of Australias to explore a darker side of our island nation. On 7 December 2020, Rafferty posted a new artwork titled Nauru. It is a collage of Australias with a negative space in the centre, a ghostly silhouette of the Pacific island of Nauru. The caption states that this piece is the ‘first in a series probably called “Current and Former Island Prisons” … Less because of an ongoing fascination with representations of “Australia” and more because of an ongoing dismay with our nation’s treatment of refugees.’

The effect of surrounding the barren space of Nauru with multiple representations of Australia is eerie, portraying the absolute control that the Australian Government has over the lives of the refugees imprisoned there. They are girt, quite literally in this piece and in reality, by Australia. Girt by Australian politics.

Nauru grew from Rafferty’s realisation that, despite years of attending rallies in support of refugees and investing himself in their cause, he ‘had no real idea about what Nauru looked like … It made sense to juxtapose these two forms – this Australia that every Australian can draw from memory and then Nauru, which most people wouldn’t even be able to point to in the Pacific.’

This juxtaposition becomes more poignant on closer inspection, when you read the slogans on the Australias: ‘True Aussie Exports’; ‘Integrated in Australia’; ‘100% Aussie’ and so on. There is a cruel irony in the celebration of exports and integration when, since 2012 over 4000 people have been forcibly exported from Australia to be detained on Nauru or Papua New Guinea (PNG), preventing them from exercising their right to seek asylum.

‘I wanted to define Nauru’s shape with map logos that are kind of jingoistic,’ Rafferty explains. ‘I think the relationship between the celebration of Australia and this national stain is the point of the work.’

For his next piece in the series, Rafferty plans to create PNG’s Manus Island, with the idea of eventually exhibiting the works and raising money for the Refugee Council of Australia or the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. This body of work builds on Rafferty’s fascination with documenting the visual ephemera that surround us on a daily basis, bringing value through the process of mapping and collection to objects that are usually discarded without a thought. In ‘Current and Former Island Prisons’, we see the potential for collections to be mobilised in different ways and contexts to tell new and alternative stories. Rafferty’s work encourages us to see collections as malleable, as things that can be revisited, reconsidered and powerfully reframed.

Lara Chapman

Layering the land: Wayne Eager’s ‘Bitumen & Dirt’

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There is a particular brilliance to the ruddy soils of Central Australia under the glare of the midday sun. Incised by the sticky tar of arterial roads that snake through scrubby bush linking north and south, east and west, the desert landscapes of the interior radiate with intensity. It is this country that is the focus of Wayne Eager’s retrospective exhibition ‘Bitumen & Dirt’, curated by Kellie Joswig and recently seen at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery in Darwin (the show travels to the Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, in March). Bringing together 78 works, including richly hued canvases, prints and works on paper, the exhibition provides visitors with a sense of immersion in the land that has captivated Eager for over 30 years.

Eager began his artistic journey in Melbourne as a founding member of Roar Studios in Fitzroy. He first came to the Territory on a road trip in 1990 with fellow Roar artist David Larwill, then returned in 1992 to make the Territory his home. ‘Bitumen & Dirt’ charts Eager’s evolving response to the desert landscapes and escarpments of Kakadu over the years and the shift to exclusively abstract compositions. While Eager has a longstanding interest in abstract expressionism, what is interesting to consider are his first responses to the landscape at Kakadu. These gouaches stand out in the exhibition among canvases that play solely with line, shape and pattern. The early landscapes also demonstrate his preoccupation with mark-making, however the principles of the western tradition scaffold the composition. A horizon line separates earth from sky, and many of the paintings still incorporate recognisable features such as trees and mountain ranges. This speaks to the pull of the landscape tradition, which Eager completely abandoned in the late 1990s.

Eager’s deep dive into abstraction coincides with a wider move away from landscape painting by settler artists troubled by Australia’s colonial past. In the years following protests around the Bicentenary celebrations, traditional landscape painting no longer sustained legitimacy and was increasingly seen as implicated in the master narratives of settlement. Eager was at the heart of this shift, but his paintings are also informed by his direct experience with the land and Australia’s First Peoples.

Employed as a field worker for Papunya Tula Artists for five years, his close involvement with artists such as Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi and Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula encouraged an alternative way of seeing and relating to country. Not only were their canvases structured around an aerial perspective, but their entire relationship to country, as one of belonging rather than possessing, encouraged artists like Eager to see the land differently. Eager’s later compositions focus exclusively on colour, rhythm and form. Increasingly, the paintings become highly layered constructions of idiosyncratic mark-making and calligraphic gestures imbued with personal symbolism. He laboriously layers his canvases, often taking months to complete as he builds the surface, obscuring what lies beneath. This also reflects a sensitivity towards the cultural history of the land and an awareness of the accumulated human history which permeates our experiences of place.

Above all, the exhibition highlights Eager’s skill as an exquisite colourist. Whether under the soft blush of first light or the deep hues of a setting sun, the many moods of the desert sands are sensually conveyed in this exhibition.

Wendy Garden, Darwin

Curated by Kellie Joswig, ‘Bitumen & Dirt – Wayne Eager: Thirty Years in the Territory’ was exhibited at Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Darwin, from 22 October 2020 until 20 February 2021; it travels to Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, from 19 March until 14 June 2021.

Returnings home: David Keeling’s ‘Stranger’ at TMAG

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David Keeling has been painting Tasmania’s landscapes for around 40 years. He sees an ancient land recently occupied where European settlement scars are still starkly visible. His view, and those of his Tasmanian contemporaries – I am thinking of Raymond Arnold, Tim Burns, Stephanie Tabram, Richard Wastell and Philip Wolfhagen – deny the benign bucolic of John Glover (1767–1849) and the sublime of Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901). These early colonial painters were conditioned by their histories: millennia of European landscape adaptation that revealed no memory of their lands’ first scars.

Keeling’s works have a quiet dignity, a stillness that should not be mistaken for a romantic or even a rational view of Australia’s conflicted possession. He has always shown us the reality we must face, with his work reflecting a gradually evolving relationship to place, the landscape slowly moving from object to subject. When our regard for Australia’s landscape is subjective, we value it more.

Many of Keeling’s late twentieth-century works puzzle over our relationship with nature and culture; our impact was defined by discord – with the original people, and the land. And he often looks to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) collection in Hobart for reference. So it was timely, in his seventieth year, that TMAG recently mounted Keeling’s first retrospective, ‘Stranger’, which featured around 70 works across four gallery spaces (20 November 2020 – 14 February 2021).

In 1983, the year the Tasmanian Government was forced to stop damming the Franklin River, Keeling returned to Tasmania after studying art in Sydney. The damaged, objectified landscape was the focus of work painted during the 1980s and 1990s. In Young couple in developing landscape with panoramic views to distant hills (1988), the foregrounded dead Glover-shaped trees are ringbarked and the land is scattered with building rubble. But then in Nostalgia (1998), he refines his realisation and begins a gradual shift. He crafts a surreal scene of a man releasing (or chasing?) a bird in a pale evening sky. The work is held within a finely framed Georgian vitrine teetering on stilt-thin legs, giving the illusion of three-dimensionality. But as you look, you realise the image has flattened the vitrine of any pretence of depth or reality. The museum container promises an objective view, but Keeling is challenging that vanity.

In the early 2000s, Keeling returned home again, this time from an Australia Council-funded European trip, and you could see his focus intensifying as he got to know the landscape more intimately. The full force of his renewed interest gathered in the exhibition’s third gallery with a series of large-format works of Narawntapu National Park on Tasmania’s northern coast facing Bass Strait. The walls were steely coloured, each painting spotlit, with Keeling’s palette dappled with shadows: life-size casuarina trees golden, grey and brown. The branches are arterial, twisted and dense, pale and luminous, and yet never overwhelming. In some, the pigments have been combed, highlighting the tapestry-like weaving of the trunks and slender leaves.

Keeling never takes you beyond your environmental comfort zone; his explorations of nature are accessible to all. And while you are entranced, he delivers his counterpoint: even you, the stranger, can find Tasmania’s unique beauty and light – despite all that has happened.

Delia Nicholls, Hobart

Curated by Jane Stewart, ‘David Keeling: Stranger’ was on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, from 20 November 2020 until 14 February 2021.