Welcome to Issue 331

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This Autumn edition of Art Monthly Australasia springs from my involvement as part of the Curatorium for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. Along with my insightful and generous peers Paschal Daantos Berry (Head of Learning and Participation, Art Gallery of New South Wales), Anna Davis (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), and Hannah Donnelly (Producer, First Nations Programs, Information + Cultural Exchange), I have been fortunate as Curator at Artspace to work alongside Artistic Director José Roca to collectively curate the 2022 edition. Titled ‘rīvus’, it centres around rivers, wetlands, seas and other salt and freshwater ecosystems as dynamic living systems with political agency. These entities have for the longest time been witnesses and victims to our collective mistreatment of the earth and of each other.  

In our research we have been led by many rivers and water bodies worldwide and their custodians from all walks of life – two-legged and otherwise – in an attempt to consider a perspective other than our own. I believe this sentiment is really what art is about and that artists are critical in leading social change by opening up hearts and imaginations.  

So for this issue I’ve invited artists, writers and curators to respond to the tributaries of thought and ideas behind ‘rīvus’, with a consciously open-ended approach more poetic than political (although the latter is inescapable and the former is often political). A number of the works and practices explored in these pages can be seen in the Biennale. Others share an interest in its delta of interrelated themes, including Indigenous science, cultural flows, ancestral technologies, counter-mapping, multispecies justice, water healing, spirit streams and sustainable methods of coexistence. Rivers, and water more broadly, were ever-present in our conversations, as were their connotations of flow and connectivity.  

James Gatt opens with his stream of consciousness, a water-like text ‘intended to meander and flow, to embrace transferral and possible cultivations’. He swims through multitudinous ideas, including the privatisation and control of water as a means to regulate and confine publics – an ongoing colonial and capitalist tactic. Moving from liquid to data streams, from the physical to the spiritual, Gatt is guided by the work of a number of artists, writers, sociologists, neuroscientists and philosophers.  

Pondering the consciousness of nature, Wergaia and Wemba Wemba woman Susie Anderson takes inspiration from ‘rīvus’ participant Carolina Caycedo’s evocative water portraits that give water ‘its own form, face, and its own particular voice’. Anderson revels in the watery qualities of empathy, adaptability, ferociousness and determination. She talks to water and listens in return. She shares its warning: be open to confluence, or else!  

As is characteristic of the collaborative spirit of their practice, IVI invited their friend and accomplished ocean voyager Captain ‘Aunofo Havea Funaki Satuala to share some of her story. ‘Aunofo is the first female licensed captain in Tonga, chartering traditional vaka across vast seas, and the transformative role that weaving and navigation have had on her life is evident in her generous words.  

In concert with ‘Aunofo’s descriptions of her haptic knowledge of sailing and weaving are Madeleine Collie’s somatic memories of her time spent in Folkestone in south-east England. Working with artists in direct response to the site opens up a larger enquiry into, in her words, ‘the task of finding other ways of being human’. In her musings the landslides of the Warren are an expression of the earth, an ‘earth being’, and also an apt metaphor for history, and for modernity, ever-shifting under our feet.  

Anabelle Lacroix delves into the diverse practice of ‘rīvus’ participant Clare Milledge (and our cover artist), who encapsulates many of the ideas explored in our pages – collaboration, sustainability, a (re)turn to the poetic, and an acknowledgment and respect for knowledge that is held and known only by the body – of humans, of animals, plants, waters and stars.  

Brazilian artist Alex Cerveny shares his exciting new works commissioned for the Biennale, while Tabita Rezaire reveals Amakaba, her evolving vision for a more conscious and responsible way of living, built in the middle of the Amazon rainforest of French Guiana.  

Thank you to the commissioned writers and artists for their wonderful contributions to this explorative issue, and to my truly collaborative and supportive colleagues in the Curatorium and at the Biennale of Sydney and Artspace. 

Talia Linz 

Guest Editor 

The meandering line in April Glaser-Hinder’s ‘One does nothing alone’

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‘One does nothing alone’ showcases the formalist sculptures of April Glaser-Hinder in a close collaboration between Glaser-Hinder and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery Curator Andrew Halyday, who have known one another for more than 20 years. Highlighting key moments in the artist’s five-decade career in Australia and Europe, the show encourages us to contemplate her meditative harmonisations of space, line and curve as she intuitively explores tangents to their fullest capacity.  

Glaser-Hinder’s sculptures evoke the dualities and rhythmic patterns found in nature, synthesised to their simplest form. Her most recent sculpture, The Wave, when Water touches Sky (2019), is reminiscent of barrelling waves or sea spray as it circumvents into the air. The cyclical energy speaks to the nearby photographic work Movement of Water, Isar River, Munich, (c. 1990), which captures the intense flow of the Isar as the current forces glistening water to twist and unfurl into crested waves.   

Her steel band series investigates density, dimensionality and the balancing of opposing forces. In Belt IV (1979), there is a push and pull motion that is elicited from diaphanous perforated steel mesh as it curves behind and the triangle of shiny polished metal as it angles forwards. A line of white light is refracted across the plinth, extending its form in a play of light and shadow.  

Although sculpture is the medium through which Glaser-Hinder identifies herself as an artist, the expanse of her discerning eye is all-encompassing, including videography, photography, painting and poetry. Her film Ice and Water (c. 1995–99) provides a glimpse into the way the artist views the world as it documents rushing water pushing against and penetrating melting sheets of ice. She captures the moment that frozen German rivers begin to thaw with the coming of spring.  

The niece of Frank and Margel Hinder, Glaser-Hinder (born 1928) began her studies at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) as a mature-age student in her forties before taking courses in panel beating and spray painting at night school in Ultimo, where she was the first female artist in the workshop. Her earliest sculpture, Yellow (1970), portrays the deft weightlessness that defines her abstract geometric constructions. Affectionately known by the artist as ‘Little Yellow’, it is exhibited in Wagga Wagga alongside her steel ribbon series. In these works, such as Slide Over (1975) and Open Ended (1976), the artist explores the illusory space held underneath the meandering line. Inspired by the flow of colour in her experimental drip paintings, the tapered steel floats with a fluidity defying the rigidity of the material.  

‘One does nothing alone’ presents the artist’s oeuvre as a series of intimate vignettes, contemplating her works of art as little worlds within worlds, but also allowing the viewer to follow the line to see the bigger picture. 

Rebecca Blake, Wagga Wagga 

‘April Glaser-Hinder: One does nothing alone’ is on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until 8 May 2022. 

The ecology of Rachel Theodorakis

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‘Journeys’ at Grainger Gallery, Canberra, features Sally Simpson and Rachel Theodorakis, whose works resonate with bones, mortality, time and thread. ‘Journeys’ is an early commercial show for Theodorakis, who graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design in 2017, and also serves as a survey of her practice to date, with fresh presentations of key works intermingling with new series. 

For Theodorakis, tradition proves mutable and expansive. Meditative hand skills learnt from her mother and grandmother are used to graft silk flowers to animal skulls and spines. The art of basket weaving has been refined to encase large curving bones of cows and the finely articulated remains of kangaroos. In this way, the Roman god of beginnings, endings and transitions has become Januss – Goddess of Transitions (2021), embodied by two ram skulls, the forward facing of which is resplendent in a headdress of silk roses. In Transference (2017), a large jawbone is partially clothed in black weaving that suspends a second bone, whose uppermost reaches are similarly covered. Each is vulnerable: the giving, supporting jawbone is being drained; the receiving bone is utterly dependent and unprotected against the time when the jawbone lets go.

Very recent works focus on relationships and wellbeing. The unabashed and unsentimental ‘Nurture’ series of 2021 is a compelling statement of the importance of the parent-child relationship. Each sculpture comprises two resonant forms: a cow bone encased in thick weaving shelters or supports a smaller similarly shaped kangaroo bone covered in finely woven thread. In contrast to Transference, the effect is of connected independence.

In Twentytwenty (2021), the individual bones of a kangaroo tail are each encased in two layers of weaving before being drawn into a gentle encircling darkness. As Theodorakis explained in her artist statement: ‘We live in a society that fears darkness and it causes great distress. I wish to share a different viewpoint … The darkness is a place of nourishment. It offers respite, somewhere to reflect, to gain new knowledge and grow strong again.’

Faced by a world of upheaval and the increasingly oppressive reality of our climate crisis, Theodorakis’s work issues a personal invitation to change. Her careful material transformations suggest that successful transitions are conscious and painstaking as well as intuitive and hopeful leaps of faith. In ‘Journeys’, her work helps guide our philosophical focus – to the darkness for the benefits that can be found there, and to each other.

Margaret Farmer, Canberra

‘Journeys: Sally Simpson and Rachel Theodorakis’ is on view at Grainger Gallery, Canberra, until 20 March 2022.

On home turf: Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty at Tweed

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What with lockdowns and gallery closures, the pandemic has brought about many changes in art practice. Interestingly, it is the established genre of still life where this can be seen most clearly.

At the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, the exhibition ‘At Home’, which exhibits still-life paintings by Ben Quilty (born 1973) together with those by his friend and mentor Margaret Olley (1923–2011), we witness the changing relationships to objects, pictorial objectives and techniques which have occurred over a generation.

As a young artist, Olley’s primary focus was landscape. Not owning a car, the convenience of a still life set up in her house gradually became her chosen subject matter – either in the form of an interior or a focused arrangement on a table. Her works are considered and sensual, with the carefully placed objects, flowers and fruit capturing light and the rhythm of space. Colour and scale are naturalistic and the order rational.

For those familiar with Quilty’s work dealing with expressions of humanity, such as compassion, anger and empathy, the return to still life may seem surprising, but it has been a constant within his oeuvre following on from his ‘Torana’, ‘Skull’ and ‘Budgie’ series of the 2000s. When COVID brought about the need for Quilty’s son Joe to homeschool in his father’s studio, Quilty decided not to work on violent emotional paintings, but to turn to the more meditative still life which he had always enjoyed.

Quilty’s work does not propose still life as a closely cropped and focused arrangement on a table, nor does he suggest an exercise in formal deconstruction. His still-life painting is more about translating a universe of feeling inspired by the natural world through the sensations of sight and touch into a sensuous combination of colour and light. It is only to be expected that his subject matter would reveal a generational difference, and Quilty’s works Multi Vitamins and Surface Spray and Locked down (both 2020) are clearly related to the pandemic.

Olley once told me that a teacher had accused her of having greedy eyes, and greedy eyes she had in the interior Chinese screen and yellow room (1996), where the work not only takes in the many objects in the room but flows into the adjacent blue kitchen. In Ranunculus and pears (2004), it is hard to imagine where one more object could fit as she masterfully handles both objects and space.

By contrast, Quilty’s Christopher’s Cobra Lily morphs into a tangle of surface shapes suggestive of its subject’s insect-eating powers, while Silence, Tone’s Waratah (also 2020) has a deeply poetic simplicity.

Curator Ingrid Hedgcock has provided an interesting connection between the two artists by including a work by 15-year-old Olley and one by 18-year-old Quilty, each of which could have been executed by the other.

Olley’s home is on permanent exhibition at the Tweed, and the inclusion of the paint-laden table and Victorian chair from Quilty’s studio gives some idea of his working space alongside Mim Stirling’s and Steven Alderton’s photographs of the Quilty and Olley studios respectively. Their unique interconnection through art is established with the inclusion of Quilty’s Elwood Park (2002) to which Olley awarded that year’s Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, and Quilty’s portrait of Olley which won the 2011 Archibald Prize.

Within the gallery spaces, audiences are encouraged to create their own still life as well as an online challenge on Facebook and Instagram. It is an exhibition which has a lot to give and a lot to think about.

Christine France, Murwillumbah

‘At Home: Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty’ is on display at Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, Murwillumbah, until 20 February 2022. As the Co-executor of Margaret Olley’s estate, the author worked closely with Tweed Regional Gallery to open the Margaret Olley Art Centre in 2014.

Into the warren: White Rabbit’s microcosm of contemporary China

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Philanthropist Judith Neilson opened the White Rabbit Gallery 13 years ago, with 500 works in her collection of contemporary (which she defines as post-2000) Chinese art. Since then, the gallery has grown from an ambitious private project to make a once largely unknown section of art history into one of Sydney’s destination galleries, and the collection itself has now expanded to almost 3000 works.

White Rabbit Gallery reopened to the public in December last year after Sydney’s four-month lockdown with a bang. Titled ‘Big in China’, the exhibition explores the very definition of White Rabbit’s aspirations as both a collection, institution and gallery space.

‘What does it mean to make it big in China?’ curator David Williams asks. According to critic Pi Li (writing in the 2010 book The Big Bang: Contemporary Chinese Art from the White Rabbit Collection), in the space of just 30 years, Chinese artists have gone from underground dissidents to global quasi-celebrities. Today, for a contemporary Chinese artist to make it big in China, talent alone is no longer enough. Rather, the grand narratives of China, the oldest extant civilisation on the planet, and the unique creativity of its leading artists combine to move the nation. Williams takes on a new approach to answer his own question, this time using the overarching idea of global celebrity to tie the works together instead of his usual thematic approach.

‘Big in China’ features the works of 11 artists spread out among the gallery’s four floors. At the entrance, a tunnel invites visitors to participate in an 8-bit video game, where they play as a communist soldier armed with Coca-Cola grenades on a mission to reach the moon – this is Feng Mengbo’s Long March – Restart (2008), a commentary on the scars that the Cultural Revolution has left on contemporary China. Upstairs, Lin Yan’s Sky 2 (2016) leads visitors through a peaceful maze constructed of countless layers of dyed xuan, alluding to the ancient yet enduring Chinese tradition of ink on rice paper.

The second floor is dominated by Xu Zhen’s Hello (2018–19), the robotic serpentine Corinthian column that writhes and twists to greet the audience, most recently displayed at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Finally, the top floor opens to Tang Nannan’s video Faith Mountain (2015) projected on the walls of a circular room. Compared to the video work at the entrance, there is an overwhelming sense of quiet here – viewers are invited to sit in the darkness on cushions and gaze into the infinite and undulating landscape before them.

The ascension from the ground to the third floor becomes a journey in itself – the progression from sensory overload to subversive art histories to pure peace brings insight to how contemporary Chinese artists animate an entire nation in unison. ‘Big in China’ brings out the gems of Neilson’s private collection, leading audiences to reach their own conclusions about what it really takes to succeed in China’s competitive and flourishing art scene.

In a sense, however, this exhibition reads like a series of collection highlights: a microcosmic retrospective gaze into the strongest works the gallery has displayed since 2009. It feels like a finale of sorts: a resolute deep dive that ties the gallery’s past 23 exhibitions together. Perhaps this signals a renaissance for the collection, as a statement that there is a new vision emerging. Or perhaps this is purely a milestone set in place by White Rabbit to mark a point in time in the continuously evolving cultural landscape that is contemporary China.

Zeta Xu, Sydney

Curated by David Williams, ‘Big in China’ is at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, until 22 May 2022. Zeta Xu was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Continuities and change: 'Doing Feminism' by Anne Marsh

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This invaluable compendium by art historian Anne Marsh provides a comprehensive overview of feminism and Australian art from the 1970s to the present. The work examined includes performance art, photography, sculpture, painting and printmaking, and is organised by decade, although there is some crossover where the material demands comparison or linkage. In Part One, Marsh catalogues works alongside excerpts from key texts of the period, which are reproduced in more detail in Part Two. This structural division proves very effective, as it allows the artworks to be in conversation with each other, permitting unimpeded visual comparison and juxtaposition.

Marsh does not treat feminism as a taken-for-granted concept or a unified movement. Rather, she succinctly traces its various threads and its relationships with both art and social change in Australia more broadly, such as the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, as well as the ongoing struggle for self-determination by our First Nations people. Although she catalogues the art by decade, she also notes that this is a somewhat arbitrary marker, arguing that the ‘feminism of the 1970s needs to be considered as part of a long decade that starts somewhere in the mid to late 1960s in Australia’.

Marsh also uses the concept of feminism as an organising principle in a manner that is expansive and generous, rather than reductive or exclusive. This achievement is underpinned, as the book’s title suggests, by focusing on action undertaken in the name of feminism, rather than the use of feminism as a designation of personal identity. In line with this approach, Marsh also includes craft in her discussion, linking it back to grassroots consciousness-raising practices. A key example is ‘craftvism’, which is used by the Knitting Nannas ‘as an anchoring point for political activism in their persistent campaigns against the mining of coal seam gas in Australia’.

Marsh identifies key international influences, such as the lecture tour undertaken by Lucy Lippard in 1975, and also Laura Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on postcolonial feminism, but balances these against homegrown influences and collectives. She is also attentive to the ways in which knowledge formation occurs, highlighting the institutionalisation of particular works in the art history curriculum, such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), and the ongoing work of challenging the canon. Marsh notes the work carried out in the last decade to contextualise the contribution of Indigenous artists to the contemporary art movement, acknowledging that in the 1970s, although the ‘nascent avant-garde in painting was emerging from the Western Desert as Indigenous artists started to enter the contemporary art scene … it was inconceivable to the white art world … that Indigenous art would take centre stage in the next decades’.

Doing Feminism is a vital record of how feminists have sought to remake the world through art, and renders visible both the continuities and the changes.

Amy Walters

Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia by Anne Marsh: Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2021, 532 pages, AU$199.99; Amy Walters was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Titular puns and Freudian slips: Sarah Lucas at the NGA

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The National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is billed as the first major solo exhibition of Lucas’s work in this country. Featuring new sculptures from both her ongoing ‘Bunny’ series and a more recent series cast in bronze (from which the gallery last year purchased TITTIPUSSIDAD, 2018), the installation sits prominently alongside and concurrent with the ‘Know My Name’ exhibition of Australian women artists.

Although she rose to notoriety as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement of the late 1980s, Lucas’s name has arguably not retained the celebrity status that other YBAs such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst still enjoy. Her work, however, continues to draw on the practices that the YBAs group used to shock the art establishment at its inception in its use of everyday objects and crude representations of sexual and other bodily processes. Her photographic self-portrait from 1990, which depicts Lucas eating a banana, is emblematic of her confrontational style. Reproduced in giant black-and-white prints on the walls of the exhibition space, it also presents Lucas in an androgynous light, a theme that recurs in her sculptures.

The first time you are in a room with Lucas’s work, it is hard to know what to make of it, and ‘Project 1’ is no exception. Surrounded by pendulous breasts and huge penises, at first glance the installation seems to be an uncanny manifestation of a stereotypical patriarchal fantasy in which women are impossibly proportioned and the phallus rules. At the same time, a disarming playful quality is also evident in Lucas’s use of visual puns and titular jokes. The figure PEEPING THOMASINA (2020) is a key example: while her name references the stereotypical male voyeur, the figure is looking at the viewer while revealing her own genitalia.

The ‘Bunny’ series originated in 1997 and references the Playboy magazine logo. Principally constructed from nylon stockings, their pliable forms echo the soft sculptures of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Their most striking features are their lanky contorted limbs and prominent breasts. As the figures are headless, the breasts meet the viewer’s eye, a tactic that draws attention to the male gaze by explicitly tracking it. Each figure is lit from above, as though they are performing on stage, an association that is enhanced by the stripper heels adorning some of the figures’ feet. While this arrangement echoes the patriarchal construction of the female body as public property, Lucas subverts this association through her figures’ implied agency. OOPS! (2019) features a figure straddling a chair in a manner reminiscent of the iconic photograph of Christine Keeler taken by Lewis Morley in 1963. In her later years, Keeler revealed that she was reluctant to appear nude, and that the pose had been selected to hide her nakedness. In Lucas’s rendition, it seems that the figure is choosing to reveal her nudity, and that this is the transgression.

DORA LALALA (2020) strikes an almost-childlike pose, as though the figure is awkwardly revealing her sexual self while in a kind of dream state. This is possibly an homage to Freud, whom Lucas admires (one of his case studies was about a woman he named Dora). Her sculptures parallel Freud’s psychoanalytic work; the unremitting focus on crude sexuality could be interpreted as reductive, but, on another level, it brings to the fore archetypes that are deeply embedded within our culture.

Since 2007, Lucas has lived in a farmhouse in rural Suffolk, where, surrounded by ancient churches and the relics of agrarian life, her access to a deeper time structure has become possible. This, in turn, has led to a revitalisation of the mythic in her work, an idea encapsulated in her bronze sculpture ELF WARRIOR (2018). Her use of bronze connotes glory and domination, especially when contrasted with the pliability of the ‘Bunny’ stockings, but the show of strength collectively implied by these figures is undercut by both the absurd size of their phallic elements and their latent androgyny – a final reminder that nothing with Lucas is ever settled.

Amy Walters, Canberra

Curated by Peter Johnson, ‘Project 1: Sarah Lucas’ is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until 18 April 2022, and can also be viewed online. Amy Walters was a 2021 participant in the APPRAISE writing program, a partnership between ACT Writers and Art Monthly Australasia, funded by the ACT Government’s artsACT grants program.

Mapping Croft’s voyages and traces of Country at CMAG

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Brenda L. Croft’s current multimedia exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG), ‘hand/made/held/ground’, traces the artist’s continuing connection to Country through an insightful exploration of her patrilineal heritage and Indigenous epistemologies.  

Dispersed across the floor and the walls of the gallery are a multitude of palm-sized glass casts of kurrwa (stone axes) and jimpila (stone spearheads), customary objects originating from Gurindji Country. Reminiscent of constellations in the night sky, the translucent objects sit atop steel bases that periodically shine with coloured lights. In the dimly lit space, the captivating work is connected by wires that have been organised organically, creating interlinking paths reflecting on Croft’s personal journey as a descendant of a Stolen Generations’ member. Another form of tracing surrounds the installation with photographs of satellite images of Country. This body of work physically maps out Croft’s voyages, many of which were accompanied by family and Gurindji community members, in the style of GPS navigation routes.

Displayed in conjunction with the exhibition is Croft’s 2018 ‘Made in Australia II’ series. Drawn from the CMAG collection, the eight large-scale photographs are reproductions of Kodachrome slides taken in the 1950s and 1960s by the artist’s mother, Dorothy Jean Croft, an Anglo-Australian woman. The enlarged images reveal Dorothy’s handwritten notes alongside the ‘Made in Australia’ manufacturing imprint of each slide, a pairing evocative of the nation’s changing postwar demographic. 

By re-examining material objects in diverse and engaging ways, ‘hand/made/held/ground’ presents an auto-ethnographical investigation of Croft’s relationship to both her patrilineal and matrilineal lineages, providing an artistic roadmap for the future. 

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Canberra

‘hand/made/held/ground’ is currently on display at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until 22 January 2022.

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.