Ecological variations, harmonic contemplation and songlines: ‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’

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‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’ celebrates the immense breadth of contemporary representations of the Australian landscape, bringing to the fore a multiplicity of voices that reflect on our cultural connection to the environment. Currently the most lucrative landscape award in Australia, it carries the same AU$100,000 prize money as the Archibald. Now in its fifth iteration, this year’s prize features 35 finalists selected from over 500 entrants, with the highest proportion of female finalists to date and the first female award recipient. Encompassing painting, photography and works on paper, the finalists broach the theme through an array of frameworks interrogating ideas such as connection to Country, secret or lost landscapes, the nature/culture nexus and environmental concerns.  

Senior Pitjantjatjara artist Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin from Mimili in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in South Australia won the 2022 prize with her painting Antara (2020). Her evocative work illustrates the Witchetty Grub (Maku) Tjukurpa from the Antara storyline, taught to her as a young girl. Goodwin depicts the three deep rock holes her community visits as part of this important ceremony. ‘This Tjukurpa holds so much for our women, for our people [and] is vital to the Maku life cycle and the continued prosperity,’ she told Art Monthly Australasia. Her intricate white dotting represents the Maku and is framed by a vibrant background that undulates with a cyclical energy. The broad sweeping brushstrokes in green, brown and yellow are symbolic of the verdant landscape and trees belonging to the Maku. Goodwin says she uses such bright hues in her artwork ‘because they are beautiful and powerful colours, just like this important Tjukurpa’. Goodwin’s expressive and layered palette echoes the vitality of the land, reflecting on the collective role of community as caretakers preserving the storylines of their Ancestors.  

This year’s judges, Mary Knights, Wayne Tunnicliffe and Judy Watson (Waanyi), assessed the creativity, narrative and skill of the entries. Dexterity and expert command of technique can be witnessed in kanamaluka/Launceston artist Melissa Smith’s honourably mentioned intaglio collagraph print this hush – Lake Sorell (2022). Utilising both new and traditional printmaking processes, Smith poetically captures the passages of sound moving across this expansive body of water. Her delicate lines follow the patterns of gentle gusts of wind and swirling eddies as a quiet harmonic contemplation of the ever-changing environment.  

Catherine Woo’s mixed-media painting on aluminium, A moment in the day (2022), speaks to light phenomena and transient moments. Awarded this year’s packing prize, her glimmering work evokes the scintillation of shifting light glinting against salt lakes or rippling water. Using the unconventional material of mica, Woo has built up delicate tonal layers of shimmering pigment reminiscent of iridescent nacre within a mollusc shell or oscillating light flickering between tree branches. It is in many ways a meditation on impermanence and the continual flux found within nature. The nipaluna/Hobart-based artist reflects on the cultural significance of this environmental wonder, which in Southeast Asia ‘is thought to embody a life force and creative energy, elusive and protean’ (according to her catalogue entry). Her evanescent painting is at once both a microcosmic and macrocosmic representation of the power of natural forces.   

This year’s finalists include the early-career artists Harrison Bowe and Kate Lewis who both evocatively capture the sweeping wilderness experienced while bushwalking across lutruwita/Tasmania’s rugged terrain. Bowe lyrically depicts the sublime power of the Frankland Range in Beyond the Citadel. In Lewis’s Arduous Fantasy (also 2022), she reveals the vast ecological variation she witnessed hiking the Overland Track in 2021, traversing lush rainforests, alpine mountains and fields of vibrant button grass and pandanus trees. The physical act of immersion within the landscape occurs again in Bungambrawatha/Albury artist Nat Ward’s energetic painting Chocolate lily buds on Nail Can hill (2022), a vivid compilation of bush wattle, eucalyptus and chocolate lilies.  

The works of art created by this year’s finalists show the expansive variety of individual and collective connections to Australia’s natural environment, with the winning work reminding us of a deeper caretaking that can take place through the poetic preservation of Ancestral storylines through the depicted landscape. 

Rebecca Blake, nipaluna/Hobart 

Curated by Amy Jackett, ‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’ is being exhibited at Hadley’s Orient Hotel, nipaluna/Hobart, until 21 August 2022.  

Ritual and ecstasy: Jeremy Shaw’s ‘Phase Shifting Index’

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Trying to distil the visual language of euphoria into a single artwork is no simple task. If we conceive of euphoria (not the series) and nirvana (not the band) as profoundly sensuous, it follows that employing written language to communicate such phenomena might prove insufficient.

Driven by a kaleidoscope of coruscating imagery and a fractured temporal character, Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index (2020), recently unveiled at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), explores how transcendental and revelatory states can allow for a kind of unrestricted agency to bloom, pithily sustain itself and then wilt, all within a few sultry moments. Commissioned and presented by a consortium of institutions including MONA, nipaluna/Hobart, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Swiss Institute, New York, and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, the work is now enjoying its Australian premiere.

Phase Shifting Index offers a rich spatial experience and explores Shaw’s ongoing fascination with altered cognisance and parallel realities, as well as the practices that trace such experiences. An immersive video installation in spirit, it can also be approached as a dance, experimental sound and quasi-archival artwork. Although the term ‘immersive’ has perhaps become overused in the wider context of contemporary art, it feels wholly appropriate when engaging with Shaw’s work.

Phase Shifting Index incorporates a seven-channel video installation and employs a raft of anachronistic media, such as 16mm film and Hi8 video tape, to present what appears, at first glance, to be found historical footage. Shaw presents a series of codified vignettes, in which fabricated subcultural groups engage in various forms of corporeal practice, including dance, physical therapy and other rites of movement. Phase Shifting Index excavates various points in pop-cultural history and provides ‘documentation’ snatched from recent memory, and includes frenetic grunge-era mosh pits, shimmering 1980s disco music videos and what could be a pensive Yvonne Rainer dance workshop.

These potent visual motifs oscillate steadily before morphing, or phasing, into something resembling synchronicity, at which point Phase Shifting Index starts to emanate a heady sense of euphoria and intoxication. As Shaw’s work proceeds towards climax, assorted bodies collude in opulent and harmonious throngs and the audience is met with a further encounter, a shared trip. Reaching its crescendo of dramatic action, Phase Shifting Index vibrates with a charged yet serene spiritual ferment. Typified by Shaw’s signature approach to datamosh visuals, the pulsating strobe-lit exhibition begins to respire deeply with choreographic contemporaneity. Following this moment of serenity, Phase Shifting Index begins to immediately burst, with torn pixels colliding across screens and disintegrating into a liquescent installation of psychedelia, before quickly fading into itself. There is a moment of pause, albeit devoid of resolution, before the cycle begins once again.

Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart

Curated by Jarrod Rawlins, ‘Phase Shifting Index’ is currently on view at the Museum of Old and New Art alongside ‘Exodust – Crying Country’, a collaborative project by Fiona Hall and A. J. King (curated by Jane Clark and Jarrod Rawlins), and ‘Within an utterance’ by Robert Andrew (curated by Emma Pike). All exhibitions are on display until 17 October 2022.

Illuminating a medium’s expressive potential

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‘Clay Dynasty’ at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney provides insights and inspiration into the world of Australian ceramics. Its large-scale display invites the viewer to spend extended time contemplating a wide range of ceramic styles, techniques and preoccupations. Showcasing the work of 160 artists from the 1960s until the present day, the exhibition features over 400 works from the museum’s collection, including 70 commissions. It ranges from functional work that responds to the British and Japanese traditions of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, through to investigations of sculptural form, politics, satire and intertextuality. 

The exhibition facilitates winding exploration through a diverse and interlinked field of ceramics in a large open space. A floor plan is provided in the exhibition guide, with a numbered route that is specified as optional. The route encompasses some temporal, stylistic and technique-based clusters, while the open layout allows for spontaneous exploration of links between various works. There would also be rich scope for an exhibition catalogue, to complement the viewer’s journey and stimulate further reflection on related contexts.   

Ceramics’ expressive potential is illuminated in the show. Evocations of natural elements can be found in many functional pieces including the vessels and plates of Janet Mansfield, Milton Moon and Peter Rushforth. Traditional Indigenous stories are conveyed in various works from the incised rounded forms of Thancoupie (Thainakuith) to the painted platters of Yaritji Heffernan (Pitjantjatjara). Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s still-life groups of functional works create a serene presence. Subtle text on the vessel of Louise Boscacci conveys the issue of extinct and threatened species.

Playful engagement with social and cultural references and ideas is prevalent. Funk-inspired ceramics from the 1970s such as Margaret Dodd’s blue FJ Holden and Joan Grounds’s postal parcels refer to political contexts. Gerry Wedd’s large urns fuse colourful imagery with text; Stephen Bird’s figures, Toby jugs and platters are embedded with satire; and Jenny Orchard provokes curiosity with imaginary hybridised sculptural creatures. Recent pandemic lockdowns have prompted various works including Vipoo Srivilasa’s humorous self-portrait embellished with significant features ranging from cats to amulets.  

For those seeking to gain insight into, or revisit, Australian ceramic history and contemporary practice, or pursue inspiration about the possibilities of the medium in general, ‘Clay Dynasty’ provides significant breadth and depth under one roof. The viewer can become immersed in a vast ceramic field and take a meandering journey through its variety and interconnections. 

Julia Jones, Sydney 

Curated by Eva Czernis-Ryl, ‘Clay Dynasty’ is on display at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, until 29 January 2023. 

Arresting and nuanced: ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’

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A black-feathered rooster hangs by its pink neck, its distressed gaze reciprocated by the family of chickens looking up at it. Next to them, a woman brandishes a knife, while the baby strapped to her back grasps the head of an already decapitated bird like a toy rattle. The vertically divided composition brings together primal need and individual vulnerability, executed in layered expressive brushwork that imparts a vibrational intensity into the painting.

This is Busui Ajaw’s Panatipata Weramani (Do not kill) (2022), part of an arresting series of paintings representing the Five Precepts in Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech and no intoxicants. Ajaw, a member of the nomadic Akha ethnic group from the highlands of Southeast Asia, fled as a child to Thailand with her family to escape violence in her home village in Myanmar. The self-taught artist’s works are part of ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’, an exhibition taking place jointly across two Sydney venues: 16albermarle Project Space and Delmar Gallery. Curated by Haisang Javanalikhikara of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and 16albermarle’s John Cruthers, the exhibition includes 12 artists born between the 1960s and the 1990s, representing early- and mid-career practices across a breadth of media and conceptual preoccupations.

Javanalikhikara and Cruthers have made an astute and varied selection which explores universally relatable themes while introducing Sydney audiences to some social and political nuances of their Southeast Asian neighbour. Som Supaparinya’s Paradise of the blind (2016/22) speaks to issues of censorship via an installation of bullet casings, shredded paper and books banned in Thailand and other parts of the Asia-Pacific; while Tada Hengsapkul’s photographic work They Said They Didn’t Use Live Rounds (2014) documents evidence of a violent 2010 crackdown in Bangkok which was denied by authorities.

Impressive material investigations are another key aspect of the exhibition, from the textured and intricate paper-cut relief sculptures of Kusofiyah Nibuesa, to the mind-bending embroideries of (Mariem) Thidarat Chantachua, to Imhathai Suwatthanasilp’s sculptures made from human hair (which gallery-goers might remember from the recent 23rd Biennale of Sydney).

16albermarle’s focus is the introduction of current art from Southeast Asia to Australian audiences, and past projects have focused on Indonesia and Myanmar, in collaboration with curators and art spaces from those countries. ‘Other Possible Worlds’ continues this ambition, expanding its footprint to a second venue in the form of Delmar Gallery at Trinity Grammar School, and emphasising the educational role that such exhibitions can play for audiences of all kinds.

‘Other Possible Worlds’ is a dynamic, affective and nuanced snapshot of contemporary life from the perspectives of these Thai artists.

Chloé Wolifson, Sydney

Curated by Haisang Javanalikhikara and John Cruthers, ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’ is on display at 16albermarle Project Space and Delmar Gallery, both in Sydney, until 31 July.   

Picturing a shared legal history: Helen Grace and Julie Ewington’s ‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’

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In early June, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery welcomed artist Helen Grace and curator Julie Ewington, both based in Warrang/Sydney, into their New Media Project Lab to present the exhibition ‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’.

In 1976, Violet Roberts and her son Bruce were convicted of murdering Eric Roberts, Violet’s husband and Bruce’s father who had been the long-term perpetrator of domestic violence against them. Details of the abuse endured by Violet and Bruce were omitted from their trial. At the time, the New South Wales (NSW) Crimes Act 1900 stated that a defence of provocation could only be argued if the killing had occurred during an attack from the abuser.

There was mass public outcry following Victoria and Bruce’s imprisonment, spearheaded by ‘Women Behind Bars’, an activist group based in Warrang/Sydney. Between May and October of 1980, the group staged vigils, marches and launched a petition in a campaign that drew widespread attention to the Roberts’ case and advocated for their release. Spurred on by an increased understanding of domestic violence within the community, the work of ‘Women Behind Bars’ successfully galvanised public support for the Roberts’ cause.

‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’ focuses on Grace’s photographic archive from 1980 in which she documented the grassroots campaign to free Violet and Bruce. The artist’s photographs, which are being shown for the first time, are exhibited alongside street posters and a campaign banner on loan from the National Museum of Australia. As part of their residency project, Ewington and Grace invited curators based in regional areas to attend a workshop at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. The visitors were granted access to Grace’s extensive archive in order to explore different selections and layouts for the exhibition. Participants encountered photographs of women being dragged away by police, activists sporting 1980s mullet hairstyles carrying the petition through the streets, and women scrawling posters and signs on the ground amid the chaos.

In what Grace refers to as her ‘activist existence’, these feminist campaigns and protests became part of her everyday life. Forty years later, through an intimate digitisation process, the artist, realised that in her mission to document the ordinary, she had in fact captured the extraordinary. Today, Grace’s evocative photographs possess the same resonance they did in 1980, with the artist saying recently: ‘I was struck by how all the issues I was concerned with are still very current — concerns that are at least for me, over 40 years old and still relevant. We haven’t made enough progress.’

After years of campaigning, Violet and Bruce were released from jail on 15 October 1980. Their case changed the NSW Crimes Act 1900 to recognise the impact and effects of domestic violence.

Ashleigh Adams, Wagga Wagga

Presented by the New Media Project Lab, ‘Helen Grace and Julie Ewington: Justice for Violet and Bruce’ is currently on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until 17 July 2022.   

Portrait of the artist as a young man: Helmut Newton at the Jewish Museum of Australia

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There is the saying that shoes maketh the man, and walking around the exhibition ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ it quickly becomes apparent that, while Newton’s photographic gaze is insistently heterosexual and male, the shoes worn by his subjects are more often than not female, though not necessarily downtrodden. These shoes are frequently stilettoed, sometimes strapped or buckled, and in one case sprouting a bouquet of feathers. They are, of course, the platforms for an army of Amazonian beauties as they act out a variety of power plays – standing, crouched or arrayed on beds – their heels often weaponised and ‘pointed’ at their masters or slaves, signifiers of submission or sexual domination depending on your point of view. 

But there was one particular shoe I kept coming back to in the show. This was almost shockingly disembodied and, like most of Newton’s photographs, shot in black-and-white. The focus was not just on the alarming curves of the Walter Steiger pump in question, photographed in Monte Carlo in 1983, and caught from behind so you could read the size imprinted on its pale leather soul (39), but also on the fleshy bulge of the wearer’s ankle, and the way the shoe’s pointy collar dug into the black stocking, suggesting a violent rupture or tear. 

For me, the shoe sums up the uncomfortable allure of the German-Australian photographer (1920–2004), the son of a Jewish button manufacturer in Berlin, who escaped Nazi persecution during the war to find refuge, first in the rag trade or schmatte businesses of Melbourne’s Flinders Lane during the 1940s and 1950s, and, later, within the smoke and mirrors of high-end fashion photography, from Vogue to Vanity Fair. Here, elegance is mixed with cruelty and steeped in sexuality while extracting outrage in an unexpected way: surely Newton would have known the offence given to women who had struggled to buy stockings during the war? As an image, however, it is unquestionably riveting. 

But the shoe does not stand alone, and what makes ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ so compelling is the surprising context it gives to an artistic oeuvre so seemingly preconceived. Here the curatorial choices are telling: no impeccable white-cube spaces or imposing wall texts. Instead, what we get is something grittier, more disorienting and claustrophobic: dark grey walls lit by elliptical neon sculptures and even lumps of cement on the floor, as well as soundscapes from the 1920s/30s and 1970s/80s (the artist’s seminal decades, first personally then professionally). The hang is cluttered and, while loosely chronological, confusing at first in the way it mixes documentation and ephemera with new large-scale and vintage prints from lenders such as the Helmut Newton Foundation and State Library of New South Wales. 

What we also get, in a raw unpolished sense, is a measure of the man himself. In ways made clear by the show, Melbourne made him an artist, as did his Jewishness, but also his secular self as he forged what would be lifelong collaborations with Condé Nast, and with his personal and creative partner – the Melbourne actress June Brunell who would become Alice Springs (1923–2021). It was in this city and in this community that Helmut Neustädter became Helmut Newton, while still shooting shoe catalogues for Myer, yet it was his chutzpah and cosmopolitanism, and a cool exacting eye inherited from pre-war Berlin, that took him to the world and held our attention so audaciously. 

Michael Fitzgerald, Melbourne 

Curated by Eleni Papavasileiou (with Cathy Pryor), and designed by Anna Tregloan, ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ is currently on display at the Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne, until 29 January 2023.   

Hope by way of melancholia: Gay Hawkes’s ‘The House of Longing’

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As a device for confronting painful and elegiac subject matter, humour can inform postures of resilience and allow for hope to take root. Be it furniture design, painting, dolewave or jazz piano, creative toil informed by a comic sensibility can often provide for the amelioration and navigation of pain.   

Currently on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), ‘The House of Longing’ is an exhibition celebrating the multifaceted practice of lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist Gay Hawkes. It is the most recent in an exhibition series highlighting living lutruwita/Tasmania-based practices and was preceded by presentations from David Keeling, Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway), Patrick Hall and Philip Wolfhagen.   

Bordering on a retrospective in its depth and scope, ‘The House of Longing’ collates a vast multitude of work drawn from across Hawkes’s storied career. It is fragmented into two distinct sections, before and after the 2013 bushfires which devastated much of the Turrakana/Tasman Peninsula, including Hawkes’s Dunalley house and boatshed studio, along with an assortment of precious tools and an irreplaceable collection of her life’s work.   

The exhibition highlights Hawkes’s attuned practice of blending approaches to furniture, sculpture, collage, education and painting with remarkable consideration. Throughout her career, Hawkes has skilfully collapsed the oft-reductive distinctions between these approaches. Much of the wisdom embodied in ‘The House of Longing’ resides in the value that Hawkes affords the interdependence of form, material and narrative.   

Almost a form of collage, Hawkes’s anthropomorphic furniture and nativity-like sculptural works are dotted with pop-cultural references and absurdist narrative inventions including Princess Diana embodying a missile, Elle Macpherson as a chook and Collingwood Football Club’s premiership victory in 1990. In Collingwood Premiership Cupboard (1991), Hawkes lovingly lampoons the religious fanaticism and pious reverence of Melbourne’s AFL community for their game. The work is indicative of how themes imbued with melancholia and religiosity are met with gentle irreverence, joviality and a persistent sense of humour, the importance of which becomes clearer as the exhibition progresses.    

Central to ‘The House of Longing’ is a video work by celebrated local filmmaker Roger Scholes, who sadly passed away in June this year. Among his many other achievements, Scholes is renowned for being the only Tasmanian to have won a critics’ prize at the Venice Film Festival, for The Tale of Ruby Rose in 1987. Taken shortly before the Dunalley fires, Scholes’s video documents Hawkes working alongside a group of young children in her boatshed studio which she dubbed ‘the Dunalley Children’s Chair Factory’. As a teacher, Hawkes taught her students to build objects and toys from found and recycled materials. In addition to illustrating her generosity of spirit as an artist and teacher, Scholes’s video can also be seen to anchor the primary gallery spaces, providing visitors with a precious moment of stillness and quiet contemplation in the midst of Hawkes’s elaborate exhibition, which also includes a number of absorbing paintings to emerge from residencies in Armenia and Georgia.  

Of the many lessons found in ‘The House of Longing’, what resonates most strongly is the crucial role of showing humour in the face of loss and hardship, wherever possible. Its ability to provide levity and reaffirm resilience is a deeply valuable tool that informs much of what we do and who we are.  

Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart  

Curated by Jane Stewart and Peter Hughes, ‘Gay Hawkes: The House of Longing’ is currently on display at TMAG, nipaluna/Hobart, until 28 August 2022.   

‘Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!’: How NIAF is showing Sydney the way

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‘It is a place where art and stories are exchanged, where buyers can meet remote artists. Best of all, it is where you can buy art that is being sold ethically.’ Writer Christopher Raja was here discussing twenty-five years of the ‘Desert Mob’ exhibition and marketplace at Alice Springs’s Araluen Arts Centre in 2015, but this pursuit of a meaningful and sustainable platform for First Nations culture has become the aspiring template for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art fairs across the country. 

‘Desert Mob’ has spawned a variety of marketplaces in the decades since, each inflected with their own particular sense of character and place: for instance, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, established in 2007, has more recently introduced fashion parades; while the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, begun in 2009, this year extends to a night of stand-up comedy. The newest offspring is the National Indigenous Art Fair (NIAF) which, since 2018, has been presenting a more intimate taste of First Nations culture (showcasing the work of around 30 art centres and collectives compared to over 70 in Darwin), but on prime Sydney real estate.  

Held at the Overseas Passenger Terminal in the Rocks on the eve of this year’s NAIDOC Week, NIAF is also the first physical Indigenous fair since a series of lockdowns closed off Australia’s remote art centres in 2020. Embracing NAIDOC’s theme of ‘Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!’, this year’s edition of NIAF imparts the art experience with holistic public programming that includes a communal weaving circle and culinary demonstrations from Indigenous chef Matt Atkins (Malyangapa and Barkindji Wiimpitja) and outfit Mirritya Mundya (Ngarrigu). 

‘We might be a tiny organisation sitting in La Perouse,’ says Peter Cooley, the Bidjigal CEO of First Hand Solutions that runs the fair along with the local Blak Markets, ‘but our reach goes right across the most remote communities in Australia. For some, the art centre is the only opportunity economically and for employment in those communities, and it is an absolute pleasure for us to be able to support those guys and bring them to Sydney – the biggest market in Australia.’ 

Cooley was speaking at the launch of ‘Heart in Art’, a NIAF satellite exhibition at the harbourside Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf that mixes classic desert painting from the APY Art Centre Collective with extraordinary pandanus weavings and stringybark works from Bula’bula Arts at Ramingining, showing how the best Aboriginal art can easily upstage any Sydney water view. ‘I hope it goes on for a while,’ said Cooley of First Hand’s art project, ‘and it just gets bigger and bigger.’ 

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney  

The National Indigenous Art Fair is at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Sydney, from 2–3 July 2022; ‘Heart in Art’ is on display at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf until 10 July. 

Inhabiting the edges: Daniel Crooks’s 'Boundary Conditions'

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Try watching Boundary Conditions in the rain. Daniel Crooks’s large-scale video commission for Sydney Living Museums (SLM), which floats on a 7 by 9-metre LED screen in front of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hyde Park Barracks, almost reaching Francis Greenway’s 1819 clock, offers a richly textured visual and aural experience that is only enhanced by the elements. Indeed, fluidity is the artwork’s masterstroke. The Hastings, New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist’s gliding motion-control camera ushers viewers through a slow moving montage of footage filmed at SLM’s various heritage sites across Sydney. Much of Boundary Conditions was, in fact, filmed during Sydney’s torrential rains earlier this year. ‘Driving from the Parramatta Female Factory to Rose Seidler House,’ recalls Crooks, ‘the rain was so heavy the car was going 20 kilometres [an hour], which didn’t bode very well for our external shots, but we got there. There are some pockets of sun.’ 

The artist’s decision to shoot closer and tighter has borne fruit. Fishbone ferns are seen sprouting from masonry, moss glistens between brickwork, and sandstone walls weep. At Rose Seidler House, a giant monstera plant threatens to turn the modernist lounge room into a greenhouse. This sense of nature taking over Sydney’s heritage sites is for the most part a poetic interpretation. In footage elsewhere, the heavily draped interiors of Vaucluse House and the handwritten paper files of the State Archives remain thankfully dry. However, rendered in Crooks’s signature ‘time-slice’ style, which digitally knits together footage in a seamless, scrolling mise en scène, what is inside becomes outside (and vice versa), and what is distant becomes staggeringly close-up in a constantly shifting game of perception, dissolving between surface and depth. 

Watching Boundary Conditions also reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, a murder thriller that takes place in real time, stitched together in 10-minute segments to appear as one long take. Like Hitchcock, Crooks revels in the artistry of presenting a sustained bravura moment, even if Boundary Conditions contains no murder scene as such. Though perhaps it points to a different sort of crime – that of omission: how so much of Sydney’s architectural past hasn’t been so immaculately preserved or documented. 

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney 

The third in a series of annual art commissions by Sydney Living Museums, Daniel Crooks’s Boundary Conditions is currently being screened at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, until 31 July 2022. 

States of rapture: Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s ‘Speaking in Tongues’

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Monumentality is often associated with grand structures occupying a space. Sometimes this effect can be achieved with small delicate forms arranged precisely to command dedicated attention. Indonesian artist Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s solo exhibition ‘Speaking in Tongues’ at Taipei’s Mind Set Art Centre exemplifies this through 11 large-scale ceramic installations.    

The most impressive is Infinitude (2022), a 17-metre-long wall installation made up of 2552 palm-sized terracotta pieces. Each has been slip-cast from a tear-shaped mould, with the design of an eye and flames above it. Installed with lighting that creates multiple soft shadows under each piece, the ensemble resembles a mesmerising scene of suspended rain. The varying shades of deep red from different clays prevent the repetition from being monotonous, and encourages a prolonged gaze across the meticulous arrangement to observe such subtle differences between each ceramic.  

Perfectly calculated to fill up and reach the ends of the gallery’s longest wall, Infinitude is elegant and captivating, and the most straightforward presentation of Setyawan’s practice in the exhibition. Showcased here and elsewhere is the artist’s ongoing fascination with symmetry, visual order and totem symbols while, at the same time, exploring the reproduction and sculptural quality of clay. Setyawan describes his laborious and repetitive process as one that inspires spiritual contemplation.   

This extends into Setyawan’s other installations, where the works all share a meditative quality. The patterns, layouts and spacings between individual pieces are deliberate and clear; there are seven rows and columns of perfectly organised circles of leaf-like terracotta in Aeviternum (2022), in which smaller leaf configurations are sandwiched in-between to make up the square wall work. A hypnotising pattern is present within each installation, where the focal point is not singular but, rather, dispersed and scattered across the consistent repetition of uniform terracotta pieces.  

Geometric configurations have become entwined in Setyawan’s visual language, with the artist having previously created works informed by the mandala and ideas of the labyrinth. Capturing Silence (2019), the only floor installation in the exhibition, is connected to these themes. Inspired by Antony Gormley’s massive Field (1989–2003), it consists of 480 clay standing figures that fill a corner of the gallery space. Capturing Silence also quite literally presents the notion of the collective through ‘strength in numbers’. 

The title of his exhibition, ‘Speaking in Tongues’, has a biblical source, but Setyawan emphasises the linguistic aspect of this expression – one of deciphering and interpreting symbols. It is also a term that suggests a state of dissociation or incomprehension. However, more pertinent to Setyawan’s practice are the states of trance, of rapture and of enthralling moments that come with it – common experiences in viewing his work.   

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei  

Curated by Ruoh Ling Keong, ‘Albert Yonathan Setyawan: Speaking in Tongues’ is on view at Mind Set Art Centre, Taipei, until 14 July 2022.  

‘Land Abounds’: Considering the breadth and blind spots of art history

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The apricot-pink tower of Retford Park peeks through the foliage as visitors approach the Italianate mansion’s former dairy, now home to the Southern Highlands regional gallery Ngununggula. Built in 1887 by Sydney’s Hordern family of department-store fame, and then the country home of arts patron James Fairfax of the newspaper dynasty from 1964 until his death in 2017, when it was left to the National Trust, Retford Park in Bowral perfectly encapsulates everything the rural enclave an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Sydney has aspired to, with a forest of oaks, spectacular topiary, and art-laden walls within which speak richly of Europe. In fact, Fairfax famously had his dining room painted with murals by Donald Friend in the late 1960s, and over the years gifted a collection of Old Masters paintings to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including works by Canaletto, Rubens and Tiepolo.   

By contrast, the old dairy sits within a meadow of wildflowers, with the only ‘introduced’ element being its Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (TZG)-designed modern annex bearing the gallery’s striking metal sign: NGUNUNGGULA, meaning ‘belonging’ in the local Gundungurra language. Opened in October last year, following a high-profile fundraising campaign led by local artist Ben Quilty and subsequent AU$7.6 million restoration by TZG, the gallery launched with an eclectic program of exhibitions by Megan Cope (Quandamooka), Tamara Dean, curator Djon Mundine (Wehbal) and John Olsen. However, it is with the current season of ‘Land Abounds’, and in particular with new works by artist brothers Abdul Abdullah (born 1986) and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (born 1977), that Ngununggula really achieves the stated aims of Director Megan Monte to ‘encourage thought and discourse’ and ‘reframe pervasive cultural perspectives’. 

Passing the low audio rumble and high jinks of Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s video montage Doomed (2007), audiences are confronted by the fallen figure of a chestnut mare collapsed on the concrete floor. Whittled life-size from Indonesian jelutong timber, Dead Horse is the latest in Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s series of animal sculptures that switch the spotlight onto the human world that breeds such creatures as pets, playthings or working animals. With the Southern Highlands known for its equestrian hobby farms and Anglophile horse culture, it is perhaps no coincidence that the artist, a seventh-generation Australian Muslim, offers up this animal, with its historical roots spanning North America and West Asia, as a more complex cultural symbol. 

But a bigger provocation lies behind this equine figure. Abdul Abdullah’s Legacy assets (also 2022) is a 10-metre painting of neighbouring Berrima, with a bird’s-eye view taking in the Wingecarribee River as it weaves through a pastoral patchwork of green. What is written in white capitals across the land isn’t quite as pretty: WHAT WOULD OUR PUBLIC COLLECTIONS LOOK LIKE IF WE DIVESTED THEM OF SEX PESTS AND PAEDOPHILES? It is a question, but a loaded one, and freighted with the recent noise of the #MeToo movement and call-out culture. 

The words hover like birds over the earth, but to experience the work in the flesh is to have the wind knocked out of you, evoking a feeling that is visceral and cerebral as the message hits home. It is not surprising to learn the painting was the product of both historical curiosity and rage as the artist delved into the archive of Australia’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape painters. ‘As I absorbed official and unofficial biographies, memoirs, and diaries I became more and more frustrated with the personalities described,’ he wrote on Instagram. ‘The projection of genius on deeply flawed individuals was used to justify and obfuscate abhorrent behaviour … I asked myself why would we continue to lionise, celebrate and uplift these practices and what contribution to the visual discourse was so essential that we owe these legacies anything?’  

Most powerful is what Abdul Abdullah leaves unsaid, naming no names, but encouraging audiences to do their own historical research, to start their own artistic reckoning. The question he asks is a difficult one to answer in the nuanced way it deserves, especially considering the breadth and blind spots of art history, but it is an important one, at this point in time, to ponder.  

Michael Fitzgerald, Bowral 

‘Land Abounds’ is on display at Ngununggula, Bowral, until 24 July 2022.  

The call for slow art in a fast world: ‘Radical Slowness’ at the Lock-Up

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Speed is a reality of modern life. Indeed, much of our early fascination with it came from its potential to usher in a kind of newness; of unfamiliar sights and sounds, changing fashions and ever-advancing technologies. Today, however, nothing could be more monotonous than speed. For curators Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji, the idea that urgency has become part of our everyday encounter – with the world of ‘next-day delivery, instant messaging and one-click purchasing’ fulfilling its promise of speed and every expectation – is something to be contested. Speed is the status quo and, so the thinking goes, no act can be more radical than slowness.  

Seen recently at Newcastle’s historic police station-turned-gallery space the Lock-Up, ‘Radical Slowness’ presented six artists who challenge our fleeting experience of time by giving it an enduring form. With time treated as a material in and of itself and no longer invisible, in each of their works it was able to take on a tangible shape and substance. In Emma Fielden’s ‘Of a Second’  series (2022), ten drawings plot the actions that take place in a second: the blink of an eye; the travel of light; the lifespan of a muon; the firing of a neuron in the brain; the snap of a finger. Time is quantified in each of the drawings which present these respective measurements in microscopic hard-to-read detail. 

The act of looking became immensely focused. The First Second (2019) by Worimi  artist Dean Cross distorts our idea of temporality by presenting us with footage of an alarm clock flickering between midnight and 12.01 a.m., between night and day, in an endless loop. The video is accompanied by a slow stretched-out version of the wartime tribute, the last post, calling on the retrospective power of memory and its ability to weave in and out of experience in a way that clock-time can only dream of.  

As the exhibition’s curators explained in the room sheet, the process of reflection – of slow focused attention – offers the potential to reclaim the very spaces of ‘thought and conscious decision-making’ we have lost in a world constantly bombarding us with new information. Akil Ahamat is explicit in this plea as he animates himself to appear in the audiovisual installation  Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow (2021). His call to a passing snail (‘How can I get your attention without leading to some kind of urgency?’) seems meant for the viewer, but also touches on questions of curatorial practice. The majority of works in the exhibition inhabited not merely their own rooms, but their own cells in a way that made full use of the jail complex and its literal and historic spaces for introspection, with the surrounding walls, permanently etched with the names and dates of people who have come and gone, constantly invoking the past.  

‘Radical Slowness’ encouraged us to simply pause. The curators’ distilled vision challenged our present-day experience of time with so little room to reflect, reminding us that it is in the power of a single moment that we  can  reflect and carry into our everyday lives a slowness that is truly radical. 

Maria Karageorge, Newcastle  

Curated by Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji, ‘Radical Slowness’ was on display at the Lock-Up in Newcastle from 27 March until 15 May 2022. 

  

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.