Innehållsförteckning för Issue 37 från Artist Profile

A LOT OF YOUR NEW WORK HAS BEEN TAKEN UP BY BIG environmental issues such as the Great Barrier Reef and Antarctica, and you have tackled the Australian landscape. Do you now look for bigger messages in your work? Well, I would think that any artist who makes a painting and it sets out to be beautiful – whether it’s the Barrier Reef, a garden or a landscape – in a sense that’s a kind of political statement. I’m not out there waving banners in the street. But every time I do a painting of the Barrier Reef, clearly I want people to consider how important it is, how we need to look after it. By and large I’m a painter. Like all painters, you are driven by an inner…

CHINESE-AUSTRALIAN ARTIST GUAN WEI STOOD deferentially in front of his self-portrait ‘Plastic Surgery’ (2015) at the launch in July of this year’s Archibald Portrait Prize at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. Descended from the Manchu nobility whose great-great-aunt gave birth to the Qing Dynasty’s last emperor, he cut an elegant and imposing figure. At just over four metres wide ‘Plastic Surgery’ is a large, politically charged self-portrait where four disembodied heads of the artist chart a metaphorical transformation from an early portrait as a black-haired Chinese man, an image that would have been on the cover of his Chinese government personnel file – “The government keeps a file on everyone” he says – to one showing his face which has morphed into a blue-eyed, fair-skinned, blonde, fully assimilated…

ENCOUNTERING ELLA BARCLAY’S installations you are enveloped by enigmatic tones, flashing lights and, sometimes, rising steam. No it is not a Dr Who episode, but she’d be amused if you described it as that. Barclay engages with the familiar materials of technology – wiring, plastic, luminescent panelling and pulsing tones – to reconstruct it into something uncanny and unfamiliar. What led you to practise art? I‘ve always wanted to be an artist in different capacities. When I was young I was inspired by the art around me but also film and understanding how things work, looking at the agency of artists. It is not necessarily an exact decision, it is more just the way you see the world and you process information. It’s also about seeing your life as an…

WHAT MAKES A PAINTING A painting is not always paint. The technical is not the actual. When I walked into the Sydney studio of Nicole Ellis, I “perceived” paintings: imposing, tightly composed, physically confronting works that seemed classically flat at some remove and then intimately tactile close-up. The quality that unites her austerely reduced grids and more intricate layered works is light, many of her grounds glower like a fresco pigment trapped agelessly within glazed plaster. Qualities of early Renaissance painting are evident in the abstracted blocks of solid colour in ‘Time-Lapse 4’ and the tense, polished geometry of ‘Time-Lapse 9’ yet the method here is very different. Nicole Ellis works with cloth, and not just canvas and linen but dress, upholstery and industrial cloth. Unlike so many painters, the…

The objects Islamic culture makes, calligraphy and miniatures are some of the best examples of paintings produced by humans. YOUR MOVE INTO ART CAME VERY EARLY? I won art prizes throughout school. I’d always wanted to be at art school. Leaving school at year 10, I went for a greenkeeping trade, but throughout that time I was interested in becoming an artist. When I finished greenkeeping, I thought “right, now I’ll do this”. So art always nagged at me. What makes you want to know how something works? I don’t know, it’s an impulse, the thing that shouldn’t need an explanation. It’s not mechanical things, it’s more emotional or felt things like music, art or cooking. Once you demystify something it lessens its mystery, it’s like learning how the magic…

YOU WERE BORN IN BOSTON, WITH ALBANIAN PARENTS; what was your childhood like? My upbringing was pretty atypical, even for immigrant parents coming to a new place. My mother passed away when I was young. I think that the most significant aspect was the fact that culturally art didn’t exist in my early childhood. What did exist was the requirement for me to spend a lot of time by myself at home. I had to keep myself busy – I used to draw a lot. My father was a tailor and he had this big old sewing machine that I used to take apart and turn it into other things. One of those things that I remember most fondly was turning it into kind of a sawmill using those big…

IN APRIL THIS YEAR THE GARVAN Institute of Medical Research in Sydney hosted an unusual exhibition called Bernie doesn’t just shake! It was a four-day event, launched by an evening function that included speakers from many different walks of life – the majority were sufferers from Parkinson’s disease. The star of the show was Bernie McGrath, a former commercial real estate agent who was given deep brain stimulation (DBS) to alleviate severe movement problems associated with Parkinson’s. What nobody suspected was that Bernie would enter the operating theatre as a real estate agent and emerge as an artist. Shortly after the procedure Bernie began experimenting with art materials, and discovered a passion for painting. Now he is a professional artist, working compulsively in a range of Abstract Expressionist styles. He…

REFLECTING BACK ON SOME ROAD trips and dreaming them up in the subsequent months can be like reliving a favourite film or book – standout lines, cinematic sequences and characters who enchant and inspire – and some gouge into the flesh and not only pepper your mind with brilliant images but give you a kind of painterly lift-off. My arrival at the Iltja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art Centre on the edge of Alice Springs and approaching the long painting tables I had all the trepidation of a young intern fronting up to a corporate boardroom. Surreptitious summings-up, lowered eyes and gingerly made introductions quickly became whinnies of laughter and excitedly made plans to head out later that week to paint the hills surrounding Standley Chasm. The preceding weeks has…

SAVANHDARY, CAN YOU REFLECT ON YOUR MIGRATION to Australia? I was eight years old when my mother one morning got up at dawn, packed all the children, left the dog, and took us down to the Mekong River and locked us in a dark room. All day long we weren’t allowed to make any sound or go outside. When it was night time, what the current Australian government would call “people smugglers” took us onto a little boat and crossed us over to the other side of the Mekong River. It was a big risk that my mother took. She did that because my father was going to be taken to a re-education camp which was notorious, as people opposed to the Communist party never returned from it. He was…

DEAN HOME’S TRADEMARK CHINOISERIE, beautifully rendered oriental bowls surrounded by fruits, paintbrushes and other luxurious detritus, began simply enough as a “reinvigoration or reinvestigation of the practice of still life”, but as his canvases grew in scale and ambition, something else began to form. “I probably spent 10 years learning what possibilities there were in painting these forms,” Home says. But the shift is clear. He no longer wants to paint the bowls, he wants to paint on them within the frame of the canvas. Pure representation is no longer the goal; the bowls on the canvas have become the canvas itself. “They are no longer just objects to be portrayed. Now it is about what I want to paint on them, I want to write other stories of the…

I GREW UP IN ROCKINGHAM, A southern suburb popularly regarded in Perth lore as the “bogan capital of Western Australia”. I was the sole University student amongst my peer group of “Rocko” mates, as well as the only member whose parents made them attend church every Sunday (until I was 17). I’ve been an atheist since that age, Catholic guilt however lasts a lifetime. The transition from high school was the first time I sensed any difficulty in my ambition to be simultaneously artist, moral citizen and “one of the boys”. While studying, I got a casual job doing artwork on surfboards at a factory in Rockingham. After graduating, the owner offered me a full-time job – an apprenticeship of sorts learning all aspects of making and repairing surfboards. I…

MY WORK IS CONCERNED WITH the grotesque as it relates to the body trace. Relying on the interaction and co-presence of humour, horror, play and terror, excess and sparsity, my art fuses the grotesque aesthetic with seemingly incongruous categories of images and forms. Clothing and unstable bodily materials provide transient territories to explore ideas of presence and absence. I am drawn to the grotesque as a category that emerges when established boundaries are compromised. The grotesque generates deformation and monstrosity in the coming together of what should be kept apart; the sense that something is illegitimately in something else. In my work grotesque images or objects fuse and confuse form, breaking down physical and psychological boundaries that might be applied to understanding the liminal space of the body through clothing,…