Innehållsförteckning för Issue 43 från Artist Profile

THE AP TEAM EDITOR Kon Gouriotis artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au ART DIRECTOR Kim Gregory kgregory@nextmedia.com.au DEPUTY EDITOR Elli Walsh ewalsh@artistprofile.com.au INTERNATIONAL ARTS WRITER Lucy Stranger SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith KATRINA NOORBERGEN is an arts writer based in Sydney SONIA LEGGE is an art adviser, valuer and writer based in Sydney DR ASHLEY CRAWFORD is a Melbourne-based arts journalist; cargocollective.com/ashleycrawford KIM GUTHRIE is a photographer based in the Gold Coast, Qld; kimguthrieaustralia.com H. R. HYATT-JOHNSTON is an artist and writer based in Sydney MICK RICHARDS is a Brisbane-based freelance photographer and filmmaker STEPHEN OXENBURY is a Sydney-based photographer; www.stephenoxenbury.com CONTRIBUTORS BRIDGET MACLEOD is an arts writer and curator based on the South Coast of NSW DR JUDITH PUGH is a regional NSW based arts and cultural writer LOUISE MARTIN-CHEW is a PhD candidate at the…

I’m also interested in wthe idea, best expressed by David Hockney, that once he has drawn something then he will always know it, and can draw it again. YOU HAVE SAID YOUR WORKS ARE PRIMARILY ABOUT painting. Why did the still life genre become the best way to explore this for you? I’ve always loved painting, looking at great paintings and trying to make great paintings. That was always my ambition, even before art school. The still life format came about organically in the studio. I was painting abstractly, this is maybe fifteen years ago, and I found that I was struggling to produce interesting works. Through discussions with friends and other painters the idea came to me that I just didn’t have enough content to inform the painting, so…

Making movies here is just so bloody difficult, it won’t stop for you. You have to close your eyes and listen to the landscape – it’s trying to communicate. ANYONE WHO HAS VISITED THE TJORITJA RANGES west of Alice Springs is struck by the ever-shifting colours, the rocks seguing from green to purple to crimson without warning, like viewing the Aurora Australis in stone. This is a delight for Balanda (white people) who know the area as the MacDonnell Ranges and who take happy snaps of the surreal changes. For the Aranda, the traditional owners, Tjoritja (pronounced choor-it-ja), is a complex realm of culture and belief. For artist Warwick Thornton, Tjoritja is a complex realm indeed. For one thing, as Thornton explains, he is a Kaytej man whose customary lands…

WHAT IS INTRIGUING ABOUT YOUR WORK IS ITS range, from muted abstracts to detailed landscapes. I am searching for a closer reality, a sensation that is denser than abstract. I grew up in Gippsland, Victoria, looking at the Strzelecki or Baw Baw Ranges with their deep fogs, snows and frosts. That atmosphere instigated a sense of oneness, if I can put it that way, in my memory. I started painting in an abstract way, which I very much like. More recently I started on a different, more intricate, tack. It might have to do with a sense of place. I always told myself that I would like to marry the abstraction and the intricacy. How did you learn to paint? I had lessons with Len French in Melbourne, which I…

‘JUST LET IT GO’ ASKS THIS ISSUE’S cover artist, Raquel Ormella, in the wonderful embroidery above. Like most of Ormella’s works it has a suspenseful relativism which charms us. Ormella’s strength is to set aside her own biases so as to place views, as well as actions, in their contexts. The phrase illustrated here could apply to anything: something dangerous or merely irritating, even stupid. But should we ‘just let it go’? For H. R. Hyatt-Johnston, too much work and too many people in the NGV Triennial was too big of an issue to ‘just let it go’. Nor was Hyatt-Johnston able to say nothing about the failure of Mami Kataoka’s 21st Biennale of Sydney to produce a printed catalogue. It’s too strange to ignore, particularly considering that Kataoka presented…

There’s a conscious humour in the paintings but also a lot of darkness. Those are the things that keep you interested. YOU HAVE BEEN CONTINUOUSLY DRAWING AND collecting characters in your sketchbooks ever since you were a child. Why have you remained dedicated to the figure? Seeing the Italian painters and a major retrospective of Balthus in Paris made me realise that you could paint the human figure your whole life. I can hardly believe it now but I had the strength of character to stick with what I wanted to paint and ignore all the fashionable trends. I had a protected, fairly secure upbringing in a small country town and I wanted to shine a light on the Mallee – that forgotten part of the world. I can’t paint…

YOUR ARTISTIC CAREER STARTED IN THEATRE SET design. Can you tell me about those beginnings? I had many interests as a young man. I was making jewellery, art and furniture, and I couldn’t decide where my life should go. I started volunteering at an art theatre in Adelaide. I realised that I could do anything in theatre; I got to work on the micro scale in model-making and on the macro scale in construction, so it was perfect for me, I could indulge all of my whims in one place. A lot of people run to the theatre, but I ran away from it. I fell in love and ran to Brisbane, and went back to the quiet, solitary life of the artist. The beauty of making art is that…

I HAD KNOWN OF ALUN’S WORK IN my student days through his 1968 exhibition at Strines Gallery and through works shown in books by Kim Bonython and James Gleeson. These books, also a source of reference for many friends, documented what we saw as contemporary painting in Australia and showed works that we may not have seen in Sydney galleries. I saw Alun’s paintings at Watters Gallery in 1970. The works were a formidable part of his ‘Noumenon’ series and were large, square paintings with central circular areas where small, sharp, organic shapes formed complex and dynamic relationships with themselves and the crisp borders of these circular enclosures. I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the exhibition and I quietly moved upstairs with a friend as people entered the gallery.…

THE INAUGURAL INTERACTIVE and immersive ‘NGV Triennial’, which concluded on 18 April, surveyed the work of more than 100 artists and designers from 32 countries and included art, fashion, design and architecture. It was dispersed across all floors of the NGV, which means you had to walk through the gallery’s collection. At first I thought this was a good strategy, as it meant first-time visitors, or even those more familiar with the collection, discovered works they may not have encountered before as they searched out the ‘NGV Triennial’ works. There were, however, some strange placements of the works, making it easy to miss them. Overall, I found this strategy distracting and, finally, frustrating. After I had made three separate visits, working my way from the top floor galleries to the…

As a child I loved being out there in the bush; it was the beginning of my long relationship with the land, and even then I noticed how it made me feel. The things I still hold close from those days are the feelings, memories and experiences the land can evoke. I SPENT THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF my life in Northern and Central West Queensland. My father worked for the Department of Civil Aviation and in those early years we lived and worked close to the small country airports. As aerodromes are built on the outskirts of town, as kids we had full access to the bush. I loved being out there; it was the beginning of my long relationship with the land, and even then I started to…

IN AN ERA WHERE THE ONCE-NARROW WHITE CUBE walls of art exhibiting are expanding into a multi-levelled edifice – from digital galleries to commercial spaces and ‘pop-ups’ – art is finding new audiences in fresh places. One such setting is inside the glass-clad façade of one of Australia’s leading law firms, Clayton Utz, where an initiative with 3:33 Art Projects is changing the face of corporate art displays. The concept of ‘corporate art’ is not a new one, and some of the world’s best art collections belong to businesses such as Deutsche Bank, UBS and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. But Clayton Utz is doing things differently. The firm is hosting regular six-monthly exhibitions, partnering each time with two or more artists at different stages in their careers, and also…

WHAT CAN VISITORS EXPECT FROM YOUR UPCOMING Shepparton Art Museum national tour? This survey draws on work from a twenty-year period, though the majority have been made in the last six to seven years, but it includes key works such as the drawings on whiteboards I made in 2008, ‘Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney’. There are two new works; one is City Without Crows, a performance that I’m reworking into an installation, video and drawings; the other is All these small intensities, a series of small hand-stitched embroidered works, which are now a 3-D installation. Is your changing scale determined by your ideas or other factors? It’s definitely to do with the idea, partly with the labour involved, and studio size. I was 2016 artist-in residence at Artspace (Sydney); the…

ADD PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES OF street life from around the world to the quiet shopfronts of a small town, and you have ‘Eyes on Main Street’. This international photography festival presents a kaleidoscopic experience of everyday street life from many very different places, and sets them into the tranquillity of Wilson, North Carolina, USA. From the tropical beaches of Kenya to the snowfields of Australia and the war-torn zones of Palestine, ‘Eyes on Main Street’ celebrates this shared experience. A far cry from the major art centres and the sterile spaces of the white cube, ‘Eyes on Main Street’ offers photographers the unique architectural stage of Wilson’s streets to show their work. Once a centre of tobacco cultivation in the nineteenth century, this town’s wealthy past resulted in a town with…

WITH THE WORK OF CERAMIC artist, NOT, the materials of ceramics and glass are essential to the form. Not that they are an end in themselves, but because they control the way in which the form is moulded, cast and arranged to become a part of what NOT describes as his ‘total worlds’. This July, NOT’s first solo exhibition is with Kronenberg Wright Artist Projects. Artist Profile spoke to him in his studio in Sydney. What will we see at Kronenberg Wright? Domestic-scale installation work in lead crystal glass and porcelain. The former is part of ongoing work I have been making at Canberra Glassworks; it follows on from my Ode to Nam June Paik that featured in last year’s Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. When did you arrive at ceramics…

In the studio I like to invert the painting so that it changes my reading of the image, so the focus of the subject becomes less important. Ultimately what matters is the unity and the invention. I do this irrespective of whether I paint a landscape or a portrait. AUSTRALIA’S LANDSCAPE HAS always been my obsession as a painter. It is the life force and the rhythm in the landscape that I am constantly attracted to. All my drawing studies begin with being in direct contact with the landscape. I often spend several days immersing myself in the feeling of my chosen area. I draw directly using coloured pencils and compressed charcoal. It’s a joy to use the immediacy of these mediums to interpret the subject in an energetic and…