Innehållsförteckning för Issue 44 från Artist Profile

When we visited Oscar Perry at his studio in a large warehouse complex in Brunswick, he was working on a new series of paintings to show at the Melbourne Art Fair in August. The studio itself is in a state of productive chaos, with unfinished paintings stacked against the walls and paint paraphernalia spread around. Oscar tells me that ‘people are shocked when they come into the studio, like it’s a crime scene or an episode of Hoarders’. Our conversation is rather like his creative process: long, meandering, a bit messy and full of tangents, obscure facts, and interesting stories. OSCAR, YOU TRAINED AS A PAINTER, AND FORMALLY your paintings seem to stem from a modernist, abstract expressionist lineage. What is your relationship to the traditions of modernist painting? Yeah,…

Michael Taylor is one of Australia’s most important living painters. His expressionist compositions speak of an extraordinary intensity and energy maintained over a long and prolific oeuvre. Aged in his eighties and busy as ever, Taylor is continually branching out in bold new directions without compromising his vision. As with an Olsen, you can tell a Taylor at twenty paces. BORN IN SYDNEY IN 1933, MICHAEL TAYLOR IS FIVE years younger than John Olsen and, in many ways, they belong to the same generation. Although not a recluse, Taylor has never been a media show pony and, unlike Olsen, he has followed a quieter and more consistent trajectory in his art. However, there are many parallels: both artists are committed to oil painting, watercolours and etchings, both explore abstracted landscapes,…

Lottie Consalvo’s practice traverses painting, sculpture, performance, video and photography, mostly within a colour palette of earthy, neutral shades. When Artist Profile met up with her, we wanted to ask about the performative side of being Lottie. YOUR EDUCATION IS IN BUSINESS, ENGINEERING, gold and silversmithing. How did you end up making art? It was just a detour. My father is a painter and I was always painting and drawing. Did you consider going to art school? I was very pragmatic then. I didn’t think I could make a living from it. Your colour palette is very earthy and tertiary based… I get that a lot. I don’t like distractions. I might occasionally start with blue but I always end up with less, paring back and disappearing into black. I…

SALLY GABORI WAS OF THE Kaiadilt people who came from Bentinck and Sweers Islands in the South Wellesley Islands, in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. They were the last group of coastal Aboriginal people in Australia to cease their autonomous hunter/gatherer/fisher lifestyle in 1947–48 when they were transported by missionaries to the Presbyterian Mission on Mornington Island. At the time the Kaiadilt had sustained themselves as a small isolated society of only several hundred people for an indefinite period of time (some thousands of years), continuing even when the colonial period swept past them for over a hundred years. I first arrived at Mornington Mission in 1973, some twenty-five years after their move to the mission, to start my PhD research with the North Wellesley Islanders, the Lardil people, who…

SATIRE INVITES US TO BECOME conspirators in a joke made at someone else’s expense. As the usual targets are figures of power and authority it’s reasonable to assume the invitation will be accepted. The satirist adopts the Robin Hood position – defending the powerless against the few who seek to impose their will upon the many. Ridicule is a weapon that costs nothing and cannot be confiscated. The satirist, as a subtitled Skippy says in TERROR NULLIUS, must speak truth to power – but in a manner so palpably absurd it doesn’t generate lawsuits. At its most effective a victim that complains only looks like a wowser who can’t take a joke. As the satirist has already pricked the bubble of pomposity and self-importance, every attempt at self-defence merely confirms…

Meeting Lisa Adams at her hilly idyll in the mountains behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is like entering another magical world of her making. Her painstaking oil paintings of compellingly realist dreamscapes sees her produce only one or two works every year. THERE’S A PSYCHOLOGICAL TAUTNESS THAT SITS AT the heart of your work, both in its subject matter and execution. Is this the only way for you? The work is what it is because of how I work and who I am. I have to go with it and be comfortable with my process. Where do these dreamscapes come from? I don’t know. The ideas gestate for a long time and when they appear, it is often something that almost takes me by surprise. I want something revealed to me…

Paul Higgs cites multiple, varied influences on his work, from art, music and theatre to computers, cosmology and quantum physics, and his multilayered constructions are the perfect medium to encompass his many interests and ideas. They combine painted sculptural elements, string, torn sections of drawings and printed text, with areas of frenetic energy juxtaposed with sections of emptiness. Higgs equates the layering of materials to the layering of sounds in a piece of contemporary music. I try to work at the edge of my competence, where the possibility of failure lurks to challenge assumptions. Decisions to leave or rework are continual… YOU PREFER THE TERM ‘CONSTRUCTION’ RATHER than collage for your works – why is this? The word ‘construction’ helps me believe that I am creating a serious internal architectural…

Artist Profile caught up with Australian artist Dan Miller in Kim’s Corner Food in Chicago, a convenience store that also contains an art gallery. Poised among the stock of candy bars, cereal packets and fridges filled with milk are floor-to-ceiling geometric cut-out collages and assemblages created by store-owner and artist Thomas Kong. Past the groceries is The Back Room, a gallery space that evolved from a conversation between Kong and Miller, who are now co-conspirators, linked by their different approach to how artists can work outside the studio. We spoke to Miller about how he has embedded himself and his practice in suburban Chicago. YOU STUDIED LAW AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, WORKED as a security guard at GOMA and then finally began your art studies in Melbourne at RMIT, followed by…

WHEN SOMEONE ASKS ‘WHAT DO you do?’ I’ve found it’s better to make up something normal rather than own up to being an artist. ‘Horticulturalist’ is my personal favourite, I’ve tried ‘banker’ a couple of times too but no one ever believes me. To answer ‘I’m an artist’ leads to the even stickier question; ‘oh cool, what kind of art do you make?’ and it’s in response to this that more often than not you lose them: ‘Well if you really want to know, my work deals with photography, markmaking, history, feelings (a big no no), the everyday, fragments, imagined futures, fictitious presents, misused objects, poetics, surfaces with personalities …’ They’ve fled the room by this point, or their eyes have glazed over, and who can blame them really? It’s…

Artist Profile visited Fiona Hall in Hobart as she was preparing a new work for the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale later this year. Known for her multi-media installations featuring a variety of hand-honed materials, the artist is focusing her energies on the fraught subject of war, and how it has always been a part of the human condition. FIONA HALL IS STANDING IN A STUDIO FULL OF broken bottles that open out into a winter garden. The earth is stubbled with dormant bulbs and the water beyond looks cold. Her materials within this space are ordinary yet menacing. Shards of green and sepia glass have been painted with chalky oil paint to outline the shattered bones of skeletons and the glass lies on the floor in a formation that you…

Harrie Fasher’s bronze and steel equine forms evoke the human vulnerabilities of life, death, struggle and war. Her recent first solo exhibition at King Street Gallery, Sydney, brought together pieces of various scales, illustrating the breadth of her conceptually nuanced and technically dextrous practice. HARRIE, WHY THE ENDURING APPEAL OF HORSES? I don’t see my sculptures as literal representations of horses. The connection between horses and humanity throughout history is so strong, as is my personal connection, that I have really always used the horse in my work as a metaphor for human experience. When trying to express fundamentally human struggles and emotions the visual language that I intuitively reach for involves horses. I have spent the majority of my childhood and adulthood in their company, drawing, riding and watching…

To bring this energy of love to physical form Zofrea is slowly creating a 400 foot (122 metres) long painting depicting the cycle of the day in four parts. Salvatore Zofrea’s monumental new ‘Day Cycle’ is a 122-metre long series depicting the energy of the day in four parts. Together they express the artist’s enduring vision of love, honesty and divinity. ‘WHEN THE BIRDS HEARD THIS story, at last they understood their connection to the Great Simorgh and comprehended its ancient mysteries. Now they were eager to commence the journey,’ wrote the Persian poet Attar, in the twelfth century. I found this magical phrase from Attar’s ‘The Conference of the Birds’ while browsing Salvatore Zofrea’s collection of poetry, music and art books in his home at Kurrajong, about two hours…

‘THESE PAINTINGS ARE MADE intaglio, with histories and figures sunk below their surface. They are like wombs or libraries—where gestation and absorption are tacitly implied.’ This is from Stella Rosa McDonald’s catalogue essay for my exhibition ‘Beside the Point, Beside Myself, Beside You’ at Olsen Gallery last year (2017), and it offers a nice insight into my work and process. My paintings talk of relationship, context and metaphor. They are loaded with autobiographical content, draw on past and present experiences and often arrive in pairs. Recent paintings use abstraction, still life and borrowed landscapes to reference everyday intimate experience held in object and place. They explore the self and use abstraction, landscape and still life as devices to do so. My work mostly takes the form of abstraction and my…

ITS WEBSITE PROCLAIMS THAT THE Art Gallery of Ballarat, opened in 1890, is the oldest purpose-built art gallery building in Australia, and the first to be built outside a capital city in the overseas dominions of the British Empire. That’s unsurprising: the goldrush brought riches to the new state of Victoria. Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria began in the 1870s, but interestingly, Ballarat came to its fine permanent home even before Sydney’s Art Gallery of NSW. The influx of migrants in the goldrush era brought many educated and socially progressive people to build Victoria’s cultural base, and regional galleries developed rapidly in that state. During the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA), eleven solo exhibitions will run concurrently in The Art Gallery of Ballarat, its annex and function hall. But…