Innehållsförteckning för Issue 49 från Artist Profile

Your photographic works are beautifully staged and finished in colour by hand. Can you speak to the technical and artistic influences in your practice, in particular your ‘Studio Series’? The ‘Studio Series’ was directly influenced by the works of studio photographers across Africa who directly challenged the European, ethnographic lens of most early photos of African people. I was initially inspired by photo and video technologies as weapons or tools that were used by colonisers to further their colonial plans. It’s really interesting to me that the first depictions of black people seen by outsiders and even by other black folks were ones that framed black bodies in such a potent way that socially those frames still exist today. More than that though, I’m interested in the moment in history…

At the heart of Yvonne Koolmatrie’s work is her homeland: Ngarrindjeri country. Stretching from the lower Murray River to its mouth at the Coorong lagoon is the land of the artist’s mother and her ancestors. Koolmatrie has lived all of her life in Ngarrindjeri country. She has traversed its landscape since childhood – by car, on horseback and on foot. Through seasonal work, hard times and personal tragedy, her life’s journey has seen her revive a nearextinct Ngarrindjeri artform, and become a master of her craft. Weaving sculptural forms with native grasses, Koolmatrie’s practice entwines ancestral stories with her own personal history in the Riverland. The river pervades Koolmatrie’s work. Not only in the materials harvested along its shores, but, importantly, in its ability to connect the artist to her…

Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room (2015) will be one inclusion at the MCA. It’s a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, red fabric memorial poppies conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs; it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many…

Mulda paints her own experience – it is the medium in which she communicates her story. She has been exhibiting consistently since 2008, yet it was the suite of paintings shown in ‘The National: New Australian Art’ in 2019 which drew the attention of curators and collectors. This year her work is also part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s ‘Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art’, in both the exhibition and an animation, No Trouble Here, which will be shown for the first time in Adelaide. It sold strongly at Sydney Contemporary with Edwina Corlette in September and was a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. What audiences find compelling is the contrast between the beautiful painterly…

The first painting I can remember is Bruegel’s Harvesters (1565). Although many years have passed since my childhood fascination with it (or rather, with its reproduction hanging in my parents’ bedroom), Harvesters continues to evade my full understanding of how a painting can be both beautiful and ugly, unsettling and attractive, and represent reality of a kind while clearly inhabiting a universe of its own. This ‘slippery’ nature of paintings, a sense of chasing one’s own tail indefinitely, became central to my desire to make paintings. Several works best uncover this line of thought while also marking key changes in my studio processes and practice. Hijacked Leader (2014) was one of the first paintings made after deciding to develop a more focused process guided by research of the source material…

In 1974, I was an undergraduate art history student at Melbourne University. Lynne Cook was a year ahead of me. We were both frustrated by the lack of women artists mentioned in our courses. Two key texts framed our thinking. One was the 1971 essay by American art historian Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?. Nochlin argued that the expectations against women seriously pursuing art, the restrictions on educating women as artists, and ‘the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based’ systematically precluded the emergence of great women artists. The other was John Berger’s 1972 book, Ways of Seeing. Berger took the provocative step of placing images of women culled from advertising, popular culture and soft porn…

There is a growing rebellion over the silence and inactivity of our country’s powerbrokers and general populace regarding climate change. We are living in a time when this rebellion is being portrayed as an inconvenience and calls for protest to only take place through established means. Lismore-based Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens has long been involved in green politics – she started with Greenpeace some thirty years ago. The same arguments and discussions keep being repeated over and over, year in and year out. For Dickens it has all been said and no-one is listening – so now it is about taking time to listen to the land itself and to build a deeper understanding of Country. In 2018 the Kandos School of Cultural Adaption developed an expansive project that involved…

Leading contemporary Australian artist Brenda L. Croft employs a considered approach to the exploration of her Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra and Irish/German/Chinese/Australian heritage. In her first solo exhibition at Niagara Galleries, ‘hand/made/held/ground’, Croft adopts the role of temporary caretaker and embarks on the process of reinterpreting and reinvigorating First Nations’ cultural objects. In it, she presents a multi-media installation that maps her intimate patrilineal relationship and repatriation journey honouring an ancient spear tip and stone axe belonging to her Gurindji homelands in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory. Croft encountered the stone axe when participating on remote site visits with Gurindji elders and other community members in 2014. The origins of such cultural objects often remain unresolved, however in this case the stone axe was directly connected to the Gurindji country.…

When Susan Norrie won an Australia Council Visual Arts Award in 2019 acknowledging her major contribution to Australian contemporary art and broader cultural life, she was unequivocal in declaring the central concerns of her practice. ‘We are at a critical moment in the history of the world. As an artist whose work has focused on catastrophic environmental consequences associated with human greed and a rampant desire for dominance over finite natural resources, I believe it is our responsibility to document the truths and impact of these endeavours. I recognise the significance of the artist’s ability to witness and probe this world with a certain poetic detachment that not only unravels truths but does so with powerful words and compelling imagery,’ she wrote. When we meet in Potts Point, Sydney, for…

‘The floor for a sculptor is the same as the floor for a dancer,’ says Jan King. ‘It’s the thing that activates your movement. Dancers can’t fly, they have to hit the floor. They come down, they move across, they lift up again – and this is exactly what a sculpture should do. It shouldn’t just sit around. It has to take off and move.’ King may talk like a kinetic sculptor, but none of her works will actually, truly move. The movement is all in the mind of the viewer who watches the way a piece seems to touch the earth lightly and spring back up in a graceful curving line. Even though her favoured material is steel there’s a pervasive sense of lightness about King’s sculptures. Realising she…

There are three aspects of my latest paintings (other than the actual physical painting process) that have become important to my work: the dual portraits, the characters and the process before the painting. The dual portraits The idea of creating dual portraits came through as a result of wanting to make two paintings with very subtle differences. I felt that using one portrait to make a whole character is difficult, but having two with only a slight variation is like being given twice the amount of leeway and using only five percent of it. The portrait is also less rigid and becomes more a flow of movement, like an animation. This idea of the animated painting reached its peak with The Fall I and II, which was exhibited in my…

To begin with the jewellery is to begin with the personal, as the personal and the intimate illuminate Lisa Roet’s work. The surface texture of the gilded abstract neck pieces, rings and bangles is the texture of Orang-utan or Gorilla skin, to be worn on human skin. A Gibbon hand becomes a cuff, or a choker. An ape’s hand around a neck adds the ambiguity of human/ape relationship to the politics of decoration. Women and apes were, and are, trophies: women decorated with jewellery, but this jewellery is not wildly expensive. One could buy earrings or cufflinks and comfortably wear them in solidarity with the primates that have been Roet’s focus for her life as an artist. Roet ‘looks at relations between humans and primates’. I’d just put down an…

Any exhibition that includes Tracey Moffatt’s image making comes with a fanfare, and her collaborative show with photographer Hayley Millar-Baker, at Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, called ‘The truth of what occurred remains’, is no exception. Art collector Reg Richardson began collecting Moffatt’s works in the 1990s and today is known to have amassed the largest body of her work – 112 pieces. His inaugural purchase was the suite of twenty-five black and white photolithographs shot in and around Broken Hill that comprise the series Up in the Sky. Richardson, who was born in Broken Hill, was attracted to the derelict buildings depicted in the images, the corrugated iron fences of the old 1800s mining town. For Moffatt the works were more about depicting an outback place anywhere, one inhabited…

Heralded as a ‘game-changer’, Te Papa Tongarewa’s newly contemporised space – Toi Art – opened in 2018 with a triumphant flourish and a feeling that, finally, the institution will be seen as living up to its promise as New Zealand’s national gallery (having effectively swallowed the erstwhile national art gallery in a merger, way back in the 1990s). It may be all about perceptions, but it’s a breakthrough nonetheless, and nothing could be better than Nike Savvas’ work to announce that breakthrough with a fanfare. There could be no clearer signal that art has its own pride of place, as one moves from the more subdued ambience of the Nature section and into the bright new world of Toi Art. There is even a sense of theatrical drama about it…

It’s the twentieth anniversary of Davida Allen’s film Feeling Sexy. The last time I spoke to Allen was back in the 1990s. I came across her phone number while sorting through a mountain of paperwork and decided to call her Ipswich Queensland home to say hello, as I hadn’t spoken to her for a while. She answered the phone with, ‘What do you want Nedelkopoulos? You have to want something.’ That was Allen and that was the last time I spoke to her. Feeling Sexy was released in Australia in December 1999, earning $475,000 at the Australian box office. The film went on to be screened at the Venice Film Festival. It was later nominated for Best Direction and won Best Original Screenplay from the Film Critics Circle of Australia…

In 2019, it’s tempting to think that we’ve passed beyond the boundaries of genre. We live in an arguably postmodern period defined by Craig Owens, for instance, as ‘a crisis of cultural authority’. However, this year’s Kilgour Prize at Newcastle Art Gallery was an exposition of the ways in which figurative painting still grapples with the generic protocols of the nude. We’ve long known that ‘naked’ simply describes a body unclothed, while the nude takes nakedness and filters it through a set of formal and conceptual conventions, politicising it in the process. Almost fifty years after its publication, I find John Berger’s Ways of Seeing remains some of the most compelling historical analysis of the nude. To Berger, the nude instantiates a concept of ‘woman’ as an object of observation,…

SHHH … Listen! Do you hear that … silence? Wordlessly, the best art talks to us, luring those beholden to its thrall and fluent in aesthetic dialect, to be offered personal truth given by those in tune with their muse. Linda Marrinon is profoundly shy but her work compels attention, a remarkable feat in today’s art world. Artists such as Marrinon permit their work to do all of their important interacting with the world at large and have little time for the niceties of social interaction. This is a refreshing approach in a world that’s increasingly reliant on the facile, beguiled by the landscape of social media and its influencers, personal branding and the commodification of emptiness. Marrinon attended St Mathews Primary School in the outer Melbourne suburb of North…

Return to Beginning, the title of a 1965 collage by Helen Marshall (1908–1996), encapsulates both her guiding philosophy and her life story: a life of cyclical returns, fresh starts and perpetual motion, moving ceaselessly for three decades across and between Europe, India and Australia. Some journeys were made to reconnect with her family in Bellarena, Northern Ireland, or for practical purposes: to work with curators on significant survey exhibitions of hers and husband Phillip Martin’s work. Others responded to the attractions of warmer climes and inexpensive living in Italy and southern France, while yet others were made in search of enlightenment and an alternative vision of harmonious human coexistence. Throughout these various journeys, she sought a childlike innocence or, as Martin put it in a poem written for Marshall, ‘to…

CHOCOLATE MILK AND CIGARETTES EVELYNA HELMER The paintings of Chicago-born, Sydneybased artist Evelyna Helmer emphasise the power of nostalgia and the allure of mystery. Often intentionally elliptical, Helmer’s seemingly quiet objects are charged with an emotional and psychological valency. Helmer’s works are somewhat Hopperesque in their cinematic suspension of moments in time. Familiar depictions evoke visions of comfort and, at times, an unnerving childhood while dismantling the barrier between reality and illusion. Objects commonly taken for granted are presented as treasures unearthed from early memories, thus encouraging the viewer to interact with her visual consciousness and presentation. The depicted reality of the objects dissolves as quickly as they appear. This approach is a common theme in Helmer’s paintings and sculptures. In the shifting atmospheric blur of Pontiac Long Gone Daddy…

Egan carefully selects familiar figures from art history who are easily identifiable, such as Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dali, and juxtaposes them with improbable companions including brush turkeys, kangaroos, domestic dogs and farm animals. Her carefully arranged scenarios transport the viewer into a world where the confines of time and place are no longer rigid, and the narrative is flexible. Egan’s paintings offer the audience a glimpse into a parallel universe where, for example, Henry VIII celebrates with a bear, chicken, rabbit and kangaroo at a picnic in the bush in Happy Birthday Henry (2019). The pastoral situations we are privy to in these paintings are undoubtedly surreal, though Egan’s technique also mimics the appearance of the Old Dutch masters she is paying homage to, such as Vermeer. Her…

The Prue Venables exhibition, recently held at the Australian Design Centre in Sydney, is on its first stop in a national tour. It is being shown with its accompanying documentary, which was filmed in her studio in Castlemaine, Victoria. Over the next four years the exhibition will tour to fourteen locations across Australia. Venables’ exhibition is the ninth in a series of solo exhibitions initiated by the Australian Design Centre to celebrate Australia’s most respected craft practitioners. It is aimed particularly at celebrating those who have been making work for over thirty years. The exhibitions, however, focus on current practice rather than being retrospectives or surveys. Venables, who has been practising since 1977, is one of Australia’s most accomplished ceramicists, with a demonstrated mastery of porcelain. Her work over the…

Our home planet Earth is a rocky, terrestrial planet. It has a solid and active surface with mountains, valleys, plains and vast oceans – and yet sometimes it feels like pure, unspoilt nature is hard to find. In many cases, if not most, we experience nature as conditioned by human beings; power lines plaguing lofty treetops, desire lines forged through forests by devoted hikers, and sacred summits stomped on by centuries of grand tourists. Why do we engage with nature this way? And what does it all mean? Multi-disciplinary artist Anna Litwinowicz’s anti-heroic practice explores her lived experience of the natural world as a means to confront her philosophical, somewhat anti-romantic, borderline scientific, multi-dimensional rhetoric. Her multi-channel video installations woo and lull the viewer into a mild cogitative state, so…