Innehållsförteckning för Issue 50 från Artist Profile

No one who saw Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Life Span installation in The Ludoteca Castello, Venice, for La Biennale di Venezia, in 2009 has ever forgotten it: a huge black rectangular solid block made from 175,218 VHS video cassettes (weighing ninety tonnes) below a fresco in a twelfth century chapel of a deconsecrated former nunnery. A poetic representation of the 1975 human lifespan average of 60.1 years, the experience of Life Span surpassed that of every other memento mori. Outside the chapel, the summer’s warmth was full of life’s energy. Inside, the black crypt seemed to ignite anxiety for a life needing to be lived; not wasted. Anyone familiar with the content of the videos would probably get Claire and Sean’s critical humour. Life Span is one of the…

‘A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of human beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also have bigger weapons. One thing I am not pessimistic about is the ability of nature to heal itself.’ Peter Booth made this comment in a conversation we had in his sunny St Kilda backyard in November 2003, a time before climate change was claiming front pages and news specials on the television. It was the eve of his massive retrospective at the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria entitled ‘Peter Booth:…

From the onset of puberty I have suffered from chronic migraines. The word migraine comes from the Greek ‘hemi-krania’, or half skull, referring to pain on one side of the head. This conception of the half, the halving of the body that migraine inflicts, became a fixation for me throughout my adolescence. What was the relationship between the left deltoid and the right ocular migraine? Did pain incline to my right side because I was right-handed even though the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right hand? In his book Migraine: Understanding a Common Disorder, Oliver Sacks wrote that ‘migraine gathers identity from stage to stage, for it starts as a reflex, but can become a creation.’ I developed a pronounced laterality toward my right side, neatly portioning my…

Having visited Iceland on an art residency in 2011, the impressions of rapture and bewilderment were hard to shake off. The nagging feeling led to an application to Hafnarborg, the contemporary art centre in the former fishing town of Hafnarfjördur. On the top floor of a spacious apartment is the artist’s residence, available to artists for a calendar month. September seemed the right time, lodged between the two seasonal extremes, and is also sympathetic to views of the Northern Lights – although in the end I only once saw them from behind a skein of cloud. No matter, there were plenty of consolations. Then and now, countless people are drawn to Iceland because of the mystique of its remoteness. Many refer, with appreciative squinted eyes, to the ‘lunar landscape’ generated…

STAGECRAFT DAVID NOONAN David Noonan is on an endless quest to source, construct and amalgamate a range of inexplicable and beguiling images. His processes are reliant upon the synchronicity of accidents, as the artist comments, ‘one image activates a dormant one and something quite special happens.’ Like the role of a puppeteer who imbues their objects with the perception of life, Noonan poetically superimposes abstract and representational imagery through a tactile process of re-vitalisation. With a curatorial idea adhering to Noonan’s heightened sensitivity to the construction and experience of space, ‘Stagecraft’ will present an intimate and melancholic suite of silkscreen collages, tapestries and a film across three adjoining spaces, surveying the Ballarat-born artist’s practice over the last five years. Acting as a gestalt, grey-scale silkscreen collages on dyed linen will…

One hundred and twenty-two works displayed chronologically in purpose designed spaces make up the retrospective, assembled by Michael Hawker, curator Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery. Molvig’s practice is introduced through a number of smaller oils dating from 1948, produced while the artist attended the Strathfield annex of the East Sydney Tech College after the Second World War. Presented after these Sydney pictures are works executed in the early 1950s, when Molvig travelled abroad with fellow Strathfield alumni to the UK and Europe (1949–1952). The oils from this time are unsurprisingly uneven, but the following sequence of paintings reveal Molvig developing, among which is his 1954 Blake Prize entry Crucifixion (1953). In this painting, the Cross – from which the forlorn figure of Christ hangs – appears to be made…

What lead to building your new studio? Claire: Having the luxury of being able to ponder, rather than have a concept in mind or making the work for a particular site. To have an object within a space to crash your big toe into or fall over; just go towards something with a gut feeling rather than the brain. There were many little things we had to consider or hadn’t heard of. With the help of YouTube, we navigated our way around making this studio. Sean: Yeah, most of our work has been about demolition and inquiries into architecture. So, it’s fitting to actually build a studio to understand what goes into making a building. I read your first project together was in a Greek Orthodox Church. S: The hall…

Art is a fascinating thing. What is it? Is it man explaining to others what he sees, how he feels, his truth, his place in the cosmos? It can be. Can U Dig It? immediately popped into my head when I was looking at Madeleine Kelly’s densely populated and challenging oeuvre. It’s a track by Pop Will Eat Itself – an independent British genre-ambiguous band, mixing industrial, dance, hip hop, techno and hard rock styles; a sampler of cool pop culture, a swirling archeology of references. To a student of the visual arts, Kelly’s work is a veritable feast. There’s a palpable intellectual rigor at work here, which isn’t surprising given she’s an academic with a PhD currently lecturing in painting at The University of Sydney. Kelly’s left wing Catholic…

In the Aegean archipelago, islands call to you. A luminous pulse in the gathering twilight encircled in an aqua sea. Long after they dissolve into distant light-flicker, they return to hover inside, as afterimage. In memory, they ignite an impossible yearning. A call to return. The tiny Greek island of Kythera, as ancestral home, has exerted its influence a world away on prolific artist and writer John Conomos. Conomos was born in Grafton (NSW) in 1947, a child of Kytheran émigré parents brought together by the ‘letter-chain mode of migration’ in Australia. His art practice is a crucible of mixed media, from single channel video and radiophonic works to hybrid forms of video art and documentary, installation, photomedia and photoperformance. Labyrinthian and mercurial, Conomos’ works traverse the big themes: memory,…

Not long ago I encountered the sculpture No.247 Metal construction (1965–68) in the exhibition ‘Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel’ at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria. It was set centrally in the space, backlit by a large window on the far wall. By some magic optical illusion, I saw No.247 not as 2.7 metres high in the gallery but outside, as a towering work dominating the TarraWarra landscape. A fleeting and enthralling glimpse which rekindled in my mind Klippel’s preoccupation over fifty years with the notion of ‘sculpture-in-the-landscape.’ This preoccupation unfurled in a fascinating way. Up to the time of what I term his ‘Great Wood Sculptures’ of 1987, Klippel had only completed two sculptures directly derived from his ‘sculpture-in-the-landscape’ obsession. Only two, over fifty years! The first of those…

In her new series of large-scale paintings and hand-built ceramic forms, Kate Dorrough continues her ongoing focus on the river as a fundamental source of fertility within the Australian landscape. The Sydney artist posits the river as a vital life force, with its cyclical nature of renewal and destruction, while also considering its importance as a potent historical and cultural emblem embedded in our literature and inherited visual language. Drawing from memory and previous art residencies, Dorrough reduces the river to an abstracted essence. Her stoneware ceramic forms evolve over time with numerous firings, where iron oxide bleeds through layers of glaze, slips and stains, creating alchemic gestures. Calligraphic marks float above stained linen canvases and fields of painterly marks, distilling recollections of swimming in warm, shallow, Gum leaf-stained river…

Is it too early to call Joseph Beuys Cafe the sleeper success of the 2020 Melbourne arts calendar? An appointment-only gallery established by collector Ian George, this is the only space in Australia dedicated to the seminal figure of late-modern Conceptualism. Name a post-war German artist and they will likely have some sort of connection to Beuys. His influence was so widely spread partly because he taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 to 1972, where his students included some of Germany’s most important late-modern and contemporary artists such as Blinky Palermo and Sigmar Polke. Yet, in Australia, the artist is somewhat missing from the lexicon, despite the absolute impact that he had on subsequent generations – a fact George puts down to the ‘tyranny of distance.’ Beuys’ conceptualisation of…

Robin White (Ngãti Awa) first came to prominence in the 1970s with her distinctive figurative representations of the landscapes and people of New Zealand. The clarity and figurative concentration of her paintings from this period, such as 1974’s Fish and Chips Maketu, translate the local specificity of an apparently mundane subject into something both talismanic and joyful. Since then, White’s practice has evolved as she has lived and travelled throughout the Pacific. In 1982 the artist moved to Kiribati, where she lived for seventeen years, leading her to experiment with a range of new media and techniques and, perhaps most significantly, opening the door to collaboration. Since moving back to New Zealand, the evolution of this collaborative mode of working has allowed White to foster a rich range of reciprocal…

The eye, the aesthetic lens of artists, has made an indelible impression upon our everyday. A motorway overpass is very Jeffrey Smart, a hillside of saplings is rather Fred Williams, a backlit side-table covered in flowers is just so ‘Olley.’ So too, the glisten on Sydney’s magnificent harbour with, for example, a retreating ferry is entirely ‘Kingo.’ Such is the tenacity of Peter Kingston’s drive that he has realised countless expressions of Luna Park, tug boats, mists, seasons and crepuscular rays of light, rope throwers on Circular Quay, vintage trains, the Phantom, Superman… the list goes on. Many of these have come to remind us not only of our own quaint past but (very cleverly) of his. We are lassoed into the wonderful world of ‘Kingo.’ Take it or leave…

Bessie Davidson was one of a cohort of female Australian artists who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, sought to expand their lives and artistic careers by travelling to the cultural centres of Europe. Davidson was one of the few who remained in Europe, establishing herself within the vibrant artistic milieu of Paris’ Montparnasse. Throughout her career, she received many accolades and awards including being made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour – the highest award conferred by the French Government. Whilst Davidson’s work has been largely overlooked in Australia, stories of her life as an artist living in Paris were frequently told in Sally Smart’s childhood home in rural South Australia. Davidson was Smart’s great aunt, and her legacy empowered Smart to follow her own artistic ambitions.…

Dimmed lights and a sky of paper lanterns at the entrance ‘Japan Supernatural’ demarcates the crossing of thresholds. While these immersive elements transport visitors into the metaphysical realms of Japanese folklore, they are also part of an anthropological curatorial approach, clearly evoking notions of the ‘traditional’ – a loaded concept ineluctably tied to the equally slippery idea of ‘authenticity.' Such theatrical features invite skepticism around the sensationalisation of Asian Art in Australia and was a concern unfortunately confirmed with the inclusion of art superstar Takashi Murakami, whose works have dominated the marketing of the exhibition. Murakami’s theory of ‘super-flat’ was first coined in 2001, writing that Japanese ‘society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two dimensional,’ reflected in the pictorial surface and in contemporary Japanese culture that, to Murakami, was…

What kind of book might an artist and a writer create together, given free reign? This is the question proposed by the kōrero series, a venture by Massey University Press enabling the artists and writers of New Zealand to explore the weaving together of words and pictures in published form. While there is nothing new in publishers engaging artists to illustrate writers’ works, either across generations (Matisse’s Poesies de Stéphane Mallarmé) or between contemporaries (Louise Bourgeois and Arthur Miller’s Homely Girl), the kōrero series aims to achieve something else. By inviting participants to collaborate from scratch on a theme that is open to evolution, novelist and series editor Lloyd Jones has created the tantalising possibility of artist and writer starting at the beginning; not with a finished story to be…