Innehållsförteckning för Issue 52 från Artist Profile

This time around, the artists – Tim Allen, Peter Stevens, Mary Tonkin, Alison Coates and David Collins – along with filmmaker Ben Ferris and art critic John McDonald were flown to Mount Zero-Taravale, a sanctuary eighty kilometres north west of Townsville. Due to the area’s location, topography and rainfall, a rich array of habitats and diversity of wildlife is supported. Importantly for the artists, the variation in landforms and changes in geology also make for spectacular scenery. Tonkin states, ‘I fell in love with the landscape of the Mt Zero-Taravale Sanctuary. We swam in stupendous river gorges dotted with Hoop Pines, wandered in the sumptuous golden light of restored grasslands in giant Rose Gum forest and walked with swathes of Cycads unfurling their silver tendrils after a cool burn. I…

I blame Nicolas Rothwell! The former most impressive of reporters about Aboriginal art and artists for The Australian also wrote fiction on such matters, which allowed him to apply his imagination, some speculation and add magic realism. At the peak of these fictive leaps is the 2013 work Belomor, ‘where truth and invention meet’, according to its blurb. It flies us from 1747 Dresden via post-Communist dissidents to the dead-end port of Wyndham in 2007 where ‘a painter seeks redemption after the disasters of his years in northern Australia.’ That painter was Paddy Bedford. Not that this chapter has the saintly Bedford at its centre – there lies the flawed figure of Tony Oliver, the Melbourne art gallery guru who finds himself in the East Kimberley with the artist he…

Adelaide-based Kim distilled his concept of Gong-Gan-Seong (spatiality) from fellow South Korean artist Lee Ufan’s Man-Nam (encounter) theory. Ufan founded the post-modernist Mono-ha sculptural movement in 1970s Japan, emphasising the phenomenology of making (or non-making) and activating the space (or relationship) between materials and perception. In February 2019, Kim created his largest single sculptural work in Adelaide’s FELTspace gallery. Density married spatiality with the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, and Arte Povera’s approach to found materials and their inherent history. Two box frames run from left and right around the walls until they met, but don’t touch, at the centre. The dark timber contrasts with white gallery walls, supporting a series of rocks suspended in fabric sleeves. On the left, only black material is used, on the right, only…

Even before Julia Morison studied graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic (1970–72) and painting at the University of Canterbury (1973–75), Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game can be seen as the beginning of her artistic education. Hesse’s novel chronicles Joseph Knecht’s mastery of a game that is so elusive that its mechanics are only alluded to throughout the novel. It requires at least the study of mathematics and music, and a synthesis of an aesthetic and an ascetic life. Like the underlying logic that structures Knecht’s game, Morison also works with and against elusive constraints. Sometimes, it is the constraint of working with ceramics as material and the human head as form, as in her ‘Head[case]’ series (2014-19). Otherwise the constraint is conceptual, like the apparatuses that augment or control the…

You studied with the Polish-born painter, Professor Maximilian Feuerring, from 1956 to 1959. Was that at an art school? I was eighteen and I saw Feuerring’s advertisement for private art classes in the local newspaper, so no it wasn’t an art school. He had been a professor at the Universitas International in Munich (1947–1950) as was typical of people who had really impressive positions in Europe. After leaving the internment camps no one would give them a job that recognised their qualifications. In the US, many of the artist refugees were made professors at places like Yale, but not here in Australia. Because of this situation after WWII, many European painters started their own schools, particularly in lower George Street in Sydney. We ended up becoming very good friends. Did…

I observe my paintings developing like a conversation, whereby each mark influences the next. Emergent forms oscillate in dialogue with one another, and motifs are repeated across planes. My work adopts the potentialities of paint to create visual dialogues where action, experience, perception and memory are interwoven and folded back into one another. I recall exactly when I realised my exhibition ‘Labyrinth’ would be different from those I have had in the past. It was March this year, and I had just received a link in a group messenger thread titled: ‘Golden Plains Music Festival Attendee Diagnosed with Coronavirus’. I called Claire, Director of Flinders Lane Gallery, to talk about my upcoming show and the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic would reach Melbourne before its opening. Neither of us knew…

From 1879 and well into 1880, the National Gallery School in Melbourne was in a crisis. The students were dissatisfied with how painting and drawing were being taught. In particular, they were unhappy that life classes were not offered. One reason was the prevailing social morality, summed up by The Age newspaper which described the life class as ‘akin to the salacities of the brothel.’ But another reason was that the Drawing Master at the School, Oswald Rose Campbell, considered ‘life study unnecessary to figure drawing.’ Leading the student dissent were Tom Roberts, Charles Richardson and Frederick McCubbin, who took things into their own hands, attending anatomy classes at Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne, and organising their own twice-weekly life classes with themselves paying for the models. But…

Xu Zhen is, arguably, one of the most fascinating artists to emerge from China in recent years, with a multidisciplinary practice that ranges across sculpture, installation, painting and collage, much of which is produced by assistants who beaver away in his immense Shanghai studio where he functions more as an entrepreneur and CEO, than an artist. The factory-like manufacturing facility which he named MadeIn Company was formed in 2009 – the name riffing off the ubiquitous manufacturing tag, Made in China. In 2013 MadeIn evolved into the Xu Zhen® brand as a direct response to how the art market too easily commodifies artists. Xu Zhen the brand went on to explore the nexus between art and commerce and the clash of cultures in an increasingly global world. More pragmatically, the…

Twenty years ago, the Howard government addressed the critical state of arts funding in Australia. The Arts Minister, Peter McGauran, initiated several reviews designed to inform policy and create a financially healthy, artistically vibrant, and broadly accessible cultural sector. The first was the Nugent Inquiry into the Major Performing Arts, which was released in 1999. Two years later, Rupert Myer was invited to chair an Inquiry into the Visual Arts & Crafts designed to ‘Build on the sector's achievements and provide opportunities for its potential to be realised.’ At this critical point in our history – in the wake of the Brandis mauling of the cultural sector, the recent cuts to organisational four-year funding, the proposal to double fees for creative arts courses and in the midst of the turmoil…

You have a substantial history working in both film and contemporary art. How do you find traversing the two fields? Video art and film pose different challenges, mainly in the distinct architecture of the viewing experience and the way meaning is made. Mixing techniques from both fields is really exciting to me. I began my career as a filmmaker, working with scripts, dominated by dialogue and the single screen of cinema. I’ve since opened up my practice to still photography and multiscreen installation as a way to upend narrative convention and experiment with more impressionistic representations of human or non-human subjectivity. In many ways your work challenges these traditional modes of spectatorship from cinema … The experience of making and watching cinema will always hold a special place for me.…

You studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the VCA (Victorian College of the Arts) in 1981, majoring in painting. Indeed, many of your photographs, such as those in your ‘Colour Field’ (2013) series, possess a painterly character. What catalysed your transition into photography, and what did you carry over from your painting practice? I’ve had an interest in photography for a very long time. As an artist it is a prerequisite to document your work – many artists from other disciplines know their way around a camera, for economic and practical reasons. Some are seduced by it – I’m one of those. I won my first film camera in a sandcastle building competition one summer, as a kid. I bought my first 35mm SLR film camera in 1976, for…

SO, I GOT LOST WRITING THIS INTRODUCTION. THIS IS WHAT I CAME UP WITH … ‘IS THAT A MAN POINTING A STICK AT THE MEMORY OF A DOG? NO THAT’S TREVELYAN CLAY WITH HIS NEW EXHIBITION ‘BEACH THROWER.’ I WAS GOING TO GO WITH SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAVES OF CONTEMPORARY PAINTING, BUT I COULDN’T FIND THE LINE. WHAT DO YOU THINK? I LIKE IT. THE IDEA OF THROWING A BEACH GOT INTO MY HEAD, SAND AND SALTWATER GOING EVERYWHERE. IT’S ABOUT COVID TOO, EVERYTHING FEELS UPROOTED RIGHT NOW. You grew up on the beach? [Says ‘Oh yeah’ confidently] Cornwall, UK (not Leeds), then Port Macquarie to Canberra to Melbourne. COVID has messed with everyone’s sense of time. I think time and painting are closely linked in a critical way. How…

‘Into the jaws of Death / Into the mouth of hell / Rode the six hundred’ In his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), Alfred, Lord Tennyson celebrates the bravery of the soldiers of the light cavalry, who knew that charging into the ‘valley of death’ against the Russian artillery would result in carnage and death. Being honourable men, the soldiers followed their orders. Tennyson goes on in the poem to lay the blame for this military disaster on the poor leadership of the hereditary titled English generals. The idealism and bravery – some would say naivety – of the ordinary soldier has been played out in numerous wars and conflicts. Like many young men of his generation, Ron Hogan, an eighteen-year-old fourth-generation Australian from a strict Irish…

Coming from the Bidjara people of south-west Queensland, Cook was adopted as a baby by a non-indigenous family who raised him to be proud of his heritage. After twenty-five years working as a commercial photographer, Cook turned to visual art. ‘I started out making art wanting to find out a little more about my identity’, he says, ‘but there was always a greater good, not only to explore for myself but also to send a message to the majority of Australians who don’t understand Indigenous history or have a deeper understanding of current issues. So many people see the issues of Aboriginality in black and white, missing the details in between. Telling this story, doing the research and putting it in my artwork helps me understand and allows me to…

It has been six years since Lisa Adams’ last exhibition with Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. The artist works at such a measured pace that it takes some years for her to amass the volume of work required for a single exhibition. Each of Adams’ exhibitions are like mini retrospectives. They do not conform to a particular thematic but are, instead, a record of her ongoing refinement. For the upcoming show, works representing the past six years of her practice will be presented. There is a modesty in Adams’ approach to making and exhibiting. ‘A lot of people aren’t aware of my work because I’m a quiet person’, concedes the artist. But one must not look too far to find evidence of her constant activity. She is quietly…