Innehållsförteckning för Issue 53 från Artist Profile

Long-held interests in history suffuse George’s practice as she excavates archives and collections to explore how medium can manifest both presence and absence. The artist’s fascination with time and space can be traced back to childhood, when her family moved from the Perth ‘hills’ to a rural property in Gidgegannup. There, they lived in a hay barn with no walls or phone line, and a generator for electricity. Her parents’ vision of building a house never eventuated, and they lived in that shed for seven years. Life here wasn’t easy – George remembers the floods, the drought and the plagues of locusts pinging against the tin shed; it was almost biblical. She describes the different ‘feelings’ of various parts of the property as she would traverse the bush, with her…

A lot of artists who set up lives abroad have packed up shop and returned to Australia. It’s sort of a line in the sand moment for a lot of people. How are you going? It’s tough, we are all is swimming in uncertainty at the moment. I’m homesick but stuck here, visa worries, canceled exhibitions, but I’m healthy and painting and doing okay. And I just had a big show here in Berlin. It was a challenge to make it happen with COVID, but friends put in a lot of work, and made it something very special. I’m looking at a series of large pink canvasses with dark triangular grid painting over the top. Tell me about this motif. How did these paintings emerge? I want these paintings to act…

Jilamara Art Centre manager Will Heathcote says that December ‘will be a formidable time for Tiwi art in Melbourne.’ Known for its geometric traditions (drawn from body paint designs), Tiwi art has extended very naturally into print media. The first printing press was acquired with the assistance of Australian Print Workshop in 1995. Funding was sought in 2000, to enable artists to visit Adelaide’s Charles Mountford Collection. Mountford (1890-1976) was an anthropologist who visited Milikapiti in the 1920s and 1940s. What he gathered comprises the largest Tiwi artefact collection in Australia. Now managed by the South Australian Museum, it includes over 1000 items – tunga bark bags, tutini (poles), bark paintings and spears. After spending time with the collection, leading Tiwi artists Pedro Wonaeamirri and Janice Murray Pungautiji made prints…

I don’t want to move this fast, I’m not ready for the future. Great mountains wave goodbye, I’m not ready– Siena Stubbs, excerpt from Shinkansen It’s hard to take on board that the giggling young woman chatting with me on the phone from Yirrkala in far eastern Arnhemland is descended from Mana, the Ancestral Shark and the legendary Djan’kawu Sisters. But Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs proudly accepts that she’s one of the 105 grandchildren of the hugely senior elder Mowarra Ganambarr who died aged about eightyeight in 2005, when Siena was three. Mowarra established three outstations for his extensive Datiwuy clan on Arnhem Bay, fought for land and sea rights, and painted his stories of descent from the Shark and the Sisters on bark for fifty years. Stubbs herself has…

In May this year we lost a precious thing. We did not know that we would mourn it, and many of us did not know how important it was until after it was gone. Months on, we are united in our grief, and we are resolute that it should never happen again. On 24 May, Rio Tinto detonated explosives at one of the oldest sites of human occupation on the continent, decimating a place that was both ancient and sacred. The blasts destroyed two culturally significant rock shelters, one of which had chronicled 46,000 years of Aboriginal history. Now people the whole world over know its name: the Juukan Gorge. A parliamentary enquiry has been launched; a Royal Commission has been called for. Rio Tinto has been stripped of its…

When we spoke about your practice and recent body of works referencing the barzakh, you referred to both moments of clarity and complexity throughout the process. In light of the quote by twelfth century Andalusian Muslim philosopher, mystic and poet Ibn ‘Arabi: ‘If you find it complicated to answer someone’s question, do not answer it, for his container is already full and does not have room for the answer’, can you explain how this tension informed the constant and rigorous process of both mark-making and erasure in your current work? There is a barzakh, or balance, between complexity and clarity, as there is between any two things. Isthmus knows both yet is neither, hence it is seen as either a potential barrier or a mediator. I was looking at the…

How would you describe yourself as an artist? I don’t really see myself as an artist. I’m more of a collector. I’m picking up and reconnecting things that I might have found ten years ago. I tend to approach time from a more organic perspective than the artworld, which is run in such a linear, forward-thinking way: shows and programs are always made in advance, always future-tense which I feel tends to compromise the present. My particular process is about enfolding the past into the present. It’s more about looking backwards in order to forge a way forward; horizontal rather than vertical. Over the last few decades, I’ve been collecting a nebulous archive of photographs, objects and notes accrued whilst living and working abroad. This remains ongoing. Have these archives…

“There is a succinctness to the medium that allows me to speak plainly about political ideas” Alex Seton’s Newtown studio isn't hard to miss, with stacks of raw stone spilling out onto the street and the shrill buzz of metal meeting marble reverberating off concrete. The artist and his team are in full production mode, racing towards the deadline for a solo show at Sullivan+Strumpf later in the year. There is little tension, but a clear sense of unity and focus amongst the small team. For Seton, life hasn’t changed all that much in the era of COVID-19. His fevered work continues, only with greater focus and less interruptions. P2 masks were already a mainstay of his daily routine – a necessary barrier against the fine mist of particulates that…

It’s good to be invited to write about my practice. I’ve wondered for so long about whether I have something that might be called that and what its contours might be. I make drawings mainly, and sometimes wood carvings, and even more rarely sculptural things. I work in my living space, usually in the evenings after children’s bedtimes. I’m drawn to making large things perhaps because I require a sense of desperation and immersion to generate energy. The desperation is permeated by a kind of amnesia and a recklessness. I don’t know how to make a drawing. Each attempt at doing so is a question of how can one possibly do it? This question has a barren-blooming sort of doubleness to it – it holds both a kind of incapacity…

Reacting to the changing world around them, every generation creates a new vernacular fused with new technology, compounding words and introducing and localising foreign loan words. Noting these fluctuations, linguistic conservatives oft-decry that language is ‘sullied’ or ‘dying’ as the ‘denigration’ of language comes to represent the desecration of history. However, Shireen Taweel’s solo exhibition ‘Switching Codes’ at Fairfield Gallery and Museum reveals that language is an evolving, embodied, living practice. Her new copper sculptural installations involve sound recordings that display language as a means of development and communication, rather than a fixed set of rules or values. That is, for Taweel, language is never lost; merely transformed. For many visitors from Fairfield in Western Sydney, the concept of code-switching or diglossia may already be familiar. Whilst code-switching was first…

Sabsabi told William Verity on Radio National about a childhood memory from the Lebanese civil war: ‘I remember one image, there was an open truck … from the olive fields … above Tripoli. It was lined with bodies. I remember … looking down from my grandmother’s verandah. I could see mothers/people searching through (the bodies) and blood had turned to brown.’ An intense experience from a world in reverse. Yet Sabsabi has turned that experience into a promise for integrity and harmony. Watching people looking at Sabsabi’s ‘A Promise’ in the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW)’s Asian Gallery, I found the types of encounters intriguing. There were those catching images on their phone while taking in the six works. Others seemed engaged in the relationships between the works. There was…

“I like painting for culture way – Kulama – that means painting culture” Already a well-known Australian artist, this year is set to foster further recognition for Timothy Cook. From his studio on Melville Island, Cook’s paintings will appear in domestic and international arenas – and a spate of new prizes are on the horizon. With exhibitions planned in Australia, Europe and the United States at the time of writing, Cook has been selected as a finalist in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ renowned Wynne Prize, as well as the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s ‘National Works on Paper’, and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary First Nations Art Award. Coming months will feature a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Aboriginal & Pacific Art (led by the long-standing Indigenous art ambassador…

Suspended in plume-like formations, hundreds of icicle-shaped glass forms are looming. Was that a sound? They’re alive in the otherwise silent space, swaying slightly in your wake. Carrying life that was literally breathed into them by their makers. Carrying the life of those who were affected by nuclear plumes at Maralinga. A precarious movement, they are glass, fragile perhaps, but also strong. I vividly remember this feeling, evoked by Yhonnie Scarce’s Death Zephyr, which I saw as part of ‘The National’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017. In the exhibition catalogue, Daniel Browning wrote, ‘The objects Scarce creates are literal in so much as they mimic the organic form of bush foods once harvested by Aboriginal people across the inland. There are elongated long yams,…

At first blush, there seems to be some kind of code to the arrangement of the small paper dots across the canvas of Nicole Ellis’ Confetti (2006). Properly, ‘dots’ might be an oversimplification here. Rather, these scraps – which Ellis salvaged from the streets in Rome – bear the marks of their manufacture in the array of tessellating shapes that they take: circles, but also the exoskeletons of circles, corner pieces with curved sides torn out, four-pointed approximations of stars. From this debris, Ellis builds a work which is primarily communicative about the social, political, and economic histories embedded in her materials. We can see how each confetti has been cut from a bigger strip of paper; we can imagine each piece thrown into the air at whatever party, then…

From the outside, your art is incredibly nuanced and dynamic. How would you describe your practice? The beauty of art is that it is intrinsically ‘non-doctrinaire’. This holds true in the processes one engages in the studio, or in my approach to mentoring younger artists. I tend to address my practice on the whole as painting, or if pushed, meta-painting, as it is on and about the subject of painting: in all its faceted complexity. How does your relationship to painting inform your work? Painting is conditional on many things. I personally acknowledge painting as a discipline, an approach, not necessarily a material manifestation. It depends on one's terms of reference. I believe in the wonderful possibilities that arise by testing boundaries. These can lead to outcomes that, when acknowledged…

Elaine was born 1941, in Tingha, which means ‘Flat Rock’. Tingha is in Northern New South Wales, but she grew up in on a mission near Murrin Bridge, New South Wales. In the mid 1990s Elaine finally had a free leg. Her husband had left her years before and all of her six children were at school, so at fifty-two Elaine found herself with not much to do. She wasn’t a drinker or a smoker and her siblings lived too far away and Elaine didn’t drive, otherwise she waited for school to finish and would go to collect the kids. One day a friend, Beryl, invited her to go to Redfern to a new cooking class that she had started. That place was the Eora Centre. At that time, in…

Gunai poet Kirli Saunders is often on the road. Formerly the Manager of First Nations projects at Red Room Company, she regularly crossed state lines – Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and the Northern Territory – to deliver the organisation’s project, ‘Poetry in First Languages’. These days she still travels but has expanded her creative practice to include the visual arts, splitting her time between writing and painting. ‘I shied away from [painting] because I didn’t have any technical training and I didn’t believe that my work told stories that mattered. But being trained as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as a writer has made me become more confident in telling stories in a range of ways.’ Saunders continues, ‘Painting feels really free in its making, and I’m…

Francisco de Goya said: ‘I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.’ In the context of his etchings, the Caprichos, and his ‘black paintings’, Goya’s shadows surely engulfed any available or remaining light in the human soul. These works spoke to the graphic reality of war in a way that our modern sprawling media eyes cannot. Yet like Goya we can look at the times we are enduring and declare ‘Estos es malo’: This is bad. And by God, it is so bad now. In this decade, nihilism in art feels like realism rather than exaggeration. In this context, what is the contemporary role of ‘black paintings’? Perhaps it is the strange liberation at looking straight into the wound…