Innehållsförteckning för Issue 54 från Artist Profile

As its social and political implications have unpacked over the last half-century, the word ‘identity’ has continued to accumulate meanings. From ‘self’ to ‘individuality’, the idea came to include a question of the separation of majority and minority, good and bad, black and white. Then as we came to see/feel there was something else about our choices, the noun ‘identity’ became the plural noun ‘identities’, more complex; less black and white; or not so good and bad; reflecting a fluidity between majorities and minorities. The word now introduces the idea of exploring the hidden within the already visible. In this issue of Artist Profile, the profiles and various articles reflect complex identities. The idea, the matter, of identity is widely and deeply canvassed through a multiplicity of artists’ works, in…

What is the importance of painting for you? By painting, I’m trying to understand or identify something, and in doing so it can be a release. Painting helps me understand, see and feel, and help resolve trauma – I don’t necessarily want to go anywhere with it. Art is a language for me to explore something that can’t be explored in any other way. Perhaps what I’d like to do more of is give each painting space and time to exist or sit with the work for longer (or just slow down a bit). I suppose painting helps me to be okay with not knowing; or just helps me try to find out more. Who is the character Klaus Cheen, found in your paintings and videos? I made Klaus Cheen…

One sunny Monday afternoon, I arrived out the front of Henry Curchod’s studio building only to realise that it was much more than that. As the artist ushered me around to the side of the building, I noticed a shiny black car sitting adjacent to the entrance with all its doors and boot open. I said, ‘Wow, this looks like a car ad’ to which Henry replied, ‘This building is actually where I work, and it is an advertising agency, but this, this is just my car, this isn’t an ad’. Following closely behind Henry, he weaved us through the vastness of his chic workplace; temporary photo studio set-ups, industrial kitchen, metres of walls reaching the ceiling eventually. This space was beautiful but nothing like an artist’s studio I’d ever…

During my last years of art school, at a critical point in my studies, on the verge of establishing my practice, a respected lecturer and accomplished artist told me I can’t sustain a practice on autobiographical themes. I was totally and utterly dejected. If I couldn’t make work about the only thing I have complete and confident authority over, what else was I supposed to do? So, I went ahead and made my final body of work drawn from my personal history anyway. And now, my career is almost entirely invested in the autobiographic. I was born in Australia to migrant parents and so experienced an upbringing where Filipino and Australian customs would often clash. I was painfully shy as a child, and having the name ‘Marikit’ and dark skin…

They say as you get older the policemen get younger – for some of us it’s Directors of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), where the charming Nick Mitzevich is now in charge. In his office last September, we remembered James Mollison, its first occupant, from whom Mitzevich, when appointed, took advice. Mollison had a dream ride: in the 1960–80s the gallery project and the national collection were bi-partisan Commonwealth priorities. Artists worked directly with Prime Ministers then, and the Commonwealth of Australia became the biggest spender in the international art world. Mollison had been mentored by great artist administrators; his job description assumed intense engagement with the contemporary art world; he made constant visits to studios, galleries and collections across Australia. Subsequent directors have not been as widely and…

The impressively comprehensive survey of Streeton’s career curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (7 November 2020 to 14 February 2021) gave us ample material to answer this question. That’s what good surveys do – they provide the critical mass which enables us to better understand individual works and how the artist made key shifts. It also helps to evaluate an artist overall. This was the first major Streeton survey since the National Gallery of Victoria touring exhibition of 1996 and it is much more substantial. Despite his close association with Australia’s visual identity, Streeton was no provincial. He spent twenty of his seventy-six years travelling, living in England for lengthy periods, but also spending time in Europe, North Africa and North America, not to…

I was thinking of this last November when I visited the multisensory light and sound spectacular Van Gogh Alive, at Sydney’s Royal Hall of Industries, Moore Park, where, across the forty-five minute length of the show, 3000 projections of Van Gogh’s paintings accompanied by several of his letters and contemporary photographs of related locations were projected at vast sizes on the interior walls, pillars and floors, of the cavernous hall, accompanied by a booming surround sound classical playlist. It covered the same terrain as Wiggins’ talk and yet couldn’t have been further from it. While Wiggins’ talk was amusingly discursive and packed with information, Van Gogh Alive was a kaleidoscopic romp across 3000 paintings where the median time looking at each image, was in the region of 0.9 seconds. Van…

How would you describe your art to a stranger? My art is essentially abstract. When you are trying to think about the bigger picture, about being human, about where we sit in the world, and about how we are, abstraction is a way of communicating more honestly. I’m not trying to paint pictures or make sculptures of ‘things’. I’m trying to paint pictures and make sculptures that are things – things that other people can relate to, and bounce off. A lot of my sculptures are life sized, they are a physical presence in the space that other humans bump into. It’s an encounter. I hope that my paintings also drag people to the point where they really have to question what they are about. Another encounter. So you aren’t…

You grew up in Bandjalang country in the Northern Rivers of NSW? I was born in Lismore and lived there till I was twelve. I thought I was going to be there forever but then we moved to Kyogle because my father became the manager of the Norco butter factory. I loved it, and I was popular, for no good reason. We then moved to Byron Bay. In Lismore, the big event in 1954 was the flood, straight on the heels of the Queen’s visit. She stayed at the Gollan Hotel, which had a balcony, so she could wave to the crowd. The next day we were all lined up in our cub outfits like a corridor of bodies leading up to the hospital so the Queen could visit the…

It’s a studio visit like no other. I pull over on a dirt road just outside Westbury in Northern Tasmania and do a U-turn before re-reading the instructions: ‘After the willow trees, then across the creek.’ On my second attempt to find Simms’ camp – his home and studio – I spot the artist waving from the side of the road. He’s tall and lanky with long grey hair, and his beard is decoratively tied in a knot. His clothes are handmade, as are his chunky wooden clogs. Simms’ camp occupies a sliver of land divided by an old railway line in the bucolic Meander Valley. This rich environment is reflected in the artist’s paintings, which feature people and farm animals amidst rolling hills and winding paths. His camp is…

There is some irony in the term ‘endangered artefacts’ given that Victoria Reichelt’s work appears to be a painted photographic facsimile. The style itself is another near-redundant form used to dazzle the untutored and too often, in less capable hands, that’s all it is. But at its best the quality that stops this type of painting dead in its tracks and elevates it from being technique for its own sake is often achieved by painstaking repetition and a kitsch humour associated with the dumb ubiquity of the objects represented. Reichelt’s paintings are hypnotic visual mandalas that seduce the eye. They become pseudo-abstract images for meditation constructed from the everyday detritus of life that, at first glance, I feel should be dismissed out of hand as just paintings of irrelevant, pointless…

When the great Canadian-born painter Philip Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer wrote a compelling biography Night Studio (1988) about the problems of having a never-around workaholic father, many were shocked by his apparent parental neglect. And it was not just his daughter; like so many artist couples her mother, also called Musa (McKim), was a talented painter and poet whose career was side-lined by Guston’s ambition. He, in turn, had his own demons to fight. Many of these did not fully emerge until the last decade of his life, when he ditched Abstract Expressionism for what appeared like wild cartoon imagery, often on a huge scale. These works used a reduced palette of mostly muted pinks, with visual trigger points in high-keyed greens and blues. Not the least of these demons…

“We know family stories… and we know our ties to Country to be true” Fiona Foley says Australia’s history of brutality doesn’t surprise her as much anymore. But it ‘has been a burning question for me since I was a child of about five, sitting on the beach at Urangan looking across to Fraser Island, thinking, “Why aren’t there any old people living over there now?”.’ During our conversation in December last year, Foley describes an inability to ‘get close to any kind of history’ that resonates loud and clear with my own experience. As Aboriginal people we know family stories, we know cultural lore and we know our ties to Country to be true, but our truths are missing from the Australian lexicon. Colonial school systems provide an education…

‘Seeing and Being Seen’, William Yang’s latest project, has had a long gestation. It was first proposed by former Queensland Art Gallery /Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator Aaron Seeto four years ago, before being picked up by another QAGOMA curator, José De Silva, who similarly moved on before the project was realised. ‘It was all in limbo’, Yang recounts, until the gallery appointed Rosie Hays, Associate Curator of Australian Cinémathèque, to oversee the exhibition. ‘Her expertise isn’t in either photography or contemporary art, but she really knows her films and so we have come to regard the project like a documentary film.’ Given Yang’s background as a documentary photographer, Hays’ appointment to curate this major survey exhibition – which, at seventy-seven, Yang prefers to call a retrospective – seems…

For many Western Australians, Ross Seaton (1944–2020) was the ‘Walking Man.’ He is a vivid memory, a point of reference, a marker in our unfolding lives. A feature of the local landscape for decades, he pushed his wheelbarrow along Stirling Highway, making his daily journey toward the ocean. On the way, he collected cardboard and other treasures left by the roadside. Hunched over, always in shorts, his mahogany-brown legs wrapped in bandages, and his eyes focused and alert, he was mysterious and uncommunicative. A compelling figure, his self-directed quest seemed laudable in an increasingly controlled and directed world. He was his own man, a Don Quixote with his wheelbarrow Rocinante setting out each day to find meaning in the world. Whether he reached his beachside destination or was forced to…

In 2007, Gillian Sanbrook bought Bibbaringa, a 950-hectare property located in Wymah Valley on the south west slopes of New South Wales. At the time, the land had suffered from overuse – too many livestock led to the degradation and reduction of ground cover and, as a result, soil quality was poor. It needed new land management practices to improve carbon levels and create the right growing conditions. A practitioner of regenerative farming, Sanbrook began the slow process of restoring the landscape. She planted over 60,000 native trees and shrubs to restore the biodiversity of Bibbaringa’s ecology. She also built leaky weirs, designed to slow the flow of water and improve hydration across the property. Thirteen years later, Sanbrook’s efforts have raised carbon levels in the soil by three percent…

Marking the Bend in the Track 2 (2020) is a new watercolour work on the program in ‘From the Mountain to the Sky: Guy Warren Drawings’. Looking at it, we follow an ochre path through the space of the picture, up and away to the right, the colour becoming only more insistent about itself as we follow it along. Through the rest of the space, lines multiply; sometimes they seem to represent plants, sometimes animal forms, even flashes of outlines that look like human bodies. This is a fitting work to include in this show, which follows the track of Warren’s eighty-or-so years of artistic practice. Throughout it all, as the exhibition attests, a commitment to mark-making – to paint, to pencil, and to the flat surface – has remained…

Having recently graduated from the National Art School, majoring in ceramics, Parker is searching for her own frames of beauty. As a young artist of Australian and African American heritage, she re-examines the ostensible ‘primitivity’ of the ceramic mode – one of humanity’s oldest artforms. Experimenting with textures and patterns on functional forms, Parker playfully prods Western ideals lodged deep within art, both historically and presently, and within one’s own perceptions of beauty. ‘My ideas of beauty are not conventional scopes of beauty. I’m inviting a new conversation – lumps and bumps are beautiful’, she explains. Each form celebrates irregularity and individuality, valorising the ‘imperfect’ as perfect. For the artist, each work is a transmission of energy, embodying a play between intent and submission. Her works are fashioned from a…