Innehållsförteckning för Issue 55 från Artist Profile

ESSE: essential nature or essence Daniel Weber Gallery: The Wellington Gallery, Waterloo, Sydney August 5th - 19th, 2021 panaxeapaintings.com Most of Daniel Weber’s paintings belong to abstract expressionism, also known as “deconstructionism” artworks. Daniel’s life and experiences make his artworks display a multitude of approaches to expressions, whether it is the use of bold brushwork or the flow of colours. His works appear to be based on improvisation and random emotional expression, yet in fact, Daniel Weber is pursuing free spirited expression and creativity, emphasising the straightforwardness, naivety and fantasy of his feelings and is very playful which makes his works interesting and fascinating. The brushwork and colours are unconventional, resulting in pictures of light sweeping dots and splatters. An unrestricted, random and improvised expression, a blend of water and…

When I call Susan Baird, the rain starts pelting down on my thin tin roof. We struggle to hear each other over the phone and soon decide email might be easier. She writes later the same day. ‘It’s torrential here now and very loud!’ For ten days Baird has been sitting tight in her cottage in Hill End, a four-hour drive north-west of Sydney. The unrelenting rainfall is breaking records across the state, overflowing local bridges and roads. She’s unsure how safe it is to drive back to her home in Sydney where her partner is waiting. In the meantime, she continues to paint. But access to materials is always at the back of her mind. ‘If I’m up here for long periods of time, you have to be really…

The nineteenth century practice of ‘blackbirding,’ as it has euphemistically become known, consisted of the widespread removal – through both coercion and force – of Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, to provide labour for the newly-established sugar plantations in Queensland. Between 1847 and 1904 this practice led to the displacement and enslavement of roughly 62,000 documented people – in addition to an unknown number of those who remain undocumented. This legacy has stayed largely absent from the pages of history, removed by numerous acts of erasure: from mass deportations in the wake of the Pacific Islander Labourers Act in 1901, to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s 2020 declaration that there had been ‘no slavery’ in Australia. As Togo-Brisby says, ‘the weight of history presses our voices down.’ Among those who traversed…

Since she started making art, Manning’s subjects have included colonisation, sexual abuse, the intergenerational impact of the Vietnam War around the world, feminism and personal security. They are expressed via the mediums of drawing, printmaking, painting, installation, sculpture, and soon will be explored with animation. The Melbourne-based Manning is also a tattooist, app developer and ‘accidental farmer.’ While the artist had a prolific period of printmaking, and still considers it to be in her blood, she has now found the stability, confidence and drive to turn her hand to three-dimensional work. As she has become more at ease with herself, and more of herself over time, what emerges is an art practice that shifts its focus from the past to future. Manning is resourceful worker who is cognisant of access…

THE MOTEL SISTERS ARE THE CREATION OF PERFORMANCE AND CROSS-MEDIA ARTISTS LIAM BENSON AND NAOMI OLIVER. DEBUTING IN 2004, ‘SISTERS’ PARIS MOTEL (OLIVER) AND TACKY MOTEL (BENSON) TAKE ‘INSPIRATION’ FROM AMERICAN HOTEL AND GIFTSHOP HEIRESS PARIS HILTON AS THEY SKEWER THE WRECKAGE OF A CELEBRITY SATURATED CONTEMPORARY YOUTH CULTURE. BEING A SELF-DECLARED ‘ICON’ IS TOUGH. WHILE HILTON SEEMS TO STAY ONE STEP AHEAD OF IRRELEVANCE, THE MOTEL SISTERS EXPLORE NEW FORMS OF CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT, PERFORMANCE AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE. IN LATE 2018, PARIS AND TACKY MOTEL WENT ‘INTO CARE’ TO WORK AT THE ABEL TASMAN VILLAGE PROJECT (AN AGED AND DEMENTIA-CARE FACILITY IN WESTERN SYDNEY). LIVING AND WORKING WITH RESIDENTS AND STAFF ALIKE, THE RESULTS – CLINICAL, BEHAVIOURAL AND CREATIVE – WERE EXTRAORDINARY. ARTIST PROFILE INVITED THE PROJECT’S COMMISSIONING PRODUCER JOHN…

Since 1991, the annual Samstag Scholarship has awarded 146 Australian artists the opportunity to study overseas. It provides the space for artists to explore new ideas, expand creative boundaries and build significant networks. South Australian artist Madison Bycroft was awarded the scholarship in 2013 and undertook a Masters of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2014. This experience was pivotal for Bycroft, who has gone on to build an international career with work shown in the US, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Italy, Lebanon and France. Currently based in Marseille, Bycroft will be returning home to Adelaide and the Samstag Museum of Art in 2021 with the newly commissioned work BIOPIC or Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée. The experience of living in Europe has embedded its way…

Perceptions do count. Throughout this 55th issue of Artist Profile our writers reflect on many views, stances, attitudes and situations. The works and the life of John Olsen have been examined ever since his first exhibition in 1955. After his comprehensive ‘The You Beaut Country’ survey at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW around five years ago, a perception must remain as to what else there can be to know about John Olsen’s work and life. It has taken the death of artist and curator William Wright, and for John Olsen to be in his mid-nineties, for Wright’s deep investigation of the artist’s darkest works – posthumously curated with the Art School’s Director Steven Alderton – to appear at Sydney’s National Art School. Pippa Mott’s…

Your artistic process is second nature, can you describe where you find inspiration and what the steps are that follow? There will always be a charcoal or pastel sketch somewhere, but it really begins with looking. I find the point of entry into the subject, studying how I could possibly capture or add to the scene in a way that would favour the painting. I do not begin work on a sole canvas, there is usually a galaxy of papers or canvas tacked to my studio wall and I create on them simultaneously, pooling ideas together into a central work. My practice embraces the layering of thin oil colour, which are then enhanced with minute details and patterning. The subject matter tends to revolve around mythology and storytelling, the characters…

In what he has previously described as a ‘cutting of the umbilical cord,’ the young Australian painter John Olsen travelled to Europe in 1956, setting in motion a cascade of experiences that would significantly shape his world view and trajectory as an artist, none more so than his experiences in Spain. It was at the Prado Museum that John Olsen first encountered the work of Francisco Goya – most significantly the ‘Disasters of War,’ 1810-20, and ‘Black Paintings,’ 1819-23, series. The former is a series of 82 etchings produced between 1810 and 1820 that bear witness to the atrocities and depravities of war – a quiet but gruesome visual protest, and a narrative of the Spanish struggle for independence against France. Olsen was, of course, experiencing these works within the…

“I remember standing out on the jetty as a kid, watching groups of stingrays glide beneath me, tracing arcs through the shallow water …” Otherworldly dispositions permeate wood-carved sculptures in lifelike scale. To be in the presence of these artworks feels like stumbling upon fragments of a dream, in which time is suspended, bound up in a meditative stillness. Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s artistry is that of a master storyteller. But the story itself is not prescriptive: it is for the audience to discover, stirred into consciousness from the annals of our own memories; compelled into being by a sense of familiarity that can feel so deeply personal, yet is universally shared. Family is the cornerstone of Abdullah’s practice, as well as the centre of his universe. ‘Nearly everything I do is…

I’ve always loved Albert Namatjira’s startling, vivid Central Australian watercolours. But these days when the name ‘Namatjira’ comes up, many people think of painter Vincent Namatjira, a much younger member of Albert’s kinship group. In 1950s Australia, however, people would likely say: ‘Albert Namatjira is everywhere! You can almost guarantee a Namatjira (print) in any home or school … ’ This talented artist was presented to the Queen in 1954, painted by Sir William Dargie (who won the 1956 Archibald Prize with the portrait) and was highly regarded by many fellow-artists. While currently he remains a respected name overseas, with his paintings highly sought after, here in his homeland it seems that generalist audiences are hardly aware of his major contribution to Australian art. Namatjira’s ancestral homeland was the traditional…

These paintings have no hint of the pandemic turmoil that has affected peoples and economies locally and around the world. Indeed, there are no humans or their made structures. Slight hints of paths, farmed land and introduced fauna are suggested in many of the landscapes, but these elements are secondary to Zofrea’s celebration of light and colour. If one were abandoned in these paintings it would be difficult tell whether one was in the eastern morning light, or the western light of the evening; the light suffuses them so the time of day, time itself, is irrelevant to the pictures: it would be possible to think they were painted when the place where they were made was known to its inhabitants as Darug and Darkinjung land, rather than in 2019…

When it became known last year that the National Gallery of Australia had commissioned an artwork by a controversial American artist that few Australians had ever heard of and had paid AUD 6.8 million for it, public and critics alike were aghast. Journalists rushed into print to damn the work unseen and to question the NGA’s apparent profligacy. Sebastian Smee, the Australian Pulitzer-Prize winning art critic now writing for the Washington Post, joined in from America. It’s ‘the sort of thing that will look like a total waste of money in a fairly short amount of time,’ he told the Canberra Times. The artist is Jordan Wolfson, whose reputation as an art provocateur is well established in Europe and the United States, where his videos, animatronics, and robotic installations –…

“There’s a certain horror about their patterned skin and distorted expressions, and yet there’s also a comforting warmth about the way the figures lean into each other…” Pinned to Georgia Spain’s studio wall is a cluster of postcards, photographs and magazine clippings. There are images of dancers, a game of tug of war, a hot-dog eating contestant hunched over a mound of food, tables laid out with feasts, a group of cheese-rolling competitors throwing themselves down a hill with their limbs outstretched in unlikely directions, and a Pieter Bruegel painting that Spain is attracted to for its ‘chaos.’ While Spain doesn’t directly replicate this source material, she captures the dynamism in these scenes, and, to quote one of the scribbles on the wall, the ‘messiness of bodies.’ She’s interested in…

For some months, Mikala Dwyer has been fastidiously observing the lace-necked doves who come to fossick in her backyard. This makes sense. Dwyer has, over the course of her career, scrupulously challenged our tightly-held notion of the rational, organising power of the human mind over the field of objects outside of it. She explores the spangling liveliness of objects, the supernatural, and the slow seeping of the nonhuman into our ways of seeing and being in the world. These doves have ‘become constant companions,’ she explains, ‘and I’ve learned the absolute joy of that companionship.’ Dwyer spent a deal of time with these creatures during lockdown in Melbourne, where she had recently moved from her hometown, Sydney, upon an appointment with RMIT University. ‘The quietness of lockdown,’ she says, ‘presented…

I grew up on Peerapper country, in Marrawah, a tiny town on the western edge of lutruwita/Tasmania. Isolated and exposed, Marrawah has a rugged environment – the trees bend in roaring winds and the swell rises high out of the Southern Ocean. Time spent within this unique landscape guides my painting practice and my process observes my evolving relationship to that place. For now, I work out of a studio in nipaluna/Hobart, though I still call Marrawah home. When I return, I engage with the environment as I always have - surfing, swimming, diving, wandering the beach and coastal scrub, my days dictated by the weather. I make drawings, small paintings and visual notes out in the landscape and in my shack studio on the ocean’s shore. Working back in…

Surfers Paradise: an amalgam of Florida, Las Vegas and Disneyland, it's Australia’s playground for everybody, a sunny retirement destination for the well-heeled from southern states, and a surfing mecca that’s produced five world champions. Sin also appears to be popular here. From between the high-rise monoliths, sand, and kitsch tourist tack oozes surf, sun and sleaze. Scrolling by the M1, gaudy adrenaline-fuelled rollercoaster tentacles and heart-stopping amusements reach into the landscape from this arterial approach to the ‘Glitter Strip.’ For me, part of the attraction of the Gold Coast has always been its embrace of the highbrow and the lowbrow. At the moment the Gold Coast is experiencing something of a cultural reboot in the shape of HOTA – an ambitious cultural complex right in the centre of Surfers Paradise…

Aidan Hartshorn explains that Growth, 2020, in the exhibition ‘Homebound,’ at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, is really a first iteration of a work he’s been thinking about for some time. He’s 26 now, and flat out as the Wesfarmers Assistant Indigenous Curator at the National Gallery of Australia. Like all young artists, he’s confronting the eternal issues of finding time and money to make work; but on this sunny autumn afternoon there’s no hint of complaint. He’s happy and confident, enjoying the opportunity of working in the institution. Growth consists of two chairs placed opposite each other on a worn ‘oriental’ rug, and on approach it looks cosy; it might not be a work of art, but somewhere for viewers to rest. Then one sees the upholstery of the…