Innehållsförteckning för Issue 59 från Artist Profile

Here we are. Backwards or forwards in time to a moment when we slip through the teeth of the world us humans have made, and feel a relaxed sense of place and connection with the nonhuman. Trees streaming up, branching into life. Trees loosely braided into forested apertures; into each a brushy wave of sky and change gushes like so many rock pools filling. The wooded verge that we so often inhabit in Seth Birchall’s paintings gives way to lyrical stretches of watery inlets, crowned by a quivering primal circle of sun or moon issuing a lambency that is swiftly unmoored from its source. On its way to us, it gets caught up in a kind of free-jazz paint play, scooting around the canvas in careening arcs, rasping at the…

Professionally, the previous two COVID-19–addled years have been kind to Daniel Boyd. He is on the cusp of having his first solo survey show in a major Australian state gallery – at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), opening 4 June. He has worked on various projects with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London’s Serpentine Gallery and one of the world’s most distinguished curators, and was astonished to receive a call from Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye inviting him to collaborate on a project destined for Sydney’s George Street and due for completion this year. Boyd has designed a suspended artwork that will sit twenty metres above the ground, supported by a single column, as part of Adjaye’s architecture. Its multiple piercings will offer dappled screening from…

In 2007, I was living on Macleay Street in Potts Point, East Sydney. The vibe was cool, well-heeled with an edge of roughness as the precinct segued into Kings Cross. It was at this juncture in a stylish art deco apartment block that the James Dorahy Project Space was exhibiting talented, rising stars. The show: Colouring the Landscape. I’d wandered into the opening, had been trying to give up smoking and was anxiously looking for a fellow addict who would comply with a gold-coin offer of a cigarette swap. It was at this point that my eye caught a huge pixelated “canvas” of cuisinière-coloured wooden blocks. The work, Model Scape, 2006, by Nuha Saad, stole the show. A playful adventure with the boundaries of abstraction, a sculptural painting embedded with…

There’s a bit of money in the local council prize, and I was pleased to be asked to bring it up to date. Twenty years in the region have taught me that western art since Cezanne does not inform the local culture, and I hoped to connect the district with the artworld I know. But the representative of the local artists group was dismayed, and meeting with the council official, to explain I wasn’t going to compromise, I decided to make a tough remark: “I’m sorry, these things are not art. Art should transform.” Another object laboured over by someone for whom Picasso is irrelevant will be bought for the undistinguished council collection. Then I travelled to the Blue Mountains to spend time with Ian Milliss. The journey between sparsely…

For over twenty-five years, Defiance Gallery has been recognised as Australia’s premier sculpture gallery. When Director Campbell Robertson-Swann established the gallery in 1995, it was because he, himself a sculptor, saw an absence of knowledge and understanding of the art form in the Australian art scene – there were limited opportunities to exhibit and no market for any but the most established Australian sculptors. By displaying sculpture in accessible exhibitions like the gallery’s group miniature show, Robertson-Swann awakened an interest in the form and assembled a community of sculptors and passionate collectors. The gallery was also associated with its location in Newtown, in the Inner West of Sydney, considered gritty and removed from the traditional commercial gallery milieu. Defiance started out pushing boundaries – with this attitude reflected in its…

The title of this year’s 23rd Biennale of Sydney (BoS), rīvus, references rivers as watercourses, conduits, and wetlands with their ecosystems both real and unreal, the divisions they create and the opportunities they provide. The artistic director, José Roca, from Bogotá, Colombia was inspired by the decision to grant legal personhood to various bodies of water throughout the world, beginning in 2017 with the Whanganui River in New Zealand. The list now includes the Atrato River in Colombia and the Indian Ganges and Yamuna rivers, with the Magpie River in Canada being granted the right earlier this year. In 2017, the Yarra River was the first in Australia to be recognised as a living entity, but as yet does not have legal personhood. The idea of “environmental personhood” was proposed…

By the time Artist Profile 59 goes on sale, Australia will either have the same Prime Minister or a new one. As I write this, the country is saturated with competing narratives of “political values,” as parties try to convince the voters in a compulsory voting system that they should lead the nation. More than any other federal election in the last thirty years, announcements on the value of the arts have been so low-key from the major parties – the Liberal-National Coalition, Labor, and The Greens – that the silence has been noticeable. We do know from the current Liberal-National Coalition government budget announcement this year that, if re-elected, they are committed to reducing arts funding over the next four years by more than 10 percent. It’s also known…

“The illusion is created by the paint, but the illusion is exposed as well” I met with Adrienne Gaha on a windy autumn afternoon in her Sydney studio, surrounded by remnants of turps and paintmarked surfaces. As Gaha took me through her artistic practice she rotated a kaleidoscope of colour-saturated canvases on the walls for her upcoming exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary. What was immediately clear was the ongoing conversation between the works over her artistic career thus far. There were no dramatic shifts in themes, but a continued exploration that was ever changing and ever evolving. Her roots as an artist are founded on her simple assumption that art was “the only thing [she] could do.” Following in her grandmother’s artistic stead, she attended East Sydney Technical College (now…

“Kihara’s use of the word ‘upcycling’ in relation to Gauguin is deeply intentional, implying the repurposing of something rendered obsolete, something that could quite equally be discarded” Of Sāmoan and Japanese descent, Yuki Kihara works with new media, performance, and mise-en-scène to articulate a network of resistance to the hegemonic narratives which have long dominated perceptions of the Pacific. Self-taught in these disciplines, and trained outside of the confines of art school, Kihara has forged a distinctive artistic voice. As she says, “I have had to invent my own language, discourse, and dialogue.” It was during her time at fashion school that Kihara first turned to the archival research that underpins her critically and socially engaged interdisciplinary practice. In the process of this research, Kihara encountered the stereotype-laden genre of…

Subscribe to Artist Profile before 24 August 2022 to go into the draw to WIN Aravalli Range - Rajastan valued at $4,500 Jo Bertini, Aravalli Range - Rajastan, 2017, gouache on handmade kutch camel paper, 60 x 79 cm (framed). Visit artistprofile.com.au Jo Bertini lives and works between Sydney and Abiquiú, New Mexico. She is a painter, educator, writer, and explorer traveling throughout the desert regions of Australia, Africa, India, Pakistan, China, and America. Since the early 1990s her works have been curated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, China, Malaysia, the US and India. Her most current solo exhibition is with the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at the Ent Center for the Arts, Colorado Springs, US, and her next Australian solo show opens in October with Arthouse…

“The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others” – bell hooks MY WORK REFLECTS MY EXPERIENCE AS A WOMAN AND AN IMMIGRANT, THROUGH A LIFELONG DECONDITIONING PROJECT. OPERATING IN A CYCLICAL MANNER, FROM RESEARCH TO ARCHIVAL AND HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION, AS WELL AS PERSONAL OBSERVATION, I CULTIVATE MY OWN METHODOLOGY CONTINUOUSLY, THROUGH EXTENSIVE TRIAL AND NUMEROUS ERRORS. FROM DRAWING AND WRITING TO MATERIAL EXPERIMENTATION AND WORLDBUILDING, MY PRACTICE OCCUPIES A TERRITORY OF INTERDISCIPLINARY INQUIRY. Ever since I remember, I was a decidedly artistic and imaginative being, struggling to exist in the prescribed reality and expressing myself mainly through elements of painting, drawing, writing, dance, theatre,…

Sometime during Sydney’s horrendous 2021 COVID-19 lockdown, I receive a phone call from Edwina Corlette, who, like all dealers at this time of year, is busy sorting out her calendar for the following year, locking in exhibitions for each and every month. Edwina asks me what I want to do. “I don’t know, something special,” I reply. In my studio in the Hawkesbury, I work in almost total solitude and I love it, so I’m sure these feelings were exacerbated by the lengthy lockdown, but I felt really disconnected from people, especially other artists. We keep chatting away, all things art, and we start absolutely gahh-ing over the new paintings that Candy Nelson Nakamarra is showing in Alice Springs at RAFT artspace. We start dreaming up an “imagine if” kind…

Thancoupie has become increasingly admired by contemporary Australian curators for her brilliance in adapting a craft that was formerly unfamiliar to Indigenous communities in Australia. After studying ceramics at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) with Peter Rushforth, she was the first Indigenous woman to graduate and then become a solo exhibiting studio “potter” – or, more accurately, solo studio artist in clay. Uniquely gifted, she essentially invented her own Indigenous version of expressing culture through an entirely new artform – an art that broke long-established rules of making, glazing, function, and balance, and took the medium beyond the boundaries of ceramic vessels as defined throughout centuries of ceramic traditions in Europe and Asia. After face-to-face exposure to Indigenous potters and clay traditions on her travels to…

Good ideas don’t have to be unnecessarily complicated. Painters on Pots is straightforward enough: find some artists who work with paint, and introduce them to a new medium. Let them go somewhat wild exploring the new medium, then see what this introduction results in. For this basic idea to work, there are some ingredients required: one is a ceramist with a bit of experience as a teacher to act as a guide, some artists with a bit of enthusiasm and a dollop of either bravery or foolhardiness, and a location, where these people can meet and interact with the clay, the teacher who knows what clay is and what to do with it, and one another. Fortunately, Zsolt Faludi fills a number of these criteria. He possesses the ability to…

Campbelltown Arts Centre, and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Luke Sciberras’s art is the product of a quarter-century of experiencing the landscape with all his senses. Most recognised for his expressive paintings of Australian and European subjects both close and far from home, his oeuvre is underpinned by an unswerving commitment to drawing, both en plein air and in the studio, and a restless urge to experience the world at its most essential. Since his early lessons from distinguished Australian painter Elisabeth Cummings as a teenager hungry for artistic direction, to the past two decades establishing a sprawling and comfortable base in the historic New South Wales gold rush village of Hill End, Sciberras has never made a painting about a place he’s not been to – nor has he made…

Institute of Modern Art To bring together the work of Aboriginal, diasporic Australian and international artists is a formidable task: How to give visibility to the complexity of lived experience without homogenising or universalising? Enter Édouard Glissant’s neologisms such as creolisation, Relation, trembling, and opacity, which offer an attractive curatorial platform for thinking through these questions. Glissant’s academic career was distinguished by his accounts of the history of trans-Atlantic slavery and the diasporic experience of the French Caribbean. Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, and Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall, the exhibition was the fourth instalment in an international exhibition series dedicated to engaging with important aspects of Glissant’s oeuvre. This language that is every stone is a fascinating excursion into Glissantian thought, and the points of friction that inevitably…

Perhaps I should not have been surprised by the number of pets present at UNSW Galleries for the opening of Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices. Associations between textiles and the domestic sphere – and attendant notions of the feminine, the soft, the sweetly corporeal, and the “low” – are key points of departure for co-curators Catherine Woolley and Karen Hall. The departure from these historical entanglements is swift, and structural. Just as the title promises, the exhibition’s treatment of the stories it speaks back to is not an abrupt negation, but truly an expansion: an airy unfurling of the field. After all, in “The Pliable Plane; Textiles in Architecture,” 1957, for which the show was named, Anni Albers considers that “if the nature of architecture is the grounded,…

Visually and conceptually compelling, Chehelnabi’s deceptively simple paintings subconsciously play with the mind. Executed in a raw, almost childlike style, his practice involves a surrealist method of combining disparate motifs within the composition in order to unsettle or perplex the observer. Against the black walls of Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre’s exhibition space, his luminous paintings pop with colour. Upon canvases painted in flat cerulean blue, tangerine orange or a white lime wash, everyday objects hover and float. A sparse, ghostly tree ascends from the middle of the ocean, surrounded by shimmering waves. Circular, balloon-like shapes float on the sea below a sunset horizon. A small peaked mountain range is contained within a blue cube. The images are peculiar, absurd, and surprising, challenging the audience’s perceptions of…