Innehållsförteckning för Issue 61 från Artist Profile

Stop-motion animation is one of the oldest filmmaking techniques. As a form it can take advantage of countless contemporary visual art disciplines: video installation, moving image, painting, sculpture, and music. Relevant and continually evolving, it is surprising that this dynamic medium is not seen more in the contemporary artworld. My most recent work, Infinite West, 2022, presented by Jacob Hoerner Galleries at Sydney Contemporary 2022, began as an attempt to create a seven-minute film, that transmuted over a period of two and a half years and two international fellowship residencies at Varda Artists Residency, California, and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, US. This spaghetti Western comedy consists of 24,480 photographs for a total duration of 17:02 minutes. The film is supported by my long-term collaborator Damien Sutton, whose composition scores and…

Noakes captures light with his hammer. He raises extraordinary three-dimensional objects from flat sheets of metal, and the shifting patterns of marks left by his hammer trap and direct the flow of light around his completed forms. The seductive material and its exquisite shapes are revealed by this flow of light, which our eyes eagerly follow. “Flow” could well be the subtitle of this exhibition, for so many of the works respond to movement in nature, whether it be the shifting patterns of sunlight as it maps the day or the choreographed flow of water. The set of “waterfall beakers” is a supreme example of the art of silversmithing, miraculously creating forms that do literally seem to surge up and flow into life. Wrought from Britannia silver, in a grouping…

The exhibition takes its name from a quote from LeWitt, where he professed “a great affinity” for the works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, while the “resonances” part of the show refers to live musical performances. Chuck Johnson and JWPATON, a Yuin musician, performed at the John Kaldor Family Hall on Wednesday 31 August at 8:00 p.m., while Steve Gunn and amby downs, the pseudonym of Tahlia Palmer, of Murri and European heritage, performed on Wednesday 19 October 2022, 8:00 p.m. The Budawang-based artist E Fishpool performs with Claire Rousay at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday 7 December, 2022. The website boasts that these three “new musical works bring 2D-artworks to new life through the experience of durational listening” – but is listening ever not durational? Unable to attend these performances, my…

The Open Collections Gallery at Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) has been operating since 1999. It functions as a discrete space within CMAG for collectors from the Canberra region to display their personal collections. Previous exhibitions have included teapots, radios, model ships, pulp fiction books. and antique scientific and mathematical instruments that one might associate with the original “cabinets of curiosities.” The gallery provides a fascinating opportunity to understand how, why, and what people are interested in collecting. This personal approach to collecting is described by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in the 1968 English translation of Illuminations: Essays and Reflections: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories … For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has…

For Georgia Lucy, art, music and her home at the Arts Hall are inextricably linked. In an unfortunate coincidence, her artwork addressing the destruction caused by Hobart’s real estate market is exhibited in HOME/LAND at Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT) just as she’s evicted from her home and studio of eight years. Albeit run-down and bone-chillingly cold, the Arts Hall has long provided affordable space for musicians and artists to live and create. The artist says, “Real estate companies are shoving their thievery in people’s faces and I’m shoving it back. My board is wobbly.” Literally wobbly. For the installation Wobble Boards – H69PM, 2022, in HOME/LAND, Georgia Lucy has amplified what she terms “visually loud” real estate signs. Inspired by the popular kinetic clock in Hobart’s Cat and Fiddle Arcade,…

“I could never have stayed overseas… because India was a new country, and as artists we had to come back and build that country.” It is close to midnight and it seems fitting that I am video calling Nalini Malani from Ahmedabad, in the politically prominent state of Gujarat. We are discussing the beginning of Nalini’s career, one that has now spanned over five decades and does not show any sign of slowing down. She is speaking to me from Amsterdam, on her way to Bath to install a new show at The Holburne Museum. Finding words to describe Nalini’s practice is not an easy task. Born in 1946, a year before the Partition of India, she has witnessed the growing pains of a nation post-Independence. To unpack and analogise…

Just as I begin writing up this article, I see a post by Tylor on Instagram showing Kaurna digging tools he has just completed – a Katha stick, Karku spade, and Yuku dish – made for his son to play with at the beach. Images show their elegant and purposeful forms sitting atop the pale beach sand, followed by a short video of the digging stick in action. It makes me think about how readily we tend to associate such objects with a historical status in the museum instead of with their everyday functions and continued relevance to lived cultural worlds. There is no reason these objects should appear uncanny. “Hopefully he just doesn’t think about those things and it’s normal, and he knows the names of them,” Tylor says…

Queerness, as a concept, runs against limiting ideas of self-categorisation, and thus generates expansiveness in the way that people can own their identity. It is this very sense of layered identities and expansiveness that is captured in the National Art School’s upcoming exhibition QUEER CONTEMPORARY. Coinciding with Sydney WorldPride 2023 and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, QUEER CONTEMPORARY 2023 comprises two major exhibitions, a suite of public programs, key community partnerships, and site activations, all hosted at the historic Darlinghurst campus in February. Oscillating between notions of queerness in historical and contemporary artworks, yet consistently re-centring on the idea of layered identities, Richard Perran’s curated show Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia celebrates the work of artists who identify as part of the Australian LGBTQIA+ community and…

In an upper corner of the home in which Rose works, a desk is laden – neatly laden – with the objects of her current study: small, utilisable textile items, largely mono- or dichromatic, with intricate, geometrically patterned bodies. On the opposite wall is a bookcase. The special, slim editions mainly live on the shelves at eye level, while around the knees are the heavy, illustrated art books. I see Matisse, and make a connection to Rose’s practice of collage with paper. When asked about this, Rose recalls video documentation of Matisse creating his cut-outs in the 1940s: he works quickly, conjuring shapes in the air, almost a few steps ahead of thought, and with an absolute decisiveness. With Rose, on the other hand, the collages seem to emerge from…

For his recent exhibition, Peter Hudson: The mystery of being here, the University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery has assembled fifty paintings and drawings showing Hudson’s creative contemplations. It is a collection that offers insight into the artist giving thought to spiritual mysteries and his awe and fascination for the natural world. The mystery of being here is the largest survey of the Sunshine Coast–based artist. Curated by Megan Williams, Manager, University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, the exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on Hudson’s work, with contributions from Christine Toussainte Morrow, Carol Schwarzman, Jeff McMullen, Charlie Ward, and Kev Carmody. Together, the publication and exhibition represent a significant body of artworks from an artist of local and national importance. Three years in the planning, the exhibition was…

Joe Furlonger was born in Cairns in 1952. He grew up in the rural (now semi-rural) Samford Valley near Brisbane. As an adult he worked as a farmhand and on fishing boats, attended art schools in Brisbane and Sydney and, after a period of gestation and experimentation, launched an artistic career that has sustained over the decades and shows no signs of dissipating. He has travelled widely, and restlessly explored many different mediums. His public profile has prospered through representation by major galleries, particularly the Ray Hughes Gallery, and through winning significant prizes, including the 2002 Fleurieu Art Prize and the 2011 Tattersall’s Club Landscape Prize. A prominent feature of Furlonger’s work is the influence of a pantheon of historical artists, including Picasso, Léger, Cezanne, Matisse, Roualt, Beckmann, and other…

Agreat number of artists produce artwork in their bedrooms, at the dining table or in their backyards. As some of the lowest-paid professionals in Australia, many artists cannot afford business insurance as well as an offsite studio to produce their work. The impacts of recent floods, as well as the ongoing pandemic, have meant that more artists have had no choice but to close their studios and set up their practice at home. Another La Niña is currently underway – and continued heavy rainfall is likely to flood or damage a number of artists’ studios. With the recent cancellation of home insurance policies for artists producing work at home, this is a big concern. For many years, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has tried to secure the…

Everyone has a tree memory, and if not of one tree, then perhaps of many: an impression based on a collation rather than a singular moment. The tree, of all things on earth is perhaps the most subliminal of sentient life forms. They become most present in their absence. We notice them when they fall or burn. Harshly pruned or hacked to the stump, felled trees are the last legal public executions. And the deforestation of earth, from vast tracts of forest to the house next door, feels both leaden in its inevitability and violent in its velocity. Instead of planting, we build. It’s hard to imagine the primeval equation of trees outnumbering humans. There is no word for trees as a collective that sounds like humanity, so, even verbally,…

“I suppose it all started when my mother committed suicide, when I was five.” John speaks deeply, slowly, every word heavy with the weight of a lifetime. Boulders roll off his tongue with heart-knocking profundity, and yet he is impossibly eloquent, sentences feather-light and frank. John tells me about the origins of his love for the natural world, about how his earliest years were spent on a farm in the south of England, where every day he would escape the fierce nannies employed by his father – into the forests, the streams, the ancient trees. “I think,” John pauses, “I was looking for my mother.” From his home on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Whipstick Forest, John recalls his childhood with cadences of wonderment and wounding. It’s clear that he became obsessed…

My first encounter with Kaye Shumack was in 1989, while I was doing a brief teaching stint at East Sydney Technical College, also known at various times as the National Art School (NAS), in the inner-Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Shumack had decided that a change of direction was needed in her life and enrolled in the newly created Diploma of Fine Arts at NAS, as a mature-age student. This term is loosely applied to anyone over twenty-one but doesn’t capture the life experience that Shumack brought to the course, which ranged from working in a women’s refuge to negotiating her lesbian sexuality with her family. It was not, however, her first involvement with higher education as she had already graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA in English…

Recently, I read an acquaintance’s reflection that the condition of embodiment is almost always embarrassment, shame, or discomfort of some kind. In Western, (post)Christian cultures we think of material life this way: the cycles of health underscored by sickness, the punctuation of life with death, the rot and riot of organic world around us. The Tweed itself has experienced more than its share of such strife in the past year, with flooding affecting the region. Lee looks reparatively across conditions like these to a horizon she figures through the Northern Rivers landscape itself: “The majesty of this region,” she says “proffers daily observation of the horizon – that mysterious liminal realm that exists between heaven and earth. A practice which has become paramount to my work, and also my life.”…

With time things begin to fall into perspective. Vivienne Binns has long had a reputation as a feminist artist notorious for startling works such as her early vagina dentata drawings. This retrospective, curated by Anneke Jaspers and Hannah Mathews, shows that across a lifetime of activity she has been much more, a leader in the social movement towards collaborative art-making who treats art as a type of philosophical discussion about our understanding of place, time, and art itself. The conventional model of artists as heroic individualists forever competing against other artists was never really true yet it seems to remain as a romantic fantasy in the Australian public mind, enacted in innumerable art prizes. This has certainly not been Vivienne Binns, an early adopter of an engaged approach that is…