Innehållsförteckning för Issue 70 från Artist Profile

Based in the peri-urban region of Wattle Glen, in Victoria, her practice is informed by the Greek heritage of her immigrant family and their working-class experiences. There is an unmissable diasporic perspective and class sensitivity that transpires through her projects. Although the focus of her work is directed towards the possibilities of fellowship, the building of cultural commons, as well as environmental issues of sustainability, there is also an underlying acerbic attention to the way class boundaries, racial hierarchies, and cultural capital are mobilised. Stefanou’s projects range from large-scale installations to modest gestures in specific places. She has used video and conducted vocal workshops. Stefanou is accomplished in performance making and committed to using art as a tool for social justice. This breadth of experimentation with media and the deployment…

On his visit to Australia in 1968 the American art critic Clement Greenberg encouraged young artists to “enjoy their diversity”—advice Jock Clutterbuck appreciated. As a student and teacher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in the sixties and early seventies, Clutterbuck’s visual alignment was tuned to a multicultural modernism acquired from teachers that included the Australian sculptor Lenton Parr, the émigré Lithuanians Vincas Jomantas and Teisutis Zikaras, the uncompromising Irish printmaker Tate Adams, and the charismatic Italian George Baldessin. While Clutterbuck belongs to the generation who made their mark during these watershed years—a time when provincialism and internationalism were hotly debated—he believed art’s lineage was an open field and subsequently carved a path towards the mystical while maintaining a deep connection to the Australian landscape. Born in the…

“Well, it’s APT time . . . again,” I want to say with the on-camera inflections of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, 1993, dejected by the day’s repetition. Now in its eleventh iteration, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) conjures, in hardened Australian gallery-goers at least, a corresponding mix of disillusionment and intrigue towards a once pioneering exhibition that has been replicating itself for at least the last fifteen or so years. As with most biennale-style exhibitions these days, of which there are nearly 300 around the world, in APT11 the issue of how conventionally governed museums can best serve the often unconventional-individual projects they rely on isn’t even remotely up for questioning. Instead, boasting more than seventy artistic projects by artists from over thirty countries, the Queensland…

There’s a rhythmic flux to the four-section layout of Hold the world to its word. It begins with the illusory motion of the exhibition’s opening artwork, Instrument for measuring the universe, 2002-04, by Blue Mountains artist, what. Painstakingly syringing paint onto canvas for two years, what’s 3D rendering of white noise captures remnant radiation from the Big Bang as it shows up in the pixelated static of analogue television sets. Right. The world in question here hasn’t forgotten its origins. This large work and the nine-panel Withdrawal to the forest, 2021, make exquisite use of MAMA’s impressive atrium, and reinforce what’s mastery of technique and desire to push the possibilities of painting. Staying with the cosmic while considering human experience and the production of knowledge, on entering the main exhibition…

The typical arc of a mid-career retrospective exhibition is that of an artist arriving at a fully formed artistic style. But this major exhibition is not a retrospective and is less about arrivals than about new possibilities and openings. The show attempts something distinct and more interesting than a retrospective as it presents works by Julie Mehretu from the mid-nineties to the contemporary moment. These include fifty works on paper spanning the full breadth of the artist’s practice, alongside thirty-six paintings whose selection are strongly weighted toward the present, with only seven produced prior to the year 2020. This highlights continuity, change, and an upswell of momentum in an oeuvre grappling with the present through an evolving language of abstraction. This is a present which, in the same month that…

Joseph McGlennon’s forthcoming solo exhibition The Hunt will be presented alongside a survey of the artist’s past work throughout Olsen Gallery, Sydney. The Hunt extends the artist’s practice of beautifully composed photographic images evoking colonial perceptions of the Australian landscape into a series that more directly engages with the violence of this history that they both represent and participate in. While McGlennon’s past work has possessed the seething weight of this violence, through gloomy scenes of extinct animals depicted through the kind of highly contrived realism that one finds in natural history museum exhibits, The Hunt brings this violence to the surface with a series of works depicting hunting dogs that were specially bred and trained to kill kangaroos throughout the nineteenth century. This series could be interpreted as works…

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What sets us apart from other creatures is our ability to communicate using a series of vocal symbols. As the distinguish British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has commented, “language is the most remarkable and the most characteristic of all human creations.” What is also remarkable, more often than not, is that these vocal symbols transmogrify over time, changing the meaning and thus reception of particular words. Take “woke” as an example. Its origin is in African American English, and from the 1930s has been used to highlight the social and political issues impacting African Americans. However, in the early 2000s, its meaning began to metastasise—championed by the political Left—to include other historically marginalised groups, taking in issues such as social inequality, racial injustice, sexual preference and identity politics, and Indigenous politics,…

When viewing the website of glass artist Nick Mount, the visitor will find the usual content headings, with the exception of “About us” which offers something quite out of the ordinary. There is a short bio followed by collections of photographs across six decades, from the 1970s to now. These images are of everyday life, in the studio and travels, but predominantly these photos are of family and capture Mount’s life from his marriage to Pauline Donaldson in 1974 through to becoming a father, and more recently a grandfather. The photographs tell the story of the artist’s life and his journey from a young emerging practitioner to a skilled and respected glass artist. But what shines through in this portrait is the foundation of family and the presence of Pauline.…

A kite consists of wings, tethers, and anchors. The wings glide against the air when in flight and the tethers connect the span of those wings in order for the kite to be airborne. Two things working together to keep an idea off the ground. But what of the anchor? Who is at the end of the line? Are they moving or are they static? When we look up and see a kite flying high, seldom do we think about who and what is keeping it anchored. Like kites, artists Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier know how to inhabit multiple spaces at once. The one up high, the one below, and the vast space in between, both in life and in their practice. Working across two studios under one space…

Bathurst has inspired the exhibition yet it’s not an exhibition about Bathurst. My mum grew up there. My grandparents and uncle had a farm there, which I frequented until they all slid off this mortal coil with the last out the gate in 1996. I was one of those ten-year-old kids that knew how to drive cars and ride motorbikes, perhaps an inkling into my later life doing art projects like drumming underwater and making documentaries in curious places. There’s certainly been some risk involved. The show embraces magical thinking, place(s), architectural space, where you begin, the unknown, new narratives in a place once familiar, improvisation, social engagement, and sensory engagement. In regard to process, I let much sit in my mind then go into production holus-bolus . . .…

With the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney recently announcing the reintroduction of admission fees from February 2025, there has been a renewed conversation about access to galleries and what shrinking arts funding in this country means for arts audiences. While the MCA’s decision might appear as a cultural watershed moment, publicly funded state institutions elsewhere have already started coyly charging admission fees to view parts of their collection which ostensibly belong to the public. This is the case for the ticketed Cats & Dogs exhibition. The curatorial premise for Cats & Dogs appears straightforward: a dive into the NGV’s collection to highlight pieces that feature all manner of feline and canine friends (or fiends). The exhibition is vast in scope, including more than 250 works of art…

Chinese Australian artist Jiawei Shen is the subject of the 2024 documentary film, Welcome to Babel, directed by James Bradley. The film won the prestigious, Documentary Australia Award at the 71st Sydney Film Festival in June last year. The festival judges commended it as "a beautifully made and thoughtful film that demonstrated the ambition to tell a global story through the intimate relationship of Jiawei and his wife, Lan." Welcome to Babel is Bradley’s feature début. He commenced filming in late 2012 before Shen formerly started work on the ninety-panel polyptych, The Tower of Babel, in 2017. Shen’s fascinating trajectory from his birthplace in Shanghai to establishing himself in Sydney lends itself well to the filmic medium. His life encompasses the violent political upheavals that have shaped modern China: the…

In a new exhibition at Linton and Kay Galleries, Perth, the primary concern of Jo Darvall’s forty-year career, that of playing the two artistic traditions of painting and printmaking against each other to reveal the beauty and mystique of the Australian landscape, is visible. Whilst studying at the Victorian College of Arts (graduating in 1990 with a bachelor of fine arts), Darvall often focused on overlooked parts of nature, such as the You Yangs outside of Melbourne in the traditional lands of the Wadawurrung people. This study grew into a deep respect and reconciliation, as Darvall notes, “when I walk through the environment, I want to stop, sit, and just be. I want to experience it fully, without rushing.” The unexpected nature of the landscape fueled a curiosity to dig…

Walking into Anna Johnson’s studio is like passing through a portal into another world: a flight of rickety wooden stairs leads to the top floor of a turn-of-last-century building where Johnson serves tea in ornate vintage china cups, a lapdog appears to have emerged straight from a late Rembrandt oil painting and the artist herself rarely stops talking about art. Johnson has been a story-teller for most of her adult life, translating visual art onto the page through narrative, criticism, and commentary. She’s written on a diverse range of artists, from Australians Ann Thomson and Simryn Gill to the American painter Sean Scully. She has a way with words. And now it appears Johnson has a way with paint too. Around us, in vivid contrast to the dilapidated charm of…

An African folktale was told to Jenny Orchard as a child, in which a woman follows an impossibly beautiful man into a forest. Against his warnings to turn back to the village she is transfixed and cannot, she watches in horror as his limbs are replaced by branches and leaves. He slowly transforms into the forest around him. The woman is trapped. She has been enchanted by the forest and can no longer return home. This tale of vivid enchantment with nature has long held Orchard’s imagination. For her, nature is entwined with human existence, not separate from it. Her childhood in Zimbabwe (southeast Africa) and its folklores are just some of the elements that take form in her fantastical creatures. Traditional folktales, biotechnology, pop culture, and nature are central…

Born in 1985 in Melbourne to migrant parents, Marikit Santiago rejected her Filipino ethnicity, being instead assertive in her Australian nationality until motherhood, when she learned to acknowledge her cultural heritage. This dual identity has informed most of her practice since graduating with a masters of fine arts from UNSW Art and Design in 2017. Her latest solo exhibition, Marikit Santiago: Proclaim Your Death! at Campbelltown Arts Centre staged throughout summer, is a continuation of these perpetual leitmotifs and a jubilant celebration of family life, which has been both a personal and creative force for the artist. Through immersive and large-scale collaborative installations, Santiago incorporates a deeper than ever personal narrative, including her family’s migration story and Filipino cultural history. This collaborative approach extends, for the first time, to her…

Upon entering Kirtika Kain’s studio, I am immediately struck by the force with which her canvases command my attention. The only way I can describe her painting is volcanic: a rupture in the hegemony of the contemporary art world. Kirtika is attuned to the interiority of her materials—tar, copper, vermilion, gold leaf, earthen pigment, cow dung—full of vitality and agency, and she follows their “unrest” with a reverential attendance. Akin to magma releases and lava flows, her works offer a glimpse into the depths of the Dalit feminist consciousness. The choice of her materials are both aesthetic and political as they resist the discriminatory Brahminical ideas of teethu or ritual impurity. As a painter, she embodies a volcanic vent, and the materials erupt through her onto the canvas. Much has…

Laurens of the restless soul, that constantly dragged him up from dinner tables with thoughts, plans, and new ideas. Laurens with the restless energy that took him around the world to restless cities, to Beijing, to Las Vegas, but always back home to the restless ocean cliff-edge landscapes of Wombarra [Wollongong, New South Wales]. Laurens chased risk, considered risk for all its potential rewards and all that you could lose from chasing it. He didn’t lose often, and it became the central thesis of his practice as he pushed out, against, and toward, both adapting and enforcing. Laurens always wanted to make sure you were having the best time, sourcing the best ingredient, finding the best restaurant—he was always interested in what you were cooking and how you were cooking…

In Thai Buddhist folklore, Siddhartha Gautama’s final trial, while he meditated under the Bodhi tree, was an assault by the forces of Mara—the Evil One. Siddhartha called the earth to witness his resolve; Phra Mae Thorani—the Earth Mother Goddess—answered. Thorani drowned Mara and his forces in a flood by wringing her hair of the “waters of detachment” collected from Siddhartha’s libations across lifetimes. Thus saved, Siddhartha attained enlightenment, becoming the first Buddha. The feeling of a rising tide in contemporary art across Bangkok is palpable Nurture Gaia is the theme of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024 (BAB2024). Odd though it seems to invoke the name of Thorani’s ancient Greek equivalent in Southeast Asia, the Earth Mother archetype—and her ubiquitous symbolic association to femininity, motherhood, nature, science, and creativity—is globally relevant.…

In her 1964 memoir Life with Picasso, the artist Françoise Gilot recites an exchange in which Pablo sets her a task with a piece of paper, a match, and a piece of torn cardboard saying, “organize them into this [sketched] form … do whatever you want, but make a composition that stands on its own feet [..,] work not just within, but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two.” And so on. As Gilot observed, the possibilities are endless, even with minimal parts. The conversation occurred thirty years after the radical investigations of synthetic cubism, in which everyday material (news paper, rattan, etc.,) disrupted the picture plane of the avantgarde moderns. It was also decades after the surrealist’s second wave of collage hit the studio’s…