Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 47 i Artist Profile

As we walk into the up-cycled meatworks where Richard Goodwin lives, the first impression is of a cabinet of curiosities splayed horizontal. On one table stands an intricate balsa wood model for a newly commissioned house, its elliptical roofs nestled upon each other like interlocked carapace. There are paintings with mechanical equipment jutting from their splattered surfaces. There are machines exploding, suspended by elegant metal rods. And then, on other densely packed tables are models for hypothetical high-rise buildings that protrude with the artist’s signature alien interventions: his parasites. There is also a matte black drum kit, a relic of the early years in London and New York seeing punk bands and carving his way out of performance art into his hybrid genre of sculpture, architecture and drawing. Usually a…

The announcement of ‘The National’ in 2017 was greeted with both elation and skepticism, considering its ambitions as a national survey of contemporary Australian art. In 2019, the second iteration of ‘The National’ is presented with a level of nuance and sophistication that precedes the first. Like in the first iteration, the fifty eight artists selected to exhibit over the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and Carriageworks reflect the complexity of nationhood and identity in diverse Australia today. However, this year, ‘The National’ differentiates itself from other biennales and major exhibitions through its meta-critical understanding of the inherent impossibility of such a task, revealing that only by exposing the gaps of Australia’s cultural narrative can we find an understanding of both ‘Australian-ness’ and contemporaneity.…

The river, and daylight, beckoned as I descended to the Potter Galleries from Federation Square to see the Heysens’ show. If ever an artist deserves natural light for an exhibition it is Hans Heysen; I found the idea of the outside intruding constantly as I looked at his and Nora Heysen’s pictures in the curatorially correct lighting. Yes, it is important to ensure future generations see the work, but seeing them as if underwater surely defeats the purpose of seeing them at all. The constraint of the underlighting illustrates wider issues confronting the visual arts today. The show’s form and narrative led me to contemplate changes in institutional engagement with the public since the sixteen-year-old Hans Heysen sold a watercolour to his Adelaide teacher, James Ashton, in 1894. Marketing, systems…

When viewers of Acute Misfortune first catch sight of Daniel Henshall playing artiste maudit, Adam Cullen, they may experience a flash of déjà vu. The quiet, menacing tones of John Bunting, mastermind of the Snowtown serial murders, are back on air. Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011) is a movie I have no desire to watch again, but it remains one of the outstanding Australian films of the past decade. A large part of that movie’s success was Henshall’s chilling performance as Bunting, a suburban Svengali who drew vulnerable people into his own violent schemes. In his directorial debut, actor Thomas W. Wright has taken a leaf out of Kurzel’s playbook. In this low-key, grainy biopic, Henshall plays Adam Cullen in the same manner that he played Bunting. The significant difference is…

McLean Edwards said to writer Saskia Beudel, as they spoke in his studio, ‘We should be fearsome, us artists and writers. People should tremble when we enter the room.’ Few painters can claim to be an inspiration to their generation as Edwards can. This issue, which features Edwards on the cover, marks the first year since Artist Profile established itself as an independent entity, and it is our thirteenth year as a magazine devoted to revealing the stories behind visual artists and their art. Our new Artist Profile team has been listening to your comments on how to improve both the print magazine and our digital platforms. Independence has meant we can provide in-depth articles on the visual arts that last beyond a ‘sound bite’. We have redesigned the print…

Michael Candy’s studio is only a short drive from the unapologetic hedonism of the Gold Coast’s pleasure strip of surf and sunshine. However, it could be another world. An unremarkable warehouse, it sits in a street of such warehouses, smash repair shops and storage facilities. There is no signage. We only find it because we have the street number. When visitors step in beneath the half-raised metal-shuttered doors, they are met with a cross between a heavy-metal workshop and a computer lab ringed with neat box-files as if deposited from an earlier analogue age. Hidden like the nest of a rare egret, at the back of all this, is the sleeping area that Candy occupies when he is not working. But mostly he works. And much of his work involves…

How do you start a work? I interact with an object in a physical, curious way, much like little children do. Children don’t have any preconceived ideas about what the object is expected to be, does or means, they just play with it. So that’s my starting point. I then think about the object’s relationship to time, to body, to functional use, what it has been in the past to someone, but also what it can potentially be. There is always play though. Word associations, misinterpretation, objects out of context – I consider all those things. And that’s multiplied if you work with a few objects at once. Which is what I find interesting about joining disparate objects together, or objects with body parts. It creates a very complex reading.…

When you began photographing you were travelling through places like Iran and Pakistan. What was it about those landscapes that appealed to you? The first thing was that I enjoyed the time and the space. I started becoming fascinated with little motifs like whisps of sand going through the wind. For some reason they were sticking in my head, and recalling them was giving me sensations and enjoyment. As a self-taught artist, what was a turning point for you? I went back to university when I was thirty three. Studying the history of photography was the biggest flip in my career. I realised what I had been doing was avant-garde 100 years before. I thought why am I doing this? I came across artists who had already been down the…

The art of Simon Fieldhouse celebrates structure and form through representations of buildings, monuments and cityscapes rooted in both historical and cultural significance. His appreciation for detail and design has recently extended to the exploration of new angles and viewpoints and, ultimately, the negotiation of the spectator’s gaze, lightly touching his drawings and paintings with parallels to art history and philosophy. At the start of his career, Fieldhouse created architectural models by hand for a commercial firm who built large office buildings in Sydney. These miniature constructions allowed him to physically engage with and understand the architectural design process, developing an appreciation for the beauty of architecture, its harmonious forms and mathematical proportions – qualities that dominated the art of the Renaissance. Ink and watercolour quickly became his preferred medium…

After an initial period as a cadet newspaper photojournalist, Everton studied photography at RMIT where she realised she was a maker rather than a documenter. Based in Melbourne, many of her series have been created in domestic spaces, some semi-derelict, or in a large studio space. This survey show includes works from six series, bookended by 'Catharsis' in 2005 and 'Indochine', made in Vietnam in 2018, both of which explore one of Everton’s key preoccupations – the intersection of Eastern and Western culture and identity – driven by her heightened awareness of people’s different backgrounds through her own experience of growing up with three adopted siblings from South-East Asia. In 'Catharsis' the central placement of furniture, curtains and archways; the directed lighting; formal costume and separation between the Asian and…

When Robert Hughes delivered his jeremaiad, Art and Money, in 1984, it seemed as if the earth would surely open up and swallow the greedy dealers, the opportunistic artists, the vulgar, nouveau riche collectors who had wrought such pestilence upon the fair face of Art. The gist of Hughes’s argument was that art was being corrupted and debased by the huge sums being paid for works by a new set of superstars whom he viewed as decidedly second-rate. Artists such as Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring left him stone cold, as did the growing adulation for Andy Warhol, who was being treated as the prophet of a new era. He snorted at ‘the art starlet one sees waddling about like a Strasbourg goose, his ego distended to gross proportion by…

We meet in McLean Edwards’ studio in Chippendale. I catch the lift to the top floor of a large warehouse building, now converted to expensive apartments. He tells me it used to be full of artists but he is the last one remaining. Off a silent, grey-carpeted hallway his door opens onto a cluttered studio, a TV screen playing 24-hour news, a sagging sofa. Edwards tells me he’s been up all night making changes to a painting of Derek Parker he’ll enter in this year’s Archibald Prize. And it’s not a good day, I soon find out. Just that morning he signed his divorce papers. I say I’m sorry to impose on such a day, that we can be quick. But he assures me it’s okay. He’s gracious about this…

Based in Dunedin, New Zealand painter Kushana Bush has long drawn aesthetic influence from disparate times and cultures. Her rich visual vocabulary is dense with references to the artists whose work is, for her, worthy of worship. Bush has been painting full-time for ten years, making the commitment to her practice after four years of teaching. It was a leap of faith that has paid off, her work being regularly exhibited across Australasia, and an upcoming exhibition at The Approach Gallery in London, curated by the artist John Stezaker, opening in July this year. For those familiar with Bush’s practice, the influence of artists such as Spencer and Giotto is unsurprising, both concerned in their own ways with contemporary expressions of faith and humanity. ‘What gets me’, she says, ‘is…

Michael Armitage is one of today’s most acclaimed young English artists. Born in Nairobi in 1984, he attended boarding school in England, and went on to an impeccable art education at the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy. Yet the longer he studied in London the more conscious he became of his origins. Armitage’s work is a product of the creative tensions that arise when you spend twenty years living in one country while dreaming of another. Having been taken up by über gallery, White Cube, the artist’s profile is rising with remarkable speed. He has a double solo exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale (until 24 November), and another survey in Turin. The latter show, ‘The Promised Land’, was put together in association with Sydney’s Museum of…

Let’s start from the beginning. When did you realise that being an artist was the career for you? I was always drawing as a child, and when I was in high school I focused mainly on art in Years Eleven and Twelve. I didn’t think much about what a career meant; I just knew that art was what I wanted to pursue. I maintained a studio practice after finishing my degree and, like most aspiring artists, had a number of part time and casual jobs to support myself. It was almost fifteen years before I could become a full-time artist. Many of your paintings and drawings are created from collaging and layering. Can you tell me about your art-making process? I work mainly from photographs due to my interest in…

Natural disasters and war have always threatened human existence. When these crises occur, the loss of human life is the greatest of all the tragic consequences. It is, however, not the only tragedy. The loss of cultural heritage, tangible history, art, artifacts and architecture is also devastating. Unfortunately, in most countries, the emergency management plans of national, local and military agencies do not include provisions for the rescue of cultural heritage. Does saving cultural material matter in the face of the loss of human life? When the crisis is over and the bodies counted, how does one quantify the loss to the culture left behind? Globally, our cultural heritage is our shared sense of identity and history. Objects are the living stories of our past. War, terrorism, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes,…

Frost gives his paintings a kind of autonomy; they want to be or become things that are partially obscure to him. For instance, he says of one of the first that he brings forward, ‘It’s a funny painting that one. It’s almost a bit darker than it wants to be, but that’s also the character of the painting I think.’ Frost talks about his paintings as though they are animated by a force beyond his control, despite also demanding the laborious deliberations of a committed studio practice. That’s not to say that they are the product of some supernatural muse or divine inspiration. No, it’s more his way of grappling with how the formal qualities of the work sometimes drive his process. So, in a painting called In an Alcove…

Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Laetitia Olivier-Gargano works from a childhood fascination with the vegetable and animal kingdoms. She negotiates complex matrices of affect, mines theory from the uncanny to the posthuman, yet always works foremost from her haptic sensory interaction with the world, creating small sculptures and stop-motion films that reflect on experiences distinct to both the human species and herself as a subject within and beyond that category. ‘People are always giving me unusual things because they know I like them,’ she says. ‘So my friend gave me a gecko that had been run over and was completely flat — I’m always collecting objects that could come in handy one day.’ The artist’s practice is grounded in a tender sense of curiosity about objects — and subjects — in the…