Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 56 i Artist Profile

It’s week three of another lockdown and for once, I am looking forward to my next Zoom of the day – my interview with Noonuccal, Ngugi and Geonpal artist Megan Cope. From my apartment located in one of the exiled suburbs of Western Sydney, Megan takes me to her childhood in regional Tasmania, where her entertainments were limited: siblings, fishing, hanging out with the chooks and reading the Rolling Stone magazine purchased from the fortunes of her chook egg money. Her family made everything from scratch. This upbringing equipped her with the tools she needed to get through the pandemic, and deeply informs her art, which speaks to her relationships with the environment, and the people who are inseparable to each place. I ask Megan if there is a starting…

Matthew Cheyne has structured his life around family and home, both tethered to an art practice that is integral to who he is. Sustainability is environmental and his house and studio were designed and built by Cheyne and wife Caroline in recent years, overlooking its bush surrounds and sitting lightly on its small imprint of earth outside Ipswich, on Brisbane’s outskirts. From his studio he has a vista into the bush, and the domestic world of his own making, both a long way from the densely populated European centres in which he lived, worked and exhibited during the ten years to 2019. Returning to Australia, the art practice which supports his family unit is predicated on financial sustainability, and requires a level of moxie that he and Caroline embrace. It…

Descending the stairs, a second hand Telecom truck awaited. Sam loaded and covered with a tarp his worldly possessions: Georgian and Victorian furniture, an outstanding portrait The Page Boy, c.1790s, a youth dressed in a pistachio green buttoned jacket by English painter John Opie (1761-1807), a large colonial painting of a racehorse as well as Gould prints, one of which a handsome Kookaburra, as well as paintings by his hand. The 1890 Blüthner grand piano, not part of this load, was placed in storage for the time being. Beset by cataracts, Sam had no vision in his left eye, so my role as a passenger for the two–hours–plus journey from East Brisbane to Oakey on the Darling Downs was to be Sam’s left eye, giving due warning if he strayed…

In 2012 in Bali and Java, Australian–Indonesian artist Jumaadi began collecting small one hundred–year–old vernacular timber houses. Some were decorated with ornate carvings; others were lightly ornamented with painted panels that had gradually faded in the damp Indonesian climate. His mission was to rescue the decaying houses and move them to his compound in Surabaya where they would be rebuilt and renovated. Now he has about ten, although he is not quite sure. Over the years the compound has become a de facto art space, somewhere for locals to gather and children to hang out. The houses also serve as a studio and home for when Jumaadi and his Australian family are in Indonesia, which now, because of COVID-19 and the travel restrictions imposed by the Australian Government, is no…

What comes to mind when Ballarat, the regional Victorian town in the Central Highlands northwest of Melbourne, is mentioned? The gold rush of the late 1850s that swept this fledgling colonial outpost, and curiously Australia’s only attempt at a revolution: the fairly timid blink-and-you’d-miss-it Eureka Stockade uprising. Rebellion is a pretty neat thing to be remembered for even if it is coupled with the greed of wealth creation. But where does photography fit in all of this? This weird mechanical and alchemical process doesn’t result in more wealth or revolutionary thought … or does it? In its sixteenth year, the BALLARAT INTERNATIONAL FOTO BIENNALE (BIFB) that runs over eight weeks comprises a vast program of photo-based media exhibitions shown throughout the fabric of the greater Ballarat community. Headlining this Biennale…

The exhibition ‘Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at Sea’ brings together the work of two brothers, who last exhibited together in Adelaide in 1949. This substantial gathering of 200 works, curated by Elle Freak at the Art Gallery of South Australia, celebrates the prolific output of siblings closely linked by surrealism but with distinct individual creative journeys. Dušan Thomas Marek (1926–1993) and Voitre (Vojtech) Marek (1919–1999) were born in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, and as young men both embarked on artistic careers. They were exposed to surrealism at an early age and embraced it as both philosophy and style while studying in Prague at the Academy of Fine Arts. Together they fled their homeland in the wake of the communist occupation in 1948, sailing to Adelaide aboard the SS Charlton Sovereign. The…

The youngest of four siblings, John Zerunge Young spent his childhood on the southern side of Hong Kong, in an art deco granite house that was scarred with Japanese bullet holes from the Second World War. As a child, looking out from the balcony he painted views of the sea and the sun setting over the bay, which was far away from the hustle and bustle of the iconic city. His father was an industrialist involved in petroleum products. By contrast his mother, of Chinese and Dutch heritage, was “more of a progressive,” a feminist and the chair of the prestigious Chinese Women’s Club, which helped soldiers after the war and refugees with resettlement. She was also an opera singer and collector of Chinese art from different dynasties. Another of…

"We live in an overly anaesthetised society. A society that teaches us to fear pain, to fear complexity, to fear the messiness of internal spaces,” Del Kathryn Barton says. “As an artist, these are the spaces that you have to courageously step into every day, and turn all the anxiety and worry and uncertainty into a kind of superpower.” It’s 10 am on a Monday morning, and Barton is speaking to me through my pixelated computer monitor. The screen glitches every minute or so, constantly reminding me that we are not standing together in her studio, but are separated by both geography and the whims of my internet provider. Yet even in these difficult circumstances, the gravity of Barton’s words, their sincerity and vulnerability, are able to somehow connect us…

Tricky Walsh appears on my laptop screen, their voice slightly distorted as we converse over distance through a shaky network from one regional part of Tasmania to another: it’s a Zoom conversation. This is how we get in touch. It’s a bit like science fiction, but it’s also a bit daggy – the future is never quite as good as we might have hoped. Tricky is in ensconced in the studio, tantalising glimpses of new work hovering in the background, in various states of progression. The conversation is easy. Tricky has a tremendous amount to say, their words coming in a cascade that’s punctuated by self-effacing laughter whenever it all gets too high concept, or too self-aggrandising; there’s a healthy dose of self-reflection and humility here. Tricky is a dichotomy:…

In 2011, George Gittoes and I were invited to speak at the World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression at Oslo about the Yellow House Jalalabad. ‘All That is Banned is Desired - A World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression.’ There I met one of the escaped women of the group Pussy Riot. We became friends and I invited her to get a lift with us to an event. She became nervous and said, “Are you sure? I think that Russian Intelligence are trying to kill me.” Getting her into the car was tricky, we had a decoy car and a double getting into a car out the front while we got into a car at the side of the hotel. While riding in the car with her, she…

In Germany alone, the home of Beuys, the anniversary is being celebrated with exhibitions in twenty-eight locations. Worldwide, there are exhibitions across all continents including Australia, Japan, the United States, and numerous European countries. Especially in the Rhineland, and more precisely on the Lower Rhine, where the artist spent most of his life, the artist is remembered in numerous themed exhibitions. In Kleve, his hometown, where the artist maintained a studio until the early 1960s, the rooms of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve – which today houses one of the most beautiful Lower Rhine museums – commemorate Beuys’s early work. Here, you can observe how the artist developed strategies over the years with which he then achieved world fame in the early 1960s with spectacular actions such as How to explain…

Speaking from Åland in early July, three months before the Sydney opening of ‘Entwined,’ Danelle Bergstrom explains her plans for the use of space at Arthouse Gallery: “The new video work will be in the second room; it was designed to fit the entire free standing wall at the end of the room. The large scale of the video is important, and alongside the video wall will be the fifteen small paintings from which the video was created.” The video work, Entwine, 2020, was created with Sydney-based digital compositor Zelko Dejanovic. Having moved to explore video since an initial experiment with it in 2019, Bergstrom understands the form as a crucible in which the concepts of her paintings can be more expansively articulated. While working on the paintings for ‘Entwined,’…

He’s known for intricately detailed sculptures and furniture, but Patrick Hall’s recent work, The Torn Whole, 2020, features crudely-sketched beasties with beady eyes, toothy mouths and fabulous eyelashes. Hall calls it an “exercise in trying to get me to draw more freely.” He hasn’t completely let go. Countering the free drawing and folds of backlit fabric – in Hall’s words, the “unexplained underneath” – is a strict grid of transparency mounts and and fine-lined diagram overlay – an aesthetic common to many of his works. Each creature is strictly framed, numbered and captioned. However, we are left to imagine the connection between the beasts and the cryptic captions like “petrified in quarried stone,” or “the unearthed secrets,” which suggest the monsters are both ancient and of this earth. Hall trained…

Why are we talking about Non-Fungible Tokens? There’s 69 million reasons … I was giving a talk back in March, a week or so after the $69 million sale of an NFT at auction (note, it was not bought with dollars, but with 42,329.453 ETH, Ethererum, the world’s second biggest digital coin, by a “cryptocurrency billionaire”), and was asked about them in the question period. I admitted that it was all Greek to me at that stage, but the scale of the acquisition seemingly out of the blue made me wary that a fad had broken onto the scene. So I set about learning about NFTs. It’s been like a game of snakes and ladders; a possibility of something new and exciting, of climbing to new aesthetic heights, followed by…

“Colourful paintings are informed by the reordering of plant form DNA; he undertakes extensive research in the field …” For Sydney-based, Auckland-born artist Michael McHugh his colourful paintings are informed by the reordering of plant form DNA; he undertakes extensive research in the field before following with experimental drawings and collage. Here is where the imagination kicks in, the artist commenting that, though there are certain structures audiences may recognise, there will always be a twist. There’s an artistic interpretation of the research material. At the end of 2019, before 2020 brought a wave of lockdowns, McHugh went to the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library in London – the largest horticultural library in the world. Here the artist was inspired by the diversity of botanical drawings and studies. As soon…

I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer – the advisor Paul Judelson – at dinner a while back. Over cheese, Judelson told me about this artist I “had to see” because, I was told, Burford is Australian, living over here, and making the kind of subversive visual images that compel writing (at the time “here” was the United States, pre-Covid, before Australia’s borders effectively closed). Now, perhaps wisely, Burford is home. We’re chatting between New York and Darwin, then Los Angeles and Darwin, as he settles into his practice on domestic soil for the first time in over two decades. Burford’s absence from Australia can be accounted for by the Samstag Grant – that is, the Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship – a…

"We are period-stained tight figure-hugging things. The fabric of our communities, the soft and long and loud. We’re the wasp at the doorway and the unmown weeds. We are shameless and seductive, like the Catholic School Girl finally doing it. We are a handbag in a food court, feral cats terrifying feral kids.” The manifesto for Skirts is built of phrases over-swarming with double and triple meanings. Available on the C3West website, the manifesto marks the most recent community project in the fifteen years – so far – of the C3West program. The skirt, here, means many things at once, depending on who is wearing, or speaking, it. The plasticity of the word was part of what drew Linda Brescia, who played a central role in organising the project, to…

At seventy-five years of age, Brown is standing in his studio in Newtown amidst a flotilla of working drawings and a pile of palette splotched painting clothes, testifying to his labours. We are in the solidly Victorian building that became the School of Arts in wartime 1916. The walls are lined with Sepik carvings while a litany of handwritten quotes are stapled to the cedar door of this vast space. An atmosphere of sustained industry pervades the room. It is calmed by the soothing sound of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopedie’ floating eerily from an ancient CD player nestled among an eclectic stack of CDs – Monteverdi, Bach, Dylan, The Rolling Stones. From within this deep, sometimes dark, cultural pool the artist has arranged a handful of luminous canvases and a most…

Muruyguwmal Muykupal Pathamukmik (From the time of our ancestors to the present day, let us continue to breathe on the embers to keep the fire burning …) – Adhi Ephraim Bani OAM The Torres Strait Islander flag has been raised for the first time outside Newcastle’s Town Hall to mark the opening of ‘WARWAR: The Art of Torres Strait.’ The flag features the iconic dhari (dancer’s headdress). According to curator and artist Brian Robinson, “Of all the totemic objects created, the mask used in ceremonial dance was the most important.” The first work you see as you ascend the stairs of the Newcastle Art Gallery is a long turtle shell mask/headdress with sharp teeth, and a fish tail protruding from the skull decorated with patterns which are both painted and…

The QR code has become ubiquitous. Although invented in Japan in the 1960s by Masahiro Hara to assist supermarkets in tracking their wares, since COVID-19, it has become a quotidian presence. Every shopping experience, each time we need coffee or visit the doctor, we are presented with a code to scan, which logs our movements through the day. Harrison Riekie is intrigued by the aesthetic form of the QR code’s concise square pattern as much as by its ability to inform, illustrate and document with veracity. This fascination led him to construct a body of works on an ambitious scale that forces us to rethink and re-imagine something constantly in our visual field. Riekie’s Quick Response codes, recently exhibited in ‘Hatched: National Graduate Art Show 2021’ at the Perth Institute…