Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 62 i Artist Profile

When an artist wins the Archibald, Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize, they achieve fame well beyond the Australian art world. Blak Douglas (a.k.a. Adam Hill) won last year, witha towering three-metre-high painting of his friend, Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, titled Moby Dickens, 2022. The picture was part climate-change devastation and part art-world dirty business. Blak Douglas is an artist admired among artists, and this deeply politicised painting is from a long history of activist works – paintings, prints, performances, public art – demonstrates his dogged perseverance as he expresses his experiences. As writer and curator Djon Mundine comments in his cover essay on Douglas, “Adam’s self-belief is fresh, consistent, and remains unbounded.” Nasim Nasr had to leave Iran to be able to choose her experiences. The idea of choice, especially…

As a high-schooler, Guerin lost interest in the dance classes she had been taking since childhood, “distracted by adolescence.” This distraction struck in Adelaide, in the late 1970s, and it prefigured what would become several hall marks of her work: an interest in what it is like to experience a body, rather than in how we might configure that body to its most pleasing effect, a delight in slowness, and the pursuit of a certain indirectness which should not be confused with indifference. In the expanse between her initial distraction and the present, Guerin has built a remarkable archive of steps. These stretch across both her independent choreographic projects and twenty-one years’ worth of collaboration with her Melbourne-based dance company, Lucy Guerin Inc (LGI). Like most artists’ bodies of work,…

“I think an experience is not something that just happens to us, it’s something we choose to do,” Olafur Eliasson opined. The Icelandic–Danish artist was speaking to the press about his new site-specific installation Under the weather, 2022, an elliptical structure suspended at eight metres above the public courtyard of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The work’s disorienting moiré effect, created by the interplay of overlying patterns, altered the appearance of the space’s strict orthogonal architecture, making its perfect square seem rectangular, and the sculpture’s elliptical shape appear perfectly round. Like in many of the artist’s works, recognising the simplicity of the mechanism behind the sensory illusion can be as jarring as its effect. And that, in fact, is part of the artist’s message. “We are never really objective,”…

Relationship. Joanna Braithwaite’s portrait of loved but departed Pep per, wearing a carrot, is in the “family portraits” section, with the recent Caroline Zilinsky Weimar Republic–referencing double portrait of Max and Gaibrielle Germanos and Huxley. The artist Euan Macleod has curated the Macquarie University Art Gallery’s current exhibition from the Germanos collection. Macleod has selected others of Max and Gabby. The lovely 2021 Swimmers for Gabby group portrait of their children by Clara Adolphs, Adolphs’s portraits of Gabby’s father and of Max’s parents and brother will be included, together with Vanessa Stockard’s of each of their children, Grace, Maddison, and Alec. These family portraits are a very small element of this big collection, but they provide a way to encapsulate the experience of a first visit to the Germanos home.…

For over sixty thousand years, Torres Strait Islanders have maintained ongoing connections to their lands, seas, skies, and culture. However, without immediate action, this will soon change. As greenhouse gas emissions accelerate global warming, Torres Strait Islanders find themselves on the frontline of rising sea levels, flooding, unpredictable winds, and coastal erosion, to name but a few of the devastating effects. In response to the worsening climate crisis, “Our Islands, Our Home” was formed by Torres Strait Islanders who demanded the Australian Government take immediate action so that they may remain on their island homes. As part of this campaign – supported by 350.org Australia – eight claimants from Zenadh Kes (the Torres Strait), known as the Torres Strait 8, took the Australian Government to the Human Rights Committee (HRC)…

Campbelltown Arts Centre is hosting Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens’s survey exhibition Embracing Shadows, on display until 12 March 2023. The show is comprised of an impressive number of works spanning thirty years of practice, and the result is both evocative and powerful. The exhibition is sprawling, and spreads out across the entirety of the gallery spaces, where each room highlights thematic chapters of the artist’s long career. Born in Sydney on Gadigal Country in 1967, Dickens is of Wiradjuri, Irish, and German descent. Having trained primarily as a painter at the National Art School, over time her practice has evolved to include more sculptural tendencies, with a refined focus on mixed-media materials and found objects. The pull towards found objects has been a lifelong fixation, and Dickens has stated that…

Sera Waters’s significance as a leading South Australian artist was firmly cemented in 2022 with two major projects exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). Her series Storied Sail Cloths, 2021, was included in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State, curated by Sebastian Goldspink, and in November her solo project Sera Waters: Future Traditions was launched in AGSA Gallery 8. Sera Waters: Future Traditions brings together several years of exploration, investigation, and making supported by the 2020 Guild house Fellowship. Waters is known for her methodical research and revitalisation of traditional textile and sewing practices, and the Fellowship enabled time for reflection and creative development. The focus of this project — in which Waters is artist, collector, and curator — is to imagine a future for…

In 1974, Tony Shafrazi took a spray can and wrote “KILL ALL LIES” directly onto Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, hanging at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He claimed his rationale was an anti-war statement, so ergo, his method was to deface an anti-war painting. And not just any artwork, but the anti-war painting of the twentieth century. Calculated to create a sensation and possibly elevate his own status, he placidly stayed in the gallery while awaiting arrest. When the judge asked if he was likely to re-offend in the same manner, he replied, “No, because it has already been done.” The bright red spray paint didn’t soak into the heavily varnished canvas and was successfully removed, but the dye was cast. The graffiti text gauged over the painting’s…

The word “freedom” is at the centre of humanity – to be human is to be free, to relate to others, spaces, and places without restrictions or persecution. Iranian-born and Sydney-based artist Nasim Nasr explores the concept of freedom through her multi disciplinary practice. As a young child growing up in Iran, her artistic talent was noticed by a primary school teacher and then supported by her father, which led to Nasr’s enrolment at the University of Tehran. However, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the freedoms available to women were greatly reduced, and things like paintings or drawings of women and nudes were not permitted. With the support of her father, Nasr was encouraged to undermine these rules and to instead create more work that celebrated these prohibited images. It…

To Aaron Fell-Fracasso, the primacy of mark-making is key. He’s constantly searching for new ways of making patterns, and any object can be enlisted to create the diverse and richly textured paintings for which he is known. He’ll manipulate implements from his workshop, break prongs off garden tools, and browse hardware stores specifically looking for construction tools to repurpose. His curious mind is constantly imagining the mark something could make, and then working through how he can fashion it into a painting. This playful approach is designed to keep a viewer interested, and he’s eager to throw them off the scent of how a work was made. As he states, “If I look at someone’s painting, I’m always trying to work out how they have created the mark, and when…

I’ve been hypnotised by drawings for as long as I can remember. My eyes are curious, always scanning the shapes of things, tracing repeat patterns and getting a bit lost in intersecting lines. There’s something about seeing the world this way that makes you want to draw everything. There must be some little receptors in my head that are addicted to the feeling of tracing line drawings with my eyes, or of breaking down real life into shapes and lines. Why does it feel so good to draw stuff? I’ve worked hard to try and keep deeply connected to how it feels to play, and to invent my own worlds through drawing for my own amusement in a similar way to when I was young. It’s an obsession and a…

“Smashing the frame,” “moving past the border,” and “breaking out of our structures” are some of the expressions Kellie O’Dempsey uses to describe her need to represent or grasp at constant change. Growing up in pubs that her parents managed in regional Victoria meant living and working amongst a daily swirl of high-pressure adult, predominantly male, interaction. This “lived” culture continued into the pubs and clubs of Melbourne’s alternative music scene, where O’Dempsey pursued her passion for music and drawing. She used to draw bands live and began by carrying sketchbooks to gigs and drawing the artists while in the audience. Drawings made in the crucible of these venues were not preparatory ideas for other 2D works, but the key medium to enable her to explore the energy of the…

Centre 5: bridging the gap is the first focussed survey of this disparate collective since the last member died in 2016. The exhibition’s location at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery is entirely apt given its particular emphasis on sculpture, its ability to display such work in interior and varied exterior settings, and for its continuous support of the Centre 5 artists and their work since McClelland opened in 1971. Theirs was a brief existence, but the reverberations of Centre 5’s approach maintain significant resonances to this day; and contemporary sculptors, particularly those involved in public art, should revisit the group’s driving philosophy. The membership – Lenton Parr, Inge King, Norma Redpath, Vincas Jomantas, Teisutis Zikaras, and Clifford Last, inspired by Julius Kane – established a five-point plan which sought to bridge the…

William Yang’s life in 1970s Sydney had a lot of parties, and the State Library of NSW of course put on a party to celebrate the pre-show view of Sydneyphiles Reimagined, restaging the show that launched his career. William is good at friendship; the crowd included people from that astonishing era, and younger ones with an interest in history, photography… and life itself. Drinks in hand, we sat down to a slide show – an event itself of the seventies – and William showed us through the time. Of course it was nostalgic: people in the beauty of youth – elderly but still glamorous in the audience – mingled on screen with buildings, posters, newspaper articles, important figures, now lost. It is nearly fifty years since David McDiarmid, Peter Tully,…

In her 2019 book Time Song, Julia Blackburn explores Doggerland, the ancient stretch of land once linking East Anglia to main land Europe, now submerged deep under the North Sea. During the course of her investigation, she meets Dutch archaeologist Professor Leendert P. Louwe Kooijmans, an expert in the transition from the Mesolithic to Neolithic periods in Northern Europe. He has a curious conception of his disciplinary methodology: “What one learns from all such studies is not expertise but a gathering of uncertainties and it is from these uncertainties that one must work.” To Louwe Kooijmans, knowledge production is not simply the outcome of the scientific method and its cold rationality. Embracing gaps and ambiguities is also crucial. When Suffolk-based bronze sculptor Laurence Edwards came across this phrase, it struck…

The glass scene in Australia is rumbling, swelling. A jolt of new energy pulses through its crystalline veins as many contemporary artists are starting to think more about glass as an accessible, experimental material. Mel Douglas has been at the forefront of this glass scene for almost three decades. Working out of the Canberra Glassworks – a studio that has piloted innovations in Australian glassmaking – her practice explores the flexibility of glass as a material for drawing and mark-making, stretching the boundaries of what drawing is, and what it can be. Objects and lines are often considered two separate entities, but Douglas’s work uncovers the creative prospects of liminality – where the form is not merely a support for the drawing, but a three-dimensional drawing itself. “The transformative material…

My upcoming show, at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne, is a presentation of new paintings that explore the sensation of luminous colour with a focus on intimacy. Its title, A Tender Anchor, recalls how formal elements create different harmonies and relationships in paintings, just like we do in our own human interactions. Colour, marks, and forms anchor one another, each element affecting the next. For me, painting always connects me back to my human relationships and to my fascination with the energies in the world around me, reflecting back like a mirror. Madeline Simm wrote in 2022 of my paintings that “mirrored proportions face each other in an exchange.” Everyday experiences have always inspired my work. I observe colour, textures, lustres, and forms from the world around me and take…

The first biennale I ever attended was the 18th Biennale of Sydney (BoS) in 2012. I was fifteen at the time, and up until then had only been exposed to historical art of the Western canon. As I slowly wandered around Cockatoo Island, I remember feeling so in awe that I felt this big tension in my chest. I never knew that contemporary art existed on this scale, that the works of artists still living could be embraced and platformed in such a way. It was an experience that I still remember as feeling sacred, almost spiritual. I remember carefully reading every inch of wall text possible, looking and listening with the intent of turning my body into a sponge to absorb every lick of expression or information offered. Visiting…

Innately fuelled by emotional response, whether a portrait or landscape, Bergstrom’s work is always a fusion between an empathic approach to the environment and the artist’s own emotional turmoil. It should immediately be noted that there is no small talk with Bergstrom, who steps straight out with her heart on her sleeve. Painting with a technique she describes as “Danish pastry, where it’s layer upon layer,” the works can be built up and textural, or veil-like, with figurative layers shimmering through: “The processes is very unpredictable. I have no plans as such, and it develops and changes on its own. I need be prepared for all the possibilities that could arise. It’s like watching clouds form. You have to be aware. Decisions are made, but the actual paint has its…

Kevin Lincoln is the master of “slow art.” Whereas so much contemporary art is ephemeral, and packs a huge “wow” impact on first encounter that then rapidly evaporates, Lincoln’s art breathes of immortality – of a timelessness and permanence. His landscape paintings on display at the Gippsland Art Gallery do not scream out at you or demand your attention. They silently lie in wait, as if in ambush, and are ready to seduce you through their finely balanced tonal properties. Once you enter the painting you are there for the long haul, and discover endless subtle nuances that delight the eye and satisfy the intellect. Nothing in them seems out of place, with all of the elements beautifully ordered and lovingly resolved. In 1960, at the age of seventy, Giorgio…

Home, is where I want to be But I guess I'm already there–Talking Heads As former Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (now the Chief Executive Officer of Bundanon Trust in Nowra), Rachel Kent, supported by Associate Curator Megan Robson, has realised a thought-provoking and ethereally aesthetic survey of the South Korean–born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh. Surprisingly, this is the first solo exhibition of his work in the Southern Hemisphere. Covering three decades of his work, it is one of the better installed survey shows I have seen at the MCA. It is an inspiring collection of installations, sculptures, drawings, and video that conjures the breaches that occur between the personal and collective spheres. Born in Seoul in 1962, Suh originally began as a painter.…

What a curator is, and what a curator does, has been an evolving discussion over the past century, with the role and reach of curation developing in concert with the changing landscape of museums and how visitors interact with art. The last thirty years have seen a proliferation of biennials and art fairs, and explosions in the financial power of commercial galleries and auction houses. Curators have, in some ways, stepped out of the dusty back rooms of museums and into the spotlight – a spotlight of searing intensity and contradiction. This rise in the visibility of the curator in the 1990s parallels the import of DJs during this period, their brands becoming sometimes more foregrounded than the musicians they were playing. These über-curators, too, became – often reluctantly –…