Sommaire pour Issue 42 de Artist Profile

IN AN INDUSTRIAL WAREHOUSE IN SYDNEY’S Alexandria, a slice of the Western Desert radiates and shimmers off an unstretched canvas in the centre of the room. It’s a seductive, optical ballet that characterises the work of Indigenous painter George Tjungurrayi. But the swimming, shifting forms that mesmerise are only one part of the magic to be discovered here. Tjungurrayi is a Pintupi man from the Western Desert, around six and a half hours west of Alice Springs. Though he lives and works in Kintore, the place he associates with most is Wilkinkarra; an enormous, arid salt lake surrounded by rolling sand hills and vast desert flats. Wilkinkarra is an important site for many Pintupi men and women, and plays a central role in the Dreaming stories associated with the area.…

“One of the reasons I like working from a small size to a larger size like this is that it constantly challenges me. You don’t get into a comfort zone, the cross-referencing is a challenge. WHAT PROMPTED YOUR MOVE TO AUSTRALIA? I was working as a curator at the Tate Gallery, and John Walker was exhibiting at the Tate and the Hayward Gallery. He was the Dean of the School of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne at the time, and I asked if there was any chance of coming to Australia, as I would like the opportunity. I received a phone call a few months later offering a year in residence and teaching. I could have taken a year’s leave of absence from the…

LATE IN 2017, ARTIST PROFILE VISITED GORDON Shepherdson in suburban Brisbane. He is now frail, and has recently moved into a nursing home facility, but his studio remains as it was. Gordon’s son, Nathan Shepherdson, breathes deeply as we walk in the studio door, saying, “I miss that smell of fresh linseed. It was part of the feeling of being here – always.” There is a humility in this building that is integral to the man. It is your archetypal 1960s Brisbane backyard shed, small, cramped, with high windows and the door covered to exclude the light. Stacked racks of paintings occupy the back wall. “The box”, purpose-built decades ago by Shepherdson’s brother-in-law to store his work away from the dust and voracious Queensland humidity, dominates the floor, knee-high with…

3RD TAMWORTH TEXTILE Triennial 2017, curated by Glenn Barkley, emphasises Tamworth Regional Gallery’s focus on textile art, both from a national and local perspective. Textile arts are not easily classified as art or craft; they have a language all their own. The complexity of textile or fibre arts as it is known in contemporary settings lies in the historical precedence. The often practical nature of cloaks and dresses cannot always be seen or read in the same way as installation or sculptural pieces. As Glenn Barkley points out in his essay about the Open House exhibition, the title suggests an openness and generosity of spirit, a space for inclusion for practitioners of craft and art or both. This exhibition is a striking example of blurring boundaries, first of all between…

I STARTED WORKING WITH LINE BY accident. During art school I began making abstract pieces with graphite pencils. I wanted to experiment with pencil and see what it was capable of. I rarely planned a drawing, rather I would just let it unfold until a form started to emerge. Some of my first drawings to come out of this process were very connected to trees. They resembled tree roots, bark or growth lines. As a result, I became more interested in how line manifests in nature, especially repetitive line – such as that which is seen in fungi, gemstones, woodgrains and rock formations. Around this same time, I attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, which impacted my life and art significantly. I experienced greater levels of patience and focus as…

MANY OF THE ARTICLES IN THIS issue of Artist Profile are concerned with the evolving nature of artists’ practices and the cycle of curatorial presentations. The daily uncertainty of making art is matched by the need for an audience to receive their art. “Everyone likes to remember the big things, but they’re not what make up the days,” Honor Freeman tells Fulvia Mantelli. Her ideas and objects are drawn from the everyday of domestic and industrial objects, and yet evolve from one piece to the next in an unusual but insightful way. The way some ideas and objects are interpreted highlights whether there is an audience commitment to a variety of options. In the “Issue” section of Artist Profile, artists Justine Varga, Michael Buzacott, Coen Young and Andrew Christofides discuss…

WHEN WERE YOU DRAWN TO ART? Probably always, but I did not realise it had a name until later in high school. As a child I liked to write long compositions and some poetry. How important has music been to your work? I consider music to be the most important art form – there are no examples in nature and it’s entirely abstract. Looking back, I think that music paralleled my “sense” of the world more than anything else. However, I didn’t feel that I had enough freedom as a musician. My early involvement with music may help to explain the temporality, as well as my desire to dissipate one central point, focus, meaning or place in the work. The music-based works I made were just as important to me…

IN THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, editors Brad Buckley and John Conomos have assembled an impressive set of authors, including Amelia Jones, John Welchman, Bruce Barber and Gregory Sholette. The front cover features a performance protest by Liberate Tate against British Petroleum’s sponsorship of the Tate Britain, ‘Human Cost’, in which a female figure in a foetal position lays in a simulated pool of oil in the interior of the gallery. This provocative image sets the agenda for the themes inside and, in this respect, Who Runs the Artworld may be considered a parallel tome to Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014). Collectively, the response to the question, “who runs the artworld?” takes a decidedly activist bent. The book is organised into three sections under the headings of Money, Power and…

LUCY: JUSTINE, DID YOU EXPECT CONTROVERSY? Justine: I knew there wouldn’t be other portraits like mine in the award. There were of course portraits that obscured the face, or rendered somebody quite vaguely. My work, in seeking to portray the relationship between my grandmother and myself, took it to that next step, by not including a recognisable face. When the Sydney Morning Herald contacted me, I thought they wanted a little story in the art pages as they would with any photographic or art awards. When I woke up the next morning, to find a controversy on the front page, it was a bit of a shock. Kon: Is portraiture possible in non-objective art? Andrew: Absolutely not. It depends on the definitions of portraiture and non-objective art. Portraiture is perhaps…

THE ORIGINAL 1968 EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL Gallery of Victoria, The Field, attempted to align Australian art with international modernist trends. Despite not receiving a formal art education, you had a dedicated awareness of what was happening outside Australia. How did you become fascinated by hard-edged abstraction and colour field painting? In 1963 I was a schoolteacher and had to do country service, so my wife and I chose the town closest to Sydney. Wollongong had an active art scene where I met Bill (William) Peascod, a successful texture painter who became a mentor of mine. Bill revealed to me that there was a possibility that I could be an artist, something I’d always wanted to be. I emulated him in texture painting but with a significant difference. My painting…

“The aim is to hold four to five Defiance exhibitions per year, while handing over “complete curatorial control” for all other shows. CAMPBELL ROBERTSON-SWANN and Lauren Harvey, art dealers with a sense of history, have taken over the lease of the ground floor of Mary Place Gallery for 2018 with the aim of doing quality shows by established artists. Sydney entrepreneur, John Feitelson, is supporting the project. “No strugglers, no students, no second-raters,” says Robertson-Swann, who swears he’d rather leave the gallery vacant than hang something just to pay the rent. Defiance, the duo’s Newtown gallery, has always been too small for their ambitions and too far from the centre of the Sydney art scene. Even though that scene has been drifting south-west for more than a decade it has…

TRANSBOUNDARIES A triennial exhibition of cross-disciplinary works by QUT alumini exploring interactions between the social, political, ecological and psychological. 7 April – 3 June QUT Art Museum, Qld SANGEETA SANDRASEGAR New work examining the relationships between the copy, allegory, translation, time, space and thought. 23 March – 28 April Gertrude Contemporary, Vic TONY COSTA Costa visualises the unique rhythms of the Australian bush based on his direct experience of the Hacking River landscape in the Royal National Park, combining real and imagined visions in search for a new pictorial truth. 11 – 28 April Art Atrium, NSW COLOURS OF IMPRESSIONISM Masterpieces from the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris chart the revolution of colour that lies at the heart of Impressionism, including works Monet, Renoir, Manet, Morisot, Pissarro and…