A day off in Winter

Well, this post has been in draft form for a few weeks now, owing to ongoing, boring issues involving my laptop (which doesn't work as well as it used to), my newish ipad (which I can't get to do everything I'd hoped it would) and finally the library computer. I was almost going to abandon it, with all the other unfinished drafts(!!!) but decided that it might still be on interest. So...

I had been working really hard over the past couple of weeks and so, despite several impending deadlines, I decided to give myself a day off on Sunday and took the train to Swan Hill - on the Murray River, which is the border between Victoria and New South Wales.
Sunday is the only day you can get there and back by train from central Victoria, or indeed from Melbourne. (From Melbourne it would be a considerably longer day!) A mid afternoon train from Swan Hill to Melbourne is scheduled on Sundays only - presumably to take all the Swan Hill locals back to work or study after spending the weekend at home.
Because it’s quite a long country trip the train is one of the really comfortable ones with a buffet car if you need it. On a mid-Winder Sunday, it was also confortable empty, with plenty of room to spread out. I really enjoy travelling by train - sitting watching the the changing landscape, the small towns and farms, the flat land and silos dotted around northern Victoria. I had knitting and music and found it very fulfilling and relaxing 'slow' time.
If you were travelling with small children, they may be enjoy the simple pleasure of watching the farm animals along the way. Because you’re higher up than when travelling in a car and the train passes only a few times a day, there was a lovely view of cattle and sheep along the line, some grazing contently, others dashing in fright from the passing train. I saw quite a few calves and was highly amused by gamboling lambs. Now I really know what gamboling means - a joyous kicking up of both front and then back legs, a bit like a bucking horse.
I discovered that you can’t actually get to Swan Hill using a Myki travel card; you need a paper ticket. Fortunately the conductor was friendly and helpful, touching my Myki off after Eaglehawk (just past Bendigo) and selling me the required paper ticket. Also fortunately I had enough cash!
I arrived at Swan Hill at about 12.30 and enjoyed a twenty minute walk along the river to the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery - my actual destination. Before going in I stopped at Spoons Riverside restaurant, just next door on the river, for lunch.  It’s really quite nice, with a big bright indoor space with full length glass all around and plenty of outdoor seating, all overlooking the Murray. The menu is fresh, with a focus on local produce.  They didn’t have the delicious terrine I had last time, so I opted for a chicken pie, one of the just-baked second batch for the day. It was on the small side, but tasty.
If you felt inclined and were more organised than I was there are lots of tables and seating along the riverside.  I saw quite a few people, caravanners mostly, enjoying their sandwiches in the sunshine, watching the river go by. There's also a lot playground equipment and free exercise machines along the river

Later in the afternoon, I got adventurous and crossed the very rickety-looking bridge to the other side for a very quick visit to New South Wales. I thought I was pretty brave. Signs indicated that only one large vehicle was allowed on at any time. (What's a large vehicle?!) The centre part of the old bridge lifts up to allow large boats to pass...or, at least it did once. There was also a sign saying that no more than six people at any time should be on the footpath part of the lift section. 

So, the real reason of my journey was to see the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Acquisitive Awards. I caught it on the final day, in fact.  It was well worth the trip. There was a terrific range of works. 

The winning drawing was Jan Davis’s quite minimalist Georgica #25, 2017, ink and stitching on Nepalese paper. (below)

The winning print was a lovely quiet book by Elizabth Banfield, from Loftia Park, 2017, linocut prints and stitching on kozo paper.

Interestingly the two winning works are similar in many ways - the use of colour, stitching and light handmade paper. Elizabeth's work was one of two artists books, both inspired by bushfires. The other, by Dianne Fogwell, was also a wonderful book 

Besides her prize-winning drawing, Jan Davis also had a print in the exhibition,which I liked very much.

Another work that I really enjoyed was one of the two video works in the show. Todd Fuller's Billy's Swan is a very beautiful and moving stop motion video created using hundreds of chalk and charcoal drawings based upon a dream sequence from the 2000 film Billy Elliott.  The drawings are bookended by footage of Fuller himself dancing the sequence.

I caught the exhibition on its last day and unfortunately couldn't get a catalogue as they were sold out...which is a good thing (although not for me).

Fuller's work can still be seen at Bendigo Art Gallery, as it is a finalist in the Paul Guest Drawing Prize. I would recommend a trip to Bendigo to see this too, especially as you can also see Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise, curated by Ben Quilty and Michael Dagostino.

Below is an installation shot of part of the Swan Hill exhibition.

After spending  some more time wandering along the river I returned  to the station, admiring the giant Murray Cod, before catching the train back home. It had been a really lovely day!

Making Connections

In the last couple of weeks or so I've managed to get to see a handful of fabulous exhibitions locally.
First, I went to Woodbine Art in the lovely village of Malmsbury for the opening of Melinda Harper's exhibition of paintings, prints and embroideries. Some of the works actually combine painting and embroidery. She lives not too far from me in central Victoria and is a founding member (as am I) of Castlemaine Press, a printmaking collective, which was launched last year, not long after I moved to Castlemaine, and which will have its own studio in the next few months at Lot 19.
I've admired Harper's colourful abstract paintings for some years. In fact, you can see her influence in my series of paintings, From the Book of LC - Leonard Cohen lyrics set within coloured abstract fields.

There is also a link to the work of Vivienne Binns (the subject of my doctoral thesis). Her In Memory of the Unknown Artist paintings look like modernist abstract paintings, but they bare actually based upon what she calls 'domestic surfaces', including carpets, bathroom tiles, as well as knitted rugs she purchased in country op shops. One of Harper's painting/embroideries is based upon a piece of cross stitch that she found in a Castlemaine op shop. A tentative link perhaps, but these works certainly reference needlework, an art form not always considered 'art'.  There is to be a major retrospective of Harper's work, opening at Heide Museum of Modern Art in late June, which I'm looking forward to immensely. Here is some information about it.

I also went to Bendigo (for a job interview) and so dropped into the Bendigo Art Gallery for lunch (which was delicious) and to see Imagining Ned. There were a few familiar (from Heide) Nolan and Tucker works there, as well as some Kelly-inspired work by contemporary artists, including a fabulous linocut print - Self Portrait as Ned Kelly aged 50 - by Clayton Tremlett, another Castlemaine Press founding member!
There are a couple of tapestries of Nolan paintings, which are particularly beautiful.

There is an exhibition catalogue that can be viewed in pdf available here.
I also went across the road to LaTrobe University's Visual Arts Centre, which almost always has interesting exhibitions. I was happy to chance upon an exhibition of Denise Green's work - an Australian artist based in New York. There are a couple of small paintings by her in the Heide collection, which I do admire, currently hanging in the laundry in Heide II.

These earlier works have the simple forms that Green has used for much of her career.  The one on the right has the fan form which she still uses extensively, somewhat modified in the painting below, in the current exhibition.The inspiration for the fan shape came from two 19th century Chinese artists, Ju Chao and Ju Lian, whose paintings were made in the form of fans and album leafs.

Whistling Winds (for Mondrian) 2011  acrylic and pencil on canvas 203 x 306 cm

There are two works that directly reference colour theory and utilize colour swatches. The signature fan shape is a consistent element across the multiple small panels.  There is something scientific about these two works, in the systematic arrangement of panels that relates both to colour theory and to mathematics. There are multiple influences cited in the catalogue, one of the most important being

Philip Fisher's book, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience, in which he discusses Descartes theories on the passions and emphasizes wonder as the primary philosophic experience.  He further relates wonder to the experience of the rainbow. So in these two works Green uses the fan shape to stand for the rainbow.

Nine Points 2010-2011 45 silkscreened paper collages on panels, overall dimensions 123.5 x 325.5 cm.

In the most recent works photographs of waterholes around the Bendigo region are spliced together with sections of unrelated abstract studio-based drawings.

Bendigo: Trees 2015 one photograph and five drawings 45.7 x 66 cm

As you can see, quite a diverse exhibition!

In the second, smaller space is a very beautiful and moving exhibition by Maree Santilla, Desiring the Undesirable. On moving to rural Victoria a few years ago Santilla was profoundly affected by the everyday sight of roadkill. She collected broken and fragile carcasses of foxes and other animals, bound them in ceramic bandages and fired them in a kiln, so several of the works include both a crumbling ceramic cast of the body and skeletal remains after the firing. These artefacts/relics are laid out within items of domestic furniture from the post war soldier settlement period.  Lighting and reflections are used to emphasise their fragility. Worth seeing if you can.  I should take photos, I know, but there is more information and some images here.

February already!

Oh dear! It's terrible to realise that it's February already and I've only managed one post this year...in spite of very good intentions. My attempt to establish a daily practice - to produce something, a collage, a drawing, each day has faltered, staggered, restarted.  I have to blame the lethargy-inducing extreme heat. We've had strings of days around and above the 40 degree Celcius mark. Very draining! I have been working on a print for ‘Bimblebox 153 Birds’, a multi-arts project responding to the 151+ bird species recorded on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge, Queensland, which is threatened by the proposed China First mine. I'm working on a couple of versions of a linocut print of the bird I was allocated - the Varied Sitella. More information and further links can be found on the project's facebook page here.
Here are working proofs of both. I was surprised that I prefer version 1, when I thought that version 2 was looking much stronger. They both need more work however.

version 1

version 2

I treated myself to a short trip to Sydney this week, mainly to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is a very participatory exhibition - lots of works that visitors add to, or may take away from. It's quite beautiful and meditative, which sounds somewhat contradictory in light the participatory elements, but true nevertheless.  There are a couple of videos of Yoko performing her work 'Cut Piece', one from 1964 and one from 2003. It's quite difficult to watch the early one.  She looks like a young, very vulnerable, but courageous woman - very moving. In the latter she's much more in control and respected by the audience/participants. There was an early Fluxus film of anonymous bottoms that I found funny and intriguing.

Wish Tree for Sydney

 

Morning Beams / Cleaning Piece - Riverbed both 1996

 

We're all water 2006 / 2013

If you happen to be in Sydney over the next 6 weeks or so, I would highly recommend making the trip to Carriageworks, not far from Redfern Station, to see Chance, the wonderful installation by French artist Christian Boltanski. Carriageworks is a multi-arts venue in a huge old industrial building, presumably where train carriages were built. It's the perfect space for Boltanski's tall, narrow scaffolding structure through which a ribbon - of grainy images of faces of newborn infants sourced from Polish press announcements - runs.

The building is pretty impressive  - the corridor to the toilets!

    
I also went to the Art Gallery of NSW to see America, Painting a Nation, which was quite interesting. Much more impressive, for me, is the exhibition Yirrkala-drawings. There are 81 coloured crayon drawings on butchers paper from 1947, by senior ceremonial leaders at Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, who produced hundreds of the vibrant drawings for the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

I was also delighted to see Imants Tillers' Conversations with the Bride on show in the 20th Century Australian galleries. It was quite a wonderful experience to wander through and have an up-close viewing of this installation that I had studied as a student of Australian Art History at Latrobe University in the mid 1990s.  You can probably work out from these details the identity of 'the bride' referred to in the title!

Imants Tillers Conversations with the Bride (details)

Though pushed for time (had to catch the train to the airport), I always love to pay a visit to some of my favourite works - Grace Cossington Smith's The Curve of the Bridge (1928-29), The Lacquer Room (1936) and The Sock Knitter (1915) and the Margaret Prestons. There was also a small group of Martin Sharp's brilliant posters on the wall, including Mr Tambourine Man, from about 1967.

I had a fabulous time - Sydney is a great place for a flying visit!

Wonder Room & The Forest of Ambiguity

Over the past week I've finally caught a couple of exhibitions I've been very keen to see.  My high expectations were well rewarded in both cases. Wonder Room at Maroondah Art Gallery is indeed very wonderful! The work of five artists - Heather Shimmen, Deborah Klein, Rona Green, Filomena Coppola and Paul Compton - are linked by the idea of the Wunderkammer, the precursor to museums as we know them. These were personal collections of bizarre and unusual objects, mostly from the natural world, but also including architectural artefacts and handcrafted objects, popular throughout Europe from the 16th until the 19th century.

While all the work in the exhibition deals with the strange and exotic in some way, there is great diversity in approach and outcome. This is particularly apparent in the case of Shimmen and Klein, who both work with images of hybrid creatures - part woman/part insect and both work (in part, at least) with linocut prints.  Shimmen's insect women are borne out of the artist's interest in the way in which many people have a largely irrational fear of insects, together with her interest in folkloric stories from the Australian bush. A sense of looking back is reflected in her linocuts that mimic engravings from old books, their fragmentation and distortion adding to the powerful sense of the uncanny and stories obscured by history. Klein's very beautiful, jewel-like Insect Women and Moth Masks have an otherworldly beauty that conjures up the metamorphoses and transformations of fairytale and myth. See her Insect Women here.
Paul Compton's highly detailed drawings of cabinets of curiosities playfully illustrate the range of possibilities to be found in the realm of the bizarre and the wonderful. I particularly enjoyed his teenage werewolf. His work demonstrates wonderful draughtsmanship and humour in equal prortions. I found Filomena Coppola's fleshy, hairy pastel drawings based upon the Australian Orchid - part animal, part vegetable - entrancingly beautiful - not at all as creepy as they might sound. It is a beautifully curated exhibition. Paul Compton's small ink and gouache drawings are never overpowered by larger works, such as Rona Green's feisty anamorphic animal portraits. At today's fascinating artists' talk it was pointed out that this, in fact, was a reflection of the Wunderkammer, where large objects were often displayed alongside smaller, more detailed artefacts and relics. Several of Deborah Klein's works are displayed in beautiful antique timber chests that also add to the aura of the Wunderkammer, as does the inclusion of Shimmen's own collection of curiosities. The work of each of the five artists is not exhibited in a discrete body but rather interspersed with each of the others. In the larger room a diagonal wall divides the room so that glimpses of each of the artists' work can be seen from any point.
Here are some images of Rona's work and the invitation with an image of Paul's work.  The exhibition runs for another week and it is certainly worth the trip to Ringwood!
Wonder Room
Elizabeth Banfield's Forest of Ambiguity, showing in the Little Window of Opportunity at Port Jackson Press is breathtaking in its finely detailed cutting (of both lino and paper) and attention to detail. For some time now Banfield's subject has been the Eucalypt forests near her home in the Dandenong ranges.  The contradictory ideas of the contemplative peace of the towering Eucalypt forest and the danger of bushfires during the dry late summer months is explored through the simple motif of the variety of leaf shapes.  Banfield's books and hanging pieces are beautifully executed, complex in their layering of texture, positive and negative and cut-out forms. More information here.
 In the main window of Port Jackson Press is a larger, very beautiful work, The Afterimage.
 
http://www.portjacksonpress.com.au/artists.php?ar=ae12381pjpa1025297771
Forest of Ambiguities continues until 3 December

Print exhibitions worth seeing in Melbourne

In the last couple of days I've seen a couple of print exhibitions well worth recommending. On Thursday night I dropped into Handheld Gallery for the opening of Janet Neilson's Close to Home.  Handheld is one of my favourite spaces in Melbourne. Run by the lovely Megan Herring and her partner Adrian, it's tiny and focuses on artist's books and small objects.  (I feel really embarrassed...as I typed that, trying to think of Megan's surname, I've only just realised why she publishes her own books under Little Red Fishy...Herring!)  The concept of the exhibition is that the artist doesn't have to go far from home for sources of inspiration/subject matter.  The works are mostly books or book-like objects, including two small series that recycle books, with pages intricately cut with the tracery of bare trees. Trees are also rendered in strong, graphic linocut prints and moodier collographs.  I particularly enjoyed the concertina book - inspired by the weaving of one of Neilson's neighbours - of collographs and woven paper elements. The folded 'flat-pack' linocut prints of cheeky magpies are also pretty gorgeous. Can't resist a magpie! See a couple of tiny prints by another lover of magpies here. http://bridgetfarmer.blogspot.com.au/
and images of the exhibition at the Handheld Gallery blog http://handheldgallery.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/close-to-home-at-hand-held.htmlrk
And then on Friday I wandered about in the beautiful Melbourne Autumn sun and got to Port Jackson Press to  see  Groundwork, an exhibition of prints by Belinda Fox, whose work I've long admired, and collaborative works by Diana Orinda Burns, Robyn Gibson and Kir Larwill, three printmakers from around Castlemaine in central Victoria. The large-scale multi-panel collaborative works are fabulous, with simple motifs, a boat and a chicken(?) wishbone, repeated over a minimal woodcut surface - layered to created a rich surface, with strong, spare imagery.
See images at http://www.portjacksonpress.com.au/exhib.php?ex=ls1000270pjpa19083333
Dropped into 69 Smith Street as a couple of etchings by Keiko Murakami caught my eye. Her exhibition, in the front gallery is called Hanga which is apparently the Japanese word for print. She must be one of the most active printmakers around!  She seems to have solo exhibitions every couple of months.  I really like the works based upon the natural world, particularly the amusingly titled Just hanging out in Melbourne, with lots of fruit bats hanging in a tree, with the dome of the Exhibition Buildings in the background.  You can see it here, http://www.etsy.com/listing/92673553/just-hanging-out-in-melbourne-original
Lastly, I went to No Vacancy Gallery at the QV Centre to see the Asia Pacific Mini Print exhibition.  There are 4 small prints by each of 53 artists, so there is a lot to see. There's a good range of work, from 17 countries, of a very high standard, as, I think it's an open entry exhibition. There are five prizewinners, with a very decent prize pool of $25,000.  Mezzotints did pretty well, although prizes also went to works in other media.  I was very impressd with the hang - must have been quite a task to hang over 200 works.  My only criticism is that there is no listing of the printaking techniques used. 

Travelling to see art

Part of the reason that I haven't posted for a while is that I've been off travelling to see art!  I've had a couple of weeks off work and did a little tour of NSW - flying to Newcastle, bussing to Port Macquarie, where I stayed wuith my friend, George, for a couple of days, then we drove to Armidale; I took the train to Tamworth - for the main purpose of my trip, to see the fabulous GW Bot, 30 year retrospective, The Long Paddock, then I took the train to Sydney where I spent the day at the AGNSW, ejoying the Picasso and the Kaldor Collection in new contemporary galleries.  I had a lovely time!
Besides Sydney, I'd never been to any of these places before.
I would have liked to spend longer in Newcastle. Enjoyed the walk along the harbour/wharf and out along the breakwater.

   In my short time there I also found the Newcastle Art Gallery where I saw Leaving a Legacy, Margaret Olley's gifts to Newcastle, and Shay Docking - Works from the Newcastle Collection.  They are both well worth a look.  Of the Shay Docking works, I was particularly impressed by those from the 1960s.
Margaret Olley's donation was quite diverse; mostly paintings - from a 1960s Carl Plate abstract work to Ben Quilty's very loose expressionist portraits of Adam Cullen from 2006.  I was particularly attracted to Elisabeth Kruger's lush Taffeta - a large-scale detail of two white roses, reminiscent of Georgia O'Keefe in its tight framing, but with more emphasis upon luxuriance and texture, and Kevin Lincoln's pared down still life, Grey Jug 1999.

Kevin Lincoln Grey Jug 1999 oil on canvas Newcastle Art Gallery, Gift of the Margaret Olley Art Trust 1999

 I was very interested to see three examples of Cressida Campbell's work.  I confess, I'm not sure that I see the point of her process - cutting a woodcut plate, then painting/inking(?) the plate to take a single print impression.  Olley's gift included two such prints and also a painted plate, or a plate retaining the paint after the single  print was pulled.  I was most interested in the plate.  It reminded me of learning in Art History of the  Spanish wooden sculptures that were originally brightly coloured (polychromed - that we would now perhaps see as gaudy.)  
Spent a couple of days in Port Macquarie, enjoying the beaches and the rainforest walk at Sea Acres National Park.

One evening we went for a cruise on the river, where I was pretty excited to see some dolphins.  They were too quick for me to catch on film, but here's the last of the sun on the water.

We spent a long but very pleasant day driving from Port Macquarie to Armidale, along the Waterfall Way, stopping at Bellingen for lunch, as well as three of the falls for which the Way is named!
The modest Newell Falls,

The very spectacular Ebor Falls, with a series of drops, the first image being the upper section, the second the lower.

 and finally Dangar Falls.  I wondered if they had been named for the family of Anne Dangar, a contemporary and great friend of Gace Crowley, who spent most of her life working at Moly-Sabata in France.

We walked out on the Skywalk at Dorrigo National Park.  Shorter than I expected but very high with fabulous views over the valley. Next post, I'll get to the art!

Heather Shimmen, Vivienne Binns and Paper Scissors Rock

Had a terrific afternoon of exhibitions today, mostly avoiding the rain. 
First, I went to Australian Galleries, Smith Street to see Heather Shimmen's fabulous linocut prints...fabulous being an appropriate adjective here, pretty much, with all sorts of imagery juxaposed, overlaid and brought together (like the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table). Her prints have a painterly richness, due to the fragmention and doubling of imagery, overlaid and slightly out of register, the combination of a graphic line that seems to derive from historic newspaper sources perhaps, with silhouettes, drippy inkspots and subtle watercolouring.
There are three very large, multi-panel works - for me the highlight being Swamp Maiden, more than 2 1/2 metres tall, a full length female figure of Margaret (or Jeanie?) Clement, impoverished society sisters who lived in reclusive destitution on their water;logged property Tullaree at Tarwin Lower in South Gippsland. I was also greatly attracted to the many small works - details from the larger works printed on felt,  as well as a group of oval-shaped prints with a central female silhouette, including Swamp Stories 2, three from an edition of 10, with variations, in painterly watercolour and ghostly overprinting.
I would highly recommend seeing this exhibition - The swamp maiden's tale -  before it finishes on 11 December.
Gallery details here. http://www.australiangalleries.com.au/index.php?option=com_ag&task=g_loc&id=4
and some of the works can be seen here http://www.artwhatson.com.au/australiangalleriessmithst/heather-shimmen?all=1&set=0

Then, I walked along Gertrude Street to Dianne Tanzer to see Paper Scissors Rock, curated by Vincent Alessi, working with the idea that sculpture and works on paper seem to be curatoral opposites, or have been until fairly recently perhaps.  The artists in the exhibition all work with paper in a sculptural forms. Fiona Cabassi's three intricately detailed works are both painting and sculpture - meticulously cut and constructed into fragile three-dimensional dreamlike worlds of possibility.
I should point out that I work with Fiona, but, as you can see below, the works are fabulous!

Wandering between the Clouds 2009



Lemon Whirls 2008


At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of colour and subject are Natasha Frisch's sculptures constructed from tracing paper - so as colourless as possible, except for a scrawl of red grafitti on From the series; Nasty little piece of work: Angel is a slut 2004.  (It doesn't reproduce very well, especially as my camera seems to be on a stting that give a blue cast to everything.  Sorry about that.)

Another of her works, Stabbing at the Station, has a similarly mundane subject, with dark overtones - a long stretch of railway line with a small deserted station at the end.

Kylie Stillman carves out negative forms from books and stacks of retail sale signs.




Maiden Hair 2009

Finally I went to Sutton Gallery on Brunswick Street for the opening of Viviennne Binns' exhibition.    She is a Canberra-based artist, and is the subject of my PhD thesis.  This is another exhibition well-worth seeing...but the hour is late and I will write more about this very soon.