Reviews, artist profiles & features
Review of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency ABR Arts
‘This kind of truth is usually hidden,’ says curator Anne O’Hehir, gesturing towards dark glasses and concealer makeup. ‘But Goldin puts on the lippy and gets out the camera.’ It was ground-breaking. ‘That kind of imagery was not seen at the time,’ Goldin says of her self-portrait Nan after being battered (1984) in a 2020 interview in Aperture magazine. Women from all over America and Europe came to her and told her their stories.
Review of SYNERGY: Tony Tuckson – drawing into painting published in ABR Arts
In one of my favourite series, the drawings take on the pared-back simplicity and radiance of the late paintings. A handful of wavering vertical strokes of charcoal inscribe pieces of thick paper torn into irregular shapes, some almost vase-like (Untitled, undated [TD 6628]). It’s easy to imagine that these paper shapes are informed by the bark paintings Tuckson was so familiar with as a curator. Like the barks, they are roughly rectangular but organically skewed. Untitled, c.1970–1973 is a tall piece almost the dimensions of a standing human figure. Here, the charcoal marks are more cumulative and insistent, sweeping the length of the faintly discoloured paper like a life force. This sense of vitality, energy, and urgency permeates the entire exhibition.
Essay-review of Site & Sound: Sonic Art as Ecological Practice, Artlink April 2021
At the Site & Sound exhibition held at McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, something of the world itself – water flowing through landscapes, katabatic winds in the Antarctic, an empty glass bottle rolling along a pavement, human voices in the wake of a tsunami, a clicking dawn chorus of shrimps – is transmitted via its sonic residues.
Image: Recording at Watts Hut, Eastern Antarctica, 2010. Courtesy Philip Samartzis.
‘Looking glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, ABR Arts December 2020
In an interview with Hetti Perkins, curator of Looking Glass, Scarce discusses Australia’s dearth of memorials to mark places of Indigenous destruction and trauma. Physical memorial and anti-memorial sites – so abundant in Berlin, for instance – offer the opportunity for remembrance, acknowledgment, and pilgrimage.
‘Why aren’t Aboriginal people shown that respect?’ Scarce asks Perkins. Movingly, Perkins replies: ‘I think that as Indigenous people we carry around a reservoir of grief within us and there’s no place to mourn.’
Image: Judy Watson, 40 pairs of blackfellows ears lawn hill station, 2008 (TarraWarra Museum of Art)
Cover story on Melbourne painter Prudence Flint in Artist Profile Issue 51. Flint is represented by mother’s tankstation limited in Dublin and London, and Bett Gallery in Hobart. Her most recent exhibition was ‘The Wish’ at Fine Arts, Sydney 13 May – 20 June 2020.
Profile of painter McLean Edwards
I interviewed Sydney painter McLean Edwards in his Chippendale studio for this cover feature article for Artist Profile Issue 47 2019. As Artist Profile editor Kon Gouriotis notes, ‘Few painters can claim to be an inspiration to their generation as Edwards can.’
Profile of Melbourne painter Amanda Marburg
Amanda Marburg’s distinctive process translates ‘found’ photographs into clumsy plasticine models. Her paintings then carefully reproduce the endearing yet unsettling absurdity and macabre undertones of this plasticine world. Read the essay in Artist Profile Issue 46 2019.
Susan Norrie https://www.susannorrie.com
Profile of moving image artist Susan Norrie
Susan Norrie is one of Australia’s most renowned artists. Originally trained as a painter she is now best known for a moving image practice that explores themes of environmental disaster, human culpability and resilience, and the redemptive potential (or not) of new scientific discoveries and technologies. She represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has exhibited widely in Asia, Europe and North America. Her work is held in the Tate collection. We discussed her practice for Artist Profile Issue 49 2019.