My review of Nan Goldin's 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency'

The unflinching gaze of Nan Goldin, ABR Arts

‘“It’s as if my hand were a camera,” Nan Goldin wrote in 1986, as much a part of her everyday life as talking, eating or sex. Her camera was just as commonplace, at that time, in her friends’ lives, capturing them naked or semi-clothed in bed, eyes closed in the shower, sprawled on towels at the beach, or masturbating. Historical markers abound: a red telephone with spiral cord, cassette players, a cheeseburger radio, Playboy magazines, a Kathy Acker book on a beach towel, Cyndi Lauper on a dim blue TV screen.’ ABR Arts

Review of Tony Tuckson exhibition

My 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 in new book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies

Thrilled to receive a copy of Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, edited by artists Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton. My essay ‘Fieldwork: Collapsing Landscapes’ included among a rich collection of contributions.

The editors write: ‘Our project emerges from a series of continuing and evolving conversations between artists, writers and researchers based in Australia, the US, UK and Europe who illuminate the vastly different approaches they take to field working and the myriad ways it informs and enfolds their practices.’ Published by Onomatopee in the Netherlands.


Review of Handmade Universe in The Saturday Paper

One of the most poignant aspects of Handmade Universe is how it foregrounds seemingly humble objects and casts them in new light, retrieving not only forgotten handiwork but also achievements from the past.

Handmade Universe: From craft to code and spaces between is showing at the State Library of Victoria until February 2023.

'A haunting sense of loss' – Amanda Laugesen

Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) writes of collecting words for The Australian National Dictionary: ‘I have found that the books I read and the quotations I collect are increasingly speaking not only to the climate crisis but also to climate grief.’ Among her recent reading was Living with the Anthropocene, which she describes as a ‘powerful collection’ that ‘threw up a number of quotations that might add to AND’s story about our changing environment’.

One of these, taken from Saskia Beudel’s contribution, is for the term greenie, an Australianism applied to, in the words of the dictionary, “any of a number of several predominantly green birds or animals”. She conveys a haunting sense of loss: “Most unnerving is the absence of small native birds once common here: the silvereyes and small honeyeaters called greenies.”

– Amanda Laugeson, ‘“The awful sense of loss”: The language of climate grief’, Australian Book Review, May 2021

Essay-review of Site & Sound: Sonic Arts as Ecological Practice, McClelland Gallery →

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.

Review-essay published online in Artlink and in print Artlink April 2021

Image credit: Recording at Watts Hut, Eastern Antarctica, 2010. Courtesy Philip Samartzis.

Image credit: Recording at Watts Hut, Eastern Antarctica, 2010. Courtesy Philip Samartzis.

My review of 'Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce' at TarraWarra Museum of Art

The narratives that inform and, indeed, are inseparable from these works are shocking. They are still fresh, travelling down generations, the artists attuned. These are living histories, urgent and raw, tangible in the present – probing for response from sufferers and audience alike. The Great Australian Dream is not what it seems, Hetti Perkins writes. ‘It is, in reality, a nightmare, a shimmering mirage, a candle in the coming storm.’  

Read more at ABR Arts…

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40 pairs of blackfellows ears lawn hill station, Judy Watson, 2008 (TarraWarra Museum of Art)


Jeff Sparrow reviews Living with the Anthropocene

Jeff Sparrow reviews Living with the Anthropocene in The Saturday Paper

‘Why do the old Romantic tropes still possess such force? In her contribution to the book, Saskia Beudel quotes Daly Pulkara, an Aboriginal man from the Northern Territory. Pulkara calls land denuded by agriculture “wild”, unlike the “quiet country” still maintained by its traditional owners. That usage – so at odds with the European focus on “wilderness” – reminds us that, prior to white settlement, Indigenous people deliberately reshaped the continent. The pre-colonial landscape reflected a purposeful interaction between humanity and nature. Capitalism destroys that transparent relationship, with the Industrial Revolution separating the population from the commons and establishing an alienation that culminates in our current situation.’