Catherine O’Donnell, Gold leafed house number 5, 2022, , from the Golden House series, stereolithographic model and gold leaf, 14 x 25 x 20 cm, Courtesy the artist
In the hands of artist, Catherine O’Donnell, the votive, golden offering of a fibro house that you can hold in the palm of two hands, becomes a reliquary, a container for the holy relics of childhood memories. Memories that are always more complex, more special, and more formative than we realise at the time.
O’Donnell is best known for her charcoal drawings, which range from a life sized, charcoal drawing of a fibro house, to small, exquisitely rendered, graphite and charcoal drawings, almost always of buildings with modest ambitions.
O’Donnell draws with not only a fastidious attention to detail, but with a loving and deeply thoughtful attention to detail. Her works while clearly representational, are never photorealistic. Catherine is drawn to the underlying geometry of her subjects, be that suburban carparks or social housing. As a child and young adult, Catherine lived in Green Valley, and recounts that she always loved the geometry of the fibro panels, a ubiquitous material in the low-income housing development her childhood memories are framed by.
Take away all the social, cultural, and political references that fibro conjures up and what her artists eye sees is the elegance of the geometric forms. Whilst she draws realistically with razor-sharp attention to detail, such as counting the bricks inthe block of flats that were the subject for Still lives (see below). She also often removes extraneous details like rooves and piers, which has the effect of displacing these buildings from their immediate environment and allowing the essential geometric forms wrapping around the facade of the building to remains the hero.
The title Still lives tips it’s hat at the genre of still lifepainting, where artists paint inanimate objects, these could be vases of flowers, skulls, books etc. except, StillLives as a multiple, is also evocative and slightly ominous, suggesting multiple lives in statis. The collective ‘s’ complicates our reading of the title. We know the visible subject of the drawing is low-income housing from the mid C20, and the title provokes us to consider the multiple possible interpretations of the building as various lives play out inside of it…
Catherine O’Donnell
Catherine O’Donnell, Still Lives, 2021, charcoal and graphite on paper, 31.4 x 100cm, Courtesy of the artist
This is an excerpt of a lecture I gave at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in July 2023. I am currently developing a regional tour of my lecture series, based on this blog: How to start a love affair with art.
Clarice Beckett, Rainy day, 1930, oil on canvas on board, Geelong Gallery, Purchased 1973, photographer: Andrew Curtis
My patrilineal grandmother was a Gordie, born in 1903 in Gateshead on Tyne near Newcastle in the UK. She came to Australia on a sailing boat. A woman whom my tough central London mother and my Aunty by marriage, both recall as being judgemental and unsupportive. They knew her as a strict Presbyterian, who in their experience made little accommodation for them during vulnerable times in their lives, when they had new babies and wayward husbands. My mother recounts a tally being totted up, to cover the cost of the food we ate when dad bunked off to Melbourne for a while. As an almost direct consequence of my mother not feeling welcome – we left Australia on an ocean liner before I turned one. My grandmother was the mother of three boys, an amateur painter and lived to be one hundred and five. She remains one of my few heroes.
One of the few photos I have of the early years of my life, is a photo of my mum, my dad, my brother, and me on an ocean liner leaving Australia and heading to the other side of the world. A thin white border contains the exuberant scene that captures us in black and white, pressed amongst an excited throng of fellow travellers. Recently thrown streamers hang over the balustrade. I am in the arms of my mother and wearing an almost outrageous party dress of tulle and frills. My white-blonde, wispy curls soften my serious countenance set amongst a sea of exuberant smiling faces. Looking back the scene becomes a movie still in my mind – a gleaming detail which holds within it the complexity of the act of leaving – undoubtedly laced with both joy and melancholy and other less easy to define emotions. My party dress and the streamers each a symbol of hope for a bright future and a mask for the ache of sadness for what might have been. A refrain that I suspect plays at various times in the musical scores of the lives of those who have ever made choices that closed one door and opened another.
A woman of my grandmother’s generation, artist Clarice Beckett (1887 to 1935) made a life shaping decision when she chose the life of an artist over marriage and children. Although eventually she became the carer to her aging mother and father, so she didn’t completely avoid the nurturing responsibilities often left to the women of her era. Perhaps unavoidably my recent experience of the exhibition Clarice Beckett – Atmosphere, at Geelong Gallery, was loaded with grandmotherly frames of reference, not least because Clarice would have been a young woman when my grandmother arrived in Australia. Compounded by the fact that I have recently assumed the signifier of grandmother as our first born had her first born as close to the top of the world as we live to the bottom.
Clarice Beckett, Across the Yarra c. 1931, oil on cardboard, National Gallery of Victoria, Bequest of Harriet Minnie Rosebud Salier, 1984, Image courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria
During a recent trip to regional Victoria where I had the pleasure of meeting the new grandchild’s other grandmother, who is a painter and an altogether lovely person, I also had the pleasure of seeing Clarice Beckett – Atmosphere, at Geelong Gallery. In this thematically curated survey show, each painting operates like a portal, presenting us with a window into Clarice’s world as she sees it, in a particular moment in time. She offers us, cropped views of Melbourne streets and country laneways, and vistas of coastal Victoria. Her small-scale works speak of time spent in and with her chosen location around the region/s she called home. Clarice turns these scenes into what can be described, although inadequately, as landscape paintings, such as Across the Yarra, c. 1931, or Evening light, Beaumaris c. 1925. Just as a biography reveals not only the nuanced complexity of individual characters and relationships, but also begins to reveal their legacy, a survey show of a single artist allows us to feel our way towards a deeper relationship with their body of work and its place within the larger narratives of art history and art criticism.
It is easy to be seduced by Clarice’s work, to enjoy the representational qualities of scenes rendered with a thoughtful, responsive touch, which speak of an openness to visual experience, a painterly rigour, and an intellectual curiosity. As I imagine the process of making these paintings I think about Clarice as a single woman, carving out time to move through the landscape, set up her art supplies from her self-designed cart, painting outdoors, in the fresh air, or working en plein air as the French Impressionist would say. I wonder, was the weather kind, did the heat and wind effect the way the paint behaved, did flies and insects make their presence felt and did passers-by stop, and talk to Clarice whilst she was trying to concentrate.
People do occur in her works, although they appear more for scale, texture, and painterly contrast than as representations of individuals. Everything in these works is first and foremost, a painterly gesture, they are abstractions, anchored-in or leaping-from lived experience. The way Clarice handles paint, and the abstract qualities of her street scenes and mostly coastal and river landscapes, lead critics to describe her as a part of the international Modernist shift away from representation and towards abstraction. There is a seriousness to her endeavour, she is not satisfied with likeness, she is aiming for something essential in the scenes she paints, something that can be described as the elemental life force or in more clearly spiritual terms as the divine.
One of Clarice’s early paintings, Still life with fish, plate and bottle c. 1919, which I’ve only seen in reproduction, reminds me of Jean Baptiste Chardin’s Still life with plums, c 1730. I will forever see the small Chardin painting, which is in the collection of The Frick Museum, in New York as a portal to the divine. I encountered the work under natural light, when The Frick’s Head of Education, Rika Burnham, arranged to have the gallery lights turned off, and the work taken down from the Gallery wall and placed near a window. This allowed the small audience, who gathered around the object with all the intensity of devotees encountering a religious relic, to see the work in similar conditions to which it would have been made. As the evening drew in and the light altered, the work moved deeper into our collective consciousness and opened me, to a more metaphysical relationship with the subject. I carried the resonance of my encounter with Chardin’s Still Life withPlums, into my experience of Clarice’s exhibition. I recognised something of the same kind of reverence that Chardin showed for his modest still life subject in Clarice’s approach to her subjects. This openness to the mystery inherent within prosaic subjects and vistas was well supported by the curatorial decision to present Clarice’s work under subtle lighting. The restrained lighting allows the works to speak softly for themselves as viewers, lean into the experience, without the bright spotlights common in contemporary galleries.
Clarice Beckett Wet evening c. 1927oil on cardboard Castlemaine Art Museum Maud Rowe Bequest, 1937 Image courtesy of Castlemaine Art Museum
Clarice’s paintings are carefully selected envelopes of landscape, not compressed but intensified through careful observation. There’s consistently a feeling of the personal in her work, a feeling of intimacy that carries through the exhibition, even though we’re looking at seascapes or cliffs, suburban roads, or urban streets, which are by their nature – public. There is always a sense of some ‘one’ who is doing the looking and some ‘place’ where the looking is occurring. From this situated encounter Clarice, a subtle colourist, creates tonal colour modulations that sweep over us as though she is throwing a soft mantle over the landscape and drawing us into it.
Nocturne, 1931 is a work where the abstract qualities start to take over from the representational aspects as the cloak of night time reduces the details in the bayside scene. The work is described in accompanying material as about mood, such as loneliness, longing or melancholy which are complicated emotions that suggest lack. I want to describe the quality that the painting is capturing as aloneness, encouraged in part because I kept wondering: Was Clarice sitting alone at night painting this scene? Which raises ideas about gender and safety which are not the subject of my essay but exist in my mind like a form of hauntology. Aloneness in the landscape, safety issue aside, could also suggest someone in touch with nature, in a meditative, peaceful state. Anyone who has cared long-term for the needs of others might even delight in time alone. The softening of the demarcation between forms in Nocturne, sees the painting becomes more spatially expansive – like a cosmos. Nocturne is a musical term and I read the dissolution of forms and move towards abstraction in Clarice’s Nocturne as an invitation to a different kind of relationship for the viewer, one that is more akin to music in its collaborative nature, informed by the mood temperament and history of the audience.
In, The first sound, c.1924, we see a horse and cart coming over the hill, in a soft-edged, misty morning light and can easily imagine the clip clop of the hooves breaking the morning silence. Clarice’s quiet, evocative painting convinces me that I have heard that sound although I have no such memory that I can call to mind. This fugitive memory is perhaps evidence of the influential Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious that suggests some memories are common across humanity and originate in the inherited structure of the brain, as opposed to our personal unconscious which is built from our individual lived experiences. A concept which disrupts the idea of absolute individuality, replacing it instead with a very reassuring concept of human commonality where it seems quite possibel to arrive at the universal through the deeply and exquisitely personal.
In Clarice’s own words, she described her job as a painter as:
to give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of beauty. Clarice Beckett, 1923 ‘Twenty Melbourne Painters’, exhibition catalogue.**
She reaches towards describing the scene she is painting, through an intimate engagement with the location, by which I mean an exchange that is personal and involves time spent in and with the landscape as its moods and tempers change. Clarice was a Modernist, finding her way towards a universal language that was not tied to National borders, the universal language of tone and colour and form – the language of abstraction. Sometimes our aims fall short of our ambitions, but it is in the reaching towards an ideal that decisions are made, and consequences ensue, painterly consequences, ideological consequences and pragmatic consequences. Clarice died at just 48 years old after catching pneumonia brought on while trying to catch the atmospheric effects of a coastal storm, although not all consequences are that cataclysmic. Clarice’s reputation faded after her early death, until her legacy had life breathed into it by Dr Rosalind Hollinrake, who after saving approximately 370 of 2000 of Beckett’s works from an open-sided shed in rural Victoria in 1970, has championed Beckett’s work for over five decades. I think it’s fair to describe both Clarice and Rosalind as women of conviction.
I re-met my grandmother when we returned to Australia, one week past my eleventh birthday. Whilst still Presbyterian she was no longer strict. It seems the decade in between us leaving and returning had softened her. Her faith had moved from being something that made her unwelcoming to the new mothers in her family, to being generous and accepting of her grandchildren. Her faith had become more spacious, a manifestation of love rather than an imposition of rigid expectations, responsive rather than coercive. The grandmother I knew saw God in every creative act, every sunrise, every bloom, every child’s face, every brush stroke that landed in the right place and every well-made bed.
My grandmother taught me how to paint a vase of flowers and how to make perfectly round pikelets, a technique I never mastered. For me, the space she made for me in her life, felt like what I would now describe, even though I am a heathen, as Grace. I use the term heathen not as a pejorative term but simply to indicate that while I talk of Grace and Divinity, I am not part of any formal religion. Lastly, I will share my ambition that I live my new role as a grandmother, with the kind of Grace and loving attentiveness that I experienced in my grandmother’s relationship to me. I also read Clarice Beckett’s relationship to her work with its desire and ambition, its attentiveness and care, and steadfastness of gaze, and weight within the canon of Australian art history as Grandmotherly, in the most complex sense of the word. A word that signifies not only position within a family, but also signifies, desire and vulnerability, public declarations of your position, loyalty and it seems to me the very real possibility for redemption or exile.
Clarice Beckett – Atmospheres, on exhibition at Geelong Regional Gallery, 1 April – 9 July 2023
* as quoted in, The present moment, The Art of Clarice Becket, Tracey Lock, Art Gallery of South Australia. p.172.
At Kamloops Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada, December 2022
Alicia Henry’s moving exhibition, Witnessing, inspired in part by Henry’s Ghanian mask collection, subverts and complicates pervasive cultural stereotypes of black African American women. During multiple visits to the exhibition, I found myself oscillating between deeply personal, intuitive responses and self-consciously awkward, political responses. The dichotomy of my responses made me wonder – was I able to listen carefully to what this collection of artworks had to tell me, or were the culturally framed narratives I carry with me so insistent that I was imprinting the work with my own prejudices? This essay is a consideration of that tension.
On entering the exhibition, I encountered two large clown heads, one male, one female, a clown is a theatrical archetype, allowing the wearer to adopt buffoon and clown-like behaviours for comedic, melancholic and often subversively political effect. Made of fabric and applique, paint and stitching, the method of creation of Untitled (Couple), 2008, spoke to the tradition of decorative, feminine craft practices often used in service of domestic comfort and economy. For example, quilts made from material remnants. In this case, the work had a deeper metaphoric layer, the open appliqued smiles left space for the underlying, darker emotional fabric of the work to reveal itself. I was taken by surprise when on entering the exhibition, the first works I encountered, the two heads that make up Untitled (Couple), made me gasp in pain. Freshly arrived in Canada, I was carrying a painful jaw issue, a consequence of a habit that I had no awareness of. Apparently, I have been grinding my teeth at night – a recent development. It seems that major life events had silted up to tip the barometer of my equilibrium towards the red zone. I didn’t see it coming and it took someone else to diagnose it. I flew to Kamloops in BC Canada as a remedy – more on that later.
The first time I visited Alicia Henry’s Witnessing, I was continually overcome, immersed in what I read in the work as the intergenerational trauma of black African American women. Henry’s figurative works are undoubtedly potent – redolent of blood and bandages with an elegant mend and make do attitude, a high aesthetic sensibility and an unflinching determination to disrupt and disturb cultural representations and narratives. The bodies of work in Witnessing, based mostly on black, female bodies and faces made from paper, cardboard, leather, felt, fabric and more, hold the wall like … what? Can you answer that? What do they make you think of? Are they Effigies? Icons? Black Madonna’s? Vestments? Last season’s clothes? Outdated stereotypes? Shed skins…? If they are masks, are they theatrical, ritual or personal in nature? One thing is for sure – they are layered. Materially and metaphorically.
Rubbed with ink, paint, and dye, and drawn over with graphite and pastel, passages of hand stitching reading like sutures over wounds or hieroglyphs on the walls of ancient tombs. The materials that make up these dark-hued personages are impregnated with colour, the worked surfaces absorbing pigment and light. Alicia Henry’s drawings hold the wall with gravitas, they walk the line between portraiture, ritual artefacts, and representation. Henry in her interview with curator Daina Augaitis nominates that the work also holds humour and joy. I tend towards the serious, and one wonders if what Henry references is the humour of the initiated? One can always laugh at one’s own family/communities experience from the inside, with more liberty than one can from the outside. Some of the deepest laughter can be found in some of the darkest places, laughter operating as a healing salve, an exercise in political will – taking cultural stereotypes, insults and pejoratives and revealing their absurdity.
As a white woman encountering these works, I recognise that I stand outside the lived experiences of black women. I also recognise my own earnestness to hold space for the work to tell its’ own tale. As a woman – the references to body, to community, to familial ties resonate with elements of my own lived experience. The over life-sized scale of many of the works present these bodies as more than human, larger than life, they hold their own space and appear to hold their own counsel – is that because what we are looking at is the husk, the mask and costume steeped in history that’s been removed and left behind as an historical cultural artifact? To see the exhibition – is to be in the process of witnessing – an active verb in the present tense. I am left grappling with the questions: What am I witnessing? What is my responsibility as a witness? Or are the works themselves doing the witnessing and I am the subject/object of the act of witnessing?
The major work in the exhibition is Untitled, (13 female figures), 2019, which in this site-specific iteration has 11 figures installed in one high-ceilinged room. The commanding central figure, stands two stories high, surrounded by black paper silhouettes of small birds, two young girls stand each side of the central figure and white paper flowers bloom exuberantly at the hem of their dresses. On first encounter, the weight of the regal presence of the central figure in her commanding red dress, kept me at a distance. Over several visits, I discovered details, not immediately apparent, like the two short vertical rows of nails, hammered into the wall beside the figures, evocative of the African tradition of hammering nails into sculpture a spart of the ritual process of getting guidance from a Sharman or wise man. I also noticed on second exposure, rows of nails between the bird silhouettes that radiate outwards from the head like a garland or a halo. The halo effect adding to the authority the figure commands. Powerful objects and the role of ritual, the full complexities of which I am not privy to, are threaded throughout this exhibition.
Untitled (cluster), and Untitled (fragments) draw on the threads of shared feminine knowledge with wombs and breast shapes, vulvas and limbs collaged and /or cut out of and into materials of various colours, from black to brown to tan, to pink, and even grey which, when we look at colour theory is all the colours mixed into one. The carefully laid out, female, body parts, evoke dynamic, open ended, visual narratives whose complexity resists our desire to pin them down with cool words and precise language. Untitled (cluster) and Untitled (fragments) offer a rich repository of gesture, where the narrative traces accumulate over time. The act of witnessing is an inherently moral one that requires a commitment of attention. Being an authentic witness to the story of another is one of the most profound acts of generosity we can offer. As Kafka says, ‘Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination’. The act of bearing witness to the story of another decenters the self, and this recalibration of focus always brings consequences, personally, socially, and politically. The role of witness for women is even more fraught as women have been cast as unreliable witnesses since at least Biblical times when the women who witnessed Christ rising from the grave were not believed. A crucial step in building a just and fair community is the act of bearing witness, another, is allowing what we witness to informs our actions. This thoughtful exhibition has left me … thinking … about both sides of the act of witnessing, of allowing the self to be seen and of allowing ourselves to see others.
As to why I sought out a visit to Kamloops in Canada in early December in an effort to solve an intensely painful jaw issue, here’s the context: My first born, a daughter, had given birth to her first born, a son, in Kamloops in Mid-November, my husband and I live in Sydney. In a sensible navigation of hemispheres and available holidays, we decided to meet our grandson in January when his mum and dad were bringing him to Australia to meet the extended family. How little did I understand the umbilical cord that still ties me to my children and now to my grandchildren. The jaw pain was real, the result of unbeknownst-to-me, night-time teeth grinding. The trip to Canada was a salve, allowing me to touch and smell and hear the new baby boy in our family, and support my beautiful girl and her besotted partner. The visceral relief I felt on being in close physical contact with my child’s child was profound. My experience of my body bonding to his worked in direct correlation to the pain in my jaw subsiding. The brutal weight and consequence of stretching too thinly the primal bond between mother, child and grandchild, has now given me a much deeper repository of compassion for grandmothers separated from their grandchildren by oceans, by landmasses and by life.
Alicia Henry’s work investigates how bodies hold intergenerational story, including joy and pain and how memory is complicated, nuanced, and intimate as well as impactful, cultural, and always political. Life leaves its traces on our bodies and our psyches, sometimes we leave traces of ourselves inside the masks we adopt, sometimes the masks we adopt leave traces and these traces become like salt in the ocean – we can’t see it, but it’s always there, touching and affecting not only us but also those around us and future generations.
I have come to understand the exhibition as a disruption of outdated cultural stereotypes of black African American women and an investigation into the practice of masking. I am using the term masking to refer both to the theatrical adoption of masks as a dramaturgical trope and to the practice of presenting a socially acceptable ‘mask’ to the world and hiding one’s true self as a practice of self-preservation. Henry’s use of masks as a leitmotif in Witnessing, presents us with a complex and complicated provocation: How do we authentically bear witness to stories and lives that have been effectively masked and are therefore only partially revealed to us. Whilst personal stories have the potential to encourage a compassionate stance in the witness – is personal exposure always necessary – creating as it does a burden on the subject to reveal all. An unfair burden that risks continually refreshing old wounds and keeping the narrative looking backwards.
I visited Witnessing by Alicia Henry during an intense, profoundly emotional time in my life when the death of my feisty, fabulous, and fierce mother and the birth of our first precious grandchild, occurred just months apart. Sadly, mum died before her first great grandson was born. The legacy of her formidable loyalty and incredible resilience are part of our family narrative as too are her emotional volatility and fierceness. We are all shaped by what and who went before us and it is my hope that the fierceness in my mum, in large part caused by her fraught relationship with her Irish Catholic father, can soften into equanimity and strength in subsequent generations through intergenerational acts of ‘remembering as repair’. I hope that the current cultural impetus towards ‘remembering as repair’ resonates with Alicia Henry’s exquisite and deeply moving exhibition, Witnessing. Indeed, I hope witnessing and ‘remembering as repair’ manifests throughout our cultural, political, and personal lives and contributes to a more just and equitable society. A big dream from a personal and situated perspective, but, as Kafka said, ‘Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination,’
I will finish this personal essay by acknowledging some of the people that have supported the artworks in Witnessing through their gestation, delivery, and growing independence, which includes but is not limited to, Alicia Henry the artist, Daina Augaitis the independent curator, Charo Neville curator at Kamloops Art Gallery and of course, you the audience who draw the impact of Witnessing into your lives and communities.
David Griggs, Untitled, 2022, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
David Griggs is a thoughtful, softly spoken man whose words arrive with padded edges allowing us to bump into them with minimal harm. Just as he is committed in his art practice to a process of call and response where each gesture and passage of paint gives rise to the next – so too he makes room for the other when talking. His quiet integrity and respect for people saw his directorial film debut become a collaborative experience that David recounts as one of the most beautiful of his life. This disclosure from David, when he was the Artists in conversation with Maria Stoljar, from the popular podcast ‘Talking with painters’, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in September 2022, was followed by a rolling, generous laugh – as he reflected that he wasn’t sure this collaborative approach was the best thing for the final film, but the process of collaboration …well … that was divine.
I read Griggs’s paintings as performative acts of visual autoethnography. I imagine as Griggs moves through the world, through international cityscapes and intimate suburban streetscape, that images silt up like sedimentary accretions creating an interior visual lexicon that David draws on in the process of making paintings. As his paintings, such as Untitled, 2022, pictured above, evolve, layer upon layer is added, often wet in wet, bringing a time-bound urgency to the process, which is revealed in the quality of immediacy in much of the mark making. Through the directness of his gestures and the way that colours, patterns, signs, and symbols energetically butt up against and layer over each other one feels one is bearing witness to an evolving, dynamic, journey-man’s record that suggests a narrative but eludes a definitive translation.
There’s a closeness to the surface, an openness to experience that I encountered through David’s work. Colours and shapes overlap and bounce off each other, eyeballs pop up. A cavalcade of characters appear across his body of work, routinely enough to be described as leitmotifs, such as skulls, cigarettes, eyeballs, with more abstract elements such as textured, surprising shapes, and purposeful, wobbly hand drawn curvilinear lines shaping and leading us around the world of the painting. In the push and pull between figuration and abstraction, the denseness of the imagery and the vibrancy of the colour choices overwhelmed me on first encounter. As I settle into a relationship with the work, the formal qualities reveal themselves to me, operating like a fluid, elastic framework from which hang traces of the cultural zeitgeist – coloured by David’s personal sensibility, such as in the artwork, The Second Lockdown, 2021, oil and resin on fabric on canvas, 150 x 450cm.
Jugendstil, 2019, acrylic, resin, oil on fabric on canvas, diptych, 199 x 367 cm overall, was exhibited in Mankini Island at Rosyln Oxley Gallery in February 2020. This intense work is painted on two fur, tiger motif blankets. As one can imagine the thick furry ground was frustratingly difficult to work with and yet he persisted – to create works that blend kitsch, representation, and abstraction, that ultimately hold the wall like an iconic and ironic history painting. Jugendstil, thumbs its nose at the tradition of the academy and the large format genre of history painting – a tradition that saw both iconic historic moments and mythic cultural narratives represented in glorious, large-scale detail, designed to uphold and at times prop up the status quo. History painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth century brought cultural legitimacy and influence for artists, as their work propagated nation building narratives through the lens of the dominant cultural group. David’s work holds cultural weight of a different anti-establishment, disruptive kind. Disrupting easy consumption David’s works offer an encounter with …. A way of being in the world. A collaborative, imminent way of encountering people, objects, places, and histories. These canvasses evoke a hectic, noisy, melange of collected deposits, traces, echoes, and impressions, accreted, and layered into the canvas like archaeological sub strata’s – that seem to be in process of constant realignment promising at any moment to erupt.
In David’s practice I see a bubbling up of cultural traces of the places David inhabits. David began a relationship with the city of Manilla in the Philippines as part of an artist’s residency. He recounts Manilla as a place where he found the kind of collaborative, energetic, generative, artistic exchange that he was trying to find in Australia. When he got to Manilla he found it – he didn’t generate it, it was already there, an artistic camaraderie between makers. Be they fine artist, poster painters or tattooists. In Manila David became part of an artistic community, not removed from the melee of life, but enmeshed with the thriving heartbeat of a big Asian city. I could be projecting all of this. I work in art galleries, which while open to all are a formal container for experience – framed by cultural convention and protocol. For me galleries are spaces of respite from the melee, they are full of life, but it is curated life whose formal and evocative qualities I delight in discovering and sharing with others. My professional life has been driven by a desire to connect audiences to contemporary art and in doing so make a space for myself – a reciprocal act of hospitality, with all the possible warmth, generosity, and risk that that implies.
For me, David’s works are compressed and complex, culturally framed narratives of intensity and emotion. In their most intense moments, I experience them as personal and cultural transcriptions of madness, addiction, and illness. When we encounter art together, we are ‘becoming-with’ (Harraway, 2016), collectively engaged in a process of bring the work into being, a process of ‘worlding’, (Harraway, 2016). Inherent in the move from the noun world to verb worlding is the proposition that the world is not static and complete but made anew in each encounter, between, people, places, species, and things. I am committed to the idea that artworks have agency and actively contribute, as do audiences and artists – to a potentially transformative, process of worlding – in which agency is not given but occurs in the unfolding of the exchange that in its co-created newness has the potential to be liberatory… or not.
After going to art school myself, to be an artist, then following a different path and spending two decades in art galleries working between artworks and audiences … I have come to understand that I don’t think like a painter. I think like a writer for whom words and language are my contribution to meaning, my pathway to connection. When I am encountering painting, I am to some extent cast adrift in a landscape where the lingua franca is foreign to me. If I want to receive what the painting is offering me, I must actively reach towards understanding. And in that reaching I inherently bring my localised, situated perspective, my history, my experiences, my prejudices. I am not always, but often, pressed up against the limit of my knowledge. Reaching with hand outstretched and one foot raised I am momentarily destabilised – inviting an encounter with otherness that I read as both risk and promise. I also consider it a reciprocal gesture of hospitality inviting otherness in and wanting otherness to make a space for me in a collaborative, performative autoethnographic act of being-with (Harraway, 2016).
Writer and auto ethnographer, Stacey Holman Jones (2011) when diffracting her writing and thinking on autoethnography through the thinking of philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler proposes the following:
Judith Butler writes, our willingness to risk ourselves—our stories, our identities, our commitments—“in relation to others constitutes our very chance of becoming human (Butler, 2005, p. 136 cited in Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2016, p.19).
For me, Griggs body of work is a time-bound, visual essay in becoming human, an essay that plumbs both personal and cultural depths. In the words of Holman, when advising readers what to do when in the receipt of auto ethnographic work,
let it be you who reads with feeling and solidarity. Let it be you who takes what experience tells and makes it into something you can use, something yours (Holman, 2011, p. 333, cited in Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2016, p.25)’.
A thoughtful provocation from a thoughtful writer that I am applying to a thoughtful painter’s body of work in the hope that it operates as an invitation to think your own thoughts, in your own way and that that way is useful to you.
Adams, Tony E. Holman Jones, Stacy & Ellis, Carolyn (2016). Handbook of Autoethnography. Routledge.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Holman Jones, S. (2011) Lost and Found, Text and Performance Quarterly, 31:4, 322-341, DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2011.602709
Kim Leutwyler, Giddy up, oil on canvas 101.8 x 76.3 cm
“Why are you hiding your face?” Asks 2022 Archibald prize winning artist, Blak Douglas, referring to Giddy up, Kim Leutwyler’s self-portrait, hung in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery New South Wales, 2022.
“I think I look hot,” replies artist and subject.
I agree, whilst tipping her cowboy hat, acquired when she went to the central dessert to make a queer cowboy film with her friend, Kim Leutwyler does indeed look ‘hot’. Although, I posit, that this performative gesture is double sided, the tipped hat both reveals and withholds. The title, Giddy up, is equally double edged, both an admonition to hurry up from the horse racing world and a sexy invitation. Giddy Up, the painting, navigates aesthetics on one hand through the lens of queerness and the politics of representation, and on the other through a painterly engagement with the application and material qualities of oil paint.
In 2022, Kim was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, with a double portrait of Australian drag artist, singer, television personality and author, Courtney, and Shane. In the same year, she was also a finalist in the Sulman Prize with her self-portrait, Giddy Up. The Sulman Prize, is one of the trio of annual art prizes that are all hung at the same time at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Archibald prize is awarded for best portrait, The Wynne, for best landscape or figurative sculpture and the Sulman is awarded for best subject, genre or mural painting. According to this year’s artist judge Joan Ross, the defining feature of the Sulman Prize is narrative. Giddy Up, holds narrative both within and beyond its frame, it is both playful and sassy in subject matter, and clearly political, contributing to the democratisation of space for the representation of kink communities by being hung in the state’s most prestigious, public art gallery.
In this self-portrait, which is a blend of expertly handled realism and abstraction, Kim chooses to pose wearing the accoutrements of Kink culture: black leather harness, tasselled bra, and holding a sex rope. As part of her ongoing artistic exploration of the evolving aesthetics of queer identified people and their allies, the black shapes of the kink gear operate as both a signifier of the kink community and as an aesthetic foil to the pop art, candy-coloured realism, and drippy, gestural abstraction. Kim’s body is rendered symbiotically with the passages of abstraction in the painting with the boundary between background and subject far less discrete than we expect. Her skin which we understand as a barrier between the inside and outside, a container within which our ‘selves’ exist is disrupted and revealed as enmeshed with and made up of, the same ‘stuff’ as its surroundings. We all know that skin is permeable, a layer through which osmosis continually occurs, exchanging the outside for the inside and vice versa, just as smells and sounds, visions and haptic experiences enter and impact on our bodies, so too does what’s occurring inside disperse outwards into the environment, materially, psychically, and metaphorically. The world imprints itself on us and we imprint our-selves on the world in a constant state of receptivity and reciprocity. This painting makes clear – the materiality of the world is the materiality of our selves.
Donna J. Harraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says in her book ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene‘, It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…
In choosing how to explore what came to matter to me about Kim Leutwyler’s painting, Giddy Up, I am using what mattered to me when reading Aimee Bender’s magical realist novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake as a device to diffract and interrogate my thinking. The protagonist in Bender’s novel, Rose, can taste the feelings of the people who make the food she eats. The novel opens with Rose’s mother making a birthday cake for Rose’s ninth birthday. As Rose puts the cake in her mouth, she describes the ingredients to us, sugar, lemon, butter, chocolate, then the feelings of the maker unfurl, drift upwards and open themselves to her. She recounts the taste in her mother’s lemon cake as a taste ‘of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, and more.’ It makes eating food fraught and exhausting for Rose as she consumes the feelings of the maker, not at an intellectual distance but as an intimate, embodied, and unavoidable encounter with the raw emotional world of the maker. Bender’s novel is a wondrous, sensitively drawn work, where the boundaries between object and subject are completely dissolved. As the novel unfolds, we discover that Rose’s brother Joseph, can disappear inside furniture, a skill he hones, until he can do it for days and then weeks. As the novel draws to a close, we understand he wants to permanently remove himself from his human body and stay inside the furniture. Rose mitigates the imminent loss of her brother’s human form, by asking him, when he makes his final decision to leave his body for good, to promise to disappear into his favourite chair. The bittersweet and loving gesture of that request is that she doesn’t ask him not to go where he wants, she simply requests a signpost, so she knows where he is when she can no longer see his body.
The way Bender explores how we experience the transference of emotion through material objects pushes the reciprocity of the exchange into a situation where the boundaries between human and non-human disappear. In Bender’s novel, everything exits on the same plane, object and subject are indistinguishable, there is no transcendence, no better than, no other than, there is no above and below, no asymmetrical power relationships, no human exceptionalism. We are all conduits for the other, both physically and materially – reciprocity is the central concept – intuitively and graphically explored throughout the novel. If Rose’s brother can disappear into and be the chair – then there is no line between human and object. If Rose can taste the feelings of whoever produces the food she eats, then there is no defining line between the way a human carries emotion and the quality of emotion food is able to communicate. I don’t mean evoke, I mean hold within itself so that as the food enters Rose’s mouth she gets the full weight, in detailed specificity of unexpressed emotion direct from the maker. It is not a new idea that objects can communicate emotions, that they hold the trace of the life they have been involved in – think of family heirlooms, jewellery of the deceased, sites of trauma. The way Bender describes material exchanges between object and person, is deeply visceral, moving away from notions of nostalgia, memory, and metaphor to embodied, lived physical exchanges, experienced highly legibly and directly, where the object itself has agency and contributes to the articulated and enmeshed qualities of the encounter.
Bender’s magical realist novel resonated for me when encountering and contemplating Giddy Up. The painting dances between a core materiality where the qualities and properties of oil paint are paramount, and the evocative, narrative aspects of the painting which rely on the painterly illusion of realism as the transcription of the real. Our encounter is with the object-hood of the painting, which seduces us with its mix of realism, pop art colours and gestural abstraction, punctuated by the black kink gear. The painting explores both the materiality of paint and the politics of representation, it is both a scaffold and an armature and a poetic re-imagining of the limits of the body and the limits of our imaginings.
By elevating the role, her gestural abstract marks play within the painted body, Kim encourages us to read the painted body as in some ways other than or more than its representation. For me, the abstract gestures with their immediacy and lack of artifice, are more directly intimate than the realism which I read and understand to be more controlled – purposefully fitting within a taxonomy of representation. Body, hat, bra, breasts are all easily named and owned within a linguistic system with its attendant cultural history of signification and enmeshment with narratives of power and subjugation. The abstract gestures are less easy to name, less easily described, less easy to fit into a rationalist world view. The conflation of realism and gestural abstraction within the representation of the body disrupts the encounter with the subject. The subject is no longer static, instead there is a constant push and pull between the realness of the paint and the representation of the subject, the imagined and the expressionistic, where legibility is constantly re-negotiated. In painting herself in kink gear and getting this painting hung in the Sulman prize, the painting plays an important advocacy role for the members of kink communities. To be represented is to carve out space both within society and within the social imaginary – both dynamic and contested, evolving spaces of potential and repression.
In August 2022, Kim was the invited guest, as part of Live at the Lounge, a weekly program of talks and activities in the Members Lounge at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For this program, Kim was in conversation with the Art Gallery’s Curator of Australian Art, the thoughtful and intelligently playful, Anne Ryan. During the conversation both curator and artist embodied and enacted a generosity of spirit drawing the audience into an inviting and generative encounter with art, ideas and each other. Throughout the talk Kim, celebrated other artists and friend’s achievements even though as the invited speaker she was the reason we were all there. Indeed, Kim drew the entire audience into her warm, exuberant embrace, holding the room, much like Giddy Up, held the wall in the 2022, Sulman Prize – in an open, reciprocal gesture of being-with.
I read a powerful duality in this work, an exquisitely political tension between this self-confessed extrovert and relaxed exhibitionist and the withholding of her identity through the carefully poised cowboy hat. A gesture drawn from the vernacular language of tipping one’s hat in greeting and a gesture that mask one’s identity as it covers part of one’s face. How much we reveal of ourselves publicly is always a navigation. What is lost and what is gained by ‘going public’ about details of one’s identity continues to be nuanced, politically and socially and remains consequential territory. I see representation, agency, vulnerability, pleasure, and fun, as all central to Giddy up.
Giddy up could be an admonishment from the artist to society. An admonishment to catch up with the artist’s exuberant, yet deeply political acknowledgment and acceptance of queer identified women’s right to express themselves in ways that are true to their sense of self. I read Giddy Up as a provocation to remember that bodies and their representation are matters that matter. I invite everyone that reads this essay to consider how and with what means they think about and express what’s important to them. A provocation that, when considering important matters – bring a sense of timeliness and urgency to their material expression.
To circle back to the words of Donna Harraway, It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…
Trying to pinpoint, how our values manifest in every action or inaction we take – is like chasing pieces of eggshell in a raw egg mixture. You know they are there but extracting them is a messy business, elastic viscous threads remain attached as one lifts pieces of eggshell out, trying to separate them from their environment.
I am committed to the idea that multiple, authentic, and contradictory perspectives are operating in all situations. I am committed to being responsive, and response-able (Barad, 2007) to people, situations, objects, resources, and social and cultural practices and more. I take my values: respect, integrity, and kindness, with me into my entanglements with the arts. My life has been, and continues to be, a practice of reading one thing through another, long before I knew of Karen Barad’s thinking about diffraction. Barad, frames the practice of diffraction this way,
of reading diffractively for patterns of differences that make a difference… not as an additive notion opposed to subtraction…I mean that in the sense of it being suggestive, creative, and visionary. (Barad, 2012, pp. 49–50)
Underpinning the way, I want to operate in the world, professionally and personally, is the concept of radical hospitality. Radical hospitality has its roots in theology and extends beyond making the stranger welcome by meeting their immediate needs, into understanding the value and weight of the reciprocity inherent in all exchanges. We are all effected and affected by each other and by all sorts of things, material, conceptual, cultural, and personal all of the time. The gift of the stranger is that they bring both their skills and knowledges to the encounter and the gift of potential disruption. Disruption prevents us from becoming complacent and unresponsive, disruption enlivens us. The stranger gives us a fresh start in each encounter – there is no burden to maintain a particular face nor to carry the responsibility for the stranger indefinitely. For me, encounters with strangers, more than any other encounters, carry within them the possibility of threshold encounters, thresholds that if we pass through them hold the promise of transformation. I’m not sure if that’s true for other people. Hence why, after twenty years working in art galleries and museums, I am still response-able to encounters with strangers, for which I now use the language of Donna Haraway to describe as world –making (2016), or worlding (Heidegger, 1971). Both world -making and worlding turn the noun world into a verb to indicate that we make the world anew in each encounter.
Working in audience engagement in art galleries, I am always thinking about how to increase the opportunities for art encounters to create threshold moments and transformative experiences for audiences, often through simple activities that have been carefully selected and framed to foster deeper engagement with the art object. It is hard to make a leap when there is nothing to push off from, therefore, in my interest in fostering transformative experiences I see planning, preparation, and organisation, as important in process-driven, performative, pedagogic activity, indeed these things become the scaffold, from which we push off into the unknown. I am using the term pedagogic to refer to any situation where we learn from each other, not to refer to formal or school-based learning. One puts all the mechanics of the encounter in place and once the audience arrives the unfolding of the encounter is no longer in your control, although you remain one of the players, alongside each of the other participants, including the objects, the architecture, the participants, what went before and more … One hopes to bring into being encounters that carry, the unpredictable, the unexpected and the transformative. I am completely committed to understanding and theorising how to create threshold crossing encounters in art galleries and museums, where people begin to think in ways that they did not imagine before crossing the threshold. I am interested in thinking about these encounters as being on a plane of immanence – where we recognise that we are all bringing each other and all things into being in each encounter – where there is no above or outside of – there is simply the same plane on which we all exist and each element is worthy of, and has a right to, its place in that existence.
I am made hopeful by encounters in art galleries that bring us into deeper and more meaningful and more resonant connection, through the twin conduits of art and other people, with the space of the social imaginary. Philosophically, I will defend the right of each stranger to their place and their perspective in and on the world. I try to follow Barad’s advice to live my life thinking diffractively seeking ‘patterns of differences that make a difference … not as an additive notion opposed to subtraction… (but) in the sense of it being suggestive, creative, and visionary’ (Barad, 2012, pp. 49–50). I often fall short of my ideal, but I remain true to my values-based mission to encounter alternate and sometimes provocative ideas from a position of grace. I take my vales of respect, integrity, and kindness into reading situations diffractively, attempting to be alert when I am privileging ideas that fit more easily with my current world view, whilst also being able to respond to a call to action to act ethically in the world.
Kate Dorrough, Monumental Water Rites, 2023, acrylic on linen, 168 x 214 cm
Kate Dorrough’s body of work is an invitation to float suspended within the landscape – like silt in a river. A sensation that draws its embodied inspiration from the artist’s memories of swimming in creeks on family holidays during her formative years. Floating in a natural body of water alters our relationship to our surroundings, as we look upwards, trees appear taller and more ethereal, skies seem preternaturally blue against shimmering, pink, sandstone forms. Whilst one is floating, one’s body becomes alert to tiny shifts in the atmosphere, one feels connected to something deeper, older, and more mysterious. The experience of floating is intuition made real, reminding us we are not separate from that which surrounds us. Each of Dorrough’s artworks becomes a testament to our intimate connection with the earth, reminding us of the eternal rhythmic pulse of creation, destruction, and renewal, and the exquisite beauty and vulnerability inherent in every stage.
Excerpt from my catalogue essay for Kate Dorrough’s exhibition at Arthouse Gallery – on exhibition 27 July – 12 August 2023
How to start a love affair with art 