Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Station Street, Fairfield
5 October 2022
The luminosity of Ian Lobb
These words are a celebration of the life of an extraordinary human, a heartfelt stream of consciousness text that touches on aspects of the life of Ian Lobb, photographer.
Ian Lobb was my friend. He was a poet, photographer, raconteur. He my first photographer lecturer at university who I could always rely on for advice on art, photography, writing and life. He was an audiophile and a lover of music, anything from classical to jazz to Nina Simone, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan. He was a lover of women. He was dreamer and a philosopher. He adored the American artist Cy Twombly. He was a rabid Sydney Swans fan!
In the early 1990s monthly reviews of student photographic work at Phillip Institute of Technology (PIT, which later became part of RMIT University) with Ian and fellow lecturer Les Walkling were electric. Ideas and passion for the work abounded, discussions ran for hours on how to create work – with feeling and insight into the condition of image (and human) becoming. Here Ian introduced me to Tarkovsky, Eisenstein and Joseph Campbell, and the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, Kyoto, Japan. And of course he introduced me to the French photographer Eugène Atget – oh how we loved Atget, and Strand, Weston, Caponigro and Minor White. We could talk on any subject. Many years later, at our regular coffee catchups in Fairfield, I would take him new photography books that I had bought and recent object d’art purchases and, over lunch, the conversation would range far and wide about photography, art and life. He helped me sequence my work – have you thought about this pairing together, what about swapping this one over – and we drew inspiration from the sequences of Minor White and his use of “ice/fire”.
Ian was a storyteller. His photographs tell stories. From the teachings of Minor White (especially his “Three Canons”) there was an acknowledgement in his work of the spirit of the object he was photographing – a moment of revelation sought in the negative and subsequent print through a connection and circular transmission of energy between artist and object back through the camera and onto film (Zen)(for example see Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson 1975, below). A moment of revelation of spirit that was so important to Ian that this moment of “revelatio” can still be seen and felt in his recent mobile phone images.
Ian was aware, fully present. He was attuned to his surroundings like few people I have met for he was tremendously attentive, tremendously awake and sensitive to the environment and the vibrations of energy that emanated from the city, the land, the sky. Imagine travelling to a small patch of earth in the Black Ranges year after year to photograph in all seasons and in all weather something that he could see and feel in that land… something any other human would not even recognise, would walk past without a moments hesitation as though nothing was there, was of no import. But not Ian. He recognised and felt the energy of that place, space.
Talking to the wonderful Australian photographer David Tatnall who was also a friend of Ian’s we reminisced the other day. Ian had won an Australia Council grant and went to America on board a cargo ship teaching yoga on the way over, first going to South America and then on to America. There he visited Barbara, Wynn Bullock’s wife, and Ralph Gibson, Brett Weston, Harry Callahan and William Clift. He attended workshops with Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro. He visited the Museum of Modern Art’s reading room and examined box after box of iconic prints by the masters, all jumbled together as he told me in folders with little order or care for their preservation. David told me he rocked up unannounced at Eliot Porter’s and said he was a visiting photographer from Australia, and while Eliot made a pot of tea he was left to go through boxes of dye transfer prints. Back then there was a camaraderie of photography very different from the present. Can you imagine doing that today!
He conversed with the masters. Like a pebble making ripples in a pond the energy of these photographers was transferred by osmosis through Ian to a wider network of artists. David and I remembered how Ian taught us to look at the print upside down in order to understand the balance of the print and develop an appreciation of its structure and the music inherent in it. Look at the image of Caponigro’s Reflecting Stream, Redding, CT (1968, below) – one of Ian’s favourites – and you just know that water has to be “wet” in that print, that the shadows of the trees on the water have to be (Ansel Adams) Zone 2, and that the Zone 7 patch of grey under the boulder in the centre of the image is critical to its music, its balance. Ian knew these things instinctively, intuitively. Ian also taught both of us how to make Ansel Adams’ “burning in” tool… three pieces of stiff black board (with the top two pieces secured by tape to make a hinges) with gradually larger holes in each board for use under the enlarger, so that you could easily flip the boards to a larger or smaller hole for “burning in” while making a print. We both still have these indispensable tools, passed down like an oral history from the master. On reflection, learning from Ian and Les during those early days printing black and white photographs in the basement darkroom at Phillip Institute of Technology (PIT) in Bundoora, Melbourne were some of the happiest days of my life.
With friend and fellow director William (Bill) Heimerman (1950-2017), The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop, Melbourne brought to Australia some of the most respected master photographers from around the world: Wynn Bullock, Emmet Gowin, Eikoh Hosoe, William Clift, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, William Eggleston, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michaels, Lisette Model, August Sander, Aaron Siskind among others … and promoted local Australian photographers such as John Cato, Carol Jerrems, Christopher Koller, Jeff Busby and more. I was privileged to have several solo exhibitions in the gallery space. For the opening of Carol Jerrems exhibition at the gallery, Ian asked her who she would most like to attend – and Carol said Ron Barassi, then the most popular sporting and cultural personality in Australia. And on the day of the opening who attended – the great man himself. I don’t know how Ian did it, but he did!
David Tatnall took Ian to Cape Paterson only a couple of weeks before his passing, the first time he had been there since his father’s death many years ago (see the photographs below). Ian took some photographs with camera on tripod and on the mobile phone and then sat down, sat down and just looked at things in that self deprecating way of his. He just looked at the rocks and the form and the light and soaked in the spirit of the place. The same with his favourite tree, his beloved lemon scented gum in the garden of his church in Fairfield. Much as the Black Range series many years earlier, he took thousands of photographs on his mobile phone of this tree in all weather conditions, at all times of the day and year. He saw and felt something there that he kept coming back too, searching for the answer to that one great question that he could never answer.
David said that he believed that he was only using the mobile phone as a visual notebook before he came back to the place to photograph with an SLR – but respectfully I must disagree. Increasingly in his later years Ian surrendered the use of his bigger digital cameras to the flexibility of his mobile phone camera, trading in their heft for the felt immediacy of the mobile phone image and his ability to study the results as he pleased. While many would dismiss these phones images as preludes to the finished work, Ian recognised (as do many artists) that these impressions, these deeply felt visual sketches, had become fully rendered works of art. He moved with the times. As he observed, “For the last 18 months I’ve been spending the first few hours of the day in the local church yard where I am photographing a lemon scented gum. I’m doing this with an iPhone as a way of exploring different ways of working that facilitates.” (Email for William Clift sent to Marcus Bunyan 22 January 2023)
Ian loved telling a story. And he was passionate about the Sydney Swans. He regaled me with the story of how he was so incensed by seeing photographers inside the circle of players celebrating in the rooms after a victory that he wrote to the club to explain that this space, this inner sanctum of celebration, should be a “sacred space” as he put it just for the players… and that photographers should not be allowed in to that space, but only be able to look in from the outside. He was special like that. He understood the significance of that circle and the energy that flowed across the space as players linked arms and belted out the club song. Nothing should disturb the sanctity of that space, much as nothing should disturb the energy of a rock face.
Ian was a (com)passionate man. He was a spiritual man. Throughout his life he had a deep abiding faith in Jesus and the benevolence and goodness of the Almighty. Now he is be gone but his energy still surrounds us. In his beloved lemon scented gum and in the many memorable ideas and images he shared with us.
Ian Lobb was my friend. I will miss his wise counsel.
God bless him xx
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. A very interesting analysis by Gary Sauer-Thompson on Ian Lobb’s Black Range series and new concepts in contemporary landscape photography can be found in the article “Ian Lobb + contemporary landscape photography” on the Thought Factory website January 28, 2024. Recommended reading.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Many thankx to David Tatnall for allowing me to publish his images that are included in this posting.
“If you think of all the wonderful experiences of making images – and then sequencing them – really it is top of the world experience. If this then happens when society is particularly in flux – on spiritual and identity issues, and sequencing happens by someone who is sensitive to the time and the issues. And is sensitive to “image”. Then you really really hope that the book is well produced.”
Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan, 29 May 2015
“In “LA Confidential” they give away their source by using the word “valediction”. A good name for a poem, maybe the best, but not an exhausted idea. Look out I have been inspired by genius. People say that they have to do something more difficult than they need. That’s ok. – there are angels to prevent that – but if you don’t want to go that way, most of them aren’t against us.”
Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Monday 11 September 2023
“Marcus – can we be told how to love ? The first thought is no – but I’m not going to rush into an answer. Can we be told how to love a photograph or which photographs to love? I do know that my walk this morning has been recalling which photographs I have loved – and stopping on those where I have not lately dwelt. I didn’t get past the Paul Strand of the white picket fence. Sitting now on Station st as the coffee shops carry out their tables and seeing it.”
Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Saturday, 16 September 2023
During this particular workshop Caponigro was sometimes in a room where he could display several prints at once – he would never take them all down after talking, but move the first images away and attach new images to the right as he talked. The workshop was with the senior students of an Oregon art school, it can be dated because it was during the impeachment of Nixon.
~ Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan, 6 January 2015
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Point Lobos, California
1948
Gelatin silver print
Marcus, have you been to Point Lobos? I think you would find it a big experience if you were there at a quiet time. Imagine Minor White going to visit Weston on Wildcat Hill, and then the short drive down to Point Lobos – there would be some frisson in that car!! It’s not quite Nietzsche going to visit Wagner – but it’s not bad. For a lot of the year the day starts with fog and then the fog pulls back a little offshore and then comes back again. I think Weston’s Pelican would have been photographed in fog.
When talking to him [Ansel Adams] you can imagine the number of mediocre questions. While I was listening all of his answers were quotes from his books. There had to be an extraordinary move to get him to break ranks with this rule.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Sunday, 5 March 2023
Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers’ Gallery]
c. 1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Untitled [Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]
c. 1910
I am very familiar with the old suitcases under the desk – I think that only one – if any – is a suitcase.
This is typically how an exhibition would arrive at the Photographers’ Gallery – it would hold about 40 matted prints. Undo the strap and open the box to typically find 2 or 3 brown paper parcels. Maybe some archival tissue on the next layer down = sometimes not = and then about 20 mounted and matted prints sometimes face to face. This is the way Caponigro for example sent his prints – I’m trying to remember William Clift – Maybe one box like that and a handmade bigger one – or maybe 2 wooden boxes = but at least half the exhibitions arrived in boxes like that.
But have a look to the left of those boxes –what are they? They look like old fashioned double-darks – maybe for a quarter plate camera. The distance from the emulsion to the edge of the case was different for these compared to the last generation 5×4 double darks. People sometimes tried to make a way of putting the old film carriers onto 5×4″ cameras – but they would be focussing on the wrong spot by not making adjustments for the different positions of the emulsion.
To return to the boxes – they would be waiting for us at the airport, and we would have to spin a yarn to the customs agents telling them that the prints were for “educational purposes only”. It was a great educational experience to unwrap some of the prints when they came with a piece of tissue paper between the print and the mat – you could see something of the image and then get to imagine it before removing the tissue.
Re Robert Frank – also note the size of the Lupe next to his hand. Ralph Gibson had Robert Franks Leica enlarger – For some reason it was in his “living room” – I have seen it!!!
~ Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan 1 December, 2015
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]
c. 1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
This was the first Ian time had returned to Cape Paterson since the death of his father many years ago.
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
Lemon scented gum, Fairfield
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Maxwell Allara (American born Italy, 1906-1981) Untitled (Minor White During a Workshop)
1959
Gelatin silver print
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian in front of his favourite tree, Fairfield
November 2021
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Moencopi Strata, Capital Reef, Utah
1962
Gelatin silver print
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
24 January 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
14 February 2023
“The light comes down the tree. But for some days it twists right to left and makes an early morning shadow.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Monday 11 September 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
22 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
8 March 2023
Marcus – thanks for the mystic particles. After I have apple and rhubarb I’ll be walking to check on the tree in the church-garden. I’m interested in this, rather than my own garden. Who knows why I can’t photograph my own. Do you have a garden close by that you can walk through easily? I can’t wait for the sun to move a bit further and the light to come back on church gum. A few weeks.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Wednesday 12 July 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
13 September 2023
Mobile phone photographs
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (Green woman)
22 November 2022
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Alex
21 December 2022
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (pink and black)
31 January 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) The path from the coffee shop
Fairfield, 4 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) The path to the coffee shop
Fairfield, 4 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Building his ying, Ignoring his yang
21 February 2023
The First One
First one through the forest
First one on the beach
First one through the shallows
First one in the deep
Yes, first in the water
To swim out of reach
First one to belong
And then to be gone
First one to be gone too soon.
First foot off the platform
First step off the map
First one to learn
With nothing to teach
First one in this life
To whisper my name.
First one through my shallows
First one in my deep
First one to be gone too soon.
First winter field night
When the fires are lit
First soul at midnight
Watching burning trees twist.
At your back is the darkness
That turns you to see …
First one to the shadows
First one to the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
There’s a sound that’s so big
We can’t even hear
Not a murmur, a pulse
A note, nor a song
After midnight it wakes you
To its echoes and trace
First one to be swallowed
First one in the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
You’re the first, yes its true
On the roll call of friends
Now there’s spaces, not names
And you: you’re the worst.
You’re a very faint glow
On a very faint path
You were first through the shallows
First one in the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
Ian Lobb 28 August 2018
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) A small moment with…
25 February 2023
“If only the lens didn’t have anti flare – it would have been an Atget moment.”
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Billiard
2 March 2023
Ian: Please see full screen for pleasing puns
Marcus: Love how the graffiti imitates the shape of the wood in the trolley and how the triangle of white dots is a metaphor for the billiard triangle used to rack up the balls
Ian: Yes. And with the billiard signage I thought it was like a players gesture – towards the corner pocket
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Friday, 3 March 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (Mother)
30 April 2023
Apart from the teenagers at church, the mention that you were talking to your mother, was one of the few mentions of that relationship since my mother had passed. One minute after that I took this on my way home.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Sunday, 30 April 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (black oblong)
Fairfield, 8 May 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (My walk this morning) Fairfield, 11 May 2023
On my second roll of HP4 were pictures of a young lady lying under clear sheets of curved 2mm plastic that I had sprayed with water (1968?). The attached is from my walk this morning. The similar mood is quite scary.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Thursday, 11 May 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) mmmm, Pasta Poetry Fairfield, 21 June 2023
Thinking about John Cato this morning. If you can google “the world is too much with us” – Wordsworth – and give a toast to John. Proteus!!!
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Wednesday, 5 July 2023
The world is too much with us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;–
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth 1802
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part III)
2000
Affirmation: When you Sing
(An affirmation from Cy Twombly’s Coronation of Sesostris)
If you sing, don’t let them hesitate
When you sing, don’t let them make signs of regret
When you sing, let them bear the loss of silence
When you sing, the lost gods are found
When you sing, the birds and trees love their shadows
Lying quietly on the ground
When you sing, the mark of nature and the mark of the mark rejoice
When you sing we trace to the source of trace – the realm.
Sing to the ghosts, sing to those to come
Flow over – into – flow over
Let the trees rise from the earth because you sing:
New sunlight on new leaves cutting into space
Write your name
with their scintilla through the air as you sing
Then each letter narrows, fades  white
Still unending trace as sing and sing as a lost god.
One majesty fades to another
Sing Osiris , sing that god into Orpheus
scribes
Porous sparse voice, could have been scattered
Empty surface – instead open sky
Bell
Nothing to shatter
Sing for the old rivers,
Sailors sink into sails,
The opposite bank still opposite
Take this – sing – most important , to the next life.
Like tall trees, rising from …
Gods cannot depart while love, I mean song, remains
Gods have not departed: it would have been heeded,
Reported as a hoax,
No arc of departure divulged song, weightless Gods have not departed – it is a drunken hoax, rumour.
Ian Lobb 30 August 2018
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part V)
2000
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part VI)
2000
Last house
Are you travelling to this very last house
On the very last street of this town?
That I built here for you,
Where I wait for you
If you go round the back you’ll find wild flowers
That you could almost touch
And you would watch the clouds come down from the hills
Long ago I promised this to you
It became my story that you’d come
To the last street
And to the last house
I watch all the doors to see you enter
So that we would almost touch
And you could watch the rain come down from the hills
Yes, it’s true, the house backs onto darkness
I swear there’s really nothing out there
Beyond this last street
Beyond this last house
Nothing you could be sure to name
Nothing we can almost touch
And at night you could keep watch, from here to the hills
You can smell salt in the air from all of the rooms
And hear the wind in the waves
But out the back you’ll only find wildflowers.
Not those grey choppy waves
That we can almost touch
On this last street
In this last house.
Ian Lobb 29 August 2018
Flickerd (Australian) Zac Foot of Sydney during the 2019 NEAFL round 14 match between NT Thunder and Sydney at TIO Stadium on Saturday, 6 July 2019 in Darwin, Northern Territory
2019
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Antonios Schneider From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did.
And what did you want? Too call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver. ‘Late Fragment’ from A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989
This posting offers a selection of photographs from my new 269 image sequence Aus der Traum (From the Dream) (2023). To see the whole extended conversation please visit my website.
The starting point for this series was a black and white image from towards the end of the Second World War (when the Germans were obviously going to loose) of a German soldier looking at writing that has been scrawled in heavy chalk on the side of an armoured vehicle. ‘Aus der Traum’ translates as ‘From the Dream’.
As the series developed the work, as is its want, took on a life of its own. I use the photographs of war and its effects as part hallucinogenic, technicolour dream and part exploration “… not to follow optically the ‘line of ideas’ in the text or in a picture and see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture.”1
 1/ Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 512.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tobacco From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) City (destruction) From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Destroyer From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Emanation From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Flick From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Goggles From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Gun From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Helmet From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Katyusha From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Men From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Prisoner From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Aus der Traum From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Trees From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Water From the series Aus der Traum (From the Dream) 2023 Digital photograph
tongue, long flickering tongue drenched in blood scours inside the cup rapacious for more blood thirsty luck sucks souls of men thorn and star spirit of insect bizarre–unique cannibal
“A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also have bigger weapons. One thing I am not pessimistic about is the ability of nature to heal itself.”
Peter Booth quoted in Ashley Crawford View from the Booth blog 29 November 2003
PETER BOOTH at TarraWarra Museum of Art
Introductory wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 1974, and at centre Painting 1975 1975 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
While the TarraWarra survey features a collection of Booth’s works from the 1970s to the 2000s, it opens with a work in the ‘Doorway’ series: Painting, 1974. It’s a canvas covered with shades of black. As the curator says, “Just near the top, there’s this very thin horizon line of red, and it feels like there’s this massive magma just behind the surface that’s starting to seep through.” I’m told that written on the back of some ‘Doorway’ paintings is an instruction: “Never hang more than six inches from the floor.” As Fitzpatrick explains, “If you hang the work a little lower for the viewer … it becomes more immersive, and this painting is the opening work in the exhibition with the idea of the doorway as a threshold.”
This minimalism is compelling. “The ‘Doorway’ series could be about nothingness, or it could be a void,” says Fitzpatrick, “but voids are also where things are generated from – so they could be about an idea of fullness … you could almost see them as a kind of dark mirror.” In a rare interview with Australian artist, writer and curator Peter Hill, Booth humbly discusses how the ‘Doorway’ series was “influenced by what was going on in the art world at the time, in reduction, minimalism and colour field painting”.
With its shrouded figure standing before a highly volatile and fiery landscape, Painting 1977 conveys a forceful and undeniably apocalyptic vision. The painting finds a literary counterpart in the work of one of Booth’s favourite writers at the time, the novelist Doris Lessing with whom he found an affinity in their shared dystopian outlook. With its powerful blend of fantasy and reality, her 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell recounts the tale, vividly narrated in the first person, of a psychiatric patient’s hallucinatory journey through a dangerous and disturbing world of environmental despoliation, societal collapse, violent conflict and cosmic cataclysm.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) Briefing for a Descent into Hell 1971 Vintage book cover published 1981
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Untitled (Daughters) c. 1976 Ink on paper 11 x 12.5cm Private collection
Untitled (Daughters), c. 1976, is a composition which originated in Booth’s visits to an inner-city park in Melbourne where he would take his young daughters to play. Here, through the intense rhythms of his lifework and cross hatching in black ink, and the introduction of symbolic forms such as a whirlpool and arrowhead, this everyday scene is imaginatively transformed into a mysterious, nocturnal realm. While his daughters play in the foreground, the artist has turned to face a rising moon on the horizon and there is a sense that he is being magnetically compelled to embark on the path which leads in its direction.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at centre, Painting 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Peter Booth Painting 1978 from the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth became known for his black, minimal ‘doorway’ paintings of 1970-74. Yet by 1977 he had given up this style and begun to record the world of his dreams and nightmares in a series of apocalyptic, visionary landscapes. Booth’s paintings suggest that we are on the edge of another dark age. His paintings are brutal representations of his bleak dreams and fantasies. In an age of nuclear threat Booth’s work has a monumentality which is evocative of the final conflagration mentioned in The Book of Revelations. Painting 1978, challenges and disturbs the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us. Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?
Booth’s subject matter largely concerns the Australian landscape, both urban and rural, and the relationship between environment and individual, as well as the individual’s capacity to create and destroy. And also what the world will be like in the future, humans as mutants.
Booth’s landscapes are charged with emotion and symbolic meaning. Memories of his childhood in the blackened industrial landscape of Sheffield seem to infuse the work, especially his well-known apocalyptic figurative paintings, which look like images of the end of the world; illustrations for The Book of Revelation. These images contain an intense image of anxiety, evoking the aftermath of some terrible destruction, vividly pictured with menacing forms and agitated, heavily applied brushstrokes.
An example is Painting 1978 which has been described as challenging and disturbing the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. “The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland”. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us.
Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?” Peter Booth has centred many of his paintings around his childhood in Sheffield England where he grew up during the war years and their aftermath.
Anonymous. “Peter Booth,” on the Art History Essay website Nd [Online] Cited 07/02/2023
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail) 1982 Pastel and casein on paper 17.3 x 12.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchase, Victorian Foundation of Living Australian Artists, 2010
More than just figures of fantasy, Booth’s curious amalgams and mutated figures often express his personal insights into the interrelatedness of all living beings. With his closed eyes and restful expression, the metamorphic figure in Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail) appears contented with his hybrid condition, affirming the artist’s belief that humans “share something with these creatures … we are part of the same thing.”
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819 Tempera heightened with gold on mahogany 214 x 162 mm Tate Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949
Another physiognomic “vision” – “the stuff of delirium and nightmare, [which] taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime” – was the painting The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819) used to illustrate John Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828). In studying the work of Blake for this posting, I found it instructive to look at Blake’s preparatory sketches for his works which can be found online. They give you a good idea of the spontaneity of the drawing and the ideas that arise, transformed into the finished work. Here in the graphite on paper drawing of The Ghost of a Flea we can see Blake’s initial vision, a more static, pensive figure with serrated wings which morphs into a muscular, blood sucking monster set on a cosmic stage, of life framed by curtains and a shooting star. As the vision appeared to Blake he is said to have cried out: ‘There he comes! his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green.’
Marcus Bunyan. “Visions of divine damnation” on the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Part 2, February 2020 on the Art Blart website [Online] Cited 09/02/2023
Artist and astrologer John Varley encouraged Blake to sketch the figures, called ‘visionary heads’, who populated his visions. This image is the best known. While sketching the flea, Blake claimed it told him that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men, confined to the bodies of insects because, if they were the size of horses, they would literally drain the population. Their bloodthirsty nature is shown by the eager tongue flicking at the ‘blood’ cup it carries. This intense disorientating image, the stuff of delirium and nightmare, taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime.
William Blake, “The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819-20,” in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Painting Two 1984, Painting 1984 and Leadman 1986 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the blasted landscape of Painting Two we are presented with a vision of a volatile world in the process of unnatural mutation. As an artist who has always been keenly attuned to what’s happening environmentally and politically, this painting forcefully conveys the fallout of a colossal act of destruction, reflecting widespread concerns in the 1980s over the dramatic escalation of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the threat of atomic warfare.
In this work a hulking grey figure, with his fierce determination and body braced for battle, appears to be biologically adapted for survival in a desolated terrain. As the title suggests, this unrelentingly bleak and polluted atmosphere has eventuated from the unbridled destructive ambitions of the toxic Leadman who has transformed the world in his own image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Leadman 1986, Painting 1984 and Painting 2012 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet Thenot Under a Fruit Tree Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet, Lightfoot in the Distance Colinet Departs in Sorrow, a Thunder-Scarred Tree on the Right Blasted Tree and Blighted Crops The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf Sabrina’s Silvery Flood Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engravings on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Blasted tree and blighted crops 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know 1821 From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921 Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1960
Cabinet text from the exhibition Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A survey exhibition of the work of the renowned Australian artist Peter Booth
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian art. This new survey of paintings and works on paper is the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and features a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
The exhibition is presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence, alterity and alienation, mutation and hybridity, the absurd and the grotesque, the road and the ruin, and the despoliation and the resilience of nature.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey into the highly expressive landscape and figure subjects which have characterised his practice since that time.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict. These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey also brings together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world, revealing Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply compelling paintings and drawings.
PETER BOOTH, curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick, is generously supported by The Balnaves Foundation.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art website
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Untitled 1997, Painting 1982 and Painting 1981 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In Doris Lessing’s 1974 novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor, in the aftermath of an unspecified disaster, civilisation gradually disintegrates into anarchy as hordes of people form ad hoc tribes in the city streets to increase their chances of survival. In this dystopian narrative, Lessing describes the irrational and aggressive behaviour that can be unleashed within the safety and obscurity of a large group. This same sense of apprehension is one that Booth shares in many of his depictions of crowds. In Untitled, 1997, a large throng of men forms a single, impenetrable wall, gathered together to cheer on the spectacle of a violent struggle. Disturbing and absurd in equal measure, this work graphically portrays the violent actions that can be incited by a mob.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) The Memoirs of a Survivor 1974 Penguin Random House book cover published 1988
Another scene of demonic possession enacted under the spell of a fiendish presence, Painting 1982, confronts the viewer with a deeply disturbing vision of human cannibalism. With its visceral imagery of mutilation and dismemberment, parallels have been drawn to the atrocities depicted in Goya’s series of etchings The Disasters of War, 1810-1815, while the highly theatrical quality of the painting suggests a more recent connection to George A. Romero’s cult zombie film Night of the Living Dead, 1968. When the work was first exhibited critics responded to what the painting conveyed about the current state of western mass culture, finding in its brutal imagery a powerful metaphor for greed and material consumption. Whichever way one choses to interpret this work, one thing remains clear, whenever a large group of men get together in Booth’s painting, there is always the potential for danger.
Wall text from the exhibition
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Saturn Devouring His Son c. 1819-1823 Mixed media mural transferred to canvas 143.5 cm × 81.4cm (56.5 in × 32.0 in) Museo del Prado, Madrid
Saturn Devouring His Son is a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It is traditionally interpreted as a depiction of the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus (known as Saturn in Roman mythology) eating one of his offspring. Fearing a prophecy foretold by Gaea that predicted he would be overthrown by one of his children, Saturn ate each one upon their birth. The work is one of the 14 so-called Black Paintings that Goya painted directly on the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. It was transferred to canvas after Goya’s death and is now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. …
Various interpretations of the meaning of the picture have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, the wrath of God and an allegory of the situation in Spain, where the fatherland consumed its own children in wars and revolution. There have been explanations rooted in Goya’s relationships with his own son, Xavier, the only of his six children to survive to adulthood, or with his live-in housekeeper and possible mistress, Leocadia Weiss; the sex of the body being consumed cannot be determined with certainty. If Goya made any notes on the picture, they have not survived, as he never intended the picture for public exhibition.
In Painting 1981 a blindfolded boor is accompanied by a red-eyed, pointy-eared imp who appears to have just whispered a cosmic joke or secret in his ear. Situated in a bleak and desolate terrain, this disquieting scenario recalls the German legend of Faust in which, following the protagonist’s pact to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge, Mephistopheles appears as his demonic guide. In this light, Booth’s painting can be seen as a powerful reimagining of this cautionary tale of how blind ambition and human hubris can lead to inner corruption and the unleashing of dangerous, irrational impulses.
A survey exhibition of the work of major Australian artist Peter Booth will be held at TarraWarra Museum of Art, 26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023.
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian painting and is considered by many to be one of the most significant contemporary artists working in Australia today.
This new survey of paintings and works on paper will be the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and will feature a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
Curated by TarraWarra’s Anthony Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will be presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence; alterity and alienation; mutation and hybridity; the absurd and the grotesque; the road and the ruin; and the despoilation and the resilience of nature.
“This exhibition will reveal Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature, and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply-compelling paintings and drawings,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey into a neo-expressionist figurative style.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict.
These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey will also bring together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world.
“Initially Booth’s highly visceral paintings of fiery, turbulent environments were the stage for confronting and, at times, violent human encounters. Since the 1990s, many of the scenes he has painted have become increasingly depopulated, implicating the viewer who is called to contemplate and navigate their own subjective relationship to these vivid landscapes.
“Most recently, the artist has returned to the apocalyptic imagery that characterised his first forays into figuration, with large-scale paintings of desolate and devastated scenes of a world in a cataclysmic state of collapse. This is art for a time of ecological and existential crisis in which anthropogenic impacts have driven the planet, and its intricate web of ecosystems, to the brink of utter catastrophe,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
Press release from the TarraWarra Museum of Art
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second right, Painting 2022 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Acheron Way is named after a long snaking road which rises steeply through the rainforest of the Yarra Ranges between Narbethong and Warburton. Pictured beneath a clear blue sky, this scene of animated trees backlit by a soft, yellow light evokes a sense of energy, growth and even hope. The swaying trunks and tentacular forms of the sprawling limbs of the trees painted in thick swathes of impasto, imbue them with a powerful emotional charge. However, there is a more ambiguous aspect to this work alluded to in its title which not only refers to a real location, but also to an infernal realm of the imagination: Acheron (‘river of pain’) one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology over which the souls of the dead were ferried. From this perspective, the tangled and twisted forms of these sentinel-like trees seem to be denying us access to the light suffused landscape in the distance, forcing us to linger in their shadow, begging the question: are we in the realm of the living or the dead?
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Untitled 1998 (below), and at right Painting 2017 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Painting 2017 Oil on canvas 193.4 x 81.3cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
In Painting 2017, as the sun begins to rise over the horizon, new epicormic growth spouts from the pruned limbs of a tree; a potent symbol of resilience and renewal. Peter Booth’s ‘Garden of Eden’ paintings vividly convey his feeling for the elemental and generative qualities found in nature and his fervent empathy for other nonhuman lifeforms. ‘Everything is connected. All life comes from the same source.’
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Acheron Way 1993, at third right Painting 2022, and at right Painting 2014 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In discussing Winter when it was first exhibited in 1994, Booth revealed: it’s about my childhood, about taking walks with my brothers in the woods in Yorkshire. Triggered by a recent return to Sheffield, this memory is transformed into a richly textured landscape of open forest which has been stilled and silenced by a thick blanket of snow. As the artist later revealed, his younger twin brothers died in tragic circumstances adding particular poignancy to this painting and suggesting that the two very similar trees which occupy the centre of the work, could be seen as symbolic representations of his siblings. In this light, Winter becomes a powerful and deeply personal expression of remembrance and cathartic release.
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 2018 (below), and at right Untitled 1995 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting (Figure with bandaged head) 2004 (below), and at right Painting 1998 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The strength and power of Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 … is palpable. But like so many of Booth’s images, formulated over years of development, the strength lies not so much in the initial ‘shock’, but with the ensuing waves of other possible readings it evokes…
The tension between our first confrontation with the bandaged figure and the subsequent sensations of pathos for, even some recognition of sensitivity within, the character makes this such a successful work. And as we look upon the painting, venturing into the space behind the bandages, the focus of the work internalises: in reading the mind of the figure we are offered a portal to see within ourselves.
This notion of the mirror to one’s soul, with themes of the nature of power and frailty, desire and control, so deftly captured within Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 adds a further dimension to the history of this particular painting.
The figure in Untitled, 2007 has averted eyes and stoically sealed lips, suggesting that he has endured great hardship. This feeling is amplified by the rich tonal contrasts and paint texture built with swathes of impasto which transform his wizened face into a blustery landscape. Having taken the troubles and turmoil of the world into himself, this austere figure is imbued with a powerful sense of inner fortitude and resilience.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Curator: Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Installation view of the exhibition Spowers & Syme at the Geelong Art Gallery showing photographs of both Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
My friend and I travelled down the highway from Melbourne to Geelong especially to see this National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition – and my god, was it worth the journey!
I have always loved woodcuts and the Art Deco era so it was a great pleasure to see the work of two very talented artists from this period, who were “enthusiastic exponents of modern art in Melbourne during the 1930s and ’40s.” Modern art that would have challenged the conservative (male) art conventions of the day, much as modernist photographs by Max Dupain challenged the ongoing power of Pictorialist photography in 1930s Australia.
From viewing the exhibition it would seem to me that Eveline Syme has the sparer, more ascetic aesthetic. Her forms are more graphic, her lines more severe, her spaces more “blocky” (if I can use that word – in other words, more positive and negative space), her colour palette more restrained than in the work of Ethel Spowers. But her work possesses its own charm: a wonderful Japanese inspired landscape such as The factory (1933, below), with its mix of modernism and naturalism; silhouetted blue figures full of dynamism, movement in a swirling circular motif in Skating (1929, below); or the flattened perspective and 3 colour palette of Sydney tram line (1936, below) – all offer their own delicious enjoyment of the urban landscape.
But the star of the show is the work of the astonishing Ethel Spowers. Her work is luminous… containing such romanticism, fun, humour, movement, play, intricate design, bold colours, lyrical graphics… and emotion – that I literally went weak at the knees when viewing these stunningly beautiful art works. There is somethings so joyful about Spowers designs that instantly draws you in, that makes you smile, that made me cry! They really touched my heart…
Even now writing about them, they seem to me like stills from a dream, scenes out of a fairy tale: the pattern of the white gulls obscuring the plough; the rays of sunlight striking the ground behind The lonely farm; the mysterious stillness of The island of the dead; the arching leap over the rope in Fox and geese; the pyramid construction of Football; the delicacy of movement and line in Swings; and the butterfly-like canopies in Wet afternoon. I could go on and on about the joy these works brought me when looking at them, their vivaciousness, their intense, effervescent spirit. If you get a chance before the exhibition closes next weekend in Geelong please go to see them.
As you may have gathered I am totally in love with the work of Ethel Spowers. Thank you, thank you to the artist for making them, and thank you to the energy of the cosmos for allowing me to see them in person!
“Is it too great a truism to repeat that the best art is always the child of its own age?”
Eveline Syme
Celebrating the artistic friendship of Melbourne artists Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, the National Gallery Touring Exhibition Spowers and Syme will present the changing face of interwar Australia through the perspective of two pioneering modern women artists.
The exhibition offers rare insight into the unlikely collaboration between the daughters of rival media families. Studying together in Paris and later with avant-garde printmaker Claude Flight in London, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme returned to the conservative art world of Australia – where they became enthusiastic exponents of modern art in Melbourne during the 1930s and ’40s.
Much-loved for their innovative approach to lino and woodcut techniques, Spowers and Syme showcases their dynamic approach through prints and drawings whose rhythmic patterns reflect the fast pace of the modern world through everyday observations of childhood themes, overseas travel and urban life.
Text from the Geelong Gallery website
Installation views of the exhibition Spowers & Syme at the Geelong Art Gallery Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Photographer unknown Portrait of Miss EL Spowers, a passenger on board the ‘Orama’ (installation view) 19 March 1935 Fremantle Reproduction courtesy of The West Australian, Perth Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Photographer unknown Miss Eveline W. Syme, who is in charge of the library section of the Australian Red Cross Society, is seen displaying a typical parcel of books as sent out to hospitals, convalescent depots etc. This parcel contains about forty units, covering a wide range of literature (installation view) 13 May 1943 Melbourne Reproduction courtesy of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The gust of wind (installation view) 1931 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The gust of wind 1931 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Special edition (installation view) 1936 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Raised in Toorak society, Ethel Spowers was the second daughter of William Spewers, an Aotearoa New Zealand-born journalist and proprietor of The Argus and The Australasian newspapers. The Spowers family lived at Toorak House in St Georges Road. Eveline Syme was the first-born daughter of company director and pastoralist Joseph Syme, who was a partner in competing newspaper The Age until 1891. The Syme family lived at Rotherfield (now Sherwood Hall) in St Kilda. Eveline moved to Toorak in around 1927.
Wall text
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Special edition (installation view) 1936 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Melbourne from the river (installation view) c. 1924 Melbourne Woodcut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A sense of place is important to all of us. For Spowers and Syme, Melbourne (Naarm) was their home and held a special place in their hearts. In the 1920s, Melbourne was an important city. Lively and busy, it was also very accessible to the river and beautiful landmarks. The Yarra River (Birrarung) winding gently through the city and the industrial landscape at Yallourn were worthy subjects to focus on. Spowers’ earlier work Melbournefrom the river c 1924 (below) was created looking at the river and is framed by spindly trees.
Text from the National Gallery of Australia website
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Melbourne from the river (installation view) c. 1924 Melbourne Woodcut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Melbourne from the river c. 1924 Melbourne Woodcut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Banks of the Yarra (installation view) 1935 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Banks of the Yarra 1935 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The bay (installation views) 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The bay 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977
Geelong Gallery is delighted to present National Gallery of Australia Touring Exhibition, Spowers & Syme opening on Saturday 16 July 2022.
Celebrating the artistic friendship of Melbourne artists Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, the Know My Name touring exhibition presents the changing face of interwar Australia through the perspective of two pioneering women artists.
The National Gallery’s Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings, Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax hopes that Geelong and Victorian audiences will add the names Spowers and Syme to their knowledge of ground-breaking women artists from the era including Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, Dorrit Black and Grace Cossington Smith.
‘Spowers and Syme are often overlooked in Australian art history, yet during the 1930s they were recognised by peers as being among the most progressive artists working in Melbourne.’
‘Exhibiting in Australia and England, they championed key ideas from European modernism such as contemporary art reflecting the pace and vitality of life,’ said Noordhuis-Fairfax.
Much-loved for their dynamic approach to lino and woodcut prints, Spowers & Syme offers rare insights into the creative alliance between the daughters of rival media families from Melbourne-based newspapers The Argus and The Age. After studying art together in Paris and London, Spowers and Syme returned to the conservative art world of Australia where they became enthusiastic exponents of modern art during the 1930s and 1940s.
Geelong Galley Director & CEO, Jason Smith says ‘We look forward to sharing the important works of Spowers and Syme and exploring their contributions further through a number of public and education programs. Spowers & Syme will be further contextualised by modernist works by women artists in our Geelong permanent collection including a major survey of printmaker, Barbara Brash.
Press release from the Geelong Art Gallery
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Balloons c. 1920 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Gift of Chris Montgomery 1993
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The factory (installation view) 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The factory 1933 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1979
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Beginners’ class 1956 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1992
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Drawing for the linocut ‘School is out’ (installation view) 1936 Melbourne Drawing in pen and black ink over pencil National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Gift of Chris Montgomery 1993 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
At the end of 1936 Spowers held her sixth and final solo exhibition. It was a survey of old favourites and new works, spanning a decade of imagination and experimentation. Among the twenty prints and six watercolours shown at Grosvenor Galleries in Sydney were five fresh linocuts: Kites, Football, School is out, Children’s hoops and Special edition. These works were a return to her most treasured themes: children and family.
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Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) School is out 1936 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme captured the joy and dynamism of movement in sport and play. Through colour, pattern and intersecting lines we see the speed and energy of children skipping, running, reaching to catch a ball and the pace of skaters circling the rink in the icy coldness. Who could forget the wonderful feeling of swinging as high as possible, looking down at the world?
Spowers’ images of children playing are reminiscent of her own childhood and have a whimsical charm about them. They capture the sense of wonder and curiosity seen in young children.
Linoleum (lino) was a floor covering that was invented in 1860. Imaginative artists discovered how effective it was for creating prints. With the right tools, it was easy to carve an image into it and make prints using coloured inks on the exposed surface.
A dramatic change in Spowers’ style occurred in 1929 when she studied under Claude Flight (the leading exponent of the modernist linocut) at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London. Her close friend Eveline Syme joined her there. Following further classes in 1931, during which Spowers absorbed modernist ideas of rhythmic design and composition from the principal Iain Macnab, she published an account of the Grosvenor School in the Recorder (Melbourne, 1932). In the 1930s her linocuts attracted critical attention for their bold, simplified forms, rhythmic sense of movement, distinctive use of colour and humorous observation of everyday life, particularly the world of children. They were regularly shown at the Redfern Gallery, London. The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased a number of her linocuts.
Stimulated by Flight’s proselytising zeal for the medium, Spowers organised in 1930 an exhibition of linocuts by Australian artists, among them Syme and Dorrit Black,at Everyman’s Library and Bookshop, Melbourne. A founding member (1932-1938) of George Bell‘s Contemporary Group, Spowers defended the modernist movement against its detractors. In an article in the Australasian on 26 April 1930 she called on ‘all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas, and not to condemn without understanding’.
Frances Derham remembered Spowers as being ‘tall, slender and graceful’, with ‘a small head, dark hair and grey eyes’. A rare photograph of Spowers, published in the Bulletin (3 September 1925), revealed her fashionable appearance and reflective character. In the late 1930s she stopped practising as an artist due to ill health, but continued her voluntary work at the Children’s Hospital. She died of cancer on 5 May 1947 in East Melbourne and was buried with Anglican rites in Fawkner cemetery. Although she had destroyed many of her paintings in a bonfire, a memorial exhibition of her watercolours, line-drawings, wood-engravings and colour linocuts was held at George’s Gallery, Melbourne, in 1948. Her prints are held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, State galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria.
Stephen Coppel. “Spowers, Ethel Louise (1890-1947),” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16 , 2002, online in 2006 [Online] Cited 26/08/2022
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The Yarra at Warrandyte (installation views) 1931 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) The Yarra at Warrandyte 1931 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977
Returning to Melbourne in 1929 with an exhibition of contemporary wood-engravings from the Redfern Gallery, London, Syme became a cautious advocate of modern art. She published a perceptive account of Flight and his teaching in the Recorder (1929) and spoke on the radio about wood-engraving; she also wrote a pioneering essay on women artists in Victoria from 1857, which was published in the Centenary Gift Book (1934), edited by Frances Fraser and Nettie Palmer. Syme was a founding member (1932-1938) of George Bell‘s Contemporary Group. She regularly exhibited with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and with the Independent Group of Artists. Her linocuts, perhaps her most significant achievement, owed much to her collaboration with Spowers.
During the mid-1930s Syme was prominent in moves to establish a women’s residential college at the University of Melbourne. In 1936, as vice-president of the appeal committee, she donated the proceeds of her print retrospective (held at the gallery of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria) to the building fund. A foundation member (1936-1961) of the council of University Women’s College, she served as its president (1940-1947) and as a member of its finance committee. She was appointed to the first council of the National Gallery Society of Victoria in 1947 and sat on its executive-committee in 1948-1953. In addition, she was a member (1919) and president (1950-1951) of the Lyceum Club.
A tall, elegant and reserved woman, Syme had a ‘crisp, quick voice’ and a ‘rather abrupt manner’. She died on 6 June 1961 at Richmond and was buried with Presbyterian forms in Brighton cemetery. In her will she left her books and £5000 to University Women’s College. Edith Alsop’s portrait (1932) of Syme is held by University College. Syme’s work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, State galleries in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria.
Stephen Coppel. “Syme, Eveline Winifred (1888-1961),” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16 , 2002, online in 2006 [Online] Cited 26/08/2022
Installation view of the exhibition Spowers & Syme at the Geelong Art Gallery showing at top left, Spowers The timber crane (1926, below); at top right, Spowers The plough (1928, below); at bottom left, Spowers The works, Yallourn (1933, below); and at bottom right, Spowers The lonely farm (1933, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The timber crane (installation view) 1926 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The plough (installation view) 1928 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The plough 1928 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The works, Yallourn 1933 Linocut 15.7 x 34.8cm (printed image) National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Bulla Bridge 1934 Wood engraving 10.1 x 14.7cm (printed image) National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The lonely farm (installation views) 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Harvest (installation view) 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Harvest 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The joke (installation views) 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The joke 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The island of the dead (installation view) 1927 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from seven blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1995 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In January 1927 Spowers and Syme holidayed in Iutruwita / Tasmania. After they visited the penal settlement at Port Arthur, Spowers produced this view of the nearby cemetery of Point Puer. Following this trip, Syme made a monochrome wood-engraving, The ruins, Port Arthur c. 1927
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Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The island of the dead 1927 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from seven blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1995
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Skating (installation view) 1929 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from two blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
When Syme joined Spowers at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in January 1929 she made the two-block linocut Skating, which summarises Claude Flight’s teachings on how a composition ‘builds into a geometrical pattern of opposing rhythms’. Her design is simplified, using the repetition of intersecting lines and curves to suggest action. Although the skaters are frozen mid-turn, the print is filled with light and movement, with Syme’s humorous suggestion of novice efforts captured in awkwardly angled arms and legs.
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Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Skating 1929 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from two blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1979
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Fox and geese (installation view) 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Fox and geese 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Football (installation view) 1936 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1982 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Tug of war (installation view) 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Tug of war 1933 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme were lifelong friends who inspired and encouraged each another in their artistic pursuits. They were pioneers in printmaking and modern art and their careers reflected the changing circumstances of women after World War 1. Spowers and Syme were among a core group of progressive Australian artists who travelled widely and studied with avant-garde artists. They were at the forefront of Modernism in Australia.
Both women grew up in Melbourne in very comfortable circumstances. Their fathers ran rival newspapers, so their families had many common interests. Spowers’ father was involved with The Argus and The Australasian, while Syme’s father helped run The Age. Both families were dedicated to many causes and generous in their efforts to help others. They also supported war efforts and the Red Cross.
Spowers was the second child of six siblings and her home life was filled with rich and varied creative experiences. Her family lived in a large home in inner Melbourne called Toorak House, a graceful mansion with large gardens to play in and explore. Syme was also one of six siblings and lived nearby in a large house in St Kilda called Rotherfield.
Spowers and Syme studied and travelled together in Australia and overseas. Both were inspired by the artist Claude Flight who taught them at the Grosvenor School in London. He encouraged his students to capture the joy of movement through colour and rhythmic line and the new method of colour linocut printing. Spowers and Syme became strong supporters of being brave as artists, prepared to experiment and promote new ways of doing and seeing.
Throughout their lives the two friends advocated for important causes. Spowers’ focus was always on the welfare of children through her involvement in kindergarten education and volunteering at the local children’s hospital. Syme was particularly dedicated to the advancement of women’s university education.
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) San Domenico, Siena (installation view) 1931 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1977 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
An inveterate traveller, Syme produced drawings and watercolours of landscape views from her trips around Victoria, her voyages to England via Colombo, and her travels through Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States of America. In addition to exhibiting her watercolours, Syme often used these compositions as the basis for subsequent prints and oil paintings.
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Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Hong Kong harbour (installation views) 1934 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Swings (installation view) 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Swings 1932 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Eveline Syme (Australian, 1888-1961) Sydney tram line (installation views) 1936 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1979 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Powers and Syme were associated with numerous art and social group, which established intersecting circles of connection and opportunity in Melbourne and Sydney. During the 1930s they both exhibited in Sydney with other progressive artists at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre and with the Contemporary Group co-founded by Thea Proctor. This print is based on an earlier watercolour by Syme, drawn after staying with Spowers’ sister at Double Bay in 1932.
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Still life (installation view) 1925 Melbourne Wood-engraving, printed in black ink, from one block National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1981 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The noisy parrot (installation view) 1926 Melbourne Woodcut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The noisy parrot 1926 Melbourne Woodcut, printed in colour inks in the Japanese manner, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 2015
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Wet afternoon (installation view) 1930 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In July 1930 Claude Flight included this print in British lino-cuts, the second annual exhibition held at the Redfern Gallery in London. Impressions were acquired by the Victoria & Albert museum and the British Museum. Wet afternoon was exhibited again in September at the annual exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria at Melbourne Town Hall and in the first exhibition of linocuts in Australia held in December at Everyman’s Lending Library in the centre of avant-garde Melbourne.
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Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Wet afternoon 1930 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1983
Prints, pigments & poison
The vibrant works by Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, printed on smooth Japanese gampi papers from 1927 to 1950, demanded special consideration during conservation preparation from the Spowers & Syme exhibition. Andrea Wise, Senior Conservator, Paper, explains the process and details the green pigment with the toxic backstory. …
The typical palette in Spowers & Syme works feature carbon black, yellow and brown ochres, ultramarine, cobalt and cerulean blues, emerald green and two organic lake pigments – alizarin crimson and a distinct lilac. Lake pigments are made by attaching a dye to a base material such as alumina, making a dyestuff into a workable particulate pigment. This process can also extend more expensive dyestuffs, making them cheaper to use. Bound with oil to create printer’s inks, this limited palette was then overprinted to achieve a wider range of colours.
Emerald green commonly recurs throughout the works. A highly toxic vivid green, invented in the 19th century, it was still commercially available until the early 1960s. Many historical pigments are toxic, based on arsenic, mercury and lead.
Today we are increasingly aware of the health and safety issues related to work of art, but this was not always the case. Emerald green belongs to a group of copper acetoarsenate pigments that were extensively used for many household goods including furniture and wallpapers. A similar pigment, Scheele’s green, was used on the wallpaper in Napoleon’s apartments on St Helena and has been suggested as the cause of his death. Large amounts of arsenic (100 times that of a living person) were found on Napoleon’s hair and scalp after he had died. While poisoning theories still abound, it has been confirmed through other medical cases from the period that arsenic dust and fumes would be circulated in damp Victorian rooms sealed tight against the drafts that were thought to promote ill health.
Anonymous text. “Prints, pigments & poison,” on the National Gallery of Australia website Nov 18, 2021 [Online] Cited 30/08/2022
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Children’s Hoops 1935 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from five blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Bank holiday (installation view) 1935 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from six blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Bank holiday 1935 National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1976
Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) The Junior Red Cross works in every land (installation view) Linocut, printed in colour, from six blocks Reproduced in Joan and Daryl Lindsay The story of the Red Cross Melbourne, 1941 National Gallery of Australia Research Library Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Powers made one final linocut print around 1941 for inclusion in a published history of the Australian Red Cross Society compiled by Joan and Daryl Lindsay. The Spowers family had a long philanthropic connection with this cause, and Eveline Syme became the first chairperson of the Red Cross Society Picture Library. Reproduced as a lithographic illustration, the long narrow composition is based on the picnicking families in Spowers’ earlier linocut Bank holiday 1935 (see above).
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Ethel Spowers (Australian, 1890-1947) Cuthbert and the dogs (installation view) c. 1947 Digest Juvenile Productions, Melbourne National Gallery of Australia Research Library Photo: Marcus Bunyan
After being diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-1930s, Spowers stopped printmaking and began a series of short stories for children. During the last decade of her life, she wrote and illustrated at least seven books. Their charm drew on stories the Spowers siblings wrote together as children, yet these were cautionary tales in which youthful characters were often reformed by the results of their actions. Of these, only Cuthbert and the dogs was published.
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Grosvenor School of Modern Art
This progressive private school was established in 1925 by Scottish wood-engraver Iain Macnab at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico. Formerly the London studio and house of Scottish portraitist James Rannie Swinton, the ground-floor interior was repurposed into studios for tuition in drawing, painting and composition, with the basement set up for lithography, etching and block printing. With no entrance examinations or fixed terms, students could attend classes at any time by purchasing a book of fifteen tickets, with each ticket permitting entry to a two-hour session.
Merchant hand-selected a small team of similarly anti-academic staff, including Claude Flight. For five years Flight taught weekly afternoon classes on colour linocuts. He emphasised that art must capture the vitality of the machine age and taught his students a new way of seeing that analysed the activities of urban life and condensed these into dynamic compositions bursting with rhythm and energy.
Frank Weitzel (New Zealand, 1905 – England 1932) Slum street (installation view) c. 1929 Sydney Linocut, printed in black ink, from one block National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1993 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The son of German immigrants, Weitzel has a volatile upbringing in Aotearoa New Zealand where his father interned as an enemy alien. At the age of 16, Wentzel emigrated with his mother to the united States of America, where he studied sculpture in California. After travels through Europe, he relocated to Sydney in 1928 were he produced a series of linocuts in response to the city and was invited by Dorrit Black to exhibit with the Group of Seven. Black arranged for Wentzel to meet Claude Flight in London in 1930; Flight included his prints in the annual linocut exhibitions at Redfern Gallery in 1930 and 1931.
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Frank Weitzel was known mainly as a sculptor but in his studio over Grubb’s butcher shop at Circular Quay, he worked in the tradition of the artist-craftsman, producing linocut batik shawls and wall-hangings, lamp shades, book-ends etc. He also played violin in the Conservatorium Orchestra and designed a modern room (with Henry Pynor) at the Burdekin House Exhibition in 1929. In 1931, looking for work in London he sought out David Garnett, a publisher and member of the Bloomsbury Group of artist-craftsman. While Garnett was not interested in Weitzel’s drawings for publication, he became an admirer of his sculpture and invited Weitzel to care-take his property ‘Hilton Hall’ and commissioned him to do heads of children. Weitzel came to be praised also by Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Paul Nash and Duncan Grant. Garnett describes Weitzel in his autobiography as “small, thin, with frizzy hair which stood piled up on his head, blue-eyed, with a beaky nose. I guessed he was not eating enough… He was proletarian, rather helpless, very eager about art and also about communism”. At around this time Weitzel wrote to Colin Simpson back in Australia, “Now I am working on a show of my own which is being arranged for me by some terrific money bags”. The exhibition was never held. Weitzel contracted tetanus apparently from minerals which got under his finger nails while digging for clay for his sculptures. He died on the 22 February 1932 at the age of 26. A posthumous exhibition was organised by Dorrit Black at the Modern Art Centre, 56 Margaret Street, Sydney, on the 7 June 1933- opened by another supporter of modernism, the artist John D. Moore. The works had been brought back to Sydney by Weitzel’s sister Mary, who had travelled to England to collect them. This small show (41 works) included illustrations to a poem by Weitzel, poster designs for the Empire Marketing Board, Underground Railways, Shell Motor Spirit, Barclay’s Lager and the Predential Insurance Company, as well as sculpture, drawings and linocuts which had been exhibited with Grosvenor School artists in London.
Lill Tschudi (Swiss, 1911-2004) Fixing the wires (installation view) 1932 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from two blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Gift of the artist 1990 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lill Tschudi (Swiss, 1911-2004) Fixing the wires 1932 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from two blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Gift of the artist 1990
Claude Flight (English, 1881-1955) Brooklands (installation view) c. 1929 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
At the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, Claude Flight taught his students the art of the modern colour linocut. He emphasised the importance of composition, building his images of urban life out of simplified form and pattern. Flight’s own practice drew on an exciting mix of avant-garde ideas: from the abstraction of British Vorticism to the dynamism of Italian Futurism to the bold geometric energy of Art Deco and the Arts and Crafts Movement’s emphasis on the handmade.
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Claude Flight (English, 1881-1955) Brooklands c. 1929 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
Sybil Andrews (English-Canadian, 1898-1992) Speedway (installation view) 1934 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Andrews first studied art by correspondence while working as a welder at an airbase in bristol during the First World War. After meeting her mentor Cyril Power in Bury St Edmonds, they moved to London to study art before Andrews joined the Grosvenor School of Modern Art as a school secretary. Like Flight, Andrews and Power believed that art should reflect the spirit of the time. Andrews showed her work in joint exhibitions with Power at Redfern Gallery, and often explored the them of manual about. She left London in 1938 and emigrated to Canada with her husband Walter Morgan in 1947, where she eventually established a practice as artist and teacher.
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Sybil Andrews (English-Canadian, 1898-1992) Speedway 1934 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from four blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
Cyril E Power (English, 1872-1951) Skaters (installation view) c. 1932 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
Sybil Andrews (English-Canadian, 1898-1992) The winch (installation view) 1930 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sybil Andrews (English-Canadian, 1898-1992) The winch (installation view) 1930 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sybil Andrews (English-Canadian, 1898-1992) The winch 1930 London Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Purchased 1978
George Bell (Australian, 1876-1966) The departure (installation view) 1931 Melbourne Linocut, printed in colour inks, from three blocks National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra Gift of Mrs B Niven 1988 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Geelong Art Gallery Little Malop Street Geelong, Victoria Australia 3220 Phone: +61 3 5229 3645
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Women in orange London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
This posting offers a selection of photographs from my new ninety-eight image sequence The sun does not move (2017-2022). To see the whole extended conversation please visit my website. The text below illuminates the rationale for the work…
Two students were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind. “It’s the wind that is really moving,” stated the first one. “No, it is the flag that is moving,” contended the second. A Zen master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. “Neither the flag nor the wind is moving,” he said, “It is MIND that moves.”
The photographs in this sequence meditate on the idea that it is the mind of the viewer that constructs the spaces and meanings of these images. It is MIND that moves. The title of this sequence the sun does not move is attributed to Italian polymath Galileo Galilei.
The photographs are not a contemporary dissection of some archaic concept or hidden historical moment. They just are. Why do I make them? Because I feel impelled to be creative, to explore the spiritual in liminal spaces that I find across the earth. Ultimately, I make them for myself, to illuminate the journey that this soul is on.
With wonder and affection and empathy and feeling for the spaces placed before it. As clear as light is for the ‘mind’s eye’.
With thankx to the few “fellow travellers” for their advice and friendship.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
“To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence.”
Teilhard de Chardin, Seeing 1947
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Brick pattern London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Sliver France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bus depot South London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Gare du Nord Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Blue/White London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tomb effigy V&A Museum, London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Float Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Scar Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Circle, two white lines, four pieces of white and a trail of dark oil Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Couple in light Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The crossing Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Equilibrium Tuileries, Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Leaving Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The sun does not move, it’s your mind that moves… France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Crystallize France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hand in hand France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) We might be otherwise – we might be all Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Every kind of pleasure Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Eiffel Tower II Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Profusion Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ancient and modern V&A Museum, London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two black holes V&A Museum, London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The Wheel of Time V&A Museum, London 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek (Shelley) France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Modernisation Montparnasse, Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The light whose smile kindles the universe Palace of Fontainebleau, France 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The unknown thought I Paris 2017 From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022 Digital colour photograph
While conceptually based (as with much contemporary photography), her bodies of work have an elemental quality to them that keeps them grounded and present even as they reference a historical past, a “felt” (pardon the pun since Ferran uses felt material) response to a present day conundrum.
The new work Birdlike “continues the artist’s practice of photographing female performers as they improvise with lengths of coloured felt … [which] allows for complex and nuanced interpretations” in response to the initial proposition, in this case Ferran’s wish “to summon the return of a small ground-dwelling bird, the Plains wanderer, Pedionomus torquatus, to a place that it vanished from long ago.”
These birds “are surprisingly distinct from any other species on the planet, they are the last family on their evolutionary line,” the only representative of family Pedionomidae and genus Pedionomus. They are threatened by agricultural practices such as cropping and grazing, and so they are at risk of habitat loss, as well as other threats such as flooding, feral predators, pesticide use and their small population size. With their ground-nesting habits, poor flying ability, and the tendency to run rather than fly from predators, the birds become easy prey for the fox. Now listed as a critically endangered species the bird makes a haunting return, a form of speculative reappearance as Ferran puts it, to a place in which it was once common – that of Wiradjuri country, near Narrandera NSW.
These beautiful, conceptual, improvised photographs are not only about the here and now, but are about present and past (a longing for a quixotic past?), about presence and absence… and about death and loss. Every thing contemporary photography is good at – that is, unpicking the threads of history and reassembling them – is here grounded “in the flatness of the landscape, the vastness of the sky and the colours of the lengths of felt the performer is manipulating.” In other words, grounded in light, colour and the red soil of the Australian landscape these re-imagined birds are captured in a fantastical performance / sublime dance (of death).
I love these photographs. They possess a sublime mystery that makes me stop and question how little the human race has learnt and how much we have lost. With species extinction, climate change and ocean pollution ongoing, this is only the beginning of the desecration of Mother Earth.
Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis (all things change, and we change with them).
In Birdlike I aimed to summon the return of a small ground-dwelling bird, the Plains wanderer, Pedionomus torquatus, to a place that it vanished from long ago. Once common over vast areas of southern NSW and Victoria, its existence is now threatened, and birdwatchers like me will go to great lengths to see it just once in their lives. In these photographs, made on Wiradjuri country, near Narrandera NSW, the Plains wanderer makes a form of speculative reappearance, via signs as indirect as the flatness of the landscape, the vastness of the sky and the colours of the lengths of felt the performer is manipulating.
I came to this way of working a few years ago. Its two key components are my collaboration with a performer – here it is Kirsten Packham – and her improvisations with lengths of dyed and painted felt. I choose the performer carefully, as so much depends on her sensitivity to her surroundings and her ability to transmit it through her physical body. With its inherent density, softness and weight, the felt can amplify and enhance her movements and gestures, while exerting a strong presence of its own. I never know what will emerge from these sessions, only that it will be something new, arising out of that moment, that performance and that situation.
Until now I have preferred to work in the familiar environment of a photographic studio. Decamping to the landscape introduced many small and some not-so-small considerations: the texture of the ground underfoot, the ever-changing effects of early morning or late afternoon light, whether it was hot, cold or blowing a gale at any one moment. Small trees crept into the frame and started acting like performers themselves. As the photographs began to accumulate, I thought I could see an out-of-place, almost alien quality emerging. This was unexpected, but on reflection it seems consistent with the displacements that have already happened in this place, as well as with those others that may come in the future.
~ Anne Ferran, 2022
Each image is available in two sizes: 65 x 50cm Ed. of 5 + 2APs and 144 x 104cm Ed. of 3 + 2APs
Synergy. Now’s there’s an interesting word. It means “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organisations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.” It derives from mid 19th century: from Greek sunergos ‘working together’, from sun- ‘together’ + ergon ‘work’. Thus, this glorious exhibition brings together two artists metaphorically “working together” under the Australian sun… even as they are separated by culture, location, time and space.
Their work comes together in a confluence of ideas of approximately equal width – one grounded in stories of family and Country thousands of years old, the artist investigating post-colonial settlement and the industrial world and interpreting Australian Indigenous objects of ritual and culture; the other not so much grounded but playing with Western ideas of pattern and randomness, belonging, and the metaphysical space of the landscape of the Monaro, in the southwest of New South Wales. Both points of view are equally valid and have important things to say about our various relationships to the land (both Indigenous and colonial) and the “creation” of a contemporary Australian national identity.
Both artists use found objects in their work, but as Russell-Cook points out, “I think that what unites the two artists is the shared materials they use, but not a ‘shared-use of materials.’ They are both fascinated by the artistic possibilities of found objects, but they use those materials to tell contrasting stories.” Connelly-Northey uses her experience of living on Country and her gleaning of discarded objects in Country to gather up the threads of her multiple heritages and Aboriginal custodianship of the land to picture – through the merging of organic and inorganic forms – the disenfranchisement of her people but also to celebrate their deep roots in Country. Gascoigne on the other hand is the more ethereal of the two artists, concerned as she is with light, land, spirit of place and the rightness of materials being used. Hers is a very structured and formal art practice grounded in her training in the Japanese art of ikebana and her understanding of Minimalism. Sympathetically, through their individual creativity both artists transmute (to change in form, nature, or substance) the reality of the materials they work with, the raw material of experience transmuted into stories. As Rozentals and Russell-Cook observe, “Both Connelly-Northey and Gascoigne’s work is defined by, and yet transcends, its sense of materiality.”
Two things jar slightly. Connelly-Northey is ‘a bit anxious’ that her Indigenous originality won’t be recognised and that “I’ve worked too hard for people to think I borrowed it all from Rosalie. Our use of corrugated iron is the only thing we have in common.”
Connelly-Northey can have no fear that her Indigenous originality won’t be recognised because every pore of her strong work speaks to her cultural being. Her spiky, brittly astringent, barbed and feathered works take you to Country, posing the viewer uncomfortable questions about “soft” assertions of history and the hard reality of contemporary Indigenous life: metal as string, desecration of sacred sights, barbed wire handles, “hunters and gatherers whose remains have been upturned by settled Australian societies.” She weaves her stories well.
If the second statement has not been taken out of context, it shows a heap of unnecessary defensive aggression by Connelly-Northey towards Gascoigne’s work. It’s a silly, uninformed statement which hints at a lack of confidence in the strength of her own work. Patently, their use of corrugated iron is not the only thing they have in common.
Both speak towards a love of the Australian land whether from an ancient Aboriginal custodianship perspective or from a Western colonial perspective. Both use scavenging, gathering and gleaning in order to recycle the refuse of society in their art making, Connelly-Northey using weaving to bring together that which is disparate; Gascoigne assembling her formal compositions with an attention to order and randomness. Both artists love to move through the space and time of the land, exploring its idiosyncrasies, “disassociating objects from their original function via a system of obsessive collecting and gathering, while simultaneously reflecting their individual experiences of being immersed in the bush environment.” As Rozentals and Russell-Cook comment, “Despite their careers having been separated by time, and coming from vastly different backgrounds, in both artists we see a singular vision that is immediately recognisable, and unmistakably them. And yet there is a sympathetic connection between their practices that is undeniable.”
Conjoined by more than corrugated iron, more than land, air and clan, their common union is the journey of two creative souls on that golden path of life and the connection of those souls to the cosmos.
“Although they are often compared, Gascoigne and Connelly-Northey are separated conceptually and chronologically. For a start, despite being two Australian women artists working with landscape, they never met. This fact is less surprising when one remembers that Connelly-Northey’s practice only matured towards the later stages of Gascoigne’s life. Gascoigne came to prominence late and rapidly, with her first exhibition in 1974, when she was fifty-seven years old, and it was only eight years later that she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. Connelly-Northey started exhibiting seriously in the mid-nineties, shortly before Gascoigne passed away in 1999. However, Connelly-Northey has herself commented on a nuanced relationship to the historical comparison with Gascoigne, pointing out in a recent conversation with Jeremy Eccles that “I’ve worked too hard for people to think I borrowed it all from Rosalie. Our use of corrugated iron is the only thing we have in common.” In some ways, then, the fact they never met may have been fortuitous, with both artists driven to probe their subject matter in distinct and complete ways. …
Surrounding built and natural environments are a recurring prompt for Connelly-Northey, who often merges organic and inorganic forms. She investigates the intricate dilemmas and complexities that arise when two cultures meet. Co-curator Myles Russell-Cook explains that the artist “is using her work to explore the connection between her multiple heritages, as well as her experience living on Country. Take her work On Country, 2017; in that installation, Connelly-Northey explores the relationship between the twin cities of Albury and Wodonga, depicting the river a living being, which she imagines as a snake repurposed out of chicken wire and rusted and industrial scrap metal. It’s a dioramic representation of the landscape, but it is also so embedded with references to Aboriginal custodianship of Country.” As a result, Russell-Cook argues, Connelly-Northey proposes “a really different way of being in Australian landscape.”
Beyond these conceptual and chronological differences, however, Russell-Cook points out that “I think that what unites the two artists is the shared materials they use, but not a ‘shared-use of materials.’ They are both fascinated by the artistic possibilities of found objects, but they use those materials to tell contrasting stories.” As Rozentals notes, for Gascoigne, “the objects had to be just right – what she collected, for instance, with shells. There could be no cracks and they had to be of a particular colour and a particular shine; she would collect the feathers of different species of birds from particular locations.” For Russell-Cook, “At the heart of what Connelly-Northey does, is the act of cleaning up Country: going out and collecting up bits of discarded and refuse machinery, and then working with that to create customary forms. She makes a lot of possum-skin cloaks, narrbong-galang, which are a type of string bag, as well as koolimans (coolamons), lap-laps, and other types of cultural objects … she repurposes them to create a juxtaposition between cultural memories.”
Extract from Rose Vickers. “Found and Gathered: Lorraine Connelly-Northey and Rosalie Gascoigne,” in Artist Profile, Issue 57, 2021 [Online] Cited 01/02/2022
Installation view of the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Tom Ross NGV
Wall text from the exhibition
Entrance to the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Lap Lap (various numbers) (installation views) 2011 Mixed media Murray Art Museum Albury, commissioned 2011 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Animal skins and woven plant fibres are preferred natural resources for making cloaks, belts, skirts and lap laps. Worn by both males and females, lap laps were created for a simple covering of the groin. Also considered a body adornment, the wearing of a lap lap has different significance between Nations. Connelly-Northey constructed these lap laps from hard and harsh materials, such as rusted industrial objects including an axe head, a cut-down rabbit trap, barbed fencing wire along with copper sheeting. Metaphorically, Connelly-Northey’s lap laps both expose and draw attention to the difficult and ‘barbed’ sexual relations thats existed between Aboriginal women and settlers, post-European arrival.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of Rosalie Gascoigne’s Step through (1977 – c. 1979-1980) at the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Step through (installation view) 1977 – c. 1979-1980 Linoleum on plywood on wood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1977, Rosalie Gascoigne commenced making sculptures out of discarded linoleum, which she sourced primarily from rubbish dumps. Step through features torn pieces of floral linoleum glued to plywood which are mounted on wooden blocks, and she used a jigsaw to cut around the shapes. Although linoleum is associated with domestic interiors, for Gascoigne it was about outdoor spaces. This work references untidy vacant blocks in the city, which one might ‘step-through’ as a short cut. Gascoigne’s floor-based works are intended to be experienced from all angles, and the arrangement of the blocks at different heights creates a rhythm, drawing the eyes to wander up and across the installation.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Smoko (installation views) 1984 Weathered wood, dried grass (possibly African lovegrass, Eragrostis curvula) Private collection, Tasmania Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of Rosalie Gascoigne’s Pieces to walk around (1981, foreground) at the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Pieces to walk around (installation view detail) 1981 Saffron thistle sticks (Carthamus lanatus) Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
‘This is a piece for walking around and contemplating. It is about being in the country with its shifting light and shades of grey, its casualness and it prodigality. The viewer’s response to the landscape may differ from mine, but I hope this picture will convey some sense of the countryside that produced it: and that an extra turn or two around the work will induce in the viewer the liberating feeling of being in the open country.’ ~ Rosalie Gascoigne, 1981
Piece to Walk Around is a microcosm of the landscape of the Monaro, in the southwest of New South Wales, where Rosalie Gascoigne lived from 1943. This environment provided the experiences and the materials that shaped her work, found on her journeys through it. Piece to Walk Around refers directly to the experience of moving through the Australian landscape, titled to draw attention to the changing visual effects as one circles the work and the shifting play of light on the natural material.
Comprised of a patchwork of bundles of saffron thistle stalks arranged in 20 squares lying on the floor in alternating directions, it resembles the undulating countryside, the ordering of agriculture and industry, and the mottled effects of light and shadow upon it. The work conveys a sense of the infinite expansiveness and liberation experienced in the country, as manifested in the grid’s open-ended structure to which additional bundles of thistles could theoretically be added or subtracted.
Gascoigne’s work from the early-1980s reveal a sophisticated aesthetic – an engagement with Minimalism’s orderliness and pre-occupation with the grid, and an almost Japanese mixture of formal composition and attention to nature. It was this sense of ‘order with randomness’ which Gascoigne recognised as an essential feature of the Monaro-Canberra region, and which resonates in the ‘careful-careless’ effect of this assemblage. Created only seven years after her first solo show in 1974, this work has a remarkable maturity and balance, achieved through a lifetime of looking at the landscape.
Anonymous text from the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 01/02/2022
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Takeover bid (installation view) 1981 Found window frames, thistle stems Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Takeover bid (installation view detail) 1981 Found window frames, thistle stems Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Balance (installation view) 1984 Weathered plywood Collection of Justin Miller, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Balance (installation view detail) 1984 Weathered plywood Collection of Justin Miller, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Graven image (installation view) 1982 Weathered wood and plywood Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne perceived wood as being distinctly different to the manufactured materials she incorporated in her art, such as tin, aluminium and iron. Wood, like the shells, dried grasses and plants she also worked with across her career, came from nature. Gascoigne gathered wood that had been weathered, including window frames and fence palings, preferring pieces that had been bleached by the sun until they were almost grey in colour. Gascoigne would use wood either as the main component of a composition, or as the backing from another work.
Installation view of Rosalie Gascoigne’s Feathered Fence (1978-1979, foreground) with Winter paddock (1984, back left) and Afternoon (1996, back right) at the exhibition ‘Found and Gathered’ at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Feathered fence (installation view details) 1978-1979 Swan (Cygnus atratus) feathers, galvanised wire mesh, metal win nuts, synthetic polymer paint on wood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the artist, 1994 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Afternoon (installation views) 1996 Painted weathered plywood on backing boards TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC Photos: Marcus Bunyan
One of Rosalie Gascoigne’s late works, Afternoon, created for the exhibition In Place (Out of Time), held at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, comprises twenty-seven panels of weathered plywood organised in a grid-like configuration. Looking out from her vantage point at the top of Mount Stromlo across the countryside, Gascoigne was in awe of the view, the vast sky, and te sense of emptiness. The sections of lights applied white paint and areas of exposed timer of Afternoon are suggestive of passing clouds, and communicates her experiences and enduring recollections of being in the landscape.
As perhaps the most archetypal form of modernist abstraction, the grid has been employed as a formal, compositional device in countless artworks over the past century.
In ‘Grids’ (1979), Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay on the subject, she describes this structural device as: ‘[f]lattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature’.(1) However, for Rosalie Gascoigne, the grid was employed as a compositional method in order to generate highly personal and experiential evocations of natural phenomena in ways which transcended the more rigid, impersonal qualities associated with its geometry.
In one of her late works entitled Afternoon (1996), Gascoigne assembled 27 individual panels of found painted timber in roughly similar sizes in a grid-like formation. At a surface level the serial repetition of components arranged and balanced according to vertical and horizontal axes corresponds to a reductive Minimalist sensibility. However, it is the heavily weathered timber with its faded white paint which infuses the work with a resonant and suggestive force. As the artist traversed the open countryside she deliberately sought out materials that she felt were ‘invested with the spirit of the place’ and capable of recalling ‘the feeling of an actual moment in the landscape’.(2) In this light, the vital materiality of the reclaimed painted timber is not only inscribed with the effects of its prolonged exposure to the elements, but it also speaks directly to Gascoigne’s deep and abiding memories of her experiences in the landscape. In Afternoon, the richly allusive quality of the individual boards is suggestive of passing clouds, evoking the ephemeral and transitory phenomena of nature in continuous metamorphosis. Contemplated as a unified pictorial whole, this humble assemblage of discarded and deteriorating matter assumes a metaphysical dimension bordering on the ineffable, one which resoundingly accords with the artist’s desire to ‘capture the “nothingness” of the countryside, those wide open spaces … the great Unsaid … the silence that often only visual beauty transcends’.(3)
2/ Quoted in Deborah Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape, (exh. cat.), Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997, p. 8.
3/ Ibid, p. 16.
Anonymous text. “Rosalie Gascoigne,” on the Culture Victoria website Nd [Online] Cited 01/02/2022
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Afternoon 1996 Painted weathered plywood on backing boards TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Winter paddock (installation view) 1984 Weathered and painted wood, painted plywood, silver gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae) feathers Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra Acquired 1985 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Winter paddock (installation view detail) 1984 Weathered and painted wood, painted plywood, silver gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae) feathers Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra Acquired 1985 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Found and Gathered: Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey brings attention to the shared materiality at the heart of the practices of Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) and Lorraine Connelly-Northey (b. 1962). Both artists are known for their transformative use of found and discarded objects to create works of art that challenge our understanding of the landscape, and Country.
New Zealand–born Rosalie Gascoigne is recognised for her textural works assembled from items that she had collected, including corrugated iron, feathers, wood and wire, as well as her distinctive wall-mounted pieces formed from retro-reflective road signs and soft-drink cases. Gascoigne moved to Mount Stromlo Observatory, a remote community on the outskirts of Canberra in 1943. Describing the area as being ‘all air, all light, all space, all understatement’, the surrounding region where Gascoigne regularly searched for materials greatly inspired her artistic practice. Her first exhibition was held in 1974 when she was 57 years old, and in 1982, Gascoigne was selected as the inaugural female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.
Lorraine Connelly-Northey was born and raised at Swan Hill in western Victoria, on the traditional lands of the Wamba Wamba people. Much of her work is inspired by her maternal Waradgerie (also known as Wiradjuri) heritage. Connelly-Northey gathers and uses materials often associated with European settlement and industrialisation, and repurposes them into sculptural works that reference traditional weaving techniques and Indigenous cultural objects. Through her work, Connelly-Northey explores the relationship between European and Indigenous ways of being and draws attention to the dynamic and resilient ways that Aboriginal people have been, and continue to be, custodians of Country.
Through a major display of more than 75 wall-based and sculptural works, Found and Gathered highlights each artist’s unique and significant place within Australian art, while also illuminating the sympathetic relationships between their works. Continuing the popular series of paired exhibitions hosted by NGV, this is the first exhibition in this series focused on the work of two women.
Held at The Ian Potter: NGV Australia, this exhibition includes works by both artists held in the NGV Collection as well as works from major public institutions and private collections around Australia.
Text from the NGV Australia website
Wall text from the exhibition
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Magpie bag (installation view) 2002 From the Koolimans and String Bags series Wire mesh, magpie feathers 27.8 × 33.5 × 10.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2003 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Pelican bag (installation view) 2002 From the Koolimans and String Bags series Wire, pelican feathers 31.4 × 29.7 × 10.6cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2003 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Narrbong (String bag) (installation view) 2005 Wire, wire mesh National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2005 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Narrbong (String bag) (installation view) 2005 Wire mesh, feathers 26.5 × 10.5 × 11.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2005 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Narrbong (String bag) (installation view) 2005 Wire, wire mesh, emu feathers 17.8 × 8.7 × 8.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2005 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey reproduces the form of traditional cultural objects with a range of gathered materials found on the side of the road, in illegal rubbish dumps, or decaying on farms. As she explains: ‘We Aboriginal people only take what we need when we need it. I do a lot of travelling to spot something and it can take up a lot of time. The beauty is that I always work from leftovers and if I don’t use a material, I take it back. Also, in the sculpting process, I try to not alter the material too much’.
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) Narrbong (Container) 2005 Iron, emu feathers 30.5 × 34 × 35.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Robert Cirelli, through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2019 Photo: NGV
Found and Gathered
By Beckett Rozentals and Myles Russell-Cook
Found and Gathered: Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey brings to attention the work of two artists, both who are well known for their transformative use of found and discarded objects to create works of art. Lorraine Connelly-Northey is a contemporary artist and Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) woman living on Wamba Wamba Country. Rosalie Gascoigne was born in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and moved to Mount Stromlo Observatory, a remote community in the Australia Capital Territory on the lands of Ngunawal people, in 1943. Both are celebrated as two of Australia’s pioneering contemporary artists.
Gascoigne passed away in 1999 not long after Connelly-Northey first began exhibiting. They never met, and it was not until many years after first showing as an artist that Connelly-Northey became aware of Gascoigne and her work. Despite never meeting, some enduring parallels between their work are evidence of their shared love for the natural sophistication of found objects. Found and Gathered: Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey is the first major exhibition to unite these artists, providing a conversation between artists and across time. Together these inspiring sculptors challenge our understanding of found materials, of seeing the landscape, and of being on Country.
Rosalie Gascoigne is recognised for textural works assembled from collected items, including corrugated iron, wire, feathers and wood, as well as her distinctive wall-mounted pieces formed from split soft-drink cases and brightly coloured yellow and red road signs. Producing work primarily about the landscape, Gascoigne’s art practice stemmed from her appreciation of humble found objects and weathered materials. Gascoigne sourced objects from the Southern Tablelands and the Monaro district, unique natural environments that lie close to Canberra, describing the regions as ‘all air, all light, all space, all understatement’,1 as well as building sites, refuse and recycling centres.
Born in 1962 and raised at Swan Hill in western Victoria, on the traditional lands of the Wamba Wamba people, today Lorraine Connelly-Northey is known for gathering and utilising industrial remnants associated with European settlement. Her practice is founded in the union of her father’s Irish heritage with her mother’s Waradgerie2 heritage. Since 1990, Connelly-Northey’s strong desire to undertake traditional Aboriginal weaving has resulted in a rediscovery of her childhood bush environments of the Mallee and along the Murray River, to learn more about Aboriginal lifestyle prior to European settlement.
Gascoigne commenced classes in the Japanese art of ikebana in 1962, studying under Tokyo-trained Norman Sparnon, who taught the modern Sogetsu school. Ikebana was to significantly inform the basis of her sculptural works. Looking towards line and form over colour, Gascoigne commenced making assemblages in 1964, her first works created from discarded rural machinery. In a similar way, the materials that Connelly-Northey works with are both natural and inorganic, combining items such as discarded wire, metal and scraps of old housing, with wood, shells, feathers and other naturally occurring media. In bringing together disparate materials, Connelly-Northey also uses her work to push audiences to consider the relationships between First Peoples and settler societies, and critiques the ongoing dispossession that is experienced by Aboriginal people throughout Australia.
Gascoigne’s first solo exhibition was held at Macquarie Galleries, Canberra, in 1974 when she was fifty-seven years old. Gascoigne quickly rose to prominence as one of Australia’s most admired artists, and four years later, she was the focus of Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourrne. In 1982, Gascoigne was the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. Following her distinguished career, a retrospective of Gascoigne’s work opened at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in 2008.3
Exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1982 was Gascoigne’s first iron work, Pink window, 1975, an assemblage comprising a window frame and painted corrugated galvanised iron. Gascoigne stated of the work that
The pink and the shape and everything was actually as I found it, and I didn’t do a thing to it. It was only after quite some months I realised it could sit on that window frame. At the time I was on about the emptiness of the Australian landscape, and I kept thinking of a woman stuck out there on the plains standing at her window. She looks out, what does she see? Nothing. It spoke of loneliness or something … and it got happier as time went on. The pink carries it … the pink is very beautiful.4
Across her career, Gascoigne gathered wood, with a preference for pieces that had been weathered, such as fence palings and apiary boxes, as well as a dozen abandoned pink primed window frames, including the one featured in Pink window.
For Connelly-Northey, gathering her materials and ‘cleaning up’ the landscape is one in the same. She describes the act of ‘gathering’, as an act of ‘taking back Country’. Caring for lands and waterways and the importance of preserving culture are two things that were instilled in her from a young age, by both her mother and father, who encouraged her to reuse discarded materials, and taught her handiwork and craft.
Many of Connelly-Northey’s sculptures take the form of classical Aboriginal cultural objects, such as narrbong-gallang (string bags), kooliman-gallang (coolamons), possum-skin cloaks and lap laps. These objects can be rendered simply, such as her rectangular sheets of metal with bent wire handles and her drawings with cable wire, or as elaborately constructed pictorial installations, which combine a variety of mixed media. Connelly-Northey uses the title A Possum Skin Cloak as a way of introducing the cultural stories that appear within her more dioramic installations. Presented for the first time in this exhibition, Connelly-Northey unites four of her most ambitious possum skin cloak installations: A Possum Skin Cloak: Three rivers country, 2010 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney); A Possum Skin cloak: Blackfella road, 2011-2013 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne); A Possum Skin Cloak: On Country, 2017 (Murray Art Museum Albury); and her most recent work, A Possum Skin Cloak: Hunter’s Duck Net, 2021 (courtesy of the artist).
A Possum Skin Cloak: Hunter’s Duck Net depicts a traditional duck net cut from oxidised, corrugated iron, that hangs, framed between two majestic river red gums, one a scarred ‘canoe’ tree. Traditionally, when using duck nets, Aboriginal hunters would throw a boomerang, no doubt a returning one, overhead like a predatory hawk to the startle the ducks, forcing them to fly low and into the net strung across the tributary of the river. The ducks in Connelly-Northey’s work appear animated, some still on the water’s surface, others in mid-flight before being either trapped or escaping the net. The encircling boomerang can be seen at the top of this dioramic scene giving audiences a sense of the action at the moment just before the ducks become ensnared.
Gascoigne is perhaps most well known for her unique assemblages constructed from cut up and rearranged retro-reflective road signs that flash and flicker in the light. The first signs she found were discovered face down in the mud at a roadside dump and, by chance, had already been cut up into squares. Gascoigne, taken by the way the material responded to the light, began salvaging signs no longer in use, collecting examples abandoned on the side of the road and also at road maintenance depots.
Gascoigne’s use of the boldness of the retro-reflective road signs to reveal her ongoing interest in the expressive possibilities of the grid is exemplified in Flash art, 1987. In this work, Gascoigne has explored all aspects of the featured lettering and negative space, creating whole words, as well as including sections and fragments of text. The title references the reflective quality of the material, with Gascoigne stating that: ‘It was the most blasting of the retro-reflectives I ever did, because it was eight feet by eight feet, it had road tar on it, and when it lit up, boy, it was every bushfire’.5 The gestural smears of black tar across the bright yellow surface additionally links the work back to the roads and highways where the signs were once positioned in the landscape.
The customary shapes and forms that appear and reappear throughout Connelly-Northey’s work most often reference the cultural objects of her ancestors, and the stories embedded within Country. Connelly-Northey has dedicated a great deal of her life to researching and exploring how these cultural objects, as well as knowledge associated with Aboriginal custodianship of Country can be reimagined using materials associated with colonisation.
One of Connelly-Northey’s most ambitious installations, A Possum Skin Cloak: On Country, overflows across two adjoining walls. This major diorama features a series of blue, white and brown koolimans representing the twin cities Albury and Wodonga. Albury was originally known by the Waradgerie as Bungambrawatha, meaning Homeland. Wodonga retained its original name, which refers to a type of plant called cumbungi, a bush potato that is also commonly known as bulrush. Within the installation are two canoes placed on the body of the barbed-wire snake that represents the Murray River.
The large possum skin cloak that adjoins to the central installation represents the land of the grass seed people, the Waradgerie. Connelly-Northey has rendered her cloak in rusted iron and sections of pressed tin that were salvaged from Albury’s former town hall ceiling during the renovations of the Murray Art Museum Albury. It is distorted and undulates, creating a sense of folded fabric.
Both Connelly-Northey and Gascoigne’s work is defined by, and yet transcends, its sense of materiality. Gascoigne perceived the wood, shells, feathers and dried grasses that she collected as being markedly different to the industrial objects incorporated in her art, such as tin, aluminium and iron. Instead, these materials came from nature itself. Connelly-Northey views the act of gathering as one of the central inspirations behind her practice. Rather than drawing attention to the differences between collected materials, Connelly-Northey uses traditional weaving, not assemblage, as a way of bringing together that which is disparate.
Gascoigne and Connelly-Northey each dissociate objects from their original function, while simultaneously reflecting their individual experiences of being immersed in the bush environment. Despite their careers having been separated by time, and coming from vastly different backgrounds, in both artists we see a singular vision that is immediately recognisable, and unmistakably them. And yet there is a sympathetic connection between their practices that is undeniable.
Beckett Rozentals and Myles Russell-Cook
Notes
1/ Rosalie Gascoigne, interview with Peter Ross, ABC, 1990.
2/ ‘Waradgerie’, also known as ‘Wiradjuri’, is the artist’s preferred spelling.
4/ Rosalie Gascoigne, interview with Ian North, Canberra, 9 Feb. 1982. Transcript held in National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Canberra, and Rosalie Gascoigne papers, box 21, National Library of Australia, Canberra.
5/ Rosalie Gascoigne quoted in Viki MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Paddington, Sydney, 1998, p. 76.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Country air (installation view) 1977 Painted and corrugated galvanised iron, weathered wood, plywood National Gallery of Australia Purchased 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne began incorporating both sheet and corrugated iron in her work between 1973 and 1974. Gascoigne viewed galvanised iron as a very ‘Australian’ material, and she continued using iron until 1998, experimenting with different weights and colours of the pieces she collected. Country air comprises four heavy, weathered and dented corrugated sheets, which Gascoigne found at the Canberra Brickworks in 1976, and are presented in the state that she found them. Encased in the simple timber frames, the ripples and bent pieces of iron have the illusion of curtains gently blowing in a breeze.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Country air (installation view detail) 1977 Painted and corrugated galvanised iron, weathered wood, plywood National Gallery of Australia Purchased 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Rosalie Gascoigne’s Crop 2 (1982, foreground) and Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s A Possum Skin cloak: Blackfella road (2011-2013, background) at the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Crop 2 (installation views) 1982 Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), galvanised wire, corrugated iron National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Ben Gascoigne AO Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Crop 2 comprises a piece of chicken wire that seems to float over a sheet of galvanised iron. The two are connected by hundreds of dried salsify heads (Tragopogon porrifolius – part of the daisy family), which are stripped of their leaves and threaded through the holes in the wire. The resulting effect is a poetic evocation of cultivated land, and of order imposed on the natural environment. Evident in Crop 2 is the influence of the artist’s training in Sogetsu ikebana, as it is based on a knowing combination of intuition and discipline, and a concentrated search for an essential form.
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak: Blackfella road (installation view) 2011-2013 Rusted iron and tin, fencing and barbed wire, wire National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak: Blackfella road (installation view) 2011-2013 Rusted iron and tin, fencing and barbed wire, wire National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2014 Photo: NGV
Wall text from the exhibition
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak: Blackfella road (installation view details) 2011-2013 Rusted iron and tin, fencing and barbed wire, wire National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak (installation view) 2005-2006 From the Hunter-gatherer series Rusted corrugated iron 119.5 × 131.5 × 5.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2006 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak (installation view) 2005-2006 From the Hunter-gatherer series Steel, Chinese chicken feathers 148.0 × 132.0 × 10.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2006 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lorraine Connelly-Northey (Australian / Waradgerie, b. 1962) A Possum Skin cloak (installation view detail) 2005-2006 From the Hunter-gatherer series Steel, Chinese chicken feathers 148.0 × 132.0 × 10.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Supporters and Patrons of Indigenous Art, 2006 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Rosalie Gascoigne’s Milky way (1982, far left) and her Lantern (1990, third right) and Vintage (1990, second right) at the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Milky way (installation view) 1995 Painted wood TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne moved to Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1943 to marry astronomer Ben Gascoigne, who she had previously met while studying at university in Auckland. The first of their three children was born later that year. It was also in 1943 that Gascoigne started exploring the region on foot, bringing home objects she discovered on her journeys. Milky way is one of just two works Gascoigne produced directly related to an astrological theme. Following his wife’s passing, Ben Gascoigne stated that although Gascoigne had many chances, at no time did she look through te telescopes at the Observatory during they years they lived there.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Lantern (installation view) 1990 Sawn plywood retro-reflective road signs on plywood backing TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Vintage (installation view) 1990 Sawn plywood reflective road signs on composition board Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia showing at right, Rosalie Gascoigne’s Yellow beach (1984) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) (Yellow beach) (installation view) 1984 Scallop shells, painted wood, plywood Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Red beach (installation view) 1984 Wood, nails, shells, paint Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne was an avid shell collector, often focusing on gathering just one type of shell at a time, and storing them in boxes, jars and bowls. Discerning in her selection, she brought home only shells she deemed to be of good colour and with no chips. The Tasmanian scallop shells used in Red beach, (Yellow beach) and (Twenty-five scallop shells) were collected by Gascoigne’s son, Toss, who was living in Hobart at the time. He gathered them from Seven Mile beach, just near Hobart Airport, which the family used to visit.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Red beach (installation view) 1984 Wood, nails, shells, paint Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Twenty-five scallop shells (installation view) c. 1984-1986 Scallop shells, wood Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Twenty-five scallop shells (installation view detail) c. 1984-1986 Scallop shells, wood Private collection, Canberra Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Turn of the tide (installation view) 1983 Painted wood, galvanised iron, shells Private collection, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Turn of the tide (installation view detail) 1983 Painted wood, galvanised iron, shells Private collection, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s On Country (2017) at the exhibition Found and Gathered at The Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The installation On Country overflows onto the adjoining wall with this possum skin cloak. This component on On Country represents the land of the grass seed people, the Waradgerie. The object has been rendered in rusted iron and sections of pressed tin, and the cloak is fringed with white and brown koolimans of varying scales, which were salvaged from Albury’s former town hall ceiling during renovations of the Murray Art Museum Albury. The rusted sheet is distorted and undulates over the entire object creating a sense of folded fabric.
In Inland sea, 1986 (above), sixteen large sheets of corrugated tin hover above the floor in a loose grid arrangement. The grid format unifies the separate parts of the composition, and also enhances the expressive power of different visual elements through repetition. The shapes and lines repeated across the buckling sheets of tin create a powerful sense of the gentle movement of wind or water.
The strong visual rhythms and movement evident in Gascoigne’s compositions are often achieved through the repetition of different visual elements. Step through, 1980 (above), is made from fifteen separate parts, each made from a torn piece of brightly coloured, floral patterned linoleum mounted on a block of wood. The blocks sit at different angles creating different levels within the installation. The spaces between the different parts create a meandering path for the viewer to explore, highlighting the importance of movement through and across space in Gascoigne’s work.
“I was thinking about the unkempt empty blocks in built up city areas … usually covered in rank grasses and flowering weeds … rubble, old tins and bottles. One steps through them gingerly and, with possible snakes in mind, lifts one’s knees high.” ~ Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 48
Text from the NGV Rosalie Gascoigne Education Kit
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Honey flow 1985 Painted and stencilled wood, nails on plywood backing Collection of Justin Miller, Sydney
Some of the most eye-catching and striking board pieces by Rosalie Gascoigne are her compositions created out of distinctive yellow Schweppes soft-drink boxes. In 1985m Gascoigne created her first all-yellow-soft-drink box work, Honey flow, which was the same year she made her first all-yellow retro-reflective work. With both these materials, Gascoigne explored all aspects of the featured lettering and negative space, including whole words, sections of texts and letters, and isolated shapes. She also experimented with different degrees of weathering and shading of her materials.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) All summer long 1996 Sawn painted and stencilled wood from soft-drink boxes Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo
One of Rosalie Gascoigne’s largest wall-base pieces, All summer long was included in an exhibition of her all-yellow works held at the Adelaide Festival in 1996. The title references the long hot summer days experienced in Adelaide and its surrounds – the sunburnt landscape turning yellow. The slivers of black text once read ‘Schweppes screw top 32 fl. oz’, and the areas of split and broken text rise and fall against the expanses of the muted golden tones, drawing the eye steadily across the composition.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Flash art 1987 Tar on reflective synthetic polymer film on wood National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by the Loti and Victor Smorgon Fund, 2010
Created from cut-up road signs that have been rearranged and organised in a grid configuration, the scratched panels and fragments of disconnected text form a striking abstract field of flickering letters against a bright yellow background. This work exemplifies Rosalie Gascoigne’s poetic use of found objects, particularly those containing text. The open structure and repetitive patterns evoke a sense of expansiveness and space, while the weather-beaten surface with gestural smears of tar connects it to a particular idea of place.
Wall text from the exhibition
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Suddenly the lake 1995 FSC-coated plywood formboard, painted galvanised iron sheet, synthetic polymer paint on composition board National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Given by the artist in memory of Michael Lloyd, 1996
Suddenly the lake is based on the view of Lake George at Gearys Gap, New South Wales, seen while driving along the Federal Highway out of Canberra. The parallel hills also reference the work of New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon, who Gascoigne greatly admired. Gascoigne referred to the curved piece of formboard used in the work as her ‘Ellsworth Kelly curve’ as it reminded Gascoigne of American artist Kelly’s Orange curve, 1964-1965 (below), which she had viewed at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923-2015) Orange curve 1964-1965 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Clouds III 1992 Weathered painted composition board on plywood (a-d) 75.4 × 362.2cm (installation) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1993
Evocative of clouds shifting and transforming shape across the horizon, the hand-torn masonite shapes incorporated into Clouds III speak to the transience of natural phenomena. The metaphysical quality Rosalie Gascoigne imbued in everyday materials that had been discarded enabled her to, as she articulated it, ‘capture the “nothingness” of the countryside, those wide-open spaces … the great Unsaid … the silence that often only visual beauty transcends’. Clouds III was originally displayed as part of an installation of three Cloud works at Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, in 1992.
“Three rivers country pays homage to my mother’s knowledge of water on country. The work is my interpretation of an opossum skin cloak with incisions depicting rivers and koolimans. The work represents the land of the ‘Waradgerie Winnowers’, my mother’s tribal boundary, Waradgerie Country.”
Lorraine Connelly-Northey, 2010
In Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s A Possum Skin Cloak: Three rivers country, she challenges conventioanl historical narratives, employing the objects of Western industry to map Waradgerie Country. Waradgerie Country, in central New South Wales, is often referred to as ‘Three rivers country’, because the Wambool (the Macquarie), the Kalari (the Lachlan) and the Murrumbidjeri (Murrumbidgee) rivers course through it. As the artist states: ‘Three rivers country pays homage to my mother’s tribal boundary, Waradgerie Country, along with the peoples known as the grass seed people who created koolimans to winnow their seed for seed cake making’.
Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) country in central New South Wales is vast, with hills in the east, river floodplains and grasslands in the interior and mallee to the west. It is known as Three Rivers Country, as the Murrumbidgee, Kalari (Lachlan) and Wambool (Macquarie) rivers course through it, teeming with life. But as the colonial frontier spread west from Bathurst in the early 1800s, the Three Rivers Country was surveyed and cleared, dissected and demarcated, and kilometres of fencing spread through Waradgerie land like cracks through ice.
In her epic installation Three rivers country Lorraine Connelly-Northey wrestles with this history, employing the objects of western industry to map her country. The materials she uses marry the two foundations of her practice: the heritage of her Waradgerie mother and the heritage of her Irish father. While her father encouraged her use of discarded materials, it was as a young child with her mother that she honed her fine handiwork skills through crocheting and sewing. As Connelly-Northey explains: ‘I set out to ensure that however my art developed it would represent my parents equally.’1
In this work the snaking rivers dominate, shifting from rusted rippled iron and the delicate open weave of agricultural fencing to the familiar lacework of rabbit-proof wire. Tying these forms together are coolamons: oval-shaped bowls that form both the riverbanks and the great, cultivated plains of the interior. The work, says Connelly-Northey, ‘pays homage to my mother’s knowledge of water on country … [and represents] the land of the “Waradgerie Winnowers”.’ But it also speaks to her mother’s life experience, ‘born and raised on the banks of freshwater rivers’ in shanties patch worked together with discarded materials like those Connelly-Northey uses in her works of art.
Notes
1/ Lorraine Connelly-Northey quoted in Julian Bowron, Lorraine Connelly-Northey: Waradgerie weaver, exh. cat., Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Victoria, unpaginated.
2/ Lorraine Connelly-Northey, artist’s statement, in Carly Lane and Franchesca Cubillo (eds.,), unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2012, p. 39.
Anonymous text. “Lorraine Connelly-Northey: Three rivers country, 2010,” on the Museum of Contemporary Art website [Online] Cited 28/12/2021. No longer available online
Aboriginal Nations / Languages in NSW and ACT – Mount Stromlo is in the ACT (Canberra on the map)
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square Corner of Russell and 
Flinders Streets, Melbourne
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2021 From the series Resonance
In 2021, I celebrate 30 years of art practice with the creation of a new website, the first to contain all my bodies of work since 1991 (note: more bodies of work still have to be added between 1996-1999).
My first solo exhibition was in a hair dressing salon in High Street, Prahran, Melbourne in 1991, during my second year of a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art Photography) at RMIT University (formerly Phillip Institute out in Bundoora). Titled Of Magic, Music and Myth it featured black and white medium format photographs of the derelict Regent Theatre and the old Victorian Railway’s Newport Workshops.
The concerns that I had at the time in my art making have remained with me to this day: that is, an investigation into the boundaries between identity, space and environment. Music and “spirit” have always been an abiding influence – the intrinsic music of the world and the spirit of objects, nature, people and the cosmos … in a continuing exploration of spaces and places, using found images and digital and film cameras to record glances, meditations and movement through different environments.
30 years after I started I hope I have learnt a lot about image making … and a lot about myself. I also hope the early bodies of my work are still as valid now as they were when I made them. In the 30 years since I became an artist my concerns have remained constant but as well, my sense of exploration and joy at being creative remains undimmed and an abiding passion.
Now, with ego integrated and the marching of the years I just make art for myself, yes, but the best reason to make art is … for love and for the cosmos. For I believe any energy that we give out to the great beyond is recognised by spirit. Success is fleeting but making art gives energy to creation. We all return to the great beyond, eventually.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Unknown photographer Opening of Marcus Bunyan’s exhibition The Naked Man Fears No Pickpockets at The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop, Melbourne, 1993 showing at left (behind the crowd) the photograph Richmond Steps 1993 1993 Polaroid
Ian Lobb (Australian, b. 1948) Marcus 31/8/92 Taken by Ian Lobb at Phillip [Institute] 1992 Polaroid
Jeff Whitehead (Australian) Marcus in his Fred Perry and Doc Martens with his Mamiya RZ67 on tripod with Pelican case on Jeff’s car, Studley Park, Melbourne 1991-1992 Colour photograph
The only photograph of me with my camera 30 years ago!
Each photograph from a body of work in this posting (below) links to the body of work on my new website. Please click on the photographs to see the work.
Resonancenoun: the power to bring images, feelings, etc. into the mind of the person reading or listening; the images, etc. produced in this way…
A body of work for 2021. Very proud of this sequence…
Taken in heavy overcast conditions with slight rain after a thunderstorm had passed through on my Mamiya RZ67 medium format film camera, at Eagle’s Nest, Bunurong Marine and Coastal Park, Victoria, Australia.
A period of intense seeing and previsualisation.
No cropping, all full frame photographs. The colours are as the camera saw them.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ma mère 1994 Gelatin silver print
Earlier in my life I believed that identity was always fluid, always in flux. These photographs reflect that belief.
Now as I get older, this belief has changed.
Identity is always steady – at a certain level – and that the old adage to know ones-self is still the greatest challenge. And that this knowledge brings a core that is consistent.
The fluidity of self-knowledge disappears when attention is sharpened.
Marcus Bunyan 2021
I am scanning my medium format Mamiya RZ67 negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Rembrandt thinking) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The conversation 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Pope folded) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Pope unfolded) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The Angelus, New R, 1892 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Thy Kingdom Come 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Purity 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Whistler’s mother (looking out to sea) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Holbein’s Happiness 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Sweet heart with leaves) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Windows at 63aa 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Urban abstraction (for Max) 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Between the breath and the silence 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Shame Fraser 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Port Melbourne to Port of Melbourne 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Out back 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (pear on black) 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Pear I 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Pear II 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract I 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract II 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude in sunlight 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract III 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract IIII 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract V 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract VI 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Question mark 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Four lines and two trestles 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Four tyres 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (two cracks) 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (plank) 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creatures) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creatures) 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel I 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel II 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel III 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel IIII 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The structure and fabric of existence 1 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Passionfruit² 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Passionfruit² 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The structure and fabric of existence 2 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 1 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 2 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 3 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Case Tractor – 1925 – 1996 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fordson Tractor 1922 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hart Parr 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) John Deere Tractor c. 1925 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Lanz Bulldog Tractor 1930 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) McCormick Deering Tractor c. 1928 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fighter 1 1994-96 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fighter 2 1994-96 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two men and a ute 1994-95 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Plume (X marks the spot) 1995 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Lumbe, Blacksmith, Undertaker 1995 Gelatin silver print
![Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers' Gallery]' c. 1975-1980](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/leiss-william-heimerman2-web.jpg "Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers' Gallery]' c. 1975-1980")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Untitled [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]' c. 1910](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/atgets-work-room-web1.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Untitled [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]' c. 1910")
![Carol Jerrems. 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]' c. 1975-1980](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/jerrems-william-heimerman-ian-lobb-web.jpg "Carol Jerrems. 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]' c. 1975-1980")
![Ian Lobb (Australian, b. 1948) 'Marcus 31/8/92 Taken by Ian Lobb at Phillip [Institute]' 1992](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ian-lobb-marcus-phillip-institute-1992.jpg "Ian Lobb (Australian, b. 1948) 'Marcus 31/8/92 Taken by Ian Lobb at Phillip [Institute]' 1992")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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