It has been going for months, but this week the inquiry into the grants system in New South Wales finally turned its attention to the arts. At a hearing in Sydney, six leading arts professionals told the inquiry about underfunding, uncertainty and sector-wide frustration with lack of transparency. Full story over on ArtsHub.
Author: janeosullivan
Family Practice
Having children can radically alter an artist’s practice. I spoke to Casey Jenkins, Lucreccia Quintanilla and Marikit Santiago about family and practice – and why they decided to make work with their kids – for this longform feature in Art Guide Issue 129, Jan/Feb 2021.
Overlapping Magisteria
Overlapping Magisteria takes its name from the idea that science and religion are entirely separate, non-overlapping realms of enquiry – one about material facts, the other about immaterial values. While the exhibition is not so much about religion, it does offer a counterargument to that kind of compartmentalised thinking by presenting five artists who blend multiple ways of sensing, experiencing and understanding the world. Full story over on Art Guide.
Ngaliya Diyam
The new Granville Centre Art Gallery in western Sydney opens this month with a resounding statement of First Nations strength and solidarity. Ngaliya Diyam focuses on the local community and presents First Nations artists from, or living on, Darug country. Full story in Art Guide.
Pieces of Spaces
Flux and change prevail in Pieces of Spaces and Other Places, a collaborative exhibition project by Carla Cescon and Tina Havelock Stevens. The idea of fatalism is handled in different ways: Cescon through tarot and symbolism, and Havelock Stevens through forces of nature.
Full review over on Running Dog.
Piinpi
“The timing is right,” says curator Shonae Hobson about the current explosion in contemporary Indigenous fashion. “And the timing is right because this space is really being led by First Nations people.”
Hobson has brought together 70 artists from across Australia for Piinpi at Bendigo Art Gallery. The survey is a testament to the breadth and diversity of this space right now, and includes wearable art and sculpture, runway fashion, streetwear, textile design, jewellery and more. If it’s a broad exhibition, that’s part of the point.
One of the artists is Maree Clarke, who has a three-decade practice across body adornment, photography, lenticular prints, sculpture and major public art commissions. “Still, in 2020, when you say you’re an artist, people say ‘oh, do you do dot paintings?’” she says. “I just roll my eyes.”
Full story in the September/October 2020 issue of Art Guide.
Rhonda and Susannah Hamlyn
Rhonda Hamlyn’s decade-long collaboration with her mother Susannah (Beatrice) Hamlyn was intense, involving long hours at home together making layered, densely embroidered textiles. They called these works patterned rugs, and later also wall hangings, but the suggestion of soft furnishings was misleading.
They were not entirely abstract or representational, but instead offered slow synaesthetic meditations on language, meaning, sensation and experience.
Their works were not easy to categorise. Rhonda Hamlyn (1944–2015) and Susannah Hamlyn (1916–1994) began their collaboration in the early 1980s, at a time when clear pigeonholes existed for women’s textile work. Their rugs drew on handiwork traditions, shared knowledge and collaborative practice, but did not slot easily into these narratives.
Full story in the Spring 2020 issue of Art Monthly.
