Author: janeosullivan

Piinpi

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“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

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Rhonda and Susannah Hamlyn in Art Monthly

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.

Lindy Lee

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Lindy Lee in Vault magazine

“Repetition, the photograph, the copy—all of those were methods to find a deeper connection,” says Lindy Lee, reflecting on the threads running through her diverse 35-year practice. In that time, she has worked with photocopies, photographs, ink, wax, bronze, paper, steel and fire. She has developed a vivid and symbolic language of colour and then moved towards somethings much more austere. “To me, it’s this continuous journey,” she says. Continue reading “Lindy Lee” →

Gregory Hodge

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Gregory Hodge in Sullivan+Strumpf magazinee

“I have a real love of the history of painting but then, in places like the Louvre, there are these little cornices that are beautiful and amazing, and those decorative elements affect the decisions I make in the studio,” says Gregory Hodge about the textures of Paris. Continue reading “Gregory Hodge” →

Kitchen creations

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Kitchen creations in Art Guide

This was a fun one! I got to speak to three amazing artists, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Tai Snaith and James Tylor, about the connections between art and cooking in their practices, and what they’ve been cooking during iso. Read the full story and find their recipes over on Art Guide.

Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu

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Nyapanyapa in Art Guide

Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu’s practice defies easy categorisation. The Yolŋu artist is known primarily for her bark paintings but she has also made ghostly fields of larrakitj, drawn on acetate, worked in multimedia, recycled materials and sculpted animals from beach hibiscus. Continue reading “Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu” →