I am a lonely painter...

That's a line from a Joni Mitchell song, in case you thought I was opening up about my personal problems... I'm working on some paintings at the moment, so for lack of anything more immediate, I thought I'd show some of my paintings from the past. Mostly I work in a collage style, i.e. I steal other people's images! For the latest works I'm also going for texture, building up the surface with lots of layers of paint, but sanding it down to get a really flat surface with none of the canvas showing. Some of them are on wood panels, but they'll have the same surface. The works I'm showing today are just the ones that I have at hand and that are webready. At some point in the future I'll add others. It seems I have an endless supply of potential future posts!

This first one is a work I made when I lived in Japan. I think I had just discovered the work of Juan Davila. I was going for pop kitsch with art-historical references. It's called La Joconde aux Croix. The title refers to Fernand Leger's La Joconde aux Clefs, which, if you look at the linked image, is the Mona Lisa with keys. I didn't have any keys, but I had some crosses... The work I was making at the time involved collaging images or items with the (acrylic) paint. The central image of the Mona Lisas is a Warhol work sewn on to the canvas, along with the crucifixes.

This work is a much later painting, or series of paintings. Each dog is painted on a separate panel. This was made for a dog-themed show at PCL Exhibitionists in 2000. I had moved from having a lot of different images crowded together, to one image per panel. I think it's called Let Slip the Dogs of War. The person who has done all my art photographing for the past 7 or 8 years, Adrian Cook, has this work. He also commissioned a similar painting of bunnies which I did with blue paint on white backgrounds. That work has been built up in layers, then sanded back. I wanted it to look a child's bedroom cupboard that had been used for years and was showing signs of age. Do children still have cupboards like that? I have photos of those paintings, too, but not handy.


This was from a time when I was trying to get a lot of texture in paintings. It started off as a mainly-blue painting, with some white bits throughout. It had 'nausea' written in the flat area in the bottom right quadrant. The title is still Nausea, but I decided to cover the whole thing in graphite to emphasize the texture and not the colour. It's mostly acrylic, but mixed media with graphite.This is probably from 2000 or thereabouts.


This one was also from my time in Japan, I think. Well, I started it there, and finished it when I moved to Sydney. It has since been covered over and sanded and used for another work. I was never very happy with it. A lot of collage elements again. The top originally had the purple text that covers the bottom showing, but it got covered up. I think I didn't like that it was so messy and chaotic. Most of my work starts off that way, then gradually becomes ordered and neat. The latest series is going back to this use of background text and foreground painted object, but with the multi-panel simplicity. Even though I don't like some of my early work, I'm showing it to show the evolution of my work.

Incubate Interview

Earlier this week I had an interview for an article for Incubate magazine, the in-house magazine for COFA. The interviewer was the always fabulous Dominique Angeloro, half of artist duo Soda_Jerk, and former art reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald (amongst other art-related activities).

The interview covered my involvement in the Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, and my soon-to-be-released book, two topics I’m waiting for the right moment to write about here, as well as my art practice in general. I had suggested the article to the editors of the magazine because of the involvement of a number of COFA graduates and staff in this year’s biennial. The magazine is part of the marketing of COFA to the community by showing the activities of alumni, current students, and staff. There’s always a slight frisson of anxiety being interviewed because I have no control over the final result. One doesn’t know what the writer is going to make of the hour of conversation, or how she’ll distill that into 500-1000 words. Not that I think I’m going to be attacked in print or anything, but interpretation of a conversation is obviously as subjective as interpretation of an artwork. Anyway, in lieu of any other art-related activities this week, I thought I’d post some of my previous press forays.

This first one was in The Daily Telegraph. I know I didn't have very complimentary things to say about the Tele in a previous post, but that's only when I'm not in it... This was about my search for socks from people for an installation for my MFA. The article was by Elizabeth Fortescue, Oct. 1., 2004.

This one was in TheHerald Sun , a Melbourne newspaper, when I had a show at MARS Gallery in 2005. It's by Harbant Gill, Mar. 21.


This one was before my show at MARS had opened. The model is wearing the kimono that was part of the installation. It's also from The Herald Sun, Mar. 9, but no writer listed.


This is from Textile Fibre Forum magazine, and was written by Richard Allport. It was a look at some people involved with the COFA Textile department. My work is the hair weaving at the top of the page. This is also from 2005.


I can't tell if these are large enough to read. Would anyone be reading them anyway? I can provide a transcript if anyone is really keen. I also have a number of other articles, but not digitized and handy. If there's a clamour for them, or if I'm having a slow news week, then they'll make an appearance!

WAP winner

Okay, they've now posted the winner of the Waverley Art Prize on their website. Have a look... Tell me I'm not wrong in saying that it's hideous! Maybe that's a bit harsh, but do you think it's worth $5000? This photo is her entry photo (all entrants submitted images on disc). She's just clipped it up with bulldog clips and sent it off and pocketed $5000 thankyou very much. She didn't even crop the image to make it look a little better! Oh, the injustice!

And scroll down to look at some of the other winning entries. I like the image with the finger holding the artwork. And the winner of the oils which isn't even centred, let alone cropped. It's enough to make me weep with despair...

Waverley Art Prize Results

Well, I didn't win the Open Prize for this competition. Nor did I win one of the 7 $1000 prizes. Nor did I get one of the 10 Highly Commendeds. Or even a Commended. My work was in the same room as the winning works... I knew I wouldn't be winning anything, because they phone the winners during the day to see if they'll be at the opening or not. They also have all the winning works on the wall that faces the door in the main exhibition room (even though they don't announce the winners for an hour into the opening). Mine was on the same wall as the door. I went to the opening anyway to see what the competition was like.

There was some really great work there, but also a lot of what looks like Sunday painter art. No images of this year's winners yet, but have a look at last year's winners and see what I mean. The winner of the Open prize this year wasn't much better than the top one from last year. It looked like a drawing from an art class where the teacher has arranged a still life and this student has drawn it quickly and roughly. I just don't get the judges' decision. I'm not saying I should have won (I'm also not saying I shouldn't have won!), but there were at least 25 works there that were better executed, more imaginative, and more aesthetically pleasing in almost every way! Maybe I'm just really out of touch with contemporary taste. Or are my grapes, as they say, sour?

Waverley Art Prize

This Wednesday, July 9, is the opening of the Waverley Art Prize exhibition. It's a small local prize, but there is about $12,000 in prizes up for grabs. The Archibald Prize offers $50,000 to the winner, but I have a better chance of winning this one! Actually, it's probably easier to get into this final, but there are more finalists, so harder to win the prizes. The list of finalists is here. I entered another chopstick work from the Everything Ends series. I've been working on this series for about 8 years now, and produce something new every couple of years. I finished this one earlier in the year for the Praxis show at Kudos. The opening is from 6:00 - 8:00 at the Waverley-Woollahra Arts Centre. 138 Bondi Rd, Bondi. The exhibition continues until Sunday July 13, every day 10:00 - 4:00.


This was the first work I made in this series. It was for an undergraduate sculpture project. I don't remember what the brief was, but my inspiration was scaffolding on building sites. I equated this with the buildings themselves, and later, to the skeletons of buildings. It was about 30cm high, and i placed it under a concrete walkway. It was meant to evoke a miniature city, abandoned, partly destroyed.




I pretty much destroyed the above work in taking it down. Some of the elements were still intact. I then incorporated all the elements, and all the other bits of chopsticks into this cube below. This shot is from a finalists' exhibition for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Scholarship (2000?), which I didn't win. Always the bridesmaid... It's on a square of sand. It's very rough and ready, and was just slightly too large to be practical to store and handle. So I broke it up, too.
After that the works became more contained and controlled, more rigidly geometric and staying within the boundaries. I contrasted the two below, where the one on the left is a simple grid, and the other is the same anarchic, chaotic style as the one above.


It looks similar to the new one at the top, but this one has pieces going through the middle, and the joins aren't tied together. The new one was actually made from the one on the left above. After making a number of other works, I decided that I didn't like the simplicity and openness of it, so I covered the surface with a random pattern of pieces. The one below (the same work as on the right above) still maintains right angles, even though they're no longer ordered and regular like the one on the left. The new work has every join tied together with string and acrylic binder medium for extra strength. All the new works have been tied together.

Those artworld people!

And I thought the whole Bill Henson kerfuffle had blown over! Apparently not. Now there's a new bit of kiddie porn exciting the masses. There are 100+ articles on Google at the time of writing. The Daily Telegraph,with usual overreaction, (for non-Sydney residents, The Daily Telegraph is a tabloid rag, barely a newspaper at all. It's like Who magazine on newsprint) has written:"IF THE community can't get "hysterical" about naked pictures of a 13-year-old, what can it get hysterical about?"
Ummm, how about children who die through physical neglect by their parents? How about poverty in the developing world? How about abuse of political power? There seem to be a lot more important issues to get "hysterical" about. Of course I have to wonder why "the community" needs to get hysterical about anything.

The Telegraph continues: "But, remarkably, even after the furore over the Bill Henson photographs has subsided, the arts community still doesn't get it." No, the art community doesn't get it because, you may have noticed, the art community rarely gets hysterical about things, discusses things rationally, and accepts a plurality of opinion on subjects such as this. And what is there to "get" on this subject? The Telegraph's opinion? My opinion is, 'Yes, I can see that you feel strongly about this, but why should I accommodate myself to your position?" Surely one (sorry Patti!) could suggest that "remarkably , even after the furore over the Bill Henson photographs has subsided, the non-arts community still doesn't get it." I think it's a bit like atheists not "getting" the reaction of Muslims to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, or not understanding the opposition by some Christians to the teaching of Evolution in schools in America. It's just not rational!

I also think that anyone who looks at the picture of the six-year-old girl on the cover of Art Monthly Australia (the reason for the latest excitement - I forgot to mention that above!) and thinks that it is sexual (and all the images for the news articles seem to have been censored with a big black square) really needs to examine their own feelings about children and sexuality. My dime-store psychoanalysis would suggest that these people have repressed sexual desires for children and are therefore attempting to suppress any pictures of naked children to avoid having to confront their own desires. I found an interesting article in the New Statesman about the screening of adults to work with children, how hugging or any touching is becoming anathema for those who work with children, and what this is doing to us as a society.

I know the point of this blog was to talk about my own art, but the chance to have one's say is seductive and addictive! I've had many letters to The Sydney Morning Herald rejected, and now's my chance to have my say!

Weighing in on the Bill Henson brouhaha

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since the last post. This blogging thing is going to be harder than I thought! Who has the time for this sort of thing? I’m limiting myself to writing about my art here. Of course I’m not going to have enough to write about if I only write about what I’m doing now (hence the entry on my Helen Lempriere application, rather than, say, getting into the exhibition, or actually winning the scholarship!), so I’m also going to be writing about past work, just so I can have images of my old stuff here. I used to have a website, but it was never updated, so at least this blog will have up-to-date info and images, but can also be a retrospective look at my art, too.

I thought for this post I’d weigh in on the Bill Henson controversy. For non-Sydney readers, it was a storm in a teacup that washed through the media and has since subsided. I did see a programme about it on SBS’ Insight last week, so thought I’d use it as an excuse to write about some of my own work in this area from the past! The controversy was sparked by right-wing nut job (or faux right-wing nut job - I think she just pretends for the money) Miranda Devine’s column on May 22. I’ve been interested in this debate for a couple of years because people get so worked up. There are clearly unconscious and irrational fears at work. I’m sure children have a better chance of going to Europe and being killed by a terrorist than they do of being molested (to paraphrase a famously dodgy statistic).

My work Picture This was created for a show called Risque at Kudos Gallery in 2001. I wanted to use these descriptions of pornography to make people have an image in their minds that they would not normally have, or to confront pornography that they would not normally see. The descriptions come from the President’s Commission on Pornography and Obscenity. The commissioners went out and bought pornography, then described it in the final report. I really can’t imagine this could happen today. I’m sure there’d be outrage that taxpayers’ money is used to buy pornography, and then to have it available for anyone to read about! I think the interesting thing about Henson’s work is not the aesthetic qualities or the allusion to classical art, or whatever else someone might use to justify the photos of naked children, but the fact that it’s provoking the kind of debate it has: Are children, or their parents on their behalf, able to properly consent to having these photos taken? Are naked photos of children (or adults for that matter) necessarily pornographic? Does looking at such photos lead to people molesting children? Should such images be banned? How do we as a society think about and deal with children’s sexuality?

Unfortunately people like Hetty “Won’t somebody think of the children?” Johnston of Bravehearts seem blinded by their own psychodramas that they’ve lost all ability to think rationally on the issue. The media certainly doesn’t help, pouring petrol onto these minor blazes that flare up. Another work that I made for a Kudos show is Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Boys So Different, So Appealing? (of course referencing the title of Richard Hamilton’s famous collage)

It consists of close-up shots of Japanese students I knew when I lived in Japan. There is nothing sexual about the photos, just snapshots, but the title instantly evokes paedophilic desire. The work was meant to draw attention to the way that paedophiles (or indeed any paraphiliacs) can use images for purposes other than those for which they were intended (for example, collecting advertisements of children in pyjamas, or as David Marr mentioned on Insight, foot fetishists watching The Sound of Music for the scenes where the von Trapps run around in bare feet!). (See the full series here)

So, in regard to the Bill Henson works, I think that yes, they can be seen as sexualised images of children, but so what? There are also many other meanings that people can bring to them, and none of those readings affect the children in the photos. They weren’t coerced into being photographed, or forced to do anything they didn’t want to do. They’re not shown in any compromising positions, they’re just naked. I would never take similar photos because it seems like far too much trouble - too many people to deal with, too many legal issues, so many possibilities for well-meaning-but-ignorant people to cause a fuss.

Paedophiles looking for legal photos of naked children should shop in art stores. There are books full of them. Check out Larry Clark; Gilbert and George’s ‘80s works featuring disaffected East-End yoof;Edward Weston’s photos of his son Neil; Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of the naked little boy on the chair (JesseMcBride) , or the little girl with no underpants; Sally Mann’s photos of her kids; Jock Sturges’ photos, etc. Hetty Johnston and those like her have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to rid the world of such images.