Helen Crawford
Resident Artist
Chong Siew Ying
Ahmad Osni Peii
Indonesian sculptor Ahmad Osni Peii was resident at Rimbun Dahan for 6 months in ’99 when he returned to Southeast Asia after living in the States for 40 years.
While he was at Rimbun Dahan, he embarked on the creation of several large-scale outdoor sculptures in painted aluminium, which were produced with the help of a team at a studio off-site.
“…This see-through spatio-shell structure is not mathematically formulated as many may assume. It is simply an intuitive discovery, so to speak, in mathematical sense for I believe all forms created knowingly or unknowingly are not absent of judiciously purposeful plan unless unconsciously or deliberately done, in other words unaccountably playful, cynical or whimsical. This is not so with my work. It is a medium discovered, precise and fit, I think, for the theme of ‘formal allegory’, a visual suggestion on harmonious relationship, a Gestalt, between ‘things’ as a whole in unity, rhythm, order, contrast, balance, proportion, to name a few, just as one would reflect on or appreciate the unarbitrary composition of all immeasurably diverse living things interactively created in nature…”
Sakinah (above and below) was the first large outdoor sculpture by resident artist Ahmad Osni Peii to be installed at Rimbun Dahan, in the Bulatan Plong in 1999. Two other pieces — Geliat Nusantara (red piece, below) and Gelang Serai (white piece, below) — were installed in 2005. All three are made of painted aluminium.
Adam Aitken
Australian poet Adam Aitken undertook an Asialink Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1998. Adam spent his residency working on his poetry and researching Malaysian cabaret. The resulting collection, Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles, was published to critical acclaim by Brandl and Schlesinger.
During his residency, he also wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition of fellow Asialink artist Matt Calvert.
Adam Aitken is a NSW based poet and fiction writer who has had two books of poetry published, Letter to Marco Polo and In One House. He was also the associate editor of Australian literary journal HEAT.
View the artist’s website: adamaitken.wordpress.com
Mutalib Mann
Mutalib Mann was the Malaysian resident artist of the Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1998. The exhibition of his works took place in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan from 28 August to 27 September 1998.
Mutalib Mann is an artist based in London, born in Alor Setar, Malaysia. He was trained at The MARA University of Technology, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and The London College of Printing in Graphic Design.
Mathew Calvert
Tasmanian sculptor Mathew Calvert was an Asialink resident artist at Rimbun Dahan in 1998.
Curriculum Vitae
Born Smithton Tasmania, 1969
Exhibition
1997 Poets and Painters, Dick Betts Gallery, Hobart
1996 Survivability, Hobart GPO
Pulp, Burnie, Regional Art Gallery
1995 Bubble Rap, M&B Motors, New Cross, London
1994 Selected Works from the 1993 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, Adelaide
1993 Group 16 Exhibition, Long Gallery, Hobart
1991 National Student Exhibition, Exhibition Building, Melbourne
1990 Insitu Fine Arts Gallery, University of Tasmania
Residencies
1998 Asialink Rimbun Dahan Malaysia
1994 McCulloch Studio, Cite International des Arts, Paris
Commmissions
1997 Art for Public Buildings Scheme, TAFE Training Facility Prince of Wales Bay, Hobart
1991 Installation for Fletcher Construction at the ANZ Centre, Hobart
Scholarships and Awards
1992 Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
Dean’s Role of Honour, University of Tasmania
Education
1995 MA Goldsmith’s College, University of London
1993 Graduated with Honours (First Class)
1994 1992 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania
Notes on the Asialink Rimbun Dahan Residency Exhibition
by Adam Aitken
Kuang Malaysia
28th August to 27 September 1998
In the six months Tasmanian sculptor Mathew Calvert has resided at Rimbun Dahan, his glass monoliths have attracted the attention of his fellow artists and visitor alike. Within the Balinese Hindu-inspired water temple surroundings of Rimbun Dahan’s guest-house studio, these pieces are quasi-architectural forms which reflect the on-going modernist desire for pure clean forms, that comment upon eclectic post-modernity and the trace of Asian ideals inherent in their setting.
Each sculpture is composed of up to a thousand pieces of broken plate glass formerly used as building material which Calvert salvaged from a nearby kampung dump (below). These pieces tell the story of their own salvation from the melancholy fate of rejected industrial materials. Each piece extends our perceptions of how these materials can be used and viewed, as objects with intelligence and meanings they would not have enjoyed had they fulfilled their original utilitarian purpose as glass for high rise.
Each piece attests to the artist’s ritual of collection, cleaning and sorting the colour and thickness of each single shard before its actual placement. Such a process requires the will to discipline the chaos of the dump, to arrest the process of decay, to rescue perfectly usable material from industry’s unthinking wastage. Each piece yearns to be something spiritually complete, an ideal which an industrialising landscape struggles to realise.
From the detritus of a boom gone bust Calvert has transformed the ugliness of broken 10 millimetre plate glass into things conventionally beautiful on the outside, but haunting and threatening inside, a solid oblong and two “sarcophagi’. Each piece seems to mourn at the unmarked grave of an industrial disaster. Over the largest piece hangs a billboard sized back lit photograph of a landmark familiar to the KL commuter, a large abandoned skeleton of what could have been just another condominium. Its bare stairwells and lack of cladding reveal the emptiness of real-estate denuded of its “face”, its loss of status as well as the evidence of KL’s suddenly arrested modernisation. Through its empty floors one can view bare laterite hills and the transient outlands of the shabby city fringe. The building has colonised what was once a useful, perhaps picturesque space with its own semi-rural complexities of people, space, work and environment.
This juxtaposition of image and glass pike is a reflexive gesture and a reanalysis of the urban environment, as well as a poignant commentary on the history of all overreaching development. A wan fluorescence lights this edifice t0 failed vision, each piece emanating the same milky-white pallor of transience, decay, vacancy. Twentieth century modernity seemed to promise a simple mode of being, but is this an empty promise after all, a conceptual dead end?
The material to a certain extent has dictated Calvert’s choice of form, and every shard has been placed carefully to achieve a layer-cake of fractured light and resonance. Through judicious placement of each shard, Calvert has captured both the beauty and the ugliness of glass, which lies in its unpredictable nature: two perfectly flat surfaces, but the edge can be either ruler-straight, or jagged and chaotic depending how the sheet breaks.
Like Petronas Towers, the viewer is astonished at the weighty impact of something so abstract, single minded, and virtually colourless. But Calvert’s pieces are ironic commentaries on ideals of giantism, purity and perfection. Like the generic office tower of curtain glass the surfaces of these sculptures shine with autonomy, and a power expressed through total dominance of medium.
Most of the shards have had minimal but intensive handling, with no intentional breakage. The edges of each fragment are aligned in perpendiculars, each a brick in the wall that might go on forever if the artist had given full rein to his obsession. In “Recovery” (right), the viewer, from a confident position of privilege, seems to be walking around disciplined walls of glass, only to find this complacency shaken on looking down into a menacing shark’s mouth of broken edges.
Glass is fragile yet potentially dangerous to the flesh. Each piece says, “come and view me, but keep your distance!”
The paradox of glass is the fact that it is both solid and transparent, and each piece exploits this double identity. There are no false bottoms or hollow spaces in “Platform” yet the sarcophagus hints at containing the organic trace of life (below). But what life? Does the oblong bury a living thin, an essence of life? Like Narcissus, we gaze from Rimbun Dahan’s soft watery surrounding, we run aground o the force of these surfaces. The viewer apprehends the work as a sublime force, both beautiful and terrifying; it promises everlasting life for itself, more permanent and immutable than us. It refers to a technological future which is frightening, because the abandoned building signifies the incompletion of human creativity and our loss over control. The abandoned structure will never know the warmth and familiarity of human activity, and is haunted by the disquietude of ghosts.
Ross Wolfe, director of the Samstag Program wrote of Calvert’s early work as being in the nature of “a barricade which assaults and offends the aesthetic, rendering itself unapproachable through gross physical attributes alone. It’s spirit is open. As art, it is naked and vulnerable” (Samstag catalogue 1994). In this installation Calvert has disciplined his earlier sense of violence and grossness. Perhaps these pieces carry a new subliminal message: that meaning lies beyond cliches of economic rationalism. It’s wastefulness, is revealed, when the “used” must pay as much as the user in terms of lost space, lost greenery and blotted out horizons. One question Calvert’s work asks is whether the broken and rejected junk of a throw-away culture can be redeemed. Calvert’s pieces make us look at the piece itself, and contemplate the labour that makes it a thing in itself with its own aesthetic value, but they also express the human yearning for permanence. It is also art that risk ugliness and generates a slight feeling of repulsion and alienation one much feel when confronted by effective political art. These sculptures, born of the scrap heap, are perhaps windows, or more mysteriously looking-glasses for those who can read their destiny, but all they reveal is the law of their own grim presence, one a lot less illusory and therefore more strikingly truthful than the vision of “development” has every quite promised.
Adam Aitken has published two books of poetry, he is associate editor of “HEAT”, the Australian literary journal and was the Asialink Writer in Residency at Rimbun Dahan during Matt Calvert’s residency.
This is an Asialink project assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia council, its funding and advisory body; Arts Tasmania and the Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur.
Stephen Turpie
Stephen Turpie was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1998.
Stephen’s is currently a lecturer of painting and drawing at LaTrobe University, Bendigo, and his qualifications include DipArt (Painting-VCA), GradDipFine Art (VCA), MVA (RMIT). Stephen has a range of interests that include sculpture, installations and time-based work along with his continuing practice as a painter. His research involves major phenomenological questions about the self, visual analogy and the engineered world, expressed in a metaphorical and sybolic format. Stephen Turpie has undertaken numerous other residencies, including at Green Street Studios , New York (1986) and Padiès Château , Lempaut, France (2008).
Catalogue Essay
In these new works, Stephen Turpie explores the evasive qualities of appearances; the ambiguity of things which have not come into sharp focus, but are demanding of our attention and ‘as through a glass darkly’ we try to make sense. Fusing imagery from biology, construction and abstract thought (mathematics, physics and philosophy) he traverses the natural and cultural worlds. This symbolic play in the metaphorical landscape resonates with an emotional intensity gained only from personal and ontological inquiry.
Turpie’s visual themes are influence by a diverse array of artists and works: from Joseph Beuys’ conceptual investigations into the fundamental principles of energy and the effects of both natural forces and of art, to Jean Miro’s symbolic innovations and Ken Whisson’s abstract treatment of the landscape.
The formal concerns of past works in painting, as well as sculpture and performance, recur again in this new series. His painted forms display the solidity and presence of three dimensional objects which are poised in ambiguous landscapes and receding intimate spaces. These arrangements are reminiscent of Turpie’s sculptural works of over a decade and a half ago in which clusters of discarded objects were delicately balanced in small museum boxes. These curious objects were the decaying leftovers of another time whose concealed histories conferred a certain dignity to their presence, the significance of which remained quietly elusive.
Stephen Turpie’s work contemplates ancient modes of thought alongside modern and contemporary ideas which reflect something of the all-at-once attempts to render life and appearances in theoretical guises. The use of the landscape genre is a significant choice for this subject as the natural cycles and biological processes have been commonly employed as metaphors for psychological and social phenomena in both ancient and contemporary descriptions. Turpie’s images are carefully constructed between the borders of figuration and abstraction, as such, his ‘figures’ are neither fixed in meaning nor anchored in the landscapes over which they hover.
Turpie’s choce and use of symbols reflect the flavour of Pre-
Socratic and Platonic modes of analogical thought. The invisible correspondences by which “all things pass through all things”; the similarity in dissimilars, were uncovered by the principle of analogy, for example, almonds are good for the eyes, walnuts for the brain, the seven planets with the sun and the moon relect the nine portals of the body (macrocosm=microscosm). The ephemeral nature of these protean transformations was underpinned by the notions of singularity and duality, sameness and difference, harmony and strife.
Throughout these works, T-junctions, chromosomes, blue intruding figures, houses and wedges group together in pairs, clusters or alone, their identity of difference forming the basis of their relation. For example, the house stands in relation to the cultural landscape as the chromosome to the internal microcosm of the body, as the defining points of civilization and humanity. These symbols display simultaneous features of singularity, self-same duality and multiplicity, yet, their identities are never simple: a T-junction can be a signature (of the artist perhaps), a letter referring to the building blocks of language and representation, it could be a telephone pole signifying energy and communication grids imposed on a barren landscape, or perhaps it represents the junction of various levels of existence, the organic and inorganic, or the biological and social. Two T’s join together to form a gateway, a bridge or a simplified dog. The chromosomes sometimes curiously look like two copulating figures, in other places like a solitary floating character. Electric blue figures invade the picture plane resembling cells in mitosis, ovum or phallus, or perhaps neurological cross sections indicating either the dualistic tension of creativity, the genesis of life, of the beginnings of intelligence and complexity.
Turpie’s imagery concurs with Richard Long’s description of his work as “a balance between patterns of nature and the formation of human abstract ideas”. Lattices, webs and branching structures are observed throughout the natural world from biology to chemistry and the mathematical descriptions of contemporary physics. The ambiguity of the brain/cell division when juxtaposed with such structures also brings into question the relationship between the structure of the world and the structure of our perceptions. The extent to which these patterns of order are inherent in the world or are imposed on sensations by the brain remains in question. In natural and human sciences as well as in art, the dividing lines between invention and discovery are hazy. For over a century, these issues have been hotly debated through the perennial questions of evolution theories and their explanatory metaphors.
Turpie’s depiction of the wedge/arrow, indicates the dark underbelly of evolution theories (competition and biological arms races) as well as the teleological notions (arrow of the Great Chain of Being) which Darwin’s wedge had overturned. The patchwork effect of some of the larger works reflect the newer modes of describing evolutionary change (and perhaps the creative process of the artist) as ‘biffrucation, tinkering and bricolage’. In biological terms, these notions emphasise the historical contingency and the exquisite imperfections of the actual structures which developed by chance from the myriad possible alternatives which had insufficient opportunity to develop. It also provides an apt metaphor for the artist and his work. According to evolutionary biologist, Francois Jacob:
“…often without knowing what he is going to produce, he (the tinkerer) uses what ever he finds around him, old cardboards, pieces of strings, fragments of wood or metal, to make some kind of workable object. As pointed out by Claude Levi-Strauss, none of the materials at the tinkerer’s disposal has a precise and definite function. Each can be used in different ways. What the tinkerer ultimately produces is often related to no special project. It merely results from a series of contingent events from the opportunities he has to enrich his stock with leftovers.”
The historical result of this process of tinkering is not a seamlessly engineered creation, but as Jacob proposes,
“a patchwork of odd sets pieced together when and where opportunity arose. For the opportunism of natural selection is not simply a matter of indifference to the structure and operations of its products. It reflects the very nature of historical processes, full of contingency.”
Turpie is both a tinkerer of symbols and a bricoleur of ideas. His fascination with the processes of nature, thought and art are both hidden and revealed in the verdant ‘openness’ of his paintings which allows us to explore the question of how ideas and experience are ordered in our attempts to apprehend the world. To the Appolonian urge for clarity and definition, Turpie’s fuzzy chromosomes reply,
“Do not befriend an elephant keeper,
if you have no room to entertain an elephant”.Rumi.
Catalogue by Elizabeth Thomas
Jan Owen
Jan Owen, Resident Poet at Rimbun Dahan in 1997, is a South Australian who now lives in the country outside Adelaide. Since 1985 she has worked as a writer, a creative writing teacher and an editor. She has published four previous books of poetry, including Boy with a Telescope, Fingerprints on Light and Blackberry Season, and her prizes include the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore Awards for her first book, and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2000.
In 2002, Jan Owen launched her collection of poetry Timedancing at the South Australia Writer’s Centre in Adelaide. Tom Shapcott, Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, who launched the ceremony, called it “a luminous book.”
Timedancing contains poems inspired by Jan’s residency at Rimbun Dahan, as well as by her travels to Thailand, Italy and Spain, and is marked by her eye for sensuous detail and by her appreciation for the value and beauty of everyday objects.
To buy a copy of Timedancing, contact Five Islands Press, PO Box U34, Wollongong University, 2500 Australia.
Fax (612) 4272 7392.
Email: kpretty@uow.edu.au
Previous versions of some of the poems in Timedancing appeared in Illuminated Leaves, an online exhibition of poetry and art at Rimbundahan.org, also featuring the works of Margot Wiburd and Noël Norcross.
The cover illustration for Timedancing is a detail of a watercolour by Thornton Walker, Resident Artist at Rimbun Dahan in 1997.
Anne Neil
Anne Neil is a Perth based artist who works in the fields of sculpture, design and public art. Together with her partner Steve Tepper, Neil travelled to Malaysia to undertake a residency based at Rimbun Dahan in 1997. During this time Neil produced several series of ephemeral works that she exhibited there and as a collaborative team, Neil and Tepper made significant contacts with Malaysian architects resulting in a commission to produce lights and signage for a new golf course and residential development. In 1999 Neil participated in the critically acclaimed exhibition and residency project, Sekali Lagi: Australian artists revisit Malaysia, with seven other past residents.
Thornton Walker
Australian painter Thornton Walker was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1996, and undertook a one-month residency in Hotel Penaga in 2012.
Bio
Thornton Walker was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1953, and emigrated to Australia, settling in Melbourne in 1965. He graduated with a Diploma of Art (Printmaking) from the Prahan College of Advanced Education in 1976, and began a Post Graduate Diploma (Printmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1977. He later deferred these studies to travel and work in Europe and the United States.
The artist’s first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1980. Walker’s work is represented in collections throughout Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, Artbank, University of New South Wales, Philip Morris Arts Grant Collection: Parliament House, Canberra, Macquarie Bank, and AXA Australia.
Exhibition Catalogue Essay
A traveller in the landscapes of our world and the landscapes of his mind, Thornton Walker evokes in his works both the presence of the environment in which they were created and the inner contemplation of their creator.
In subject, Walker’s works include three established genres of traditional art – the landscape, the portrait and the still life. Yet he blurs the distinction between these genres, and creates works which embody all three of these forms while embracing abstraction and the serendipity of chance.
Overlaying or, perhaps, underpinning Walker’s choices for the content of his work, is his own personal interest in philosophy and the spiritual, and with Eastern/Asian philosophy in particular. One particular Buddhist text has long been of importance in his considerations of the great questions of human existence: “What is the enduring body of reality?” It is a question that perhaps best conveys the concerns that Walker addresses in his work and, by implication, in his life, and it is a question to which I will return.
The work which Walker had created during his residency at Rimbun Dahan follows naturally from his accumulated body of previous work. His depiction of the orchard outside his Rimbun Dahan studio and various studies of fruits and ceramic bowls reflect his continuing use of the external world as a means of considering, even meditating on, the internal world of the mind.
For many years, Walker has depicted a simple Chinese bowl, whether alone or with one or two others, as the sole physical object set in an abstract and seemingly random background whose presence is, nevertheless, just as concrete as the delicately painted but solid bowl. Examples of this aspect of Walker’s work can be seen in “Two Chinese Bowls (Tea Ceremony l)” 1997 and “Two Chinese Bowls (Tea Ceremony ll)” 1997. These are paintings that were made using wood found in the Rimbun Dahan grounds. The ‘background’ of each painting happens to be naturally occurring marks and stains on the wood arising from its previous use in some form of construction. However, the works’ appearance is not unlike paintings which Walker has previously created on canvas, where the space surrounding the bowls has been built up with layers, drips and washes of paint and, sometimes, fragments of handwritten text.
In both paintings, the bowls are distinct and unique individuals, their substance confirmed by the shadows which they cast on their uncertain surroundings. However, they have a presence beyond that of mere inanimate objects. They are metaphors for order, creation and life, surrounded by the apparent chaos of vast forces we cannot measure and do not fully understand.
In the suite of watercolours, Walker once again focuses on ceramic bowls, some plain and unadorned, others with decorative patterns or embellishments. Sometimes they are alone, at other times in pairs or in groups or hovering over a paler reflection or ghostly image of themselves. These bowls, which themselves take on a life, are often seen together with fruit in or around them. Guavas, limes, papaya and cempedak provide forms through which Walker can apply, with such delicacy, his fluid washes of colour onto a paper that is stained and splattered, like some parchment that has been recovered from a flood.
These images of bowls and fruit acquire their own personalities, engage in dialogue, remain silent, occupying space in a minimalist landscape of washes which run and drip. Once again these objects are lit by an unseen source of light and although their shadows confirm their existence, they seem removed from space and time and become, for us, almost devotional objects upon which we may meditate.
A group of somewhat dark and brooding landscapes, based on the view of the orchard outside his Rimbun Dahan studio, provides an insight into another aspect of Walker’s oeuvre. These images are essentially tonal, capturing both shadow and light, and transforming the simple, close view of tree trunks and branches into a mysterious place where the footfall of people is anticipated but not witnessed.
In some of the watercolours appear fragments of text, sometimes Chinese, sometimes European, adding another dimension to an already multi-layered image. The graphic linear quality of the Chinese characters which appear to have been stamped on (but which are in fact rendered painstakingly by hand) give the work a sense of documentation, something vaguely official. In two works in particular, small red freshly rendered lychees maintain their distance from the well-ordered text, text that may describe or perhaps proscribe them.
And there, in the overlapping washes of “Two Malaccan Bowls” 1997, we can make out the words “the enduring body of reality”. For Walker, it comes down to this: What are we? What is real? What is unreal? What is permanent? What is transient? What is the mind? What is the body? Walker’s works address these questions with a quiet persistence and we have the privilege of experiencing, with him, this quest for the essential nature of the universe.
Guy Abrahams
August 1997
Director, Christine Abrahams Gallery
Artist Statement for Hotel Penaga Residency
I wanted to be completely open to new influences and subject matter during my time at Penaga as the artist in residence; to absorb the rich culture in Penang and respond to it as best I could, in the studio.
After exploring the town for a week, what stayed with me were the old faded photographs of faces I saw on temple and clan house walls. They resonated for me as a window into the past, a nostalgic glimpse of a rich culture.
I decided to do my best to recreate this feeling in paint. I took snap-shots of these photographs, often out of focus and partly obscured with reflections on their glass frames, and then set about interpreting them in watercolor, ink, acrylic and oil paint.