Australian

Christine Gillespie

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Christine Gillespie

Christine Gillespie was a Melbourne-based writer who has published short fiction in Australia, India and Paris. She won a number of competitions and awards and her first play, White Stars, was commissioned by Playbox Theatre, Melbourne and performed in 2000. During her Asialink residency in 2000, Gillespie spent nearly nine months at Rimbun Dahan as well as undertaking a research trip to India. In Malaysia, Gillespie gave talks, readings and workshops at various universities and the Australian High Commission and networked extensively with Malaysian and Indian writers and artists. She completed the first draft of her novel, Ornamental Bodies, based on the story of Muddupalani, an Indian dancer and courtesan.

Christine died in 2012, following a long illness.

Gary Proctor

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Gary Proctor

Gary Proctor was the Australian artist in residence in the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2000. In addition to his own arts practice, during his residency he started a project with members of the Orang Asli community of Kampong Peta, Endau, Johor, making slumped glass art works. The project was similar to previous projects he had been involved with, with Australian Aboriginal communities in Warburton, Western Australia.

gary

Towards an Art of Habitation

notes for Gary Proctor’s exhibition catalog, by John von Sturmer

This is sincere art. There are multiple impulses. Some of it may be closer to art brut than first meets the eye. The orderliness may be deceptive; the high design value may value design less than first appears. There is an edginess, maybe a prevarication, which is disconcerting.

If an idea works in art it’s not because of the worthiness or the strength of the idea but because of how it is worked. This is not just about how it is rendered or translated into art. Instead, it is how it works within the activity of art-producing, how it twists, deforms, regulates, directs, translates, frees, re-works the very intentionality and capacity of the artist. Unless it has the capacity to make and to unmake the artist it’s a waste of time. For ‘idea’ to become ‘truth’ it has to be taken into the very body of the artist, and there exposed ruthlessly to what we might call the ‘real’, the whole weight of the artist’s biography as lived and, more than that, to the very possibility of the artist as a living being. Unless the artist can engage with the idea, unless the artist can approach the idea through that thing they inhabit, their body, the idea is unworkable and useless. This is not to say that the useful idea must be easily approached or even that the art work should exhaust its potential. We must allow that the gap between the idea and truth may be rather large, and full of shadows and ‘unknowing’. The artist ‘revels’ – a form of play. It may be hard and it moves us rapidly beyond any conscious pursuit, whether this be of pleasure, pain, release, calm, revelation, an active ‘dumbing down’. Such things may be brought to bear – indeed, it is hard to avoid them. I shall call them orientations; but any claim that they can be willed to constancy must be greeted with extreme dubiousness.

* * *

To work in a new context, surrounded by different stimuli, smells, tastes, sounds, colours, textures, manners, attitudes, different ideas of all kinds, is to enter a whole language of otherness. Mr Proctor is, of course, not new to the new. His experiments are broad and wide-reaching, both within art practice itself, moving with confidence from medium to medium (in this he is happy to have a high aptitude for things technical and practical), and within the politics of art practice.

Lest the phrase ‘politics of art practice’ offend, let us substitute what hopefully is more accurate: namely, a conscious reflexion on the contexts and conditions and purposes of art practice. This almost obsessive interest has, within my certain knowledge, involved this artist in working with street artists in Sydney and with the Ngaanhatharra people of the Western Desert, as well as maintaining a formal exhibition path. In all situations, let me suggest, issues of personal and group identity have been involved; also, the transfer of designs developed in accordance with the dictates and possibilities of one medium to other media. This has not been about forging new identities so much as widening the capacity of this or that image-producer to engage with new materialities of expression. Let me venture to suggest that it is in this ‘shifting’ or ‘displacement’ that the image-producer has the opportunity to become an artist for the first time. In pursuing these goals Mr Proctor has deliberately eschewed the commercial – a strategic decision which raises serious questions about the capacity of any individual regardless of ethnicity or point of origin to maintain identity (already a difficult notion) in the face of the insistent urgings of the cash nexus and the process of commodification.

I do not wish to judge on these matters. It is important only to indicate certain tendencies – tendencies which, while they may appear conservative, have nonetheless led, in the case of this artist, to radical innovations sustained by intense commitment and drive. I refer notably to the creation of an enormous ‘archive’ of Western Desert paintings, designs, objects, stories, oral accounts, social record, photographs of the Ngaanhatharra Aboriginal people – selected components of which have been made available at public exhibition in many parts of Australia, as well as overseas.

One might expect that such activities might leave a large, even a transparent trace in his own work. Outside the production of glass pieces, this appears by and large not to be the case. Certainly at first glance. Moreover, it is easily argued that glass was always one of his interests. At a deeper level, there is no conspicuous impact of Ngaanhatharra visual or representational traditions; nor is there any apparent reliance on Ngaanhatharra narrative devices. Yet the Ngaanhatharra influence may be there, not so much in the elements of his work, but increasingly insinuating itself as a working method. Mr Proctor has told me as much and willingly acknowledges the ‘message of trust’ – the necessity to trust the self – imparted to him by the late Mr Holland, an artist of rare talent and worldly insight. I may also be remiss in ignoring the impact of rock painting – and the way they disburse disparate elements over large surfaces.

I make these remarks only to get at the ‘truth of the work’. What they suggest is that this artist has a rather watertight set of concerns which have maintained a high biographical constancy. The same may hold true to what he might consider a proper context or politics of art production. In other words, the twin tendencies to experiment with new media and to engage with new and rather large projects are keyed to rather fixed concerns. Watertight does not mean static – for it is clear that there is an unfolding. And while the overt content may appear to be about protest, let me suggest that a more productive reading might be to consider the notion of living spaces. I would like to suggest that there is a profoundly architectural impulse to his work. The body – his body – is never far away. This involves more than furthering the range of expressive possibility; there is a desire for completion if not closure. The idea has to be made concrete; he surfs ideas not quite sure what shore he might land on or what dangers lie in his path. The ‘letting go’ involved, the sense of abandonment, always involves, however distantly, a notion of home. This is more than mere habitus.

Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor

* * *

Somewhere between the pathology and earnestness of ‘the great public issues’ and the quiet interstices of ‘the inner life’, there is a third space, more humdrum, so ‘usual’ its value is apt to be totally discounted: the everyday. It is here that ordinary people seem most intent on sustaining themselves. It demands no grand vision, it pleads no special causes – but satisfies itself with the steady accumulation and sifting and retaining and disposal of the elements of life as they arise. It operates close to the ground; it does not pride itself on its utility yet it is ‘useful’ precisely because it is there.

The problem lies in how to give the ordinary value – or perhaps more accurately, how to participate in it, as an artist, without distorting its value. This is a tricky business. Any inflation of the lifeworld immediately makes it uninhabitable. Conversely, any retreat from the lifeworld surely treats it as already uninhabitable. Put simply, the task is to keep the habitable habitable.

We might think that the habitable should be able to look after itself but it doesn’t. Unless it can be made constant with our ordinary concerns it is gone – in all likelihood forever. It is the most endangered of all endangered species. To survive it requires careful attention: almost a tending. For it is never just there; it isn’t a constant in itself but subject to the most subtle modulations as well as the most devastating happenings. The habitable is constant in its need for constant adjustment.

* * *

How do we inhabit these times – or are they merely to occupy us? Are we all just engines running together, pretending to the illusion that we are all radios intended for tuning to the same frequency band? Is speed to substitute for our inability to inhabit memories, or is it the agent of loss? Does the rain soothe our naked skin or should we protect our full body suits as a matter of routine self-protection? What, are we to be locked within an Eternal Doomsday (what I call ‘the economy of remedy’) or shall we trust to the progress of ‘Progress’? To occupy the bland, repetitive, sterile spaces we have created for ourselves will we need somehow to develop the ‘art of self-ignition’ – endlessly pushing ourselves to responsiveness as if, somehow, we were little ‘generators of meaning’? Is meaning just to be another word for shock?

These images come from the artist. In the same spirit I would like to conclude with a passage in his words which links the elements of play, discipline, technique, a coming-into-knowing through activity:

I have canoes for the sea. Away from the ocean I work to maintain body strength for the return. I can roll upside down and watch things underwater, and then roll back up with a flick of the paddle. In a Malaysian swimming pool I practiced my rolls for a year, all a matter of knowing what a paddle is doing. I can do five different rolls …

I like this notion of differentiation through practice, a practicing which engenders its own carefully calibrated experience, a working at being at home that can be anywhere. I had thought of habitation as rooms – rooms to be designed, used, filled with familiar things. But activities, too, can be habitations.

Remembering, too, that not all of us yearn for the sea.

John von Sturmer
Sydney
10 January 2000

 

Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor.
Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor.

Adam Aitken

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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

Mathew Calvert

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Mathew Calvert

Glass_shards1

mattTasmanian 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

matt1

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.

matt4

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.

matt2This 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.

matt5Most 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.

matt3Ross 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

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Stephen Turpie

steveStephen 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

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Jan Owen

janJan 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.”

'Air and Edge,' Jan's poem dedicated to Hijjas Kasturi's architecture.
‘Air and Edge,’ Jan’s poem dedicated to Hijjas Kasturi’s architecture.

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

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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

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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

thorntonThornton 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.

'Two Malaccan bowls', watercolour, 1997, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Two Malaccan bowls’, watercolour, 1997, 76 x 56 cm.

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.

Enid Ratnam Keese

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Enid Ratnam Keese
'Quantum Leap,' 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995
‘Quantum Leap,’ 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995

‘Out of the nine month midnight’

‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’
Albert Camus

‘old Death
Shall dream he has slain me, and I’ll creep behind him,
Thrust off the bloody tyrant from his throne
and beat him into dust, or I will burst
Damnation’s iron egg, my tomb, and come
half damned, ere they make lightening of my soul,
And creep into thy carcase as thou sleepest
Between two crimson fevers, I’ll dethrone
the empty skeleton, and be thy death’.
Thomas Beddoes

 

Enid Ratnam Keese is well known in Australia for her printmaking and her drawing. Her prints in particular are greatly admired and figure in our public museum collections. In the light of these new paintings it is worth considering this background. Printmaking has long been a neglected practice in international contemporary art. But it is often precisely in those areas of apparent neglect, removed from the fashion of the moment, that a great deal of the more interesting thought takes place.

In this exhibition of paintings, constructed in three sections: Connections, Requiem and Out of the nine month midnight ( a line from Walt Whitman), Enid has brought a great deal of the sequential and fragmented nature of the imagery of her printmaking to bear on the subject matter of the paintings. The process of layering images in sequence and allowing for their ambiguous juxtapositions to act on the viewer independently of the general narrative text of the image is much more common in adventurous print works than in painting. In this way Enid has brought a fresh approach to the construction of these images that belie the conservative choice of painting as their media. She has also deployed her images so as to reference numerous icons from the history of western painting: the Birth of Venus, the fish and the cross are part of Western Christian repertoire. Even the manner of isolating the garment of the Kebaya recalls modernist iconography, in the bathrobes of Kim Dine for example.

However these images escape easy associations, for as a Malaysian woman resident in Australia she represents the most interesting contemporary visual phenomena of cross cultural pluralism exemplified by the Asia Pacific Triennial, whose second incarnation will take place in Brisbane later this year. In these paintings she speaks of the difficulties of acceptance in your culture of origin and of the displacement of your culture of acceptance. She is placed in a zone of production where her work could be perceived to be not really Malaysian and not really Australian.

This state of hybridity is characteristic of art itself today, in which significant work arises within the region of this collision of cultures. Previously Enid dealt with these issues through an analysis of the way we gained our perceptions of the Gulf War through the images of satellite television. Her fascination with periods of the human horrors of war are intriguing and ever prescient. At the end of the century art is witness to the excesses of our deterioration as a species. Perhaps it is only in this kind of cross cultural art practice that we see the possibilities for hope and even survival.

Enid’s work has always dealt with signs of the body, particularly the female body. In these paintings she uses the distortion of the body to symbolise the status of sensation within. For her in these paintings the body is absent, but present through its exoskeletal sign of the traditional Malaysian women’s costume of the kebaya. The distortion is both representative of the subjugation of the gendered body from without (the impositions of society on women) and indicative of the distortions of the sensations and aspirations of the person as individuated subject. The body here disappears in this space, crushed as it is between the emotive aspirations of placement from within and the socially driven control imposed from without.

In these paintings the shredded form of the traditional dress wavering under the tension of the space becomes a powerful and resonant image at odds with its historical context. The Kebaya is here depicted as a sinuous set of veins pulsing and contorting both the presence and absence of the human figure. This presence, defined by the metonomic use of the kebaya as icon of traditional culture acts as guardian against reductive gestural expressionism. It has been observed that metonomy, unlike metaphor, is based on a sequential link between the object and its replacement, ‘the record of a move or displacement from cause to effect, container to contained, thing seen to where it was seen, goal to auxiliary tool’. In these paintings metonomy takes the form of the absent or repressed images of memory and displacement.

In the large triptych paintings of the series titled “Out of the nine month midnight”, the nine months represent on the one hand the duration of Enid’s residency and the gestation time for both the paintings exhibited here, and on the other the period of solitude experienced by every human child. One triptych titled “Lament for a Solo Performer” has the image of a rock precariously suspended above an egg held outwards by its nurturing hand/cradle. This image recalls Samuel Beckett’s description of life as being the “womb suspended above the tomb”. In this large and impressive painting the landscape is at once solid in its colour and turbulent like a lake of molten rock in which faces loom up from beneath the surface only to disappear like images in the memory. Seated to the left of the painting clutching a hand full of flowers is a figure cut by a mouth that literally slashes the distorted face leaving in its wake a razor like trace.

The ambiguous images that surface from this at times almost violent brushwork evoke a melancholic search for the lost, the loss of identity and of definition of one’s ability to write oneself into culture. Through metonomy Enid forces the viewer back to a re-reading of these sign as though for the first time. The desolate disillusion of the space between is the metier of these paintings. They speak to that hallucination of the will of the other. We want to imagine that we can summon the object of our desire at will, but desires are never determined, they are received.

Donald Fitzpatrick
1995-96 Visiting Scholar in Fine Arts
Queensland College of Art
Griffith University

enid2

John Foubister

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John Foubister

Australian visual artist John Foubister was Rimbun Dahan’s first Australian artist-in-residence in 1994. From September to November 2011 he undertook a three-month residency along with his artist partner Melanie Fulton at Hotel Penaga in Georgetown, Penang.

Bio

johnJohn Foubister studied a BA in Visual Arts at the South Australian School of Art from 1980-1983. From 1984-1995 he maintained a consistent art practice alongside paid employment. During these years John held five solo exhibitions, and participated in twelve group shows in Adelaide, and one at the National Gallery, Canberra. He was a founding member of three artist run studio spaces in Adelaide. In the years 2005 to 2011 John participated in group exhibitions in South Australia, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. In 1994 he was recipient of the Rimbun Dahan Residency which provided studio space for one year in Malaysia, with an exhibition at the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur on completion.

From 1992 until 2007 John worked as a recreation provider for people with disabilities. His joint roles included Coordinator and Arts Worker in Art Programs for people with disabilities. John project managed six major disability arts exhibitions in South Australia.

John produces medium to large scale oil paintings which reflect his interest in environment, philosophy and the role of the imagination in creating realities. Most recently his work has been concerned with the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

John has work in the National Gallery, Canberra, and private collections in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, England and the USA. In 2011 the Adelaide City Council Public Art Program featured a selection of John’s paintings, reformatted into large light boxes and positioned externally in the CBD area.

 

THE BIG VIEW FROM THE ROOM

Catalogue notes to John’s December 1994 exhibition at Rimbun Dahan by Julian Bowron, Director, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

‘If infinity can be grasped and manipulated using rational thought, does this open the way to an understanding of the ultimate explanation of things without the need for mysticism?  No, it doesn’t.’[1]

The ineffable, the intensely personal and the perverseness of things are the subject matter of John Foubister’s paintings. While this is by no means new territory, the pervasive inclination to rationality, expertise, and the systematic will to a taxonomy of the metaphysical. along with the material which pertains in the current era, makes it a hard road. Much contemporary art practice prospects rich veins of current theoretical discourse and mines them with alacrity and diligence. Particular attention is paid to ensuring that the appropriate commentators are on hand to endorse the process.  Consequently, artists’ and writers’ endeavours are contained within the current orthodoxy.  The bigger picture is less frequently attempted.

Foubister’s interest in quantum physics reflects the ‘preoccupations’ driving his work ‘the big view from the room’.[2]  The artist’s recurrent visual language also grapples with the dilemma of reconciling personal and wider relevance.  At first an exhibition of his work can appear disparate, disconcertingly so, but this has to do with an unwillingness to adopt the convenient package of a suite of work systematically or didactically promoting a neat set of ideas, or forming a too-tidy aesthetic hanging.  In his determination, this strategy of discomfort, Foubister aligns with much current installation practice in insisting that the viewers begin to look beyond ‘familiar’ vocabularies and bring to the work readings of their own informed by various permutations of private, collective and cultural experience.

Adelaide poet and writer Ken Bolton has referred to Foubister’s work as ‘paintings for people who are no longer enchanted with painting’[3].  Greenberg’s dogma continues to haunt painting, obstructing its ready acceptance as a site of intellectual engagement, despite an irrefutable catalogue of intelligent contemporary work.  The primary obstacle is however not the monolith of modernist notions but the obsessive drive to exorcise the modernist ghost which too often results in a denial of the continuity or histories of practice.    Contemporary conceptual practices and the theoretical concerns which commonly inform them are consequently presented as having somehow spontaneously arrived fully formed and unencumbered by a history of ideas.  Painting site most uncomfortably with this persistent if untenable position because its formalist concerns especially, persistently evidence a long history.  The cult of the curator/specialist has been particularly unhelpful in this respect, focusing opportunistically as it does on the apparently new in order to promote the discovery of ‘innovation’.  Edward Said has encapsulated this pervasive dilemma particularly well.

‘Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge;  as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.’[4]

In these new works, enhanced by a year’s consolidated work away from familiar spheres, a definite narrative emerges from familiar imagery and concerns.  A vivid internal world apears in haunting primordial pictures dominated by dark seas and dense jungles overlaid and intertwined with labial whirlpools and sucking vortexes of swirling paint.  Alternatively grids of flatter colour are a field or a blind for an amorphous figure and the letters ‘I f if?’  Or perhaps “JF” the artists self mocking  grandiose signature.  Certainly Foubister teases the seriousness of  the gaze and disarmingly parodies his own self-consciousness.  Often floating in the foreground of the picture plane is a grinning smiley face, the artist returning the viewers’ gaze with a wry and at times slightly frightened assurance.

Foubister knows what can be done with paint, knows well the seductive and lyrical qualities which can so effectively promote sensuality and aesthetic bravado.  Critically he knows also how to withhold the medium from the surface and manipulate by means of latency,, banality and deliberate unpaintedness.  It is by these means, as well as his deliberate jerky narrative, that he invokes a journey which is strange and at times uneasily familiar.  Wider concerns such as the way in which individual subjective reality is ‘constructed through the processing of sensory stimuli’[5] consideration of the infinite which ‘can be contemplated and symbolised but not known’[6] are intermingle with the obsessively personal, the palpably erotic and a sense of absurdity and pervading doubt.

These are not the ubiquitous media or technologically generated images though which many painters have sought to transcend the ‘inescapably precious materials of painting’[7].  These are overtly painted and drawn images consisting of particular and downright expressive marks and technique.  They draw upon Hodgkin, Guston, McCahon and Magritte at least.  Painting unrepentant:  this work demonstrates a thriving practice.

In the work of Australian contemporary visual arts a sustained commitment to making work and maintaining articulate ideas is too often rewarded by a highly marginal existence.  In a recent conversation with an Adelaide artist I found myself all but asserting that this endemic situation somehow works to maintain the urgency and edge necessary for a vital visual culture and was rightly taken to task.  The equation of poverty of means with creative energy as co-dependent factors in sustaining ideas is a sentimental and insidious notion.  Opportunities for artists to concentrate on their work relatively free from financial pressures are all too few.  Foubister’s generous residency in Malaysia has been one such opportunity and is reward for great persistence and determination against the odds.

[1]Davies, Paul.  The Mind of God  London, Penguin 1992

[2] Foubister, John,  letter to the author 14 November 1994

[3] Bolton, Ken.  John Foubister-the resent work: some notes towards a reading of his work  Broadsheet Vol        23 No 1 Autumn 1994   p. 25

[4] Said, Edward.  Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith LecturesLondon Vintage 1994 P. 57

[5] Foubister, John letter to the author 14 November 1994

[6] ibid

[7] Bowron, Julian. Mark Wingrave, Crossing (exhibition catalogue) Adelaide The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia June 1994