Gabrielle Bates exhibited work she had made during her residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2007 in an exhibition at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, Melbourne. Angela Hijjas was invited to give the opening speech.
Opening Speech by Angela Hijjas
I am delighted to be here at Trocadero Art Space, Footscray, Melbourne for Gabrielle Bates’ opening, and honoured to have the chance to say a few words about her practice in Malaysia and the immense pleasure we had in hosting her.
Gabrielle was Rimbun Dahan’s Australian resident artist for 2007, and she created this body of work in our Malaysian compound. She is an honours graduate from the University of Sydney and has been exhibiting since ’93. Early in her career, she experimented with conceptual video and mass media work, but she re-discovered that an important medium for her is painting, to which she returned when she had a residency at Hill End in 2000. From then on, she started developing her own style of layering, colour and form, highlighted by an echoing effect that reinforces the themes of her paintings, but at the same time seems to place her subjects in a different dimension.
Gabrielle’s experience at our residency in Malaysia has, I hope, had a similarly seminal effect on her art practice as did Hill End, certainly when she first arrived in Kuala Lumpur there was much to experience in S E Asia that was new to her, not least our political and cultural climate. She started out with a series of three small works for an annual charity show that we do each year for WWF Malaysia. The show was entitled ‘Superstar!’, and was about the cult of celebrities and how it now shapes so much in popular culture. Gabrielle was thinking about how we make gods of celebrities, so she decided to create some celebrities out of gods… She took religious figures from Hinduism, Christianity and Buddhism, and transposed them into tabloid front page bad boys, and girls… Gabrielle herself has said that such an approach would not have raised an eyebrow in Australia, but she hadn’t counted on Malaysian “sensitivities”! Portraying a god as a rock star, giving the finger to the paparazzi, was shocking – people in India might have rioted over less, I was told – so the curator decided to pull the work from the show.
This could have been a very disturbing introduction to a residency in a new country, but Gabrielle turned it to her positive advantage as she thought about boundaries and freedom of expression, and she recognized that the issues of censorship, in particular self censorship, are everywhere, even entwined in her own life pattern. Despite these concerns, Gabrielle isn’t delivering any judgements about our cultural paraphernalia, and yet she still manages to create works with a mesmerising impact that is due entirely to their rhythm and sheer beauty.
The audience at the Trocadero. 
Gabrielle Bates and Angela Hijjas at the opening of ‘Mouth of Flowers’ at Trocadero. 
A reunion of participants from the residency at Rimbun Dahan. L-R: Tim Craker, David Jolly, Martin Paten (all 2006) and Gabrielle Bates.
Pattern making had already become an important element of her work, and she began to investigate Malaysia’s symbolism, its fabrics, wood carvings and plants. These cultural symbols, woven into patterns that embellish her figures, emphasise how a particular culture can consume us and be a sole reflection of who we are if we allow that to happen, rather than enabling us to express ourselves individually.
As well, Gabrielle used new materials in her Malaysian work: Chinese ink, water colour, even pond water, and finally piercing her works with needle and thread, superimposing yet another layer of meaning onto her subjects. She attached bells to some of these embellishments, influenced I think by a more Malaysian aesthetic, and symbolically enlivening the work and calling the figures back to life and action.
Gabrielle’s subjects were people she met over her year in Malaysia, many of them other resident artists or performers who stayed at Rimbun Dahan. Donna Miranda is a choreographer with whom she had a close daily relationship, and Donna appears in many of these works, with the slackness and tension of her dancer’s body patterned, echoed and stitched, to bring out the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of her life, distorting the familiar and transforming it to the curious.
In addition to the works here today, there were several more of Gabrielle’s works that I’m pleased have stayed in Malaysia. We have kept two of her pieces, one of my daughter Bilqis, who co-ordinates the choreography residency that we host, and another of Donna Miranda. Amongst others, the piece that is featured on the cover of her catalogue was acquired for an important Malaysian collection. And there is yet another work that she has made for the next Art for Nature exhibition that came out of her year with us at Rimbun Dahan. It is an extension of her embroidery that evolved into a community project, in which she recruited all her Malaysian friends to work on a grid she devised… this work will be assembled for our next exhibition in May, and I’m sure this time that it won’t be pulled from the show!
We have been running our programme since ’94, and have hosted about 60 artists, sculptors, writers, dancers, choreographers and performance artists, some of whom are here this afternoon, and I must express my appreciation to Gabrielle and all the others, who have enlivened our programme with their energy and imagination, as they have developed their practices. It is never an easy option, being an artist, and I hope that our small effort helps to encourage greater creativity and awareness of each other in our respective communities in Australia and Malaysia.
As I see it, Gabrielle has coped with the initial strangeness of it all, adapted to it, and taken elements of her Malaysian experience and utilized them for her own expression. She has given us all we could wish for in her year at Rimbun Dahan, and I know she will most likely be developing these ideas in her next residency, in Penang at Malihom later this year, so I look forward to welcoming her back to Malaysia, and congratulate her on combining her Australian and Malaysian experiences in such a significant manner.
I would also like to thank the organizers here at Trocadero, for giving her the opportunity to show this body of Malaysian works, and hope that you will all enjoy the exhibition as much as I have enjoyed seeing these works evolve over the past year. Thank you.