ART WRITING
I visit artists in their studios and write about their work. For example:
2022 Art Collector Magazine, profile on artist Nick Santoro
2021 Art Collector Magazine, profile on ceramicist Scott Duncan
2017 – 2024 texts for artists Hannah Barclay, Sean Crowley, Lee Bethel, India Mark, Chris Zanko, Aaron Fell-Fracasso, Henry Jock Walker, Rob Howe, Frank Nowlan, Erin Mison, Darren Munce, Gabriel Adamik, Mignon Steele, Julia Flanagan, Georgia Spain, Madeleine Peters, Mark Merrikin, Andy Hutson
Some old favourites:
Angelica Mesiti, The Line of Lode and the Death of Charlie Day, Broken Hill Film Festival 2008
Tropical Hotdog Night, curated by Fiona Lowry MOP 2007
Fiona Lowry Come In Closer GBK 2006
SIGNIFICANT TREES - BARRETT HOUSE 2024
text accompanying the exhibition
I entered the beautiful Barrett House studio with a proposal to locate trees on the Randwick Significant Tree Register. This project is ongoing. The works shown here have emerged from contemplating and visiting local sites and noting the convergence of planting, construction, and detritus. They carry the mark of time on weathered surfaces through retraced linework and revisited places. The two narrow paintings are on linen that has been bleached and degraded by the elements, then patched up and brought into Barrett House to be stretched and painted.
The plantings depicted in the works represent urban fragments that express verticality and a sense of emergent and sustained growth. Two of the plants have local origins. The Gymea Lily (Doryanthes Excelsis) is found in the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub Forest and is also included as a popular landscape feature. Then there is the tree fern that pushes to the light. There are some great tree ferns just down the road from here in Fred Hollows Reserve, a site impacted by urban change but with beautiful features of remnant Sydney Sandstone Gully Forest. The sequence of three long works on paper are hybrid drawings, responding to this gully, a site with a history of dumping but also a richness of wildlife, bush care and regeneration.
The square double painting is an outlier but connects to a long-term fascination with architectural idealism, collective endeavour and intentional communities. The work uses a tarpaulin found down the end of an abandoned food garden in Thirroul, north of Wollongong. I stretched the tarp, washed it, hung it on a rotary clothesline then stitched the holes. On the stretched surface, I applied an enlarged tracing. They are words from an old letter handed to me one night through the wrought iron bars of my bedroom window at the front of a terrace not far from Barrett House. A romantic and fraught gesture from one 14-year-old to another. This text has an eternal quality in its scrawled proposal to form a new society, carried with me through the years like these worn and scumbled surfaces.
In painting, drawing and sculpture, I explore the dynamic between natural and constructed elements in urban environments. I also write about these things and the work of other artists. Previous solo exhibitions investigate the reuse and recycling of structures, materials and ideas and the effects of weather events. Earlier art residencies in Beijing, China (Asialink/OZCO) and Arcosanti, Arizona, fueled this dynamic. The reuse of materials in my work is a metaphor for cyclical thinking and broader processes in cities where materials and structures deteriorate, regenerate and reconfigure.
AND A GREAT PIECE BY ART WRITER, ANTHONY SPRINGFORD FOR 22° HALO
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