issue 2Allens art journal

cover: JIAWEI SHEN

Self-portrait with G E Morrison (detail) 1995

oil on canvas, 167 x 304cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

…visual artists can play an important role: their responses confront and challenge preconceived notions of identity, of history. Importantly, they encourage us not to be indifferent to difference.

Allens has a long history of working throughout Asia

and, as a way of establishing connections and

creating dialogue, selections of paintings from

the Allens Art Collection are displayed in offices in

Jakarta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing.

It is fitting, therefore, in the second issue of the

Allens Art Journal, that we acknowledge some

of those artists in the Collection whose cultural

backgrounds lie in the rich legacies and diverse

artistic traditions of this vast geographic region.

EAST/WEST is a convenient way of describing this

dialogue. The intention is not to overemphasise

differences; rather – as the artists included in this

edition illustrate – it is to discover interconnections

that add depth, even poignancy, to individual

practices. In turn, it is this vibrancy that enriches

contemporary visual culture in this country.

One writer recently suggested that ‘despite an

incredible wealth of activity that has occurred

throughout the last twenty years at least,

Australian culture has yet to understand the

impact that intercultural experiences have had

on its evolution and how the anxiety of location

– how we perceive, articulate and imagine the

cultural histories which result from the specific

geography and history of this continent – impacts

on how we understand our art history and imagine

its future.’1

1 Aaron Seeto, ‘Transcultural Radical’, www.artlink.com.au, vol 31 # 1,

pp 28-31

While this draws attention to the contemporary

cross-cultural phenomenon that has pervaded

many social, political and economic discussions

and debates, it is also a reminder that cultural

interchange has always part of Australia’s

settlement and identity even though it has not

always been acknowledged or celebrated.

This is in spite of the much trumpeted

‘multiculturalism’ – a vexed term that too often

glosses over the history of trade and cultural

exchange, the complexities and subtleties and

long-established networks of migration and

settlement across the Asia region.

In this sense, visual artists can play an important

role: their responses confront and challenge

preconceived notions of identity, of history.

Importantly, they encourage us not to be

indifferent to difference. As the artists included in

this issue reveal, their encapsulations of history

and experience provide insight into the effects of

socio-cultural processes – the work celebrates the

local within the global, yet reminds us of just how

fragile the local is when faced with the realities of

all-encompassing global forces.

Allens is especially grateful to the artists and writers for their contribution to, and support of, the Allens online publishing

venture. We also acknowledge the photographers Tom Psomotragos (Sydney) and Andrew Ashton (Melbourne)

We would also like to thank Mengfei Pan and Vigen Galstyan and the University of Sydney. Integral to the University of Sydney’s

Art Curatorship and associated postgraduate art history degrees, is the availability of internships within fine art institutions:

Allens is pleased to be able to participate by offering specialised projects related to the Allens Art Collection and artist archive to

students from these courses.

Copyright for the text in the Allens Art Journal is held by Allens and the authors. Views expressed in these texts are not

necessarily those of the publisher.

Photography: Tom Psomotragos; Andrew Ashton (installation photography 101 Collins Street, Melbourne)

issue 2Allens art journal

EAST/WEST: SELFHOOD AND CULTURAL ISSUES THE PAINTINGS OF JIAWEI SHEN AND LINDY LEEMengfei Pan 7

Jiawei Shen and Lindy Lee have become important figures in Australia’s contemporary art scene. While their practices represent the multicultural diversity associated with the visual arts of this country, it is not just the soil of this place, thousands of miles from their homelands, that nurtures and supports their art. Key works by Jiawei Shen and Lindy Lee reveal deeper connections between here and there, the present and legacies associated with their past.

ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING: LINDY LEE’S UNTITLED (BLUE – EL GRECO’S COMPANION) 15

Vigen Galstyan

INTERVIEWS: 17

JIAWEI SHEN LINDY LEE

FOCUS:

MARIA CRUZ – TO BE TRANS-NATIONAL 19

Maria Poulos in conversation with the artist

TIM JOHNSON – THE ART OF COLLABORATION 29

Ewen McDonald

SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN – PAINTING AS A DELICATE SKIN 35

Maria Poulos in conversation with the artist

EXPERIENCE AND ABSTRACTION 41

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn

SPOTLIGHT:

LIN ONUS 47

Ewen McDonald

JANET LAURENCE 51

Maria Poulos

RECENT ACQUISITIONS:

CLIFTON MACK 55

RAMMEY RAMSEY 59

ALLENS ART COLLECTION 61

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LINDY LEE

Justice that punishes 1988

oil, wax on canvas, 174 x 134cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

The paintings of Jiawei Shen and Lindy Lee.

EAST/WEST: SELFHOOD AND CULTURAL ISSUES

Jiawei Shen and Lindy Lee have become important

figures in Australia’s contemporary art scene. While

their practices represent the multicultural diversity

associated with the visual arts of this country, it is

not just the soil of this place, thousands of miles

from their homelands, that nurtures and supports

their art.

Key works by the artists in the Allens Art Collection

– Lindy Lee’s Justice that punishes (1988) and

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) 1989; and

Jiawei Shen’s Self-portrait with G E Morrison (1995)

– reveal deeper connections between here and

there, the present and legacies associated with

their past.

The two works by Lindy Lee epitomise an earlier

phase in her practice, the late 1990s, when she

explored notions of authenticity of selfhood by

employing copies of ‘masterpieces’ from the

Western tradition. Jiawei Shen’s Self-portrait with

G E Morrison, on the other hand, is typical of his

continuing investigation into history – his large-

scale oil painting illustrating typical compositional

aspects associated with the artist’s approach to

representation.

Within the Collection, the three works generate

an interesting dialogue: they reveal how two

Chinese Australian artists incorporate disparate

cultural inheritances within artistic practice.

Understanding this cultural richness and these

formative personal memories is an important

dimension to the appreciation of Lee and Shen’s

work. Biographical traces are evident in the

paintings: the inclusion of portraits and other faces

Mengfei Pan

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period, the 1960s-70s.1 His experiences during

those years have, without doubt, profoundly

influenced his art, but when recalling the ebbs

and flows – the absurdity, insanity and agony

happening to and around him at that time – he

is quick to add that a positive ‘by-product’ of the

Cultural Revolution was that he was able to receive

art training and allowed to practise ‘art’.2 Shen’s

personality was shaped in the tumult as well.

The restricted access to literature and pictorial

resources – anything deemed heterodoxcal – and

the scarcity of these materials, due to censorship,

did not blind him: rather, it made him more

skeptical and thirsty for knowledge and the ‘truth’

behind the official words. His critique of Chinese

history has not ceased since moving to Australia:

Self-portrait with G E Morrison, produced about six

1 For more about the Cultural Revolution context of Shen’s art, see

Grahame Kime, ‘Introduction’, Shen Jiawei: From Mao to Now 1961-2010,

Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2010, pp

7-9

2 Jiawei Shen, ‘The Fate of a Painting’, Shen Jiawei: From Mao to Now

1961-2010, op cit

– characters who fix the viewer with their gaze –

are an obvious clue to the significance of particular

people and the past. While their individual

backgrounds serve as artistic inspiration and

result in different approaches to painting, there’s

a similarity in the way Lee and Shen attempt to

address notions of selfhood and cultural identity.

Further, by focusing on the differences and the

similarities – especially Shen’s Self-portrait with

G E Morrison and Lee’s Untitled (blue – El Greco’s

Companion) – the insightful ways artists use the

personal to explore and address larger social and

political issues through art becomes apparent.

CULTURAL ROOTS: MEMORY AND ARTISTIC INSPIRATIONJiawei Shen (b 1948) moved to Australia in

1989 and, when first introduced, tended to

be characterised by an earlier identity – as a

propaganda painter for the Communist Party

during China’s turbulent Cultural Revolution

JIAWEI SHEN

Self-portrait with G E Morrison 1995

oil on canvas, 167 x 304cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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LINDY LEE

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) 1988

photocopy, synthetic polymer paint on Stonehenge paper, Perspex box frame

6 parts, each 42 x 29cm (unframed), 43 x 30.5cm (framed)

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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Morrison’s autobiography and repeatedly included

in books on his life.7 Shen also refers to some other

historical documents in the collection; for instance,

a Chinese name given to Morrison by a Chinese

scholar, a Chinese-style passport granted by the

Qing government so that Morrison could travel

in four provinces in China, and several Chinese

postage and imperial stamps. Although the

appropriation of photography and the playfulness

associated with the incorporation of passports

and stamps are typical in contemporary art, the

overall look of the painting is formal and classical

– it’s realist in style and the figures are posed in a

conventional manner. The solemnity of the large-

scale painting (167 x 304 cm) is emphasised by the

evocative and gloomy background colour. It seems

that Shen’s formal training during the years of the

Revolution and, later, at an academy – combined

with his passion for historical subjects – is a legacy

that the artist finds hard to break away from or is

reluctant to abandon.

While the Cultural Revolution can be considered

the cradle of Shen’s art, for Lindy Lee an intuitive

approach to art-making was largely provoked by

cultural perturbations in mid twentieth-century

Australia. Lee’s parents were the first migrants

in the family to leave China for Australia. Born in

Brisbane in the 1950s, Lee’s sense of diaspora was

further aggravated by the ‘White Australia Policy’

at that time. In the name of ‘self-protection’, the

children were not allowed to speak Mandarin –

even at home.8 As she recalled, her childhood was

never a happy one.9 The darkness of childhood, and

7 The autobiography of Morrison, An Australian in China, first published in

1895, was a celebrated book that led to his appointment as a journalist

for The Times. This photograph also appears in later books on his life, for

instance: Cyril Pearl’s Morrison of Peking,1971; Peter Thompson’s The

Man who Died Twice – The Life and Adventure of Morrison of Peking, 2004,

and former National University of Australia professor Lo Hui-Min’s edited

anthology, The Correspondence of G E Morrison, 1976.

8 Andrew Taylor, ‘The search for self’, The Sun-Herald, 21 November 2010, p

3.

9 ibid.

Photograph of Morrison

in western China

Source: Jiawei Shen,

ed, Old China through

G E Morrison’s eyes,

trans Dou Kun, Fujian

Education Press,

Fuzhou, 2005, pp 8-9.

years after his arrival, is a significant work in this

regard. The painting reveals Shen’s passion for the

history painting genre – it’s the culmination of his

interest in modern history, a series of coincidences

and an encounter with the photographic collection

of George Ernest Morrison held by the Mitchell

Library at the State Library of New South Wales.3

Morrison (1862-1920) was an Australian

journalist working for The Times who resided in

Beijing. For more than two decades at the turn

of the twentieth century, he travelled extensively

throughout the country interpreting Chinese

affairs for the outside world, often making political

suggestions to the Chinese leaders at that time.

Morrison was such a lover of China , he considered

it his second home. He assisted the leaders to

secure the best outcomes in negotiations with

Japan and the West.4 It seems that there was no

better person than Shen – with his painterly skills

in portraiture, scholarly research and thorough

understanding of the history of both countries – to

produce a portrait of this legendary man. Shen

selected a famous photograph in which Morrison

is depicted in full Chinese garment with five

Chinese people who assisted his trip in west China

in 1890s.5 In his autobiography, An Australian

in Beijing, Morrison expressed his admiration

for these Chinese labourers’ frugal lifestyle.6 It

is a significant and unique image that has been

used on the cover of a 1970 reprinted version of

3 When Jiawei was working on a portrait of Hedda Hammer for the

Archibald Prize he got to know her husband, Alastair, son of G E

Morrison, through Powerhouse Museum curator Claire Roberts,

which led to researching documents in the Morrison Collection held

by the State Library of NSW. Much later, after the production of this

self-portrait, Shen was fortunate to get funding (and the waiving of

copyright fees) which enabled him to compile a book on the Morrison

Collection, Old China through G E Morrison’s eyes, published by Fujian

Education Press in 2005. Interview with Jiawei Shen, 11 October 2011.

4 For more about Morrison, see Nicholas Jose, ‘Preface’, Jiawei Shen (ed),

Old China through G E Morrison’s eyes, trans Dou Kun, Fujian Education

Press, Fuzhou, 2005, pp 11-14.

5 ibid pp 8-9.

6 ibid.

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a lack of cultural belonging, became the impetus

for making art and continues to be a strong

presence in her work.

Early in her career, during which time Justice that

punishes and Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion)

were produced, a major inspiration was the idea

of ‘the copy’. This concept connects with her

memory of wanting to be a ‘blonde surfie chick’

when she was little, and the need to question

notions of selfhood – especially in regard to

cultural dislocation.10 In those days, she felt like ‘a

fraud, a copy, a flawed one … counterfeit white and

counterfeit Chinese’.11 Untitled (blue – El Greco’s

Companion) adapts El Greco’s self-portrait, which

she copied from a textbook on six A5 sheets of

paper dozens of times.12 Compared with Shen’s

self-portrait, Lee’s two works are painted in strong

single hues – Justice that punishes in deep red and

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) in vibrant

blue. Lee believes in the power of colour, which she

associates with particular meanings. For instance,

red invokes violence and love/hate emotions;

blue is symbolic of introspection.13 The method

and media, the ‘copy’ and strong colours, are

characteristic of the artist’s early works.

10 ibid.

11 Quoted in Melissa Chiu, ‘Struggling in the Ocean of Yes and No’, Lindy

Lee, Benjamin Genocchio and Melissa Chiu (eds), Craftsman House,

Sydney, 2001, p 16.

12 Interview with Lindy Lee, 8 November 2011.

13 ibid.

Jiawei Shen once wrote: ‘memory of the past

always plays a significant role in one’s growth

trajectory’.14 For both artists, cultural roots and

personal experiences are the reason for their

distinctive approaches to painting. Yet, despite

their disparate styles, the work of Shen and Lee

address similar topics – for them art is a place

where selfhood and cultural issues collide and

merge.

FACE: SELFHOOD AND CULTURAL RENDEZVOUSSelf-portrait with G E Morrison demonstrates Shen’s

flair for portraiture and exacting representation

– a technical virtuosity that is well-respected

both in China and in this country.15 He grasps the

characteristics of his subjects and his painterly

touch is defined and confident – a confidence

that, very likely, arises from his understanding of

the history and stories concealed in photographs,

in texts and books and revealed in interviews. In

this painting he presents a hierarchically arranged

group, highlighted by the colours chosen for each

identity. Monochromatic grey is used to depict

the policeman on the very left and the two coolies

flanking Morrison , while Shen and Morrison –

the artist and his subject – are painted in bright

colours … Shen in a yellow tunic top with a red-

covered book in his hand and Morrison in Chinese

garb of peacock blue. While it is a painting of five

people, it is more precise to describe the study as a

dual portrait with three typical Chinese characters

in the shadows, as background information.

The artist’s title focuses on the painting as a self-

portrait. Yet, the inclusion of himself would not

have been easy for Shen. It was not until the late

1970s that Chinese artists were allowed to put

themselves in the works they produced or sign

their names on the back.16 Emancipated from any

form of restrictions in Sydney, Shen allowed his

brush to dance more freely and did not hesitate

to model himself in a casual outfit in front of a

mirror.17 With his palette and red-covered book,

he clearly identifies himself as an artist. The

book is Morrison’s autobiography, An Australian

in China, whose cover uses the exact photo Shen

appropriates for his own composition. The way he

14 Interview with Jiawei Shen, 16 November 2011.

15 Shen has been a frequent finalist in the Archibald Portrait Prize. Many of

his works are kept in national museums in China and Australia..

16 Shen, ‘The Fate of a Painting’, op cit, p 31.

17 Interview with Jiawei Shen, 11 October 2011.

Morrison’s Chinese name

given and written down

by a Chinese scholar.

Source: Jiawei Shen, ed,

Old China through G E

Morrison’s eyes, trans Dou

Kun, Fujian Education

Press, Fuzhou, 2005, p 5

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firmly holds it close to his body, showing the cover,

is reminiscent of how the Red Guards advocated

Mao’s words and the Party so exclusively. This book

seems to be another indication of the impact of

the Revolution: and the objects he has chosen to

hold can also be interpreted as representing the

artist’s two forceful instruments – painting and

reading as ways to understand the world.

In terms of portraiture, Shen’s positioning of

himself is unusual. He does not put the ‘self’ at

the centre but to the left. When compared to the

original photograph, the place Shen occupies in the

painting is that of Laoh Wan (Old Wan), a guide,

horseman and an accountant.18 The multi-talented

Laoh Wan played a key role during Morrison’s trips

and his name is even passed down to the present.

Given this fact, the artist’s decision to put himself

in that position stresses his belief not only in the

role of the artist in society, but the significance of

his own presence in the painting.

Within the composition, Shen and Morrison

occupy the same space: there is no obvious

difference in stature between artist and writer/

envoy. Instead a powerful cultural rendezvous

transcending time and space is proposed in this

painting. Made ‘real’ (and seemingly authentic) by

the artist’s realistic rendering, the narrative is in

fact far from real: it would have been impossible

for the two figures to have met, let alone be posed

together in a picture. This may be one of the

18 Shen, Old China through G E Morrison’s eyes, op cit, pp 8-9.

reasons why Shen chose not to include the original

Chinese architectural background of the original

photograph: in his work the ‘meeting’ place is

undefined. Rather, the artist depicts an ambiguous

space – a place located somewhere between East

and West. On one hand, the oil medium is typical

of Western art practice; on the other, the painting

is laden with Chinese references, including

Morrison’s Chinese outfit, two Chinese passports,

signatures, stamps, and margins that are clearly

borrowed from Chinese scrolls.19

Alluding to traditions from the East and West,

Shen focuses on another ‘hybrid’ – Morrison

himself, a Westerner wrapped in his adopted

Chinese identity. But there is one slight difference

separating Shen’s Morrison and the real one: in

the photograph that the artist has appropriated,

Morison’s fake glasses are removed, which,

seemingly, enhances his eye contact with the

viewer. In this particular East-West context,

although standing apart and not visually

communicating with each other, the gaze of the

two men – both keenly interested in Chinese

politics, who seem to connect spiritually –

invites us to enter their world, to explore their

backgrounds and understand their formative

fascination with China. Despite differences in

appearance – their outfits reflecting the historical

periods – the two share a physical locality:

Morrison first landed in Shanghai from Australia

19 It is a tradition of Chinese scrolls to leave the margins of the silk after a

painting has been fixed to its mounting.

Photograph of Morrison’s

Chinese passport

Source: Jiawei Shen, ed,

Old China through G E

Morrison’s eyes, trans.

Dou Kun, Fujian jiaoyu

chubanshe, Fuzhou,

2005, p 6

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in the 1890s, while Shen, born in Shanghai in the

1950s, later, migrated to Australia .

Like Morrison , Shen genuinely cares about

his country. In this respect, he is not unlike

the American journalist Edgar Snow who

wrote Red Star over China (1937), a banned

book that influenced the young artist during

the Revolutionary years.20 If Morrison is often

considered to be a symbol of cultural exchange

within a contentious historical context,21

juxtaposing himself with Morrison, Shen similarly

suggests a world of cross-cultural dialogue

and where introspection is a place of infinite

possibilities.

On the contrary, Lee’s art is based on her own

cultural experiences. She often likens her art to the

complexities one associates with reading a face,

which she sees as key to human complexity – not

just the colour of eyes and skin (the surface) but

the traces that lead to recognition of the inner

being.22 Compared with the realistic portraits of

Jiawei Shen, Lee’s faces are mysterious, anonymous

and, sometimes, just a vague silhouette. Untitled

(blue – El Greco’s Companion) encapsulates the

self-probing associated with her practice. At

first glance, this ‘copy’ may seem like the artist

is vandalising one of the great paintings of the

Western tradition, but this suite of six works

– each slightly different in terms of clarity and

darkness – recounts something beyond what

could be considered just A5 photocopies.23

Lee’s summoning of El Greco , ‘the Greek’ who

established his career in Spain , alludes to her own

‘outsider’ status and the self-assurance associated

with a ‘European’ cultural identity. The woman in

El Greco’s portrait looms in the darkness, yet she

remains mysterious and taciturn: it’s as if Lee’s

efforts to connect herself with Western culture

is in vain – the copy, the artist, results in another

depiction of otherness, emanating awkwardness

and alienation. The woman remains a stranger, a

nomad, a wanderer seeking resolution, residence

20 Grahame Kime, ‘Interview with Shen Jiawei ‘, Shen Jiawei: From Mao to

Now 1961-2010, op cit, 2010, p 22.

21 Morrison, in the words of Nicholas Jose – an established writer, art critic,

and once Cultural Counsellor to the Australian Embassy Beijing – is

‘an embodiment of the close and continuing links between China and

Australia, a human thread tying Chinese and Australian history together

at significant points.’ Jose, ‘Preface’, Old China through G E Morrison’s

eyes, op cit, p 11.

22 Interview with Lindy Lee, 8 November 2011.

23 The process of making these portraits is quite simple: first Lee brushed

marine-blue on each sheet of paper and then putting them through

the photocopy machine multiple times. Interview with Lindy Lee, 8

November 2011.

and remedy.24 These six blue portraits remain as

propositions or meditations – their ‘irresolution’ a

comment on the fluidity of identity.

Lee has said all her work is about self-portraiture.25

The blue portraits record what could be described

as an ‘ahistorical melancholy’ – but a sentiment

best understood within the historical context.

Shen’s art also contains his own opinion towards

history. But, as many critics have pointed out, his

art is, in a way, self-suppression and denial, which

is probably due in part to the impact of political

turmoil upon the artist’s personality.26 Shen always

tries to present the truth he discovers and believes,

and aims to achieve objective historical accounts

that can be conveyed, translated and disseminated

by means of art. Culture, its cross-boundary

fluidity and universal humanity, has been his usual

topic and something to be celebrated in his art –

‘culture’; for Lee, it however, is not such a merry

thing. The uneasiness associated with coping with

two cultures – one ancestral that haunts her, the

other, acquired, that has become her companion

– accounts for Lee’s deep interest in philosophical

thoughts and her acute artistic sensitivity. In both

instances, despite the different approaches and

formats, the artists’ encounters with their cultural

backgrounds are metamorphosed … blended, if you

like, each a double ‘self-portrait’.

Lindy Lee’s Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion),

and Shen’s Self-portrait with G E Morrison reflect

the two artists’ ruminations over their past and

notions of selfhood and culture. As witnesses,

participants and bearers of history, they

imaginatively reveal the apprehensions associated

with identity and trans-cultural experience.

Through the processes of art they have been able

to crystallise their thoughts, yet remain speculative

not only about formative individual circumstances

but about the nature of cross-cultural dialogue.

From childhood, both Shen and Lee had the

intuitive feeling that art could provide a way

through the labyrinth, without ever expecting to

arrive at a particular destination.

24 Lindy mentioned she is ‘malleable, changeable’. (see Taylor, ‘The search

for self’, op cit, p 3). Her art trajectory proves her words: after this

appropriation of Western paintings, she moved to appropriating family

photographs and then aspects of Zen Buddhism..

25 Taylor, op cit, p 3..

26 Art critic John McDonald once commented, ‘Shen is a whole-hearted

painter who has come through a tough artistic training in China. He has

all the technical ability, the courage to take on ambitious compositions

and a hint of self-deprecating wit’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March

1997).

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A first generation Chinese Australian, Lindy Lee works like a cultural forensic investigator looking into issues of identity and belonging.

An

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LINDY LEE

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) detail 1988

photocopy, synthetic polymer paint on Stonehenge paper,

Perspex box frame

42 x 29cm (unframed), 43 x 30.5cm (framed)

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

Vigen Galstyan

Lindy Lee’s Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion)

ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING

Lindy Lee is represented in the Allens Art Collection

with two mixed media paintings from the artist’s

early oeuvre. One of them, Untitled (blue –

El Greco’s Companion), is a six panel assemblage

that encapsulates Lee’s rigorously conceptual

approach. A first generation Chinese Australian,

Lee works like a cultural forensic investigator

looking into issues of identity and belonging.

Her Eastern heritage comes to play an important

role in her works, as it inevitably collides with the

amalgamated, Western, profile of the Australian

context. After studies in London, and later in

Sydney, Lee began exhibiting alongside a new

generation of Australian women artists who

took on a highly critical, deconstructive stance

towards the past. Her interest towards issues

of authenticity in the age of globalisation was

evident almost from the beginning of her career.

It was shared by many artists of the time, such

as Tim Johnson and Micky Allan, and was quickly

embraced by major art institutions such as the

National Gallery in Canberra and the Art Gallery of

New South Wales, which purchased a number of

Lee’s works during the 1980s.

The artist notes that as Australians ‘we have been

bad copies of Europe’1 and her paintings of the

1980s demonstrate this literally by comprising

‘bad’ photocopies of Renaissance portraits. The

ghostly visages of European noblemen stare at us

with a blurry gaze, their multiplied, otherworldly

presence as intimidating as it is eerie.

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) belongs

to this series of reflections on Western art. The

1 www.artcollector.net.au/LindyLeeTheManyFacesofLindyLee.

Accessed 12.03.2012.

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work comprises of photocopied reproductions

of a woman’s portrait attributed to El Greco

and currently in the Philadelphia Museum

of Art. Repeating the image across six panels

arranged in sequence, Lee glazes each one with

layers of thinned, transparent oil paint. All of

the panels are the same, yet different. The artist

has allowed the mistakes and accidents that

arise due to overprinting in the photocopier to

come through the paint layer. In order to see

these subtle differences, the viewer has to fully

concentrate as Lee’s painting demands a prolonged

scrutiny in order to ‘reveal’ itself. The frequent

appropriation of El Greco’s imagery in Lee’s works

is not accidental. The sixteenth century Greek-

Spanish artist faced similar issues of being a

perpetual outsider trying to construct his selfhood

in a foreign context. According to the artist, the

appeal of ‘El Greco’s deep sense of fervent belief’

is another important aspect of identification for

her practice, which is so informed by Zen Buddhist

philosophy.2

Despite this, the work immediately conjures up

memories of Warhol’s multi-panel screenprints.

But the prerogative is completely different. If

Warhol’s aim is to pinpoint the pre-eminence of

the surface and the vacuity of the self, Lee uses

the device of the copy to arrive at a different

conclusion. She is not interested in how history

vanishes into thin air or becomes commodified

POP iconography. What appears more pertinent

to her concerns is how history becomes a mine

2 Andrew Taylor. ‘The Search For Self: an interview with Lindy Lee’ in The

Sun Herald, 21 November 2010, p 3.

for the imagination with the passage of time,

fuelling new constructs and paradigms that shift

the original meaning in order to create new ones.

The thick layering of the photocopier’s black ink

suggests our accumulated distance from the

‘original source’, yet its ghostly presence continues

to hover in our reality.

Untitled (blue – El Greco’s Companion) is also,

as Terry Smith suggests, a reflection on the

limitations of painting, the muted, confined and

immobile state of images that are trapped within

the frame.3 In a way, Lee’s work can be seen as an

attempt to liberate the painted image from its

contextual corset. Works like Untitled (blue – El

Greco’s Companion) and especially the larger multi-

panel renditions like Philosophy of the Parvenu,

(1990), create a rhythmic movement that seems to

explode off the edges of the frame and continue to

evolve in the imagination of the viewer.

We can also see the painting as a commentary

on Australian art’s hereditary reliance on the

Western tradition: like a child unwilling to leave

the parent’s shadow, it seems destined to emulate

the seductive certainties of this formidable

patriarch. Yet Lee’s commentary does not satirise

the ‘copy culture’ of Australia; rather surprisingly,

she validates the process of copying itself that

informs so much of our current context. Through

incessant borrowing and distancing, the ‘original’

has become a newly transformed entity: it is a

simulacra with an identity of its own.

3 Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1990, Oxford

University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p 549.

issue 2Allens art journal

INTERVIEWS: JIAWEI SHEN

LINDY LEEA

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…the fern is like any microscopic image of plant growth, of tendrils uncoiling. I was really impressed by that kind of essence in form – in many ways, every growing thing unfolds like the fern.

MARIA CRUZ

Organic No 2 1991

oil on canvas, 183 x 213cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

Maria Poulos in conversation with Maria Cruz

FOCUS: MARIA CRUZ – TO BE TRANS-NATIONAL

In 1997, Maria Cruz won the prestigious Portia

Geach Memorial Award, with her painting Maria

painting 1997. While the title refers to the artist

herself, ‘Maria’ is such a generic name and yet

there is a resonance, a rich legacy associated with

it. Maria Cruz is painting a self-portrait but the

image alludes to the many Marias who have been

painted over time.

This oscillation between the ordinary and the

elevated is one way of approaching Maria Cruz’s

attitude to art-making and her responses to the

vibrancy to be discovered in the world around us.

Her paintings have a metaphysical quality that

connects with reflection, personal and communal

exchange; yet, semiotics and colour theory play

pivotal roles. Incorporating the anecdotal alongside

art historical references and philosophy, Cruz

merges figuration, text and compositional aspects

associated with abstraction within her practice.

A motif in Cruz’s visual language is the liana,

a woody climbing tropical vine. In her hands,

the liana symbolises the vital energy of organic

growth, which in some of her paintings becomes

an arabesque-like, dynamic form epitomising the

relationship between culture and nature.

An expatriate visual artist now based in Berlin,

Maria Cruz lived and worked in Sydney from the

1980s. Despite moving in international circles, she

has always maintained close ties with this, her

homeland, and the Philippines, the place of her

birth.

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MP: Untitled (drawing) 1985 is one of your very

early drawings and the earliest of your works

purchased for the Allens Art Collection.

MC: When I saw it again, I thought ‘Oh my God …

it’s a European one’. The drawing was included in

my very first show, when I graduated from Sydney

College of the Arts. I was so touched to see it

hanging in the Sydney office.

Former managing partner, the late Hugh Jamieson

– whose passion and vision was the driving force

of the Allens Art Collection – saw it at your first

show?

Yes, it’s amazing when you think of what Hugh

did. I met Hugh through Mori Gallery – I had

just finished art school and was about to go to

Germany to further my studies.

Given the range of your work in the Allens Art

Collection, your approach defies categorisation. It

can be considered abstract, figurative, portraiture

and even landscape

My work crosses categories in the same way that it

does for many other contemporary artists who are

interested in all forms of visual material. I feel that

I am like those artists who are informed by things

that catch their eye. I’m particularly interested in

colour, in nature, text as form … any kind of image.

The depiction of events and aspects of everyday life

triggers something in me.

Your paintings in the Allens Art Collection date

predominately from the 1980s and 1990s; what

were you focusing on at that time?

During the 1980s I had been working with colours

and the processes of painting. I’d been very

experimental with my manner and application of

paint. Basically, layer upon layer of changes and

corrections. I don’t hesitate in removing something

from the painting if I am not happy with it, and to

overlay it with another image. I was very interested

in creating lines, very linear forms against colour

field explosions of different combinations. And I

think those works were very much informed by

nature. They’re like clouds or bursts of green in the

landscape, and forms like hills. At the time I was

particularly interested in a particular organic form

that is like a sphere from a plant – the liana and its

tendrils, a botanical form from which I derive many

of my abstract forms.

Two works, Carrier of human emotion 1989-90

and Organic No 2 1991 – both now hanging in the

reception of the Melbourne Office at 101 Collins

Street – appear quite different in terms of subject

and the way they are painted. Yet, the abstract

curving forms suggest they could be part of a

series incorporating the liana vine. Do you usually

work this way, following an idea but across a range

of resolutions?

My paintings don’t usually follow on from each

other, I don’t paint in a methodical way. This

approach came later, it’s what I do now. But in the

1980s and 90s I would have had several canvases

hanging in my studio and would’ve worked on

them simultaneously with the same idea … trying

different colours and different ways of applying the

paint.

Did you have any particular influences? Were there

any particular artists who inspired you at the time?

In those days I liked the ideas and the abstractions

of people like Gerhard Richter and painters like

Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. These artists

influenced my work a lot.

You’ve moved on in your practice and have

experimented with other media, yet you continue

to paint. Tell me about your attraction to paint, its

plasticity.

Paint is a material that I still connect with even

though I’ve moved on and now incorporate other

media. Paint – more than other processes – is so

immediate and it’s so primal. I can have an idea or

a feeling that I want to express and communicate,

and immediately I can do it. I can paint it. I can see

a result. And in terms of colours and material, the

plasticity of paint is ideal … it’s so connected with

touch, and that’s probably what attracts me the

most.

Do you consider your works to be auto-

biographical?

Not in the sense that they have a narrative about

myself. I think they are more about improvisation.

This period of my painting was more about

impulse and stimulus and learning to work on a

large format, on different scales and formats …

and, I think, with a real interest in nature.

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MARIA CRUZ

Untitled (drawing) 1985

acrylic on paper, 113.5 x 101

(unframed), 140 x 126 cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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Speaking of nature, and perhaps the lush

vegetation of the Philippines, do these works relate

to your cultural upbringing?

I’m not sure my fascination with nature relates

directly to my cultural upbringing … but I am very,

very inspired by nature everywhere. I have, in fact,

memorised the perfect land/seascape for me – I

can paint it with a few brush strokes. It’s not a

particular place, it’s more like a mindscape. But

whether it’s a Filipino landscape or a European

landscape, I’m not so sure – both are landscapes

that create the same feelings for me.

The use of text in your work, often subtle, is

intriguing. In Post Office 1989-90, Untitled (Boy)

1990 and Untitled (Reflection) 1990, words are

embedded within the surface but, in a certain

light, visible beneath layers of paint.

I work a lot with text as a form now, but during

the late 1980s and early 90s was when I started

experimenting with words. The text I used then

was hidden and it appears more like a secret

message … I was attempting to combine lettering

with very abstract forms. I remember at that time

I did quite a few paintings just using the names

of the days of the week. I’m not sure if one of the

works you mention is part of this series … it would

be hard to tell, the words were so obscured. But

that’s how I became interested in text as form. I

then started giving meaning to each letter … not

so much a personal meaning, but what the letter

shape could be visually on a canvas. In this sense

the letter, word or text relates to everything else

included in the composition.

Looking again at the large-scale canvas Organic

No 2 1991, can you describe the origins of that

work?

It’s a succession, a repetition of the same kind

of form with two spheres at both ends, and it’s

a version of this fernlike growth or tendril that

emerges when a seed sprouts. The forms in this

work are all repetitions of that energy. Someone

once described the fern to me … it is like any

microscopic image of plant growth, of tendrils

uncoiling. I was really impressed by that kind of

essence in form – in many ways, every growing

thing unfolds like the fern.

MARIA CRUZ

Grace 1990-91

oil on canvas, 121 x 91cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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Do you consider this an abstract painting when,

equally, it could be a landscape or figurative

painting derived from natural forms? There’s even

the hint of calligraphy, the flowing linear pattern is

like writing – a secret language …

For me Organic No 2 is an abstract painting

and, similarly, the earlier work Carrier of human

emotion, which has a variation of the same fern-

like tendril motif. I like the fact that the use of

this symbol connotes other things … it’s a way of

opening up the picture to interpretation by others.

Actually, the larger painting is a combination

of different movements of my body – the way

I work with paint. I still work this way … there’s

an essential connection between the body, the

act of painting and the scale of the work. And, of

course, there’s the impact of colour. I really like

clashing colours … I do not follow traditional rules

about colour combinations. And perhaps you’re

right about the calligraphic aspect because of my

interest with text and writing.

Tell me about the work When I liked romantic

painting 1989-90. The linear motif has gone,

replaced by a burst of white paint across the

surface.

Visiting the Allens office, it was so nice to see all

these works again, especially When I liked romantic

painting. It has that effect of repelling you but

drawing you in at the same time. This is a duality

that I like to play with in my work – and in this

work I used varnish on parts of the canvas so that

the two surface effects play off each other. When

I was making this work I had became interested

in hard edge abstraction – and the works that

followed were more hard edge, colour field

paintings. The central burst of white you describe

was not made by scumbling but the very opposite,

by using a brush and layering the paint. It was very

intense work … layering, correcting and erasing.

That’s why the painting looks as if it’s still in the

process of being made.

And because it looks like it’s ‘always being made’,

this, again, opens up the possibilities for viewers to

complete the work …

Yes, that’s the intention.

This applies also to the smaller painting Grace

1990.

Grace was the beginning of my interest in spheres.

And, as the title suggests, there’s a religious

connotation to the work as well. I’m very interested

in religious icons and religious paintings of the

middle ages and, in particular, an artist called

Stefan Lochner. I often have a fear of God feeling

in some of my images. Grace connotes a kind of

reverence but more like a light, an omnipotent

light. And the burst of colour in the middle of this

work lights up the picture’s imagery … like a cloud,

a plume of colour bursting from a halo.

Do you intentionally take ideas from art history?

Yes, especially the paintings I’m currently working

on. I am working from icons but mixing them

with comic representations of sound or light –

juxtaposing colour, the material that I get from

comics and the details I glean from religious

paintings. But the results are abstract, there are

no images. There are lines … in fact, I’ve become

really interested in Aboriginal work from the desert

and bark paintings. I’m now based in Germany

and recently began painting on board – works that

lean against the wall rather than hanging them.

It’s as if I’m internalising all these references from

comics, allusions to religious iconography and now

Aboriginal paintings, that suddenly emerge as pop

imagery.

Let’s return to another highly varnished painting,

Boy 1990. Like Grace, and other works from this

period, it has a sensuous surface and is as much

about the materiality of paint as it is refering to a

deeper, less obvious meaning.

Unlike Grace, this painting is not about spheres

or religiosity; it alludes to graffiti or street art

that was sold in the Philippines in the 1960s. For

instance, when they wrote ‘Boy,’ they made it into

the physical appearance of a boy. Basically, this

is the background to the painting. Talking about

sensuous surfaces, though, these days I have bad

reactions to paint – I cannot work the way I used

to. As a young painter, I just went crazy, I lived in

my studio breathing all these fumes all the time.

Now I get headaches and turps irritates my eyes –

I’ve even lost my sense of smell. I still work with oil,

but I use just the purest oils … besides, they really

have the most intense colour.

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Although your work might not be specifically

cross-cultural, you are a Filipina who has taken on

Western modes of practice. Is this something that

you think is relevant to your practice?

Yes, I think it is relevant. Whenever I go back to the

Philippines I notice that my mode of practice is

different in that it’s more informed by abstraction.

There the culture is highly figurative, seeing the

world as images in their perfect form and never as

abstractions.

Although you were born in the Philippines, your

roots are there, and you obviously have very strong

ties to the place, but you’ve travelled extensively

and now live in Berlin.

Yes, I’m probably one of those people who see

the world as flat! I’m always joking, saying

‘Oh, I see the world as a big house, and I have

different rooms in this house, and so I don’t see

it necessarily as separate places.’ I guess for me

personally, this is a good way of adapting to my

situation and the paths I move along.

Some critics have talked about the ways

you reference globalisation and migration,

mediatisation and tourism in your work. Is your

nationality and background intrinsic to what you

do, or do you see yourself purely as an artist?

I think my background is intrinsic to what I do

because I couldn’t live without the stimulus of

Manila. I couldn’t be producing the work that I am

producing now without the vibrancy of that city.

I see myself as a ‘trans-national’. I’m a citizen of

three countries, really.

MARIA CRUZ

Post office 1989-90

oil on canvas, 101 x 101 cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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Australia, the Philippines and Germany?

Yes. My family lives here in Australia, my

granddaughter is here, and then my father

is in the Philippines, and I am married to a

German. Although I can see myself as a little bit

of everything – that is, as a tourist in all these

countries, a trans-national – I have a very sacred

memory related to my origins, which can never

be removed. There’s no way you could erase it.

And I find myself keeping a lot of things from the

Philippines. It is the third-largest Catholic nation

in the world and the first in Asia, and my family

has an old tradition from my great-great-great

grandfather, where we change the clothing of

our statute of St Peter. I keep the clothing and

everything, so I have a stack of these things. Every

third year the family changes the clothing … it’s a

big ritual.

Recently, I was reading a text by Svetlana Boym – a

Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures

at Harvard University as well as a media artist,

playwright and novelist – who writes on the

relationship between memory and modernity, and

between homesickness and sickness of home. She

was talking about the Russian emigrate essentially,

but I felt it really applied to me. She describes how

you have a kind of love-hate relationship with

your place of origin. You see it with a critical eye

sometimes and then, if other people talk about

it in a negative way, you don’t accept it. I am still

very much part of my culture … but it’s very much a

push-and-pull relationship.

MARIA CRUZ

Carrier of human emotion 1989-90

oil on canvas, 101 x 101cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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MARIA CRUZ

When I liked romantic painting 1989-90

oil on canvas, 160 x160 cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

Some of your paintings are inspired by personal

photographs, or other images that you’ve sourced

from magazines and books. Are these items self

referential?

Yes, some of them are from my own photo albums

from when I was a child. When I paint these

images, the painting process takes over but the

impetus and original images are based on what

happened in real life. At one time, I painted a series

of paintings that related to the 1972 earthquake

in the Philippines. These paintings were

autobiographical in the sense that I depicted, in

an abstract way, what happened to the crockery in

my mother’s house. The shards and pieces of china

were sprawled across the floor, they resembled

still life paintings except that the ceramics and the

plates were completely dishevelled.

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Interview: Maria Cruz

… the way I work with paint … there’s an essential connection between the body, the act of painting and the scale of the work.

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The interconnections made when working between cultures and communities are made manifest in the techniques and symbols Johnson has absorbed into his practice.

Tim

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TIM JOHNSON

Lakota 1989

oil on canvas, 151 x 121cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

In Tim Johnson’s paintings, images are scattered

cross the canvas like signs on a complex map,

traversing time as well as space. This artist is a

traveller in the physical, imaginary and conceptual

sense of the word. His paintings as well as his

songs (he has been writing and recording rock/

blues music since the early 1970s), document

his journeys through various cultures and places.

While his references to Aboriginal painting have

often defined discussions of Johnson’s art, his

practice needs to be more widely understood in

terms of a conceptual eclecticism that has been

part of his approach since the early 1970s. As an

artist and occasional writer, Johnson also invokes

the power of dreams: ‘Images are dreams and

exist independently of time – so we can paint the

future.’2

It could be suggested that Tim Johnson’s distinctive

painting style – at once interpretative and

celebratory of the potential of appropriation and

the insights that can be gained by appreciating key

elements from other traditions – represents the

hybrid reality of contemporary Australian culture.

Emphasising Australia’s geographic proximity to

Asia, the artist considers the legacy of European art

history of less relevance, perhaps, than the diverse

cultural, spiritual and artistic practices of our

Eastern neighbours, our Indigenous communities

and other First Nation artists who, similarly, have

had to confront the challenges of oppressive

colonisation.

2 Sue Cramer, ‘Illusory Worlds: an essay on Tim Johnson’, catalogue essay

for Documenta IX, Mori Gallery, Sydney 1992.

Ewen McDonald

FOCUS: TIM JOHNSON THE ART OF COLLABORATION

The only limits to painting … are those set by the artist who is afraid to reflect the reality of his or her mind.1

1 Tim Johnson, artist statement, Notes on Painting 1970-77, published by

the artist, Sydney 1977

1 Tim Johnson, artist statement, Notes on Painting 1970-77, published

by the artist, Sydney 1977.

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TIM JOHNSON

Platte River 1989

acrylic on linen, 152 x 182cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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TIM JOHNSON

Red Mt Meru 2000

oil on linen, 152 x 183cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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tied to Renaissance perspective nor limited by a

need to embody the physically experienced world,

but a place for storytelling and mapping. Later,

this approach connected with the use of multiple,

interlocking picture planes associated with Eastern

painting (especially Chinese and Tibetan landscape

painting) and totemic aspects of Native American

art.

The interconnections made when working

between cultures and communities are made

manifest in the techniques and symbols Johnson

has absorbed into his practice. For instance, the

dots associated with much Aboriginal painting

become in Johnson’s work a compositional

device (like the differing registers of reprographic

image-making), a vibrant ground upon which the

energy associated with meaningful collaboration

is communicated to the viewer. The artist is ever

hopeful that cultures can learn from each other,

that inclusion will counter feelings of being

indifferent to difference. In this sense, Johnson’s

paintings traverse that fine line between pictorial

reality and the world outside the frame – a world

that is, based on effective, respectful dialogue and

exchange.

Further reading: Sue Cramer, ‘Illusory Worlds: an essay on Tim

Johnson’, catalogue essay for Documenta IX, Mori Gallery, Sydney

1992; Barbara Flynn, ‘Tim Johnson’, Emerge and Review: a look into

the UBS Australian Art Collection, UBS, Sydney 2007, pp 52-53

Tim Johnson (born 1947) lives and works in Sydney. Recent solo exhibitions include Supernatural, Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2011); Emulation, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney and Worlds Apart, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2010); Painting Ideas, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009). He has been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including 2011 Roundabout, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2011); Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2008); Flight Patterns, MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (2000); Antipodean Currents, Guggenheim, New York, USA (1995) and Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992).

The artist once suggested it would be great if

‘Australian art could be seen within the context of

Aboriginal, Asian and American traditions and still

have its own identity.’ Recognising the impossibility

of such an all-encompassing approach, Johnson

has come to focus on the need to work in a shared

symbolic space … ‘perhaps like a Buddhist Pure

Land, or the mandala itself, to create an illusory

reality or virtual reality in which the space that

the artwork occupies is revealed to the audience

that read enough signs to begin to unravel its

meanings.’3

From a practice encapsulating counter-culture

ideals, conceptualism, a restless eclecticism and

cross-media experimentation – which included

sculpture, kinetics, film, installation, photography,

artist books, music and performance work –

Johnson developed a painting practice that has

increasingly focused on cross-cultural dialogue.

Since the 1980s he has explored a range of

interconnected cultural references and sources

– at first inspired by his experiences travelling

throughout Asia in the 1970s and, then later, when

he worked with Aboriginal artists from the Pintupi,

Warlpiri and Anmatyerre communities at Papunya

in the Western Desert. By this time, the artist

realised the significance of collaborating with

other artists: he was one of the first Australian

artists to work with the Papunya Tula artists but

more as a pupil than a teacher. At the time he

wrote: ‘Papunya is a place where new technology

and pure abstraction meet an ancient wisdom and

an art that transcends European knowledge and

systems.’4 A consequence of these exchanges with

senior artists like Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Clifford

Possum Tjapatjarri and Michael Nelson Jagamara,

was that Johnson was given permission to use

some non-sacred Aboriginal motifs in his own

work. Similarly, he adopted the notion of painting

being a field of images in deep space – no longer

3 Tim Johnson and My Le Thi 2002, correspondence between the artists

and curator Wayne Tunnicliffe, quoted in ‘The symbolic space of Tim

Johnson’, Brought to light II: contemporary Australian art 1966-2006,

Lynne Seear and Julie Ewington (eds), Queensland Art Gallery Publishing,

2007, p 167.

4 ‘Travel Songs’, Tension 9, 1986 republished in Tim Johnson, Mori Gallery,

Sydney and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1987.

TIM JOHNSON

Justine n/d

oil on linen, 152 x 60cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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Identity for me is a fluid idea and you negotiate between the identity that you were born with, the places and situations you have been in, and personal experiences.

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SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN

Criss Cross 1998

acrylic on perforated canvas, 183 x 153cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

FOCUS: PAINTING AS A DELICATE SKIN

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn in conversation with Maria Poulos

Laos – a landlocked country in Southeast Asia

has had a long and tumultuous history. In 1893 it

became a French Protectorate; in 1945 it briefly

gained independence after Japanese occupation,

but returned to French rule until it was granted

autonomy in 1949. In 1953 a long civil war began

which was quashed in 1975 when the Communist

Pathet Lao movement came to power.

Despite the many social and political upheavals,

Theravada Buddhism has remained a dominant

force in Lao culture: its significance reflected in

the language, temples, literature and all forms

of creative expression, including the visual and

performing arts.

This is the birthplace of artist, Savanhdary

Vongpoothorn who, after fleeing her home in

southern Laos and spending nine months in a

refugee camp at Nong Khai on the Thai boarder,

arrived as a refugee in Australia in 1979. She had

been separated from her father who was a captain

in the Royal Army and who was also marked for

execution by the Communists. During 1979 those

connected with old regime were rounded up for

‘re-education’. She was eight years old when

she came with her mother and three brothers

to live in a Department of Immigration hostel in

Cabramatta, west of Sydney.

In 1998, Savanhdary returned to Laos with her

parents. This was the first time she’d seen her

home country since escaping the civil war and the

first time she met her 93 year-old-grandmother –

it was a particularly emotional time for the artist

and her family to whom she feels very close. Her

parents had renounced Buddhism after arriving in

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Australia – deciding to attend a Christian church in

an effort to assimilate into Australian culture – but

twenty years later, when they returned to Laos and

to the temple, her father, Mungsamai became a

Buddhist monk. This visit was also a turning point

in Savanhdary’s artistic practice. On her return to

Sydney she began exploring new techniques that

have their origins in the traditional arts of Laos

– the most obvious being the puncturing of the

canvas with hundreds of small holes, often within

a grid-like pattern, that not only recall the textures

and methods of weaving but the rituals associated

with fabrics and touch.

Despite the fact that her childhood memories

are tainted by war – and she has no nostalgia

for Laos – there is a certain serenity in work. Her

paintings could be considered as prayers, forms of

meditation wherein each mark can be understood

as a reference to the repetition inherent in

breathing, chanting and music. As a monk, poet

and musician, her father has not only helped her

retrace her cultural past, he has become her studio

assistant – working by her side, burning holes with

a soldering iron to delineate the grid-like structures

sketched by Savanhdary upon the canvas that have

come to typify her practice.

Originally trained in sculpture, Savanhdary’s

practice moved from installation to object

painting, and her painting processes have shifted

from fibre washes and glue to acrylic on canvas.

There are notable affinities in her work with

Aboriginal art, her work is similarly grounded in

cultural beliefs and rituals. Knowledge of Laotian

textiles and, increasingly, experiences within the

Australian landscape are key sources. The subtle

colours and muted tones, and the dot matrix

of knotted threads, reference not only the weft

and weave of traditional textiles, they reveal the

influence of Australian art history.

There is a formality to the compositional structure

of her work. Often, an alternating rhythm is

established between scraped back, worn and

almost bleached-out sections and more vibrantly

coloured panels. Yet, simultaneously, the paintings

evoke not only the poetic landscapes of Dorothea

MacKellar – ‘the stark white ring-barked forests,

sapphire-misted mountains, the green tangle

of leaves and ferns on warm ochred soil, brown

streams and soft, dim skies’ – but aspects of the

later works of Ian Fairweather and Fred Williams.

Detailed and layered both physically and

conceptually, Savanhdary creates meditative,

introspective works. While the juxtaposition

of delicate washes and perforations may seem

contradictory, the combination builds a complex

web of repeated forms that allude to the optical

rhythms associated with minimalist abstraction as

much as they refer to the patterns and textures of

woven cloth.

MP: It’s some time since you grew up and fled from

Laos. How do you look back upon that time now?

SV: I don’t think about it much, because I don’t

dwell on it. Sometimes my mother would talk

about her family background, and how she grew

up with ten siblings. And she’ll talk about her

grandfather – my great grandfather – the little

that she knew him and the little time that she

had spent with him listening to his stories. I’m

always riveted … I just love hearing the history of

my family, I’m fascinated by it. In terms of growing

up in Laos, I don’t have a lot of memories – and

remembering has a lot to do with language.

Watching my children growing up, I see how

crucial and important a first language is … how it

informs their learning, their memories …

When I was young, up the to the age of eight, my

social interaction was limited. The main source

of stimulation was my mother … I was always

with her. I went to school but I never really picked

up the language in a formal way, like learning

to read or write. I guess what I’m trying to say is

that language is a crucial link to remembering, to

memories.

The beauty of your work is that it is so evocative.

There is another level to language – the visual.

I grew up with traditional textiles, with rituals,

weddings and other functions associated with

the temple and other similar places – and in all

of these the visual aspect is vibrant and strong. I

remember these things about Laotian culture but

not the formal language.

Perhaps this has to do with the trauma of being

forced from one’s homeland?

Maybe … I mean, I’ve never really thought of it in

that way. But when I hear my mother talk about

how she escaped on her own with four children

on a boat and how the boat almost sank and how

she had to get the water out the boat … I just

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get shivers up my spine thinking about it. Such

courage and bravery. And being a mother myself

now, I wonder if I could do that with my children?

But, I guess, if it comes to choosing life or death

you’d do anything for your children.

I remember vividly prior to escaping, when my

mother took us four children at dawn to a place of

hiding, near the river. We stayed there all day and

we were not allowed to move or speak until night

time when someone came to take us down the

river and into the little boat. But apart from that I

remember our house and the well at the back.

Visual forms like sarongs and things like that,

remain too – but I think some of these memories

are of early days here in Australia when I was

growing up.

Connected with the trauma of that night, your

father was already on a hit list of wanted people …

Yes, that’s true. His brother was a colonel, and he

was a captain. When they took his brother, we

knew we had to escape.

When your family returned to Laos later for a visit

that too must’ve been very difficult?

It was. While my father’s family had been on one

side, my mother’s family was on the opposite.

They’re staunch communists … they’re in the party

and they’ve become key players in running the

country. My auntie back then, was the leader of the

Women’s Union and two of my cousins are now

working in the Prime Minister’s office.

Prior to arriving in Australia you spent nine months

in a Thai border camp, do you have memories of

that time?

I do have one memory that is strong – when my

mum growled at me.

It was because everyone had been designated

a particular spot where you could keep all your

things. We had a mat on which we’d sit, sleep

and eat and then we’d clear things away … but

someone would always have to sit there to look

after your belongings otherwise things would get

stolen. My three brothers were always going off

and playing like kids do, but I always stayed with

my mother because I was a young girl and the only

daughter and my mum was overprotective of me.

So I was the one who had to sit on this mat and

look after our things. We had a container full of

sticky rice and on one occasion when she went to

get some food, she came back to find there was

only a little bit of rice left. She asked me “What

happened?” and I said “Oh, that man next door, he

asked if he could have some … and he took like, you

know, a lot.” Mum got so upset, and this is what I

remember!1

Coming to Australia must have been a real culture

shock? You’ve talked about the red roofs being like

mushrooms …

Yes … those roofs had quite an impact! And the

way the houses were so close together. Absolutely!

Arriving in Australia was a culture shock for all of

us.

Yet your family assimilated quite easily … or at

least they wanted to.

Yes, they wanted to assimilate. Uppermost in their

mind was education. After staying in a hostel in

Cabramatta and being around a lot of people with

similar backgrounds, they wondered how you

could get an education when you’re always with

your own people and hearing only their language.

My mum had a nephew who lived in Narwee so my

parents decided that we should go and live near

them.

We ended up just a block away from their house

and went to school there. Narwee was so different

to Cabramatta. Every weekend my father would

take the family to the city- we’d walk to the station,

take the train into town, go to Chinatown, then

have McDonald’s and go into the Greater Union

cinema complex, not to watch a film … because we

couldn’t afford it … but to just run around and play

safely away from danger. That was our weekend

entertainment.

Later on we moved from Narwee to Campbelltown.

When did you first become interested in art?

Well, I have to say I wasn’t very academic at

school, but I excelled in Art and English. I chose

all the wrong subjects … subjects that my more

academically-inclined friends chose like science

and economics which I flunked anyway. I should

have opted for the humanities. My marks and my

art portfolio got me into art school where I was

fortunate enough to have really good, inspiring

teachers. I loved art school and the idea was

instilled in me that anything, any material could

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SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN

New leaves 1998

acrylic on perforated canvas, 96.5 x 95.5

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

be art. This was important because I had no money

and the focus on the appreciation of materials

and objects … any object … . was liberating. I didn’t

have to spend money I didn’t have on art materials

… . I started to go out into the bush, to find things

and to do something with them. It was fun, it

was exciting, it expanded my thinking. At the

time I had no idea what it meant to be an artist,

but when I was in my second year I was invited

to submit a proposal for a group exhibition at the

Performance Space in Sydney. From that point I just

kept on going.

I immersed myself in the processes of making,

working with tactile materials, and playing with

possibilities. I didn’t think about how I was going

to survive … I was on an Austudy program and

I was just thinking ‘Maybe I could just live on

government support! By then I knew I just wanted

to do this, to be an artist.

In 1994, I began to work at Wedderburn, at

Roy Jackson’s studio, and for eight years I was

surrounded by other artists who were equally

inspired by that location.

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In 1998, I applied for an Australia Council working

grant to prepare a series for exhibition. I was

successful … this was my big break … I received an

award of $15,000 to be able to focus on making

work.

It was like ‘Wow!’ … more money than I had

ever had in my whole life. It enabled me to

stop waitressing on Friday and Saturday nights,

something I had done since I was 18. I decided no

more casual jobs – not even the casual work at

Utopia Gallery on Saturdays. I decided to take my

luck on sales and be a fulltime artist.

When were you introduced to Aboriginal art?

Through working at Utopia Art Sydney and

prior to that, working as a gallery technician at

Campbelltown Art Centre. Being exposed to artists

from Papunya greatly inspired my work.

You first exhibited found objects and things

discovered in the bush and later, you incorporated

repetition and patterns into your work …

Yes, but when I was making floor installations,

the grid was always there as a compositional

device. The grid was an ideal structure to deal with

objects and repetition … I was interested in how

you could juxtapose organic materials and the

inorganic. The grid was the most effective way of

presenting ideas and the floor is a ground I was

very comfortable with. When I graduated from

art school I created a mandala-like piece using

bush material, making hundreds upon hundreds

of these little objects from gluing casuarina and

banksia seeds and stems together so that they

looked like little insects.

The work I do now also incorporates repetitive

elements but it is more focused on a meditative,

perhaps mantra-like, aspect. It’s the processes of

making … each a reflection on how the particular

work is realised. While there’s an underlying

personal narrative, I don’t see the finished work as

overly emotional.

Tell me about the narrative aspect of your two

works in the Allens Art Collection, Criss Cross and

New Leaves both painted in 1998.

Criss Cross was the work I did for my 1998 solo

show for which I was awarded the grant. It was

inspired by my experience of Aboriginal paintings

and living at Wedderburn … the focus was very

much about the place, the surrounding bushland.

When I look at that work now, I think about

Wedderburn, the colours, my studio. It

encapsulates that place, where I was at the time

and what was happening in my life. That’s the

underlying personal narrative.

It’s equally an abstract, geometric work. The subtle,

muted tones, the weft and warp of traditional

woven textiles, and it’s the beginning of the dot

matrix patterning …

You’re right. At that stage I felt strongly connected

to influences from my background, my education …

my life. Thinking back, I’m really lucky to have been

able to work at Wedderburn with all the other

artists and thankful for the opportunities that

arose. Criss Cross is a work that encapsulates this

period of my life.

Did it take you a long time to create a work like

that one?

It did take me a long time because back then, I was

doing everything on my own – the preparation of

the canvas as well as the final realisation of the

work. My dad wasn’t helping me in those days.

With this particular painting I started by drawing a

grid on the back of the canvas and worked on both

the back and front at the same time.

What was the purpose of painting from the back?

I worked on the back of it because when you

perforate the canvas – which I did with a soldering

iron – the paint seeps through to the front and the

colours stain the holes made by the burning. This

was the first part of the painting process and then

I painted over the seepages on the front of the

work.

Do you have a preconceived notion of exactly what

it is you’re going to paint?

No … I can’t work that way. I don’t make

preliminary drawings before I start. So I have no

idea how a work’s going to turn out. Usually I have

a vague idea but it’s more to do with trying out

a particular technique. Often I work on several

canvases simultaneously.

Your work has been described in terms of

alternating rhythms. For instance, the formal

compositional aspect of Criss Cross where the

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Australian artist but with a Laotian background.

That’s my identity … how I use it, or how it comes

out, is different in the different situations I find

myself in. For me it’s not a conflict and I don’t see it

as a conflict.

More than identity, my work reflects where I am

living. Where I live now is fantastic – we back

onto a reserve and I go for a lot of walks into the

bush land around Mt Ainslie. It’s no wonder my

current focus is on landscape painting … so I guess

I could be called ‘an Australian landscape painter’!

I don’t ever want to be pigeonholed in terms of

my identity and just because I use my cultural

heritage, doesn’t mean it’s always apparent or

crucial to my work. It depends on the personal

narrative that’s happening at the time. My last

show included works made while my daughter and

my dad were with me in the studio and, obviously,

I was thinking a lot about the past and our history

… it came up in the conversations we were having.

Aspects filtered through in the work because of the

emotional impact of being together in the studio

at that time. I think what I’m trying to say is that

sometimes my Laotian background is stronger in

the work than the landscape … at other times the

landscape is dominant. I think with New Leaves

that’s the case whereas in a painting like Criss Cross

there’s a real sense of two cultural identities.

Given your reputation and acceptance as an

Australian artist, and the circumstances of your

arrival in this country, do you think about what

talents may lie hidden in refugee camps and

detention centres.

I do … and it upsets me. I have always felt strongly

about the plight of refugees.

Given the importance of your mother in your life, is

there a strong feminist aspect to your practice?

Laotian culture is matriarchal. Yes, we control

the boys, the men … I grew up with three older

brothers yet my mum and I were the bosses! So

as a woman, I’ve inherited many of my mother’s

strengths and her courage … I feel empowered by

that legacy.

darker and lighter rectangular shapes appear,

optically, to move forward and back within

the picture plane. And the surface has a worn,

weathered look as if parts of it have been bleached.

The painterly effects in that work were difficult to

achieve because optically, at times, the opposite

was happening to what I was attempting to

achieve. But in the end, it all needed to come

together as one work without jarring. It’s similar

to the dimensions apparent in Aboriginal painting

where the lines, colours and contrasts create

amazing optical patterns yet it all comes together

as one work.

New Leaves is complex in this way: it has the

vibrancy you’ve just described that one associates

with Aboriginal painting. What’s the narrative

behind that one?

New Leaves was also completed in Wedderburn. It

was Spring and the new leaves were coming out

and I just loved all of the colours and the verticality

of the tree trunks I could see outside my studio

window.

One writer suggested correlations with your work

and paintings by Fred Williams.

I love Fred Williams’ work – especially the Chinese

and Japanese influences. The Wedderburn studio

was right in the bush. When you stepped outside it

was straight into mulch and leaves … it was dense,

intense, but it was not impenetrable. I’d go for long

walks and find details … the colours, vines growing

over bushes, new flowers that had just come up. I

was inspired by all these subtle, detailed patterns

and textures … the visual richness to be found

in the bush. My work at the time synthesised all

these elements.

Does your identity play any role in your work? The

cross cultural nature of your upbringing suggests a

range of influences beyond those associated with

Western art traditions.

Identity for me is a fluid idea and you negotiate

between the identity that you were born with,

the places and situations you have been in, and

personal experiences. I see myself as an artist, an

issue 2Allens art journal

…if I had to sum up the meaning of abstraction in my work, it would be found somewhere in the space between experience and memory.

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn

EXPERIENCE AND ABSTRACTION

In 2003, I wrote a brief ‘linear’ narrative of my

life as an introductory text for Abstractions,

an exhibition curated by Mandy Thomas and

presented at the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra. Of

course, while this narrative may appear whole, it is

in fact fragmentary.

I’d like to begin with how my family and I left Laos,

and end by writing about my recent return there

as a tourist. In the course of telling this story I hope

to be able to say something about how experience

and abstraction speak to each other in my art

practice.

My family and I escaped from Laos to Thailand in

1979 – a year in which things became unstable

for many as the rounding up of those connected

with the old regime for ‘re-education’ got into

full swing. We stayed in a refugee camp in

Nong Khai, Thailand, for nine months before

we came to Australia. Upon arrival we were

provided accommodation by the Department

of Immigration in a hostel in Western Sydney’s

Cabramatta. After one year in the hostel my

parents became anxious to leave and start a new

life in the larger Australian community.

My father came from a military family. In Laos

he had been an army captain, and his brother a

colonel. With virtually no English, the only work

he could find in Australia was as a manual worker.

He worked as a printer for 20 years until his recent

retirement. My father worked hard for little pay,

but with four young children to support he had

little choice. As soon as my father started this

job, we moved out of the hostel to an apartment

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in Narwee in Sydney’s outer south. My parents’

hopes for a new life in a new country were mainly

invested in their children’s education and, they

thought, the only way for their children to have

a decent education was for us all to immerse

ourselves in the Australian way of life and have

Australian friends. They believed we would not get

an education or speak the language well if we lived

around too many Asians.

The only family we had in Narwee was my

cousin’s. Otherwise we were isolated from the Lao

community. Occasionally we would attend cultural

events at the Buddhist temple in Stanmore,

Sydney. But, one day, the people from the Church

of England came knocking at our door and my

parents invited them in. They stayed for hours

talking about God and Jesus, and how they wanted

our family to join their church. My father thought

that this was the greatest, that finally somebody in

Australia wanted us to be part of their community.

So we went to church every Sunday for two years

and my three older brothers and I went to Sunday

School. This went on until, one night, my mother

had a dream. She dreamt there were two men

fighting at the foot of her bed, one wearing a

yellow robe with a shaved head, the other wearing

white rags with long hair and blue eyes. They

fought and wrestled, until the man wearing white

rags with blue eyes walked away. My mother saw

this as a sign, that the Buddha was telling her she

was betraying her own ancestral roots and culture

by going to church. After working for two years,

my father had some money saved, and my parents

decided to move back to Western Sydney. They

bought a house in Campbelltown.

Campbelltown in the early 1980s was a small

town, with a small population of Asians. In the

last 20 years it has grown enormously. But living in

Campbelltown even then, you got a real sense that

this part of Australia was indeed a multicultural

society. The friends I went to school with were

Greek, Italian, Dutch/Indonesian, Filipino,

Vietnamese, Cambodian, Slavic, Romanian and Lao.

Campbelltown has the second largest Lao

community in Sydney, the largest being in Fairfield.

The growth of this community brought with it

a need for a centre where people could practice

their faith. There are now two Buddhist temples

in the Campbelltown area, both only 20 minutes

from our house. One temple is more multicultural,

being shared by Theravada Buddhists from Sri

Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and

Laos. The other temple is known as the Lao temple.

We frequent both. My mother is finally at home,

through religion and our connection with the Lao

community. I grew up and went to art school with

this cultural and religious background.

Towards the end of my final year at art school I

had a studio in the bush at Wedderburn, a rural

area 15 minutes out of Campbelltown. There,

you wake up and see birds and wallabies, and

when it is hot you can see goannas walking in the

bush. Sometimes, when it is really hot, there are

bushfires. Once, the fire came right up to the ridge,

a few metres away from the studio. The entire

area of bush that could be seen from the studio

was burnt out. Trees that had been green and

leafy were just skeletal. Everything was black and

charcoal. It looked like a moonscape.

After the fire the rain came and the trees and

bush were rejuvenated. New leaves grew and the

animals were back. During that rain the light on

the gum trees was grey and subdued. My source

of inspiration had been from this bushland

environment. Here I must thank my friend,

the painter Roy Jackson, who has been a great

supporter of my work, and has often inspired me

to ‘get on with it’.

The works I produced in the first two years of living

in Wedderburn were mainly floor installations. I

collected and connected many things from the

bush such as seedpods, vines and flower stamens.

Content and form in these earlier works derived

from the physical properties of these objects, with

which I played around, manipulating them to form

an image in a metaphorical way.

One floor installation is Legs on Seeds 1992 (300cm

diameter). This work is made up of Casuarina

seeds and Banksia stalks. The stalks have hooks

at the end, which became legs for the seedpods.

Each individual ‘seed on legs’ is travelling in a circle

towards a diamond centre and back out again, in

a mandala form. The work suggests, among other

things, that time is cyclical.

The idea for another floor installation work, Vine

Water 1993 (200 x 200cm), came about while

I was walking in the bush. I found some trees

and scrub covered in pristine vines. Pulling them

apart, I felt both their softness and their strength.

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I unravelled them and knotted them into strings

before crocheting them. The spiral was the natural

form to come out of this process. For this work I

did some research into hydrodynamics, learning

how in England the locations for castles were

chosen because there were signs of water lines

in the ground.1 My work was inspired by this

juxtaposition of a man-made form – the castle –

and the natural geodetic lines.

Thus, in my installation a grid of plaster cubes

(moulded from ice cubes) formed the base for

the natural material of the bush vines, with their

watery spiral forms. The last floor installation I

have done to date is Rice Lines 1994 (200 x 200cm).

This work is made up of flour, water, salt and rice

grains. Black rice grains are embedded in circular

‘cakes’ (moulded from cake tins) arrayed in rows

of one, two, three and four. The rice lines become

denser in the centre and expand out, expressing

my abiding concern with the mandala and the

meanings it contains.

The longer I stayed at Wedderburn the more I felt

I wanted to paint. Two years after arriving there

I did. Initially, I stuck bush material onto paper,

drawing with Casuarina seeds directly onto paper

(as in Annica, 1994). Next, I stuck fibre washers

onto canvas to create the Kasina series (Fire Kasina,

Air Kasina, Water Kasina and Breath Kasina, 1995).2

After graduating from art school, I had a casual

job as a gallery technician at Campbelltown

Regional Art Gallery. It was here that I was exposed

to contemporary Aboriginal painting and Asian

textiles. After an exhibition called Phoenix and

Dragons came to the gallery, I realised I didn’t need

to look far for inspiration. I was impelled to look

at the Lao textiles which were part of my own

heritage and cultural background. These became

an important reference point for my work, and as a

result, my early works on paper from 1996 involved

perforating the paper with a sharp needle as a

direct reference to stitching.

Growing up I was always surrounded by beautiful

Lao textiles, which I have in turn worn to temples

and weddings. Until I woke up to them, Lao textiles

were for me always something that were only

functional. My current appreciation of traditional

Lao textiles is not only for their beauty and vibrant

colours, but also the structure of the weave,

1 Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past, London: Abacus, 1972.

2 Kasina are coloured discs used by monks to aid meditation.

especially in a complex piece of fabric (for instance

where a skilled weaver has deliberately offset the

image to give it an optical illusory effect). I am also

keenly aware that in Laos, textile production is

woman’s domain, and a vital part of the domestic

economy.

Although a Buddhist, I am not an avid reader of

Buddhist books. My house is not filled with them.

I do have a few books on Buddhist philosophy

that I return to, contemplating a sentence

remembered or discovering a new one. But my

practice as a Buddhist consists chiefly in going to

the temple, talking to the Abbot, eating and so

on, and is ultimately bound up with Lao Buddhist

cultural practice. If my work has been informed by

Buddhist metaphysics, then these are principles

that I have absorbed in my many visits to the

temple as a child. This is reflected in the fact that

my very first installation work in 1991 referenced

the food offerings that are a vital part of Theravada

Buddhist cultural practice. I had hand-moulded

cooked glutinous rice into rough conical objects

that looked like miniature stupas. These were

then slowly burnt in the kiln, which resulted in the

base of the cone turning a golden yellow colour

which gradually turned into charcoal at the top. I

then stacked these objects in a pyramid form on

a circular bed of grains of rice. At the temple food

is offered to ancestral beings accompanied by the

rhythmical chanting of the monks. The monks are

mediators for these offerings. Their consumption

of the food denotes the end of the offering. The

lay people can then participate in eating, an act

symbolising death and rebirth. My installation

evokes this burnt offering, not least in the smell of

burnt rice which emanates from it. It was included

in the Untitled 92 exhibition at the Performance

Space, Sydney.

Dating from 1996, this Buddhist influence can

also be seen in the names of my perforated works

on paper, which are titled in Pali, the Theravada

Buddhist language (eg Sakala, which means

‘entire’, and Jitatta, meaning ‘one who has subdued

the mind’.)

In 1996, I started to think about paper as object

rather than just surface – a result of the technique

of perforation, since perforating the paper had

warped it and given it a wave-like appearance.

After perforating paper I moved on to perforating

canvas. Initially, I used a hole puncher to cut

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into the canvas. This allowed the play of light,

air and space through the work. Subsequently

I replaced this technique by that of using a

soldering iron to make the holes – a method

which proved more efficient and provided more

scope for experimentation. Unlike the hole punch,

the soldering iron made raised perforations,

which created a marked tension between the

canvas as two dimensional surface and three

dimensional object.

From 1998, the landscape entered into my work,

represented in the abstract through colour, light,

space and mood. The textile influence is still

present, but increasingly in the abstract rather

than as a direct reference to my cultural heritage.

The painting Weaving Trees 1998 is suggestive of

the synthesis of these two elements, weaving and

the landscape. One could read this as a metaphor

for the way Australia for me is about home and

place, and this is woven into the painting – much

like the Lao women weaving their life stories into

their fabric.

I have been painting for more than ten years now,

and my work no longer draws on traditional Lao

textiles alone. Rather, I have spent some years

looking at and appreciating other textile traditions.

In 2000, I had a residency in Arbroath, Scotland,

at Hospitalfield House. Discovering an old book

on clan tartans in a second-hand bookstore in

Edinburgh actually led me to experiment with

tartan designs as visual abstract forms. I combined

tartan patterns with bindis which I bought in

Singapore’s Little India shortly before going to

Scotland, so that the works I produced in Arbroath

and on my return to Sydney form something of

a travelogue. What resulted was the Highland

Mandala series.

Another studio residency I took was in Tokyo, in

2002. I went to Tokyo to research contemporary

and traditional Japanese textiles. While in Japan I

also became interested in Japanese Zen temples

and gardens, which I saw on my trip to Kyoto.

The golden yellow of Kyoto’s autumn leaves, and

the silvery grey lights reflected in the gravel, gave

welcome relief from the gaudy colours of Tokyo.

This experience led me to experiment with the

lines of the raked stoned garden. Another enduring

experience I had in Japan was that of walking

among the confusing multiple levels of the

cityscape around Shinjuku in Tokyo’s ‘centre’. The

ground, the raised walkways between buildings,

and the subterranean passages all exist within

the same visual space. This had the effect of

disorientating my whole sense of balance and

perspective. Various Levels 2002 is one of the

results of this experience.

I have travelled so much in the last few years, living

between Australia and Singapore. I have travelled

in Asia, once to Scotland and twice each to London

and Paris. After all this, I can still say that the most

enduring inspiration for me is Australia and the

Australian landscape. The vastness of the country

awaits my discovery. Still holding strong in my

memory is that mysterious rock in the Centre:

the light, the colours … and Asia, real as a place,

experienced by an Asian woman who inhabits

Australianness.

On a trip back to Laos between December 2003

and the New Year I had an experience I want to

relate (my second time back, but my first time

back as a ‘tourist’). Eating outside at a restaurant

on the Mekong River in Luang Prabang, I saw an

elderly man with thick glasses sitting on a chair

under a tree. He was weaving a fishing net hooked

onto a branch of the tree. I could hardly contain

my curiosity during lunch. After our meal I went

straight to him, still hungry to know what he was

doing, and how he was doing it. At the same time

I was in awe of the exquisiteness of his fine work,

which must have taken him months to do. Like

a true capitalist I offered to buy his net, a price

for which I had to negotiate with his son, as the

father appeared to be perplexed by the whole

thing. Walking away feeling elated that I had taken

possession of such beauty, at the same time I felt

sad and guilty about the fact that I had taken away

his net for a miserly 80 000 kip, which is equivalent

to $13. What would he do now? A friend suggested

‘He’ll just make another one,’ and I was a little bit

consoled. I like to think that I have recognised a

fellow artist, but some nagging questions remain

from this encounter with the elderly man. Should I

have taken his net away from him? Was he actually

intending to use such a fine-holed fishing net? Is

this a measure of how depleted the fish stocks in

the Mekong River are? Was he aware fishing with

such a net would make things worse?

In retrospect, after walking away with the net I

could not put my finger on why the feeling of guilt

and sadness came over me. I was torn between

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wanting to keep the net as an exquisite object and

wanting to give it back to him. The elderly man’s

reaction to the money exchanged was an anti-

climax for me, as he appeared totally disinterested

by it. Not knowing what to do with it, he even

tried to give the money to his son, but the son

said that it was his money, and he should keep it.

I think deep down I expected him to be thrilled by

my offer. The fact that he was not, threw me. We

were momentarily caught between each other’s

worlds. With my money I had dragged the elderly

man into my world; I had turned something that

had for him only a functional and useful value

into a commodity. What was traditional became

an object of fetishisation. At the same time I had

identified with his mode of production. The image

of him weaving under the tree spoke to me about

the net being made according to the rhythm of a

pre-industrial world. The unexpected meeting with

the elderly man made me think about my process

of perforating the canvas and paper, and about

the contrast between the ‘staccato’ movement

of the perforation and the fluid motion of the

paint brush. The repetition and regular nature

of the perforations are much like the elderly

man’s weaving, and suggest to me a similarity

in the passage of time through our work. The old

man’s work was not made as a commodity; the

production of the net was an end in itself. All of

which made me think about my early installation

works. Why I had chosen to make the kind of

work I did, using the perishable kind of material

that I did? It also made me think of my recent

works on canvas – how they get sold, and the

strange relationship of ownership. That to me is

an abstraction in itself.

The fishing net is now hanging in our house in

Canberra, the object of my inspiration. I plan to

do a number of canvas works using this weaving

technique. I am fortunate enough to have a cousin

living in Australia, originally from Luang Prabang,

who is a fishing nut and knows how to make

this type of net. He will teach me, and I hope to

collaborate with him.

Finally, what can one say about abstraction in one’s

work, where the process of working is not about

words but everything about the visual: colour,

light, space and composition? And if the work is

done through the process of doing it, how does

one describe this ‘process’? What I can say is that

before I begin painting there is always a visual

inner plan. Often this plan is not the end result,

and the work goes through a visual journey to

arrive at a finished result that includes elements

not conceived of before the painting was started.

But sometimes this inner plan is so clear and so in

harmony with the material – paint, paper, cotton

threads, seed pods or grains of rice – that the work

seems to travel along a single road. I don’t really

have the language to talk about how I get from

where I am when I start to the finished work, but if

I had to sum up the meaning of abstraction in my

work, it would be found somewhere in the space

between experience and memory.

This essay reproduced with permission of the artist.

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Looking at Onus’ vibrant, fertile depiction of the waterhole, one can readily associate the mother and child relationship with the adjective ‘gulunbuy’ – his pool is full of life…

Lin

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LIN ONUS

Arafura n/d

acrylic on canvas, 182.5 x 182.5cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

…[a] bridge between cultures, between technology and ideas.

Ewen McDonald

SPOTLIGHT: LIN ONUS

Lin Onus was born into a politically active,

suburban Melbourne home in the late 1940s. His

parents – Glaswegian-born Mary McLintoch and

Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man from Cummeranunja,

near Echuca on the New South Wales banks of the

Murray River – were members of the Communist

Party as well as campaigners for Aboriginal rights

in Australia. From an early age he was aware of

the problems urban-born Aborigines faced: when

he left school in is early teens he realised he had

absorbed ‘everyone else’s history and values but

not those that were rightfully my own’.1 Later,

Onus acknowledged that it was difficult to ‘resolve

the extent of his Koori-ness and the extent of his

White-ness’ but that he hoped that history would

1 Quoted in Jennifer Isaacs, Aboriginality: Contemporary Aboriginal

Paintings and Prints, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1992, np.

see him as ‘some sort of bridge between cultures,

between technology and ideas.’2

If he was driven to find a place and acceptance

for himself in the contemporary visual arts of this

country, it was through his unique, idiosyncratic

and sometimes subversive merging of Western

and Indigenous painting traditions that secured

his position as a pioneering artist determined to

bring Aboriginal issues to the fore.

His practice crossed boundaries: illustration,

painting and sculptural forms absorbed aspects

of his two ancestries, at times harmoniously

but, more often than not, he created provocative

juxtapositions to deliberately challenge non-

Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge and interpretation

2 Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neale, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art

and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2000, p 667.

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of Indigenous society and its many complex

traditions.

Onus first exhibited a work in 1974 – a painting

inspired by the discovery of a box of watercolours

found at his father’s shop, Aboriginal Enterprises.

This was followed by an exhibition at the

Aborigines Advancement League in Melbourne in

1975.3 In many respects, the socio-political milieu

of the artist’s upbringing laid the foundations to

his artistic practice – he may have been self-taught

but the cross-cultural, hybrid nature of artistic

influences gave his painting a certain power and

immediacy. 4

During the 1980s Onus was the Victorian

representative on the Aboriginal Arts Board of

the Australia Council. At this time, on a trip to

Arnhem Land, he meet the Yolngu elder and artist

Jack Wunuwun at Maningrida and through him,

Onus gained links to the elder’s extensive family.

Wunuwun, convinced that the ‘Kooris down

south’ had lost much of their culture due to early

assimilation, became his adoptive father and

mentor, giving Onus traditional designs he could

paint. For over a decade, Onus made frequent visits

3 The Aborigines Advancement League had been established by his father,

his uncle Eric Onus and others during Lin Onus’ formative years.

4 He was a follower of the American Black Power movement and in

1971, he played an active role in the Bunwurring (Kulin) Land Claim in

Sherbrooke Forrest in Victoria. Despite these key events however, Onus

concluded that the best way he could contribute to Aboriginal causes

was to use the power of his art to communicate his feelings about the

challenges facing all Australians.

back to Arnhem Land – the influence of which can

be seen in his later paintings where traditional

techniques and patterns merge eloquently with

Western realism. A key element is the distinctive

rarrk or traditional cross-hatching that Onus began

to incorporate into his compositions. For some

writers, the resulting visual disjunctions that typify

the later paintings, act as ‘enduring metaphors for

the cultural destruction suffered as a direct result

of colonisation’.5

The undated painting Arafura is typical of this

later period. The title refers to the vast inland

fresh-water Arafura swamp that, geologically, is

considered a consequence of the last ice age but

is now an extensive flood-plain with a network

of waterways and rivers flowing towards the

Arafura Sea that lies to the north of the Australian

continent. To the Aboriginal people inhabiting

North-east Arnhem Land – the Yolngu who

divide themselves into two moieties (halves), the

Dhuwa and Yirritja – the land, social relations

and the universe are grouped within this division.

Accordingly, Yolngu art represents the the world –

seasons, animals and plants – within this system

of moieties: for instance, the natural environment

is divided into key groupings – waterholes

(Gulunbuy), mangroves (Larrtha’puy), beaches

5 Sylvia Kleinert, Urban Dingo: the art and life of Lin Onus 1948-1996,

Margo Neale (ed), Craftsman House Sydney, 2000, p 29.

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(Rangipuy), forests (Diltjipuy), jungle (Retjapuy)

and plains (Niydjiyapuy).6

Onus’ painting connects with this profound and

complex legacy. Watercourses and swamp areas

– Gulunbuy – have great ceremonial significance

for the Yolngu: the word ‘gulun’ used to describe

them in Djambarrpuyngu language, literally means

‘stomach’ but is also synonymous with ‘womb’.

Looking at Onus’ vibrant, fertile depiction of the

waterhole, one can readily associate the mother

and child relationship with the adjective ‘gulunbuy’

– his pool is full of life, lilies rise up towards the

light and beneath them in the dark water are

rectangular, stylised depictions of plant life painted

in typical Yolngu fashion. On closer inspection,

one can see reflected in the water, the shadows of

tree trunks topped with spindly foliage, the bush

canopy surrounding the pond. This ‘doubling’ of

the world – above and below the water masterfully

6 Further reading, see Djon Mundine’s exhibition catalogue, The Native

Born: Objects and Representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002.

intertwined by the artist whose work often

incorporates such trompe l’oeil ambiguities –

equates not only with the Yolngu moiety system, it

reveals Onus’ merging of Western and Aboriginal

traditions of representation and his attempts to

reconcile them.

It was Lin Onus’ wish to have his work bridge a

divided society. Despite his life being tragically cut

short, he is celebrated as a pioneer of the urban

Aboriginal art movement – the roots of which were

nurtured by his father’s activism and the turbulent

years when Aboriginal rights were being vigorously

fought for by many urban Indigenous groups. In

1993, the artist was awarded an Order of Australia

for his commitment to Aboriginal arts and for his

significant contribution as a painter/sculptor.

Lin Onus, 1948-96 Yorta Yorta, Southern Riverine Region, Melbourne, South-east region language group: Wiradjuri.

ARTIST’S NAME

Title, Year

Materials

00 x 00 inches

© the artist

ARTIST’S NAME

Title, Year

Materials

00 x 00 inches

© the artist

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JANET LAURENCE

Iosis 1989

mixed media on canvas

diptych, each panel 160 x 60cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

With a poetic and thoughtful sensibility, Laurence explores ideas of nature, science, history, transformation and memory.

Maria Poulos

SPOTLIGHT: JANET LAURENCE

Alchemical transformation, perception and history

are appropriate ways to describe the underlying

themes throughout Janet Laurence’s oeuvre. In

many respects, her work represents the nexus

between art, science, imagination and memory.

She uses a diverse range of materials to produce

works which are often a response to specific sites

or environments such as Iosis 1989, from the

Pacific Iosis series. These works were created and

influenced by Laurence’s experience while living

in Japan. The Asian references which become

apparent include the use of Washi paper, the

scale and form of the works which are likened

to Japanese screens, Chinese landscape panel

paintings and vertical scrolls.

Iosis 1989 is a diptych made from gold, silver

and metallic pigments, black ink, shellac, paper,

adhesive and metallic printed dots and a Japanese

paper support. An abstract image, it is created

with collaged paper, textures printed in black

ink; runny silver metallic pigment and shellac

on layered Japanese paper. Runny showers of

paint drip or stream across the surface of the

work. Reflective surfaces have often featured in

Laurence’s artworks which now feature glass for

its alchemical properties, particularly its ability to

transform from liquid to solid through the agency

of fire which allows for degrees of translucency

and transparency. Conversely, the transparency of

glass and reflective surfaces is revelatory, reflecting

the transient effects of light and allowing the

viewer to witness processes of change. Laurence

references Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘sfumato’, (the

process of applying multiple layers of paint to

create shadows of ambiguity, as in Mona Lisa’s

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Laurence has always been profoundly aware of the interconnection of all life forms and in this instance, the title Iosis is a way of describing the flux, or instability and transience which occur in matter.

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enigmatic smile) and in Iosis 1989 she employs

this method to slow perception and to evoke the

passing of time and memory, causing the viewer to

linger and look more closely, perhaps to meditate

on the mysteries that lie beyond the painted veils

that make up this work.

The word ‘Iosis’, from the Greek language is a

term used in alchemical writing and in art as a

symbol to represent the purple phase (or Iosis) of

the ‘Great Work’ which is the third and final stage

of transformation. It is marked by the purpling

or reddening of the material and occurs during

the ‘coagulation’ operation. It can include blood, a

phoenix, a rose, a crowned king, or a figure wearing

red clothes. Laurence has always been profoundly

aware of the interconnection of all life forms and

in this instance, the title Iosis is a way of describing

the flux, or instability and transience which occurs

in matter. Laurence says:

The painting is part of a series of works

where I was exploring paint as matter in its

various states. This was part of my interest

in alchemy. It’s the transformation of the

matter that is important in this case – of

fluids spilling, pouring, forming and un-

forming what may have been solid.1

1 Email correspondence, Janet Laurence and the writer, 4 June 2012.

With a poetic and thoughtful sensibility, Laurence

explores ideas of nature, science, history,

transformation and memory. Layers of images and

meanings are created through a sophisticated

grasp of materials to create shadows and

reflections of nature, the world and the beholders’

place in it.

Janet Laurence is a Sydney based artist who has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas since the 1980s. Her work is represented in many major Australian and international collections and has been included in several national survey exhibitions. Public commissions and architectural collaborations include significant national and international projects, such as: Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (1993); The Edge of the Trees (with Fiona Foley), Museum of Sydney (1994); 49 Veils(with Jisuk Han), award-winning windows for the Central Synagogue, Sydney (1999); In the Shadow, Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, Homebush Bay (1998–2000); Stilled Lives, collection showcases, permanent display, Melbourne Museum (2000); the Australian War Memorial (with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer architects), Hyde Park, London; and The Breath We Share, The Sidney Myer Commemorative Sculpture, Victoria (both 2003). Her most recent solo exhibitions in Australia include: ‘Birdsong’, Object Gallery, Sydney; ‘Janet Laurence’, Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane (both 2006); and ‘Greenhouse’, Sherman Galleries, Sydney (2005). A survey exhibition of her work was held in 2005 at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra.

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CLIFTON MACK

Jarman Island (Lighthouse)I 2011

acrylic on canvas, 122 x 79cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

The lamp may long be extinguished, but the lighthouse on Jarman Island remains a powerful beacon in the eyes of the acclaimed Yindjibandi elder and artist, Clifton Mack.

Ewen McDonald

RECENT ACQUISITION: CLIFTON MACK

An old photograph of the Jarman Island lighthouse

shows the late nineteenth century, 15-metre high

tower standing aloft a rocky outcrop. Another

image shows a dilapidated structure – with its

outer coating of red and white paint peeling –

restrained by steel cables, anchoring it into its

surrounds. Decommissioned in 1985 (superseded

by the Cape Lambert Lighthouse), the lighthouse

and the adjacent keepers rubble-and-mortar

cottage were in desperate need of preservation.1

Located on an island separated from the mainland

only at high tide, just a few kilometres beyond

Cossack – the historic shipping port established

in 1866 near Roebourne and the Harding River

1 The restoration of the Jarman Island Lighthouse was authorised and

overseen by the Heritage Council Of Western Australia from 2003.

Both the lighthouse and the keeper’s cottage are now classified by the

National Trust of Australia.

in the north west region of Western Australia2

– the lighthouse was a crucial navigational

marker, guiding fleets of pearling boats (until

the burgeoning industry moved north towards

Broome) and freighters bringing supplies into Port

Headland. For 40 years the settlement at Cossack

was a gateway to the Pilbara and Kimberley

regions – especially during the West Pilbara Coast

gold rush years – but by 1900 the pearling luggers

and gold-diggers had vanished and, because the

tidal estuary at Cossack was subject to silting, the

port could not accommodate the larger sailing

vessels. The town rapidly declined and by the

1950s was largely abandoned.

2 Originally named Butchers Inlet when it was established in the early

1860s as a landing place for European settlers, Cossack was a major port

until the early 1900s.

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In North-West history, Jarman Island and its

lighthouse is an important historical site.

The lighthouse is one of the few remaining

prefabricated cast iron structures shipped from

England to be reassembled on the island.3 Ordered

in kit form (which included the tools and exterior

paint) the shipment arrived a year later in 1887

and was put together by a labour force made up

of prisoners from Roebourne, including Chinese,

Asian and Arabian pearlers who had been stranded

in Cossack during the cyclone season. The plated,

cast iron segments (each about an inch thick)

were designed to be flanged and bolted together

on the inside of the structure, creating a smooth

exterior surface less prone to salt spray corrosion.

Completed when the lens arrived separately from

England, the lighthouse required a resident keeper

to ensure its four-wick Douglas burner (fuelled by

kerosene or paraffin oil) was lit every night. In 1917

the lighthouse was automated, its burner replaced

by a sun-valve activated acetylene gas lamp.

The lamp may long be extinguished, but the

lighthouse on Jarman Island remains a powerful

beacon in the eyes of the acclaimed Yindjibandi

elder and artist, Clifton Mack. His painting brings

new life to the tower and in this particular work,

he depicts the now restored structure sitting

majestically atop the outcrop: rocket-like, it strains

3 Cast iron towers were constructed in segmented form as a viable way to

establish lights to remote locations.

towards a starry night, its island base lapped by

white tipped waves.

At sunset, it is said, the sandy earth around the

lighthouse absorbs a reddish hue, and in this

painting the rising ochre-coloured mound is

littered with footprints of the many gulls settling

there. Some commentators have suggested the

persistence of seagulls represents the natural

world and the iconic tower is emblematic of the

fragility of human endeavour. In this sense, the

lighthouse is equally a symbol of invasive European

settlement and the impact of colonial enterprise

on the traditional owners of the West Pilbara

coastal region.4

Historical events and particular Pilbara sites

have become a preoccupation of Clifton Mack:

a second painting in the Allens Art Collection

monumentalises Dawson’s Well located at the old

turn-off to Millstream on the Tablelands. It too,

lies within Yindjibarni country. As the artist has

described, the well was dug by European settlers

who needed a resting place and watering hole

for horse and wagon travellers.5 The Yindjibarni

people also camped nearby on the river bed, close

to where the railway line was laid that linked

4 See Oliver Watts, exhibition brochure, Clifton Mack / 15 February – 17

March 2011, Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney, and Jeremy Eccles, ‘When

the world was soft’, exhibition review, Aboriginal Art News, www.

aboriginalartnews.com.au/2011/03.

5 Artist text prepared by Yinjaa-Barni Art for the Certificate of Authenticity

for the painting Dawson’s Well, catalogue # 1112-11.

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the settlement at Tom Price to Port Samson, the

coastal port that by 1904 had replaced the jetty at

Cossack.

As with Mack’s Jarman Island Lighthouse series,

the rock structure at the centre marking Dawson’s

Well dominates the painting, the viewer’s eye

drawn to it by the railway track, roadway and

river that lead towards the watering hole. Again,

the image encapsulates two worlds – Yindjibarni

country and a frontier land. While the painting

represents a junction, a resting place, it could

equally refer to a painful disjunction between two

vastly different cultures – and more recently, to

a clash of values in what now, for some, is a vast

and empty mineral rich land just waiting to be

exploited while for others, it is a place of enduring

cultural significance with sacred, ceremonial and

historical sites that need to be protected.

Sources: Lighthouses of Western Australia Inc [http://www.

lighthouse.net.au/lights/WA/Jarman%20Island/Jarman%20

Island.htm. Accessed April 2012] and Karratha Visitor Centre

[http://www.pilbaracoast.com/attractions/jarman-island-

lighthouse. Accessed April 2012].

Clifton Mack Born: Iremagadu (Roebourne) Western Australia, 1952 Skin: Balyirri Tribe: Yindjibandi / Language: Millstream Tableland

Clifton Mack started painting in mid 2001 at the Bujee-Nhoor-Pu Centre in Cossack where through Pilbara TAFE he attended tertiary courses in art. Since 2006 he has been a key artist with Yinjaa-Barni Art. His country, its stories, native flora and fauna, and bush tools inform his work. In this way he continues the traditions and knowledge of water courses – the locations, seasonal patterns and lore connected with Warlu, the fresh-water snake, associated with his father Long Mack, the revered Yindjibarndi Rainmaker.

Mack has had solo exhibitions in Perth and Sydney since 2009 and has been included in national and international group exhibitions including the annual Cossack Art Awards (where he has won a prize every year since 2002); Colours of Our Country exhibitions (sponsored by Rio Tinto, 2006-11); the Telstra National Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Art Award Darwin (2010); LNG15 World Conference, Barcelona, Spain (2007) and Antica Terra Pulsante, Vitali Gallery, Florence, Italy (2006). In 2011 he was awarded the Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Artist Award, Sydney.

CLIFTON MACK

Dawson’s Well I 2011

acrylic on canvas, 72 x 108cm

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

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RAMMEY RAMSEY

Warlawoon Country 2007

natural earth pigments on linen, 122 x 135 cm

Provenance: Jirrawun Arts, WA [RR200711134]

Courtesy of the artist and Caruana & Reid Fine Art, Sydney

Allens Art Collection

© the artist

issue 2Allens art journal

Concerned with transmitting Gija traditions and law to future generations, his works express important spiritual messages regarding country and the natural elements – earth, wind, fire and water.

Maria Poulos

RECENT ACQUISITION: RAMMEY RAMSEY

Rammey Ramsey was born at Old Greensvale

Station (now Bow River Station) in north-Western

Australia in the mid 1930s. He is a Gija man of

Jungurra skin whose parents were from the Elgee

Cliffs, west of the Bedford Downs. His Giga name is

Warlawoon which is the name given to the area of

his country. Although he has worked all his life in

the bush as a stockman and is renown for breaking

in horses, he is also a dancer and a teacher.

Beginning to paint in 2000 for Jirrawun Arts,

Ramsey is now a leading member of the East

Kimberley painting movement that commenced

in the early 1980s under the auspices of the great

Gija law man and artist Paddy (Jampin) Jaminji

(1912-96) and Rover Thomas Joolama (c1926-

98). The legacy of these influential artists and

their generation is now carried on in the work of

Rammey Ramsey.

True to his law, he only paints stories he has

custodial rights to through birth and family. Many

of his restrained sophisticated paintings depict

the gorge north-west of Halls Creek, in an area

surrounding Elgee Cliffs. The Gija style of Ramsey’s

country has a figurative orientation influenced

by regional rock art and ceremonial body paint

designs and Ramsey draws on both Western

Desert and East Kimberley styles to create an

idiosyncratic synthesis that is rare in the work of

bush artists. Like Rover Thomas Joolama, Ramsey

has developed a dynamic artistic language which

is free from the ritual structures of Western desert

art, powerfully conveying his deep affinity to

the East Kimberley landscape. Hills, rocks, cliffs,

wallaby holes, camping places, rivers, rocks in

the riverbed, waterholes, roads, stockyards and

meeting places appear as distillations of important

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yfeatures in the landscape. A line might depict a

road or a river, a circle a waterhole, a camping

place, a cave, rectangles, stock yards or hills. Red

ochres surrounding black representational forms

of hills, rivers and stockyards are transformed

into atmospheric fields that move in degrees

from white-pink to red. Details and outlines are

emphasised with lines of white pipe-clay stippling.

Strokes and rhythms of brushwork are the result

of mixing two colours ‘wet-in-wet’ directly on to

the surface of the canvas – ‘the ngarranggarni

way’ he adopted from Goowoonji (Paddy Bedford

c1922-2007).

Concerned with transmitting Gija traditions and

law to future generations, his works express

important spiritual messages regarding country

and the natural elements – earth, wind, fire and

water. Visions of the Kimberly – that is, heat,

dust, the smoke of a grass fire, clouds of mist and

rain – are also apparent. His bold compositions

are permeated by the spirit of the country of his

birth and this knowledge now reaches beyond

his community to the wider public. His visionary

ochred paintings merge the past and the present,

the spiritual and the physical, to suggest the

topography of the East Kimberly landscape and the

presence of unforeseen forces within it.

Source: Caruana & Reid Fine Art and Jirrawun Arts, text by Frances

Kofod and Tony Oliver. © Jirrawun Arts 2004.

Over recent decades, artists have been exploring the rich legacy of art history and have critically examined the conventions and contexts of the tradition of art. These days, it is common for the work of artists to go beyond aesthetic concerns and to challenge preconceived notions about the nature of art and its role in society.

While much contemporary practice is based on a

broader use of materials, new technologies and

responses to different cultural contexts, works

in the Allens Art Collection illustrate that the

art of painting and aesthetic concerns are still

fundamental to artistic expression.

The Allens Art Collection dates from the late 1970s,

when the firm moved into the offices of the then-

new MLC Centre, Sydney. What began as a way of

enlivening the office environment has grown with

time to become a significant survey of painting

over the last four decades. The Collection now has

more than 1000 works hanging in all of our offices.

They not only create vibrant workplaces in a range

of contexts, but reveal an ongoing commitment to

young and emerging artists in this country. In fact,

a core purpose of the Collection is to support

young, unknown Australian artists – we don’t buy

work from artists who already have a high profile.

The works also reflect the passion of former

Partner Hugh Jamieson – the driving force of the

Collection. In an introduction to an exhibition of

works in 1993, he wrote:

‘In the closing years of the twentieth

century, Australians, if they are to survive,

are faced with the need to find innovative

solutions to their problems. This is also

true in the practice of law. For those of us

who work with the Collection in front of

us every day, the artists encourage us to

confront the new, not only through the

colour and vitality of their works, but also

by the messages they convey. By supporting

working artists, the firm is encouraging

the development of Australian cultural

expression. By providing a platform for this

expression, the firm makes a statement

about the sort of Australia it believes in.’

ALLENS ART COLLECTION

Allens respects the rights of all artists and copyright owners. All works that appear on this website do so with the consent of the artists or copyright owners.

You must not reproduce, copy or transmit any

image or information contained on this site

without the permission of the artist or copyright

owner (other than for the purposes of a ‘fair dealing’

with the work under the Copyright Act 1968 (cth),

such as for private research or study). You must not

exploit any of the works on this site for commercial

purposes. Contravention would be an infringement

under the Copyright Act. Requests for publication

of any of the works appearing on this website

should be made to us in writing.

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issue 1Allens art journal