2021 choice cuts:

plastic cords prolapse from an orifice of faux fur / do you remember magic eye puzzles? / a weed sprouts from a drain / a cosmic ray of light piercing through Sydney’s winter chill / twin blades on scissors slicing through time and place / dawn breaking on the horizon of the darkened mind / the emperor has no clothes, all that remains visible are his bits, and bytes


2021 took on a strange shape after lockdown took a big bite out of the middle of it, so I’ve reprised the roundup of professional milestones as a reminder of what actually happened in this corner of the freelancing universe. As it turns out, I wrote about 20,300 words in the form of various reviews, essays and profiles, and there were a few other fun opportunities thrown in for good measure.

The Art Gallery of NSW was humming in the middle of the year – the Archibald celebrated its 100th birthday, and my feature on the anniversary exhibition Archie 100 was the cover story of the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum in June. Around the same time the Gallery opened its first international show post-covid, Hilma af Klint, which I reviewed, also for the SMH. Sadly both shows were only open for a couple of weeks before lockdown shut gallery doors, so it was great to be able to get back in there later in the year to review the summer shows Matisse: Life & Spirit and Matisse Alive, this time for HK-based arts journal CoBo Social, who this year also published my reviews on The National, Primavera, and the pleasurable, the illegible, the multiple, the mundane, which was the final show at Artspace before The Gunnery closed for 12 months of renovations.

I was honoured to be invited to write the catalogue essay for John Olsen: Goya’s Dog, an exhibition at the National Art School Gallery spanning eight decades of Olsen’s practice. Excerpts from this essay appeared on the wall labels throughout the exhibition, and an abridged version was published in the Winter edition of Art Monthly Australasia. Other catalogue essays in 2021 included those for Caroline Rothwell’s show at Hazelhurst Art Centre, Michelle Cawthorn at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Clara Adolphs, Nancy Constandelia, Ali Noble, and Kathryn Cowen. Interviews and profiles included Julia Gutman for Art Collector, Zoe Veness for Design Anthology, and Margel Hinder for SMH.

A couple of things penned in 2020’s lockdown made it to print in 2021. These included an essay on Sarah McConnell’s work was published by Melbourne University Press in the book Art + Climate = Change II, and a catalogue essay for Stuart Smith’s group exhibition at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, (re)arrangements, the victim of a double-whammy, finally installed just prior to Sydney’s long lockdown in 2021 but unable to open to the public.

In March I was invited by Asialink Arts and Santy Saptari Art Consulting to participate as a panellist in the series Dekat-Dekat Jauh (So Close Yet So Far), with the conversation providing a springboard to future actions and possibilities. Later in the year, it was great to meet the next generation of artists for another round of fast-paced writing workshops (the art writing equivalent of speed dating!) as part of the National Art School’s Professional Development Program.

After serving as external assessor in 2020 for the inaugural programming round of the new Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, it was great to see the Gallery launched in November 2021 with the 20th anniversary exhibition of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. In the leadup I enjoyed delving into the history of the award and interviewing past winners as I worked on content for the updated WSSP catalogue.

The icing on 2021 was being the subject rather than the author of a work, with Joanna Braithwaite’s clever painting Aficionado exhibited as a finalist in the Portia Geach at SH Ervin – a thrilling end to the year.

Thank you to artists for your work & thanks to those who commissioned art writing this past year. Looking forward to looking more in 2022.

Joanna Braithwaite, Aficionado-portrait of Chloé Wolifson, 2021. Image courtesy the artist.

#otherworlds2 – Kathryn Cowen at AirSpace Projects

Sydney artist Kathryn Cowen’s exhibition #otherworlds2 is on show at AirSpace Projects, Sydney from 6 – 21 November 2021. My catalogue essay is below.

The other day, an ad for a fast fashion website scrolled its way up the screen.

PLEATHER, it read. So Much Pleather You’ll Feel Like You’re In The Matrix. Two models, unlikely to have yet been born when the film in question was released in 1999, lounged against each other clad in black plastic-leather outfits, against a backdrop of a melty vector grid.

It seems like a delicious coincidence that as we slowly emerge, blinking into the light after pandemic-induced lockdowns, we are being encouraged to clothe ourselves in the trends from the time of a different bug, over 20 years ago. The apocalyptic fear, uncertainty and speculation that the Y2K Bug generated has vanished, replaced with a pleather-clad nostalgia for a dystopian future. At the time, the Y2K bug seemed like a symptom of civilisation’s advancing digitisation. As it turns out, our relentless physical encroachment on the natural world was the real problem, and a zoonotic disease was the thing that would send us back into a panic-buying frenzy, 20 years after people had abandoned their millennium bunkers.

In #otherworlds2, Kathryn Cowen invites us to imagine a new future, led by the speculations of the present: synthetic biology, the search for alien life, science-fictional worldbuilding. Like the locus for these explorations, the Deep Space gallery of Airspace Projects is a laboratory, where one of Cowen’s paintings has been cultivated into another world, element by element. Light, colour, sound and scent conditions are all controlled by the artist in this environment – control that allows the viewer freedom to play with endless possibilities. In this laboratory-installation, a phosphorescent painting that depicts vegetation on either land or the seabed spills out into a biofuturistic world where incantations are uttered, strange smells swirl, and the light startles as it switches between artificial day and artificial night.

Sculptures inhabit this space like new creatures born into a humidicrib under an incandescent lamp. Physically attaching natural materials to synthetic ones is a challenging process, both in the artist’s studio and the scientist’s laboratory; once fused, a new type of thing emerges. Rubber cords cascade like a horse’s tail from a geometric fixture; painted plant stamens push upwards from a fluffy pink bulge; whipper-snipper plastic cords prolapse from an orifice of faux fur; synthetic purple extrusions recall brain matter; blue cable-tie anemones bloom; green sponges glimmer with flecked constellations. Their forms echo that of cells, with tendrils recalling the dreaded spike protein. There is a fine line between gaining and ceding control.

In this cave, this world within a room, the viewer is left to perceive the world of which they are protagonist. In the absence of other figures a soundtrack forms the accompaniment, interspersing the poetic invocations of Cowen’s collaborator Gareth Jenkins with an improvised soundscape performed on found, homemade and conventional instruments, echoing the hybrid nature of the sculptures in #otherworlds2. Jenkins intones:

This is not today or tomorrow
this is sometime else.
This is a dotted line
We’ve been following
all our lives.
No deviation
in the grand mean vector
under this Ultra Violet Light

this is the inclination compass
in Spring
getting it all just right.

A weed sprouts from a drain: Caroline Rothwell ‘Horizon’ at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery

Caroline Rothwell’s practice explores the intersection of art and science through sculpture, collaged historical prints and digital animations that invite viewers to consider our relationship with the natural environment. Rothwell’s exhibition Horizon is on show at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery until 28 November 2021.

The accompanying catalogue, including my essay for this exhibition, A weed sprouts from a drain, can be read at the link below.

View the Caroline Rothwell: Horizon digital catalogue.

(re)arrangements – Curated by Stuart Smith

In 2020’s lockdown, I worked on a catalogue essay for Stuart Smith’s ultimately postponed group exhibition at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, (re)arrangements. Like many 2020/21 shows, this one has been the victim of a double-whammy, finally installed prior to Sydney’s long lockdown in 2021 but unable to open to the public. Read the catalogue here and see installation images below.

The investigations undertaken by the artists in (re)arrangements result in new logics, new orders. These artists rearrange form or idea, seeking new intent by repurposing an existing one. A car part found by the roadside turned 3D glyph; a repainted detail from an early 20th century naturist magazine; an abstracted fragment of a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. (re)
arrangements
explores how strategies of redeployment and recontextualization can generate new ways of seeing and understanding. Coordinated by Stuart Smith, the exhibition brings together the work of ten artists with transformative approaches to a diverse range of media and subject matter. By fragmenting and transforming existing artworks, objects and found images, the works in (re)arrangements enable new ideas and forms to take shape.



Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings, at the Art Gallery of NSW

Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings at the Art Gallery of NSW is one of many casualties of the most recent NSW lockdowns, only open to the public for two weeks before the gallery had to close its doors. The AGNSW has now made available an online virtual tour of the exhibition, so I am taking this opportunity to revisit my review of the show which was published in The Sydney Morning Herald back in June. Explore the exhibition and have a read.

Artspace Sydney’s ‘the pleasurable, the illegible, the multiple, the mundane’ exquisitely captures what it is to be human

The final exhibition at Artspace, Sydney, before it closes for a year-long renovation lures viewers into a sensitive, multifaceted study of the human condition through artworks by 12 Australian and international artists.

My review of Artspace Sydney’s the pleasurable, the illegible, the multiple, the mundane has been published on CoBo Social – read it here.

A communal studio setting: the happy medium

In 2020, I was commissioned to write a story on artists’ studios in Sydney – a snapshot of group studio settings amidst the pandemic year. Unfortunately the shifting sands of the pandemic publishing landscape meant that it never made it to print. While some of the setups described have since changed, the way artists work is of enduring interest to me, and I hope others too, so I have given the piece a belated lease on life below. The many artists and arts workers quoted in this story gave generously of their time and thoughts for this story and I thank them for that.


Long before co-work settings were trendy, artists and their supporters were establishing shared work environments. For many artists, working from home isn’t a viable option. Space is limited; materials can be toxic. While some artists are in a position to work in a private studio, for many, a space within a communal studio setting is the happy medium.

For Penrith-based artist Kirtika Kain, whose work responds to historical texts, her residency at Parramatta Artist Studios (PAS) has presented an opportunity to share ideas with fellow Western Sydney artists. “We are all focused artists and from such an array of global communities; although our practices are so diverse, we have found unique connections,” she says. “There is a camaraderie without a hint of competitiveness.” Kain is one of 20 current studio artists across City of Parramatta Council’s studios, describing it as “a textbook residency… in allowing us the space to be alone and connected,” and facilitating her transition from student to fulltime artist. “[C]urators I only dreamed of meeting have come through our doors.”

“Without a significant exhibition venue in the Parramatta region to this day, Council recognised a significant gap in supporting local artistic practice and local culture, and so strategically decided to support the making of art,” explains Director of PAS Sophia Kouyoumdjian. As well as the sense of community fostered in the studios, PAS artists’ work is included in exhibitions further afield, including an annual exhibition at Artspace in Woolloomooloo (which also hosts its own studio program), the two-part survey show New Sacred at Mosman Art Gallery (2018 and 2022), and many partnerships with regional galleries.

Established in 2006 in the Parramatta CBD (where Kain is currently in residence), PAS branched out to a new space in Rydalmere in 2019. The larger Rydalmere studios situated in a light-industrial area allow artists to experiment with material and scale “in ways we have never witnessed before at PAS,” Kouyoumdjian says.

Carriageworks resident artist Dean Cross also appreciates the opportunity to branch out in scale. Cross moved from Canberra to become a resident of The Clothing Store Artist Studios, a building close to Carriageworks which the Redfern multi-arts centre leases from Infrastructure NSW. It’s Cross’s first studio experience. “Because the studios are so luxurious – it’s bigger than my apartment – I’ve been able to work at a scale that I’ve never been able to work at before,” Cross explains. “It’s changed how I can look at my work and I’m incredibly grateful to have been here and even for it to have been extended because of Covid.”

The impacts of the pandemic have been mixed. “When I first came back into the studio [after lockdown] in some ways it was a positive, because I had…fresh eyes on all these half-baked ideas that I’d left when the doors got locked,” Cross recalls. However, he did find it difficult to regain the momentum of a regular studio practice. “[I]t took a little while to find that flow again, and…I couldn’t remember where I’d put my scissors.”

Cross is not alone in having his studio practice interrupted by the pandemic. At Crows Nest-based Studio A, a supported studio for artists living with intellectual disability, 17 represented artists share a communal space, a setup which has posed challenges during Covid-19. As CEO and Artistic Director Gabrielle Mordy explains, a full-time online program was created in the space of a week, a process which involved navigating variables such as group homes and limited internet experience. With some artists continuing to work in the studio and others discovering they prefer to work from home, the whole studio currently connects daily via video calls and has also continued their daily dance sessions this way.

In non-pandemic times, Studio A’s resident artists work in a single shared space, using mediums including digital art, painting, drawing and textiles – the studio contains several looms and sewing machines. The studio evolved out of a recreationally-focussed program, and aims to provide opportunities for artists living with intellectual disability to be involved in mainstream art networks. This has led to many collaborations which often include access to the more extensive studio resources of other artists.

Studio A’s original location in Hornsby proved to be a barrier to resident artists in accessing Sydney’s broader contemporary art world, and while their current location is an improvement, the studio is on the hunt for larger, more central, accessible yet affordable premises near a transport hub, with a gallery to promote greater visibility of artists work to passers-by.

This lack of affordable, suitable artist studios in Sydney is not unique to Studio A, and organisations like Brand X have addressed the issue by working with developers, landlords and local councils to repurpose empty spaces for cultural practitioners (they currently manage a Creative Precinct at St Leonards, and the City of Sydney’s live/work tenancies in inner Sydney).

Art collectors Teresa and Andre Biet have also made an impact on the issue of affordable studios, establishing Shirlow Street Studios in 2019. The couple, whose program Art Incubator provides exhibition and mentorship opportunities to emerging artists, purchased and renovated a former olive processing facility in Marrickville, incorporating a design studio and workshop on the ground floor, and eight artist studios above. Resident artists are chosen across various stages of their careers in order to develop mentorships between emerging and more established artists, and studios were designed without doors, the open access promoting “exchange and conversation particularly when problem solving about a technical aspect of their practice,” Teresa Biet notes. 

In nearby St Peters at Orange Tongue Studios, the same no-door approach also applies, with artists sharing tools and tips and occasionally posing for their studio neighbours. Except for artist Floria Tosca, who joined last year, all of the current eight occupants have been at Orange Tongue since it was established in 2017. Tosca, whose practice includes painting and drawing, felt that the space was right for her as soon as she entered the building.

“[T]here’s a camaraderie [and] generosity…not just in making the work, but also in supporting each other in showing it, and…when people are going through difficult times.” With many artists having exhibitions cancelled this year, the supportive studio environment has been crucial. Artists Jonathan Dalton and Giles Alexander set up Orange Tongue (named after the material they used to build the walls) when their previous studios were demolished to make way for the Metro. “We couldn’t find a space adequate to our needs, so we leased a warehouse and purpose built the space,” Dalton explains.

Artists Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan van Hek, who work in materials including mirror, Perspex and neon, also struggled to find an appropriate studio space after relocating to Sydney from Perth in 2012. “[T]he rents were astronomical and the spaces tiny! It was quite alarming – at one stage we were shown a space in a building in Camperdown that was literally a section of a hallway and it was $250/week,” Cavaniglia recalls. After spotting a ‘For Rent’ sign in a derelict-looking building in Marrickville, they discovered a “huge space with the best light. It’s a rare gem.”

Five years after moving in, Cavaniglia and Van Hek also took over the lease of the neighbouring unit and were joined by artists Gemma Smith and Grant Stevens. (Smith’s dog Puffin is a recent addition to the studio family.) “[T]he only drawback to the space is the ordeal of taking things up and down a fairly tight set of stairs,” notes Cavaniglia. “On occasion we’ve had to lower works out of the loading windows down the side of the building onto the road – it’s a pretty impressive effort and the people in the factory across the road will often drop tools and come and help out with the more precarious manoeuvres.”

Back over in St Peters in an old brick factory on the Prices Highway is a creative industrial space that defies traditional notions of the artist’s studio. Tortuga Studios was established in 2008, evolving from an earlier studio in Turrella. Managed as a not-for-profit incorporated association, Tortuga boasts 21 studios, a large gallery space (which in non-pandemic times is home to year-round exhibitions and events), photographic studio, kiln, hot-desks, a multi-purpose inner laneway, and a set-building workshop large enough to house the set of the interior of an RFDS plane. Tortuga is occupied by an extended family of creative practitioners including photographers, writers, carpenters, metalworkers, riggers, bagmakers and a clown.

“We are artists, but we talk of ourselves in terms of our cultural production,” Director of Tortuga Studios, H Morgan-Harris, explains. “Cultural production and manufacturing [are] a vital element in the broader entertainment industry, one of Sydney’s most dynamic sectors. The professional expertise at Tortuga – across multiple disciplines – cannot be described in the context of ‘artist studios’ solely. It is so much more than that. A number of our tenants take on multi-million-dollar projects, work in an international capacity and run creative crews of 40+ workers at a time.”

Tortuga is a particularly collaborative space with history and experience anchoring its strong community. But whether occupied by long-term residents or a rotating roster of artists, shared studios of all kinds offer artists and creative practitioners support, connection and solidarity. Conversations take place around meals and coffees, technical questions are nutted out, there are formal and informal opportunities to connect with others in the creative ecosystem, and, as Cross notes, “when you just need that extra set of  hands…it’s as simple as knocking on a door.”

Chloe Wolifson, August 2020