Personal Political Emotional

Artist Megan Evans was for some years the partner of Aboriginal activist and artist Les Griggs who suicided in 1993. Fifteen years later she has begun to write his story - a story of reconciliation with herself and her country, through a relationship that undid her and put her back together again.

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A New Truth to Materials

A New Truth to Materials Boxcopy (Miles Hall, Chris Handran, Chloe Cogle, and Ross Manning) Curator: Raymonde Rajkowski Level 3 Metro Arts, Brisbane April 30 - May 30 2009

Danni Zuvela

Choosing who will keep the stories strong

In early 2006, the renowned Liyagauwumirr painter Mickey Durrng Garrawurra died in his home on Milingimbi. For many years, Durrng (1940-2006) and his brother Tony Dhanyala (1935-2004) were the only people authorised to paint the Liyagauwumirr’s most important clan designs. Before his death, however, Durrng made the seemingly unorthodox decision to pass this knowledge and authority to his sister Ruth Nalmakarra (b.1954) and her family. What followed was a flowering of tradition, as Nalmakarra and her sisters used this broadened authority to instigate a cultural revival that united their community around these ancient designs.

Henry Skerritt

Living palely

The Stoics may have taken rationality too far in their resolute minimisation of all feeling. Are emotions no more than disturbances in the logical landscape? What of Pascal’s ‘the heart has its reasons that reason is not acquainted with’? Perhaps the rationality/emotion divide is overdrawn, risking battle lines forming around pure opposites never found in real life examples. Yet the issue has bite, relevance to intimate features of our life: our friendships, our sense of safety in the world, how much we give of ourselves and give up of ourselves to our working life and the living texture of what it feels like to be us: fugitive, or having the ‘warm antiquity of self’.

Doris McIlwain

Notes on melancholy and anxiety in the works of Sanja Pahoki

The artworks of Sanja Pahoki walk a zigzag between melancholy and its contemporary cousin, anxiety. Curator and writer Hannah Mathews interviewed Sanja Pahoki about her recent work while thinking about Daniel Birnbaum's comment about the relationship between melancholy and the arts: "The idea of the melancholic as someone not only passive and depressed but also creative is the basis for the Renaissance idea of the genius – the dialectic between darkness and light, destruction and creation."

Hannah Mathews and Sanja Pahoki

Reconstruction Works: Paul Caporn

Reconstruction Works: Paul Caporn Turner Galleries, Perth 17 April – 16 May 2009

Nien Schwarz

Drifting in My Own Land: Nalda Searles

Drifting in My Own Land: Nalda Searles John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth Touring Australia 2009 – 2013 19 June - 30 August 2009

Holly Story

SRL: Stigma Research Laboratory

SRL: Stigma Research Laboratory Philippa Steele, John Vella, Scot Cotterell Moonah Arts Centre 8 May – 21 May 2009

Andrew Harper

Ann Newmarch: Opening Pandora's box

In 2007 Ann Newmarch was represented in 'WACK, Art and the Feminist Revolution', a major exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Newmarch embraced feminism in the early 1970s. Her art practice manifests the view that all representation is political. Her new work, reiterates a position that she adopted in 1972 : "I try to get onto the page visual images that combine to make memory: past memories incorporated in new sensations and new images related back to past experience. Contemplation ...of our environment that recalls other times, places and relationships."

Janet Maughan

Artrave

The Divided Heart

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Astra and the ventilation hypothesis

Astra Howard’s 'Action Research/Performances' necessarily require participation by members of the public. This makes them unpredictable. Astra’s presence is not about entertainment. It is not a show. There is no star. There is no attempt to expose any individual. There are simply sincere attempts to understand them. Astra acknowledges and responds sincerely to one of our deepest and most affective human needs – our need for emotional expression. Our need to have our voice heard. Our need to vent.

Eliza Muldoon

Inside Sydney's new Outsider art centre

Outsider Art is enjoying increasing attention in Australia. STOARC – the Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection – at the University of Sydney opened its public face at Callan Park Gallery in March 2009.

Colin Rhodes

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