Currents II

Published 01 September 2006

Becalmed: The Art of Going Nowhere in the Work of Nicholas Folland

Profile

Wendy Walker

Becalmed: the art of going nowhere in the work of Nicholas Folland

Published 01 September 2006

ex de Medici: Symbols of Mortality

Profile

Kelly Gellatly

ex de Medicis self-named approach to her practice Dogs Breakfastism signals an idiosyncratic working method that has seen her embrace photocopy, sound, performance, photography and drawing across a three-decade career. Kelly Gellatly looks at the multifaceted creative occupations of de Medici as both a visual and tattoo artist and the inherent connection she makes in and between these two practices. This text looks at two of de Medicis most prominent series - Gals n Guns and Spectre - through which she explores pressing issues such as global capitalism, corporatisation, materialism and the ongoing war on nature.

Published 01 September 2006

Heather Ellyard: Inventories and Commentaries

Profile

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Heather Ellyards valued objects are static, symbolic, juxtaposed rather than flowing. Ellyard asserts that she wants to speak the lyrics and sorrows of our time. As she has said, I am interested in the glimpses, held, remembered, aligned inclusively&I am interested in awareness and how to acknowledge it within a visual framework. It may be that Ellyards vision of the periodical table is a bridge: between life made up of many little things and the one big thing toward which we all yearn. She leans more to wisdom art than to the mimetic or the sublime. Ellyards art is incorrigibly plural, and sustainedly committed to the broadest kind of human vision. Textual references include the works of D.W. Winnicott, Jacob Rosenberg, Arthur Koestler, Basquiat, Brett Whiteley and Primo Levi amongst others.

Published 01 September 2006

Kevin Todd: Multi-valency Rules OK

Profile

Sean Kelly

Published 01 September 2006

Renate Nisi: Sculpture of the Senses

Profile

Cath Kenneally

Renate Nisi is obsessed by being packaged in a body, that condition common to humans, other animals, plants and even microbes. Growing up in Germany, where 'art had epic qualities', she flirted with the Sublime and the Romantic but converted to Expressionism 'with the figure as central motif.' A further shift has occurred since then, towards minimalism and three-dimensionality, 'away from the sovereignty of forms onto the relational qualities of environments.'

Published 01 September 2006

Robert Owen: A Different Kind of Modern

Profile

Carolyn Barnes

Robert Owens longstanding interest in exploring dimensions of light and space beyond the merely visual reaches back into an important line of constructivist art of the early twentieth century. Experiments with form and material have characterised Owens practice throughout his career, as has his openness to heterogeneous influences. Some of the major influences on Owens practice include metaphysical philosophy, Buddhist spirituality, optics, geometry in physics, minimalist sculpture and the work of Marcel Duchamp. This article refers to the works of Naum Gabo, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, Lynden Dadswell, Walter Gropius, Chairman Clift, George Johnston, Leonard Cohen, Jack Hirshman, Jean-François Lyotard, Charles Biederman, David Bohm and Stephen Hyde.

Published 01 September 2006

Sara Hughes: The Big Stick Up

Profile

Rhana Devenport

The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references. Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.

Published 01 September 2006

Yvonne Boag: Mapping Place, Memory and Conversations

Profile

Donna Brett

Yvonne Boag is a traveller, a wanderer and keen surveyor of her surroundings. Her concerns of language and place traverse a myriad of media such as paintings, prints and drawings in a career spanning three decades. As Boag commented in 1989 With every new work I start, it seems I am always at a beginning. Each work is an attempt to hold on to time. To make marks of that time, which will trace a pattern through my life& Through this text Donna Brett looks at Boags journeys to places such as Korea, Paris and the Lockhart River and her use of iconography and dense layering as a means of mapping her interaction with places, journeys and people. Some artistic influences here discussed include the works of Roger Hilton, William Scott, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Avis Newman. The Lockhart River, Urban Landscape and Conversations series are referred to in considerable detail.

Published 01 September 2006