WA Now

First Nation artist Julie Dowling

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 03:24:24 +0000

First Nation artist Julie Dowling

Artist Julie Dowling at her WA Now Babanyu – Friends for life opening at AGWA. Photo by Daniel James Grant.

tanya.sticca@a… Fri 10/07/2020 - 11:24am

13 February 2018

First Nation artist Julie Dowling is an activist, a visionary and an artist. Earlier this week we spoke to Julie about her current exhibition Babanyu – Friends for life showing at the Gallery as part of WA Now and what influences her work.

Yes

From the paintings shown in the exhibition, is there one in particular that resonates most with you and if so why?

I think at the moment it’s the portrait of my mother Ronnie Dowling: The neurotic. I remember the many stories she told me as I was painting it.

My mother was an artist but was stopped from pursuing a life as one because her family relied on her for financial support. She became a domestic servant from the age of 11 and finished schooling at 14. When my twin sister and I were born, she began her art again but kept it hidden from the world.

My mother is my friend and teacher. She was and still is very influential in the discipline side of my art making. She taught me how to see art as an extension of my own freedom, of it being part of myself and to talk about everything that surrounds me to the world. My Mum taught me to have a social conscience and eye for justice in all things.

Tell us about the Badimaya culture and how this influences your work?

Badimaya culture was always expressed in clandestine ways before the mid-1980s however it was following this period that my family and I began to openly express who we were and what we felt about our culture. The Badimaya culture was kept hidden however I was able to learn many things from my grandmother. I learned how to look after the land, its creatures and about how we are all connected to the land. I also learned a smattering of the Badimaya language from my Grandmother. She did not speak it often because she was taught that the language wasn’t legal to speak when she was growing up and feared we would be taken away if we spoke it in public also.

Since the 1980’s I’ve been involved with cultural renewal in my family and within many communities. Culture is an act of empowerment as much as it is a language of being.

Badimaya culture is also land specific as it relates to a place and an environment and without those two/three things acting in unison…language/place/cultural practice then it’s very difficult to see into the universe of knowledge & understanding that still exists here. Our country is north of Dalwalinu to the south, Mt. Gibson to the west, the eastern area of Lake Moore and the land north of Mt. Magnet

Julie Dowling Is it ok to be two things at once 1996. Synthetic polymer paint, red ochre and blood on canvas, 104 x 65 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1996. © Julie Dowling / Copyright Agency.

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What do you hope people will take away from your exhibition and from the stories conveyed through your work?

I hope they see the paintings in terms of documenting a journey or me tracking through everything as a woman, a Badimaya cultural being, someone who is interested in cultural history, decolonisation, First Nation empowerment, ending racism, ending sexism, living my life as a twin and also as a fair-skinned First Nation person. There are many multi-layered contextual meanings in the work and each plays out more in some than in others.

Julie Dowling

Artist

The main objective at present is to end racism. Everything from the cognitive dissonance and white fragility that many white people feel about First Nation people to those that don’t know about how systemic racism can rob First Nation people of many things from land, language to identity. Racism impacts every human being in some way.

What are you working on these days and can you tell us a little bit about it?

I’m working on a great number of miniatures for an exhibition at Midland Junction that is about language and the land. I’ve been contributing to a science called ethnobotany which looks into (with First Nation scientists) how language and the understanding of plants/landscape/environment are all linked. Without an intrinsic interaction with the environment, ethnobotanists have found that humans get depression and a great number of mental disorders over generations.

These miniatures will be mapping the process of moving away from language and land and also the returning to it in the form of de-colonisation and using cultural renewal of my own Badimaya language. I hope it helps people to heal.

Julie Dowling’s free exhibition is showing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until the 13 August 2018.

Visit Julie Dowling’s official webpage.

Julie Dowling

WA Now

Babanyu – Friends for life

Indigenous art

Western Australian

AGWA

Card Text

First Nation artist Julie Dowling is an activist, a visionary and an artist. Earlier this week we spoke to Julie about her current exhibition Babanyu – Friends for life showing at AGWA.

Art vs. Science: A Discussion with Oron Catts

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 06:07:42 +0000

Art vs. Science: A Discussion with Oron Catts

WA Now – Biomess: The Tissue Culture & Art Project AGWA installation view, 2018. Photo by Rebecca Mansell.

tanya.sticca@a… Wed 08/07/2020 - 2:07pm

26 September 2018

Walking into Biomess – The Tissue Culture and Art Project exhibition at AGWA is like stepping into a surreal combination of art exhibition, museum display and a scientific lab. Within well-polished David Jones-esque display cases sit an interesting array of living and dead organisms, including; live snails known for being hermaphrodites (having both male and female sex organs) in order to reproduce and the wing of a cross-bred Gallah and Corella.

Arising from 20 years of research at SymbioticA at UWA (a research lab and program that allows for artists to engage in biological scientific practices) Biomess is an accumulation of artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr's interest in the rise of biological technologies and its attempt to control life. Sitting within two opposing fields, Catts and Zurr have the opportunity to conduct research and produce work that challenges and questions our perceptions as a culture.

We recently spoke with Oron Catts and discussed the intersection between art and science, and where he feels Biomess fits.

Yes

What influenced you to start the SymbioticA initiative?

In the early 90’s I did my Product Design degree at Curtin University, and I was looking at the potential to start designing living biological products. I recognised then what is becoming extremely obvious now; that life is treated as a raw material. Biology is becoming an engineering pursuit and product designers will be called upon to design biological products. I found this prospect extremely problematic, to say the least.

So did you study science as well?

No [laughs].

I’m not offended when I’m called a scientist, but I was never trained formally as a scientist, but in 1996 I entered the lab and never left.

To put it bluntly, my interest is not so much in science but in how we, as humans relate to life and how life is really changing. For the last 20 years, I’ve seen enormous shifts around life from the Human Genome Project to areas like synthetic biology.

Do you think that there is a relationship between art and science?

Yes totally.

Science is almost like the religion of our time. We use it to explain the world around us, but science and scientists don’t have the tools to make a cultural sense of it. As artists, it is our role to engage with the scientific field and use an artistic methodology to experiment in the ways science can’t.

If life is a raw material to be engineered and engineers, business people and scientists can make decisions on what is to be done to life, then artists should be there as well.

What is interesting about an artistic practice is that unlike scientists, who are very much expected to find an answer to a question, artists don’t have those expectations. We’re allowed to ask questions and there’s no need for us to come to a conclusion.

That’s why I decided to not continue on as a designer, because design is similar, they are looking for solutions.

A lot of the questions around science and art relationships, from my perspective, are addressed at SymbioticA. We are in a unique position where it is an artistic based research centre embedded in a scientific environment.

There’s an idea that when one becomes embedded in an institution one loses a sense of autonomy. We found that at SymbioticA, we have total autonomy to engage with subject matter without interference.

This show is unlike anything exhibited in AGWA before. Do you feel your work is often called into question?

Yes constantly. On many different levels, Biomess is about confusing people and questioning what an institution is. For example we’re working with the WA Museum and a lot of the works in the show are from the collection, but putting these organisms into those luxury display; ‘How does this change the audience readings?’

Oron Catts

Artist, researcher and curator

WA Now – Biomess: The Tissue Culture & Art Project AGWA installation view, 2018. Photo by Rebecca Mansell.

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It’s important to make art that enables people to question their own idea of what art is. In your opinion, what makes something art?

Intentions. So the same objects can be seen as many different things, but also the canonisation of these objects within the structure of the gallery.

One of the things we realised quite early was the constant resistance to putting living organisms within the gallery space. Places like AGWA and the WA Museum are designed to conserve and maintain objects and organisms, thus many things in a museum are preserved.

So bringing something living into the museum or gallery, just by itself, it’s already an intervention that we take for granted.

So you’re interested in the clash between all the different ways life is classified, and how you can challenge this?

Yeah! By putting something that changes over time, that can die, that survives, this is part of the critique we have about the objectification of life.

I think the most important part of this work is that ‘I don’t know’. We’re supposed to know everything, especially in the 21st century and our continuous access to information, but really in relation to life, we know so little. I think that ‘I don’t know’ factor of the work is important.

I think that ‘I don’t know’ factor of the work is important.

Absolutely. The licence we have to engage with these sorts of questions is constantly being asked as well. That’s okay, we have to raise these complexities. That’s why we named this show Biomess, because this show is not about the clean, neat answers that everyone strives for. It’s about the messiness of life.

There are no clean neat answers, especially when it comes to life.

Oron Catts

Artist, researcher and curator

Curator Talk

Join Oron Catts Saturday 20 October at 11.30am in the Biomess exhibition space.

Twilight Opening

In celebration of Unhallowed Arts Biomess will remain open on Friday 19 October until 8pm. Entry is free! Why not combine a visit to Biomess with a visit to PICA as they launch HyperPrometheus commemorating the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818).

WA Now

Biomess: The Tissue Culture & Art Project

Oron Catts

Ionat Zurr

Western Australian art

SymbioticA

UWA

AGWA

Card Text

Walking into Biomess – The Tissue Culture and Art Project exhibition at AGWA is like stepping into a surreal combination of art exhibition, museum display and a scientific lab.

Bringing two obsessions together in Hyperkulturemia

tanya.sticca@artgallery.wa.gov.au — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 04:55:23 +0000

Bringing two obsessions together in Hyperkulturemia

Andrew Nicholls I Porcellini (self-portrait as Tobias Smollett) 2015-2018 (detail). Large format photograph, 120 x 150 cm. © the artist.

tanya.sticca@a… Wed 08/07/2020 - 12:55pm

12 December 2018

What was the inspiration behind your upcoming WA Now exhibition, Hyperkulturemia? How did you come up with the idea?

Broadly speaking I’m just generally fascinated by the history of the decorative arts, which has up until recent decades been regarded as a less-significant genre than the ‘fine arts’, and also by the history of Britain during the Eighteenth Century. This project brings those two obsessions together.

More specifically, as a child, I was transfixed by a Spode bone china ‘Blue Italian’ meat platter that hung on the wall of our dining room. It was a wedding gift, given to my parents by my paternal Aunts, and in hindsight, it was probably the nicest object we owned. I remember vividly being four or five years old and just standing and staring at it, and thinking that it was the most beautiful object in the world. Soon after I completed art school the design worked its way into my drawings, and I began to research its history. I quickly came to appreciate how it sits within the history of British decorative arts, and how it very deftly reflects the cultural context in which it was first created.

The design mixes an Italianate landscape with a Chinese border, and therefore reflects British taste during the mid-Eighteenth century when the world was opening up to travel, and Britain was in the midst of a very determined (and ultimately incredibly successful) program of empire-building. Much effort has gone into trying to identify exactly which part of Italy the design depicts, and the general consensus is that it is a composite image by an artist on their Grand Tour of Italy.

This inspired my fascination with the history of the Tour, and its aesthetic and cultural legacies. In 2014 I received a Fellowship from the State Government to travel to Italy on my own ‘Grand Tour’ on a knowingly-impossible mission to try to locate the Roman ruins depicted in the Spode design. This ended up developing into a series of residencies over four years in various iconic locations that were integral destinations on the Eighteenth Century Tourist’s itinerary. This exhibition, Hyperkulturemia, is the outcome of that research.

For readers who are not familiar with it, can you explain what the Grand Tour entailed?

The Grand Tour was literally the beginnings of what we now know as tourism. We take it for granted today that it is a worthwhile and enjoyable pursuit to travel to another country and experience its culture, but three hundred years ago this was a very new idea. The world was a much larger and more hostile place, and international travel was very expensive, time-consuming, and quite dangerous. People would only generally travel for reasons of politics, religion or commerce, or for military service, rather than for pleasure. The Tour changed all of that, for better or worse.

In the Eighteenth century, Britain was actively trying to rebrand itself as a superpower, and the Grand Tour was part of this agenda. The Tour was basically the same idea as the modern ‘gap year’. Young men of noble birth would complete their formal education by travelling through Europe for anything from a few weeks to several years. They would visit various countries but always the endpoint was Italy, in order to view the remnants of classical antiquity (since Britain was modelling itself on the Roman Empire), to appreciate the great masterpieces of the Renaissance (as this era also saw the beginnings of notions of taste), and, during the latter half of the century, to travel to Naples and view Vesuvius (which was erupting at the time) and the recently-discovered ruins of Pompeii, the great scientific discovery of the day (which reflected the Enlightenment interest in geology and archaeology, respectively).

…and so the Tour was all about raising the next generation of great young men to lead Britain into a new golden age, however despite these very stoic intentions, most of the Tourists during the Eighteenth century were incredibly privileged, incredibly young men – the majority were still teenagers – travelling away from their families and aristocratic society for the first time, with vast amounts of money and privilege. Hence, and not surprisingly, for the most part, they behaved utterly appallingly, eating, drinking, partying and seducing their way across continental Europe. Countless Tourists caught venereal diseases, fathered illegitimate children, or gambled away the family fortunes in Venice and ended up locked in debtors’ prison…and so there was this tension that I find completely compelling, between these very noble intentions, and the unleashing of this ribald and previously-repressed desire…and during an era when Britain was engaging with other cultures in an incredibly destructive and problematic way, the Tour represents a more benign cultural phenomenon, so it’s something from my own cultural lineage that I felt I could make work about that didn’t need to grapple with, say, histories of slavery or attempted genocide.

Andrew Nicholls The Last Judgement 2016-2018 (detail). Archival ink pen on watercolour paper, 12 panels able to be rearranged into two alternate configurations (one panel shown), 76 x 57 cm each. Artbank collection, commissioned 2016. © the artist.

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Over time the tradition opened up to aristocratic women as well as young men, then to the upper classes in other British colonies, and eventually to the middle and lower classes via the advent of mass tourism in the nineteenth century. But the Eighteenth Century Tour was the heyday of the tradition, and its influence can still be felt across Britain and its colonies today in everything from the use of Roman columns in civic architecture to the global popularity of pasta and ice cream.

Tell us a bit more about the exhibition title Hyperkulturemia.

Hyperkulturemia is the German word for ‘Stendhal Syndrome’, a mysterious medical condition that allegedly afflicted certain Grand Tourists. It is allegedly a malady that can occur when one encounters great art and becomes overcome, to the extent that one can cry, collapse, or even hallucinate. It has never been officially recognised by the medical profession, I think for good reason, and was much more likely to have been due to the heat and the crowds in the galleries of Florence, plus the fact that most of the Tourists would have been hungover or still drunk, or indeed, actively performing an extreme reaction, in order to demonstrate how sensitive they were too great art. A lot of their reactions were for show – the Eighteenth century was the great age of sensibility and taste, both of which were very new ideas, and very finely drawn, complex concepts, and members of the upper classes were heavily scrutinised by their peers. It was crucial for a young person entering polite society to show that they had refined taste, but there was equal pressure not to appear gauche or that you were trying too hard.

Did you experience it yourself or do you believe it’s more of an imaginary phenomenon?

No. I have on occasion been moved to tears by artworks, though in each case jetlag probably had a bit to do with it, but I don’t believe it’s a legitimate condition. However, I love the idea that an artwork could have such a powerful physically disruptive effect. It’s a really marvellous idea and was the perfect metaphor for this body of work, which explores this unruly masculine desire erupting out of a very sober, noble context. That said, I have made an artwork that once caused someone to throw up, which I still think of as the best review I’ve ever received, but I think that was a one-off.

The composition of each photo appears to be quite elaborate and thought out. How did you go about selecting the locations where the photos were taken?

The photographs are each staged in sites that were significant destinations on the classic Tour itinerary, including Piazza del Popolo (the entrance to Rome during the Grand Tour era), Hadrian’s Villa and Villa Gregoriana in Tivoli, sites surrounding the Via Appia Antica in Rome, and Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii outside Napoli…and there are numerous other photographs that didn’t make it into this particular show in other Tour locations. I tried to select sites that were truly iconic in relation to the Tour but were less-obvious than, say, the Colosseum or the Roman Forum. This was to try to avoid ending up with a group of works that looked like postcards but was also a pragmatic decision as I wanted to include a lot of male nudity, and so I had to find sites where this could be achieved. My wonderful friend and model David Charles Collins became adept at surreptitiously stripping off and running into frame so I could get the shot, then running back out of shot and getting dressed again in a matter of seconds. Doing this in a major tourist site like Pompeii was particularly challenging, but also a lot of fun. It was more difficult with the Large Format photographs, as this isn’t a process that can be rushed. The first image we shot on Large Format was at the Nymphaeum of Egeria in Rome at around 5.00 am. The site is located in a public park and David had to lurk in an ancient archway and run into shot in the brief moments of privacy between the scores of joggers and cyclists passing by.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the exhibition?

I hope that people enjoy the work. It’s quite an unfashionable kind of exhibition, very elaborate and idiosyncratic, and very self-indulgent, but everything in the show draws upon a particular historical aesthetic. As with all my work this exhibition is trying to trick people into reading it a particular way, so I hope that at least some viewers are able to look past the nudity and consider the aesthetic lineages I’m referencing. If people can recognise echoes of the Tour in contemporary culture I will be very pleased.

Andrew Nicholls

Artist

WA Now Artist Talk with Andrew Nicholls
9 March, 11am-12pm | FREE

Hear from artist Andrew Nicholls for an insight into his artistic practice and his WA Now Hyperkulturemia exhibition.

Western Australian art

AGWA

Card Text

Broadly speaking I’m just generally fascinated by the history of the decorative arts and also by the history of Britain during the Eighteenth Century. This project brings those two obsessions together.

WA Now

First Nation artist Julie Dowling

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Art vs. Science: A Discussion with Oron Catts

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Bringing two obsessions together in Hyperkulturemia

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