Artist Profile

Artist Profile Team Publisher JOHN FEITELSON Editor KON GOURIOTIS OAM Art Director KIM GREGORY Deputy Editor and Sub-editor ERIN MCFADYEN Principal Writer ELLI WALSH International Writer PIPPA MOTT National Advertising Manager JILL TROCHEI Distribution and Subscription Manager BEN LOPES Distribution Officer CHARLI POPE Illustrator SIMON FIELDHOUSE Stories + Photos KIRSTY BAKER is an art historian and writer living in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand DR. BROOKE BOLAND is a freelance arts writer on Wodi Wodi, Jerrinja, and Yuin lands of the NSW South Coast PROF. BRAD BUCKLEY is an artist, writer, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne ĐỖ TƯỜNG LINH is a Vietnamese curator, writer, and art historian ANDREW GAYNOR is a curator, essayist, and researcher based in Melbourne KATYA GROKHOVSKY is a Ukrainianborn artist living and working in NYC, homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking). She is Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial CHRISSIE HALL is a photographer based on Gadigal land, Sydney; chrissiehall.com ANDREW HARPER…

By the time Artist Profile 59 goes on sale, Australia will either have the same Prime Minister or a new one. As I write this, the country is saturated with competing narratives of “political values,” as parties try to convince the voters in a compulsory voting system that they should lead the nation. More than any other federal election in the last thirty years, announcements on the value of the arts have been so low-key from the major parties – the Liberal-National Coalition, Labor, and The Greens – that the silence has been noticeable. We do know from the current Liberal-National Coalition government budget announcement this year that, if re-elected, they are committed to reducing arts funding over the next four years by more than 10 percent. It’s also known that decisions for…

Stolon Press is a small art press established in 2019 by Tom Melick and Simryn Gill. Melick is a writer, and Gill is best known as an artist – although both work in the fertile space between image and text. A stolon is a figure for just such an inbetween space. It describes a stem found on some types of plant, like a strawberry or currant bush, that runs horizontally outwards, touching ground at points along the way to sow roots of new satellite plants. The goal of the Press, as stated on its crisply designed website (courtesy of Robert Milne), is to similarly work “close to the ground,” feeling out neglected spots in the field of knowledge where they might seed new living ideas. They aim to publish images and…

Here we are. Backwards or forwards in time to a moment when we slip through the teeth of the world us humans have made, and feel a relaxed sense of place and connection with the nonhuman. Trees streaming up, branching into life. Trees loosely braided into forested apertures; into each a brushy wave of sky and change gushes like so many rock pools filling. The wooded verge that we so often inhabit in Seth Birchall’s paintings gives way to lyrical stretches of watery inlets, crowned by a quivering primal circle of sun or moon issuing a lambency that is swiftly unmoored from its source. On its way to us, it gets caught up in a kind of free-jazz paint play, scooting around the canvas in careening arcs, rasping at the edges…

“The illusion is created by the paint, but the illusion is exposed as well” I met with Adrienne Gaha on a windy autumn afternoon in her Sydney studio, surrounded by remnants of turps and paintmarked surfaces. As Gaha took me through her artistic practice she rotated a kaleidoscope of colour-saturated canvases on the walls for her upcoming exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary. What was immediately clear was the ongoing conversation between the works over her artistic career thus far. There were no dramatic shifts in themes, but a continued exploration that was ever changing and ever evolving. Her roots as an artist are founded on her simple assumption that art was “the only thing [she] could do.” Following in her grandmother’s artistic stead, she attended East Sydney Technical College (now the National…

The American Southwest, as it exists within the white settler-colonist imagination, is loaded with complex and often contradictory narratives. Its low population density, heat, presumed barrenness, and sheer expanse belie the reality of complex ecologies, topographies, weather systems, and flourishing ancient and modern cultures. Jo Bertini has been courting these contradictions for several decades now, in an enduring love affair with the desert that has seen her traveling extensively throughout arid regions of Australia, Africa, India, Pakistan, China, and America. Her latest exhibition at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at the Ent Center for the Arts represents the culmination of eight years of knowledge and experience with the landscape of New Mexico, her adopted home. Bertini’s paintings tenderly draw on the dichotomies of the desert; each work becomes an act…