National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: This square, the text, and the black object are vying for attention, vying for story telling. Whose story is it here that we are looking at? What is the relationship of the so-called ‘dimension of television’; of these fake characters, in our own lives?

All of these sort of dynamics played out as we see within the picture frame; we see this tension the object and the text. And this of course is a dialogue which has run right through painting and mark-making at the end of the twentieth century, so it’s an extraordinarily intellectual picture, yet at the same time it delivers a message coming out of the pop culture.

And I think this sense of the relationship of the relationship of the pop culture to the ‘high’ culture is something which has certainly interested me, and as I look back at this collection I can see it sort of coming through in so many of the works that are on display here.

PF: Bill Culbert’s light box is interesting, because the yellow in it is a very intense yellow, which reminds me of the reflector pieces that Rosalie made so famous.

It’s also three or four found objects; an old biscuit tin, a soap dispenser, and oil dispenser and a yellow cup, with two of them inverted with a light source under them. And they just glow like the sun. They have sense of light emanating from them.

And it is a theme that runs through this collection; it’s the way in which the found, the discarded; the refuse of life… the detritus… There are artists out there who can turn that so simply, at just a turn, into something that is so beautiful and is so poetic, and never attempting to disguise what those objects are.

And you can see a sense of age, and mark, and use in this particular piece and yet it transcends that, and creates [its] own magic, [its] own poetry, without attempting to subvert the elements therein.

And that is the magic; that is artifice of art, and it’s right in front of you, and you can see it happening, and yet it’s such a delicate and such a rare touch, when it does happen, and I think it happens mightily, in this piece.

PF: The moment I saw this particular work… It’s from a series that she did. Maybe about fifteen or twenty images, where she photographed housing estates in New Zealand, and then collaged figures onto those particular houses, and I had been totally oblivious to the fact that these images, when they were first shown, had caused an uproar in New Zealand; really quite virulent attack.

And she was attacked for denigrating welfare housing by suggesting that people of extraordinary sortof physical dimensions lived in these buildings. I had exactly the opposite response. When I saw this photograph it was my parents’ wedding. The whole tilt of the man’s head… It was just like the one photograph I have of my parents’ wedding.

You could never see my mother’s face in the shot because the hat she had came right over her head, sort of at 45º, and I always remember my father saying ‘Your mother was a beautiful woman when I married her’, and I thought ‘well, you can’t see that from the photograph because all you see is this hat’.

But I just thought there was a real mark of fondness and quaintness in this couple, and here they were as bride and groom at the beginning of their life, but depicted as being at the end of it, and still together and clutching, so I found most of the images in the show quite touching, rather than scarifying, or vilifying, or whatever it might be.

And it’s been a very, very fond work of mine, and I have four or five images of hers from this series, but this is one that I particularly like, and I have a great fondness for Invercargill; it comes in at many levels, this particular piece.

PF: Gina, in terms of artists who have joined the collection, or joined the family, or whatever it might be, is certainly the last at the end of a long line. Somebody had rung me; an artist friend of mine who had judged a competition, and hadn’t awarded Gina the main prize, but had rung me to say ‘You should get out there; there’s something there that’s you’.

And I went to an enormously large… I think nearly six hundred works in this exhibition held at the Casula Powerhouse, and I walked into the space and bang! There was this poppy piece; luminous, large, crying out amongst this host of landscapes, and personal dilemmas, and dioramas… and here was this piece that was just so lovingly beautiful. Yes, they were poppies, but they were something else. They were just so much an elemental flower, without being anything. They were quite magical; I mean, I really didn’t respond to them as poppies, but they were just as if you had stepped into some Arcadian field, and the Gods and the pan pipes were all there, and I think piping too out of the Western Suburbs of Sydney, much maligned as they are, was this object of extraordinary light, and lightness, the whole lightness of being, and I was absolutely hooked.

And Gina’s work has gone on to look at more serious subjects of late, but in this particular painting is (such) a delicacy of touch that many, many artist friends of mine can’t believe that it has been painted.

There’s not a mark out of place on it. You can smell the flowers breathing. I always remember Keats’ great poem about spring. And this has got this moment of new life, but as we are reminded by Keats:

The flower will fade

And the scythe will go through the paddock.

But this to me is just a wonderful celebration about life and its potential for great beauty, and with all those buds still to come out, still more and more, it’s just such a wonderful celebration.

PF: Dallas would primarily be a visual artist; a painter, but every now and again he’s made models, and in an age today of model-making, they are very, very crude.

But to me that sense of crudeness is not a criticism, it’s something that I particularly enjoy. And in Dallas’ work we’ve got a doll that he’s made, or, a figure of a man in the scale of a doll, and then just coated it; covered it with fake fur.

And it’s got an ape-like look to it, and yet it’s obviously one of us. It’s quite an unnerving piece, because everything about it is so ‘bad’, and yet there’s a magic that comes through, where it makes us think about the chain of being we might be in, and the idea of the ‘missing link’, and this well could be the ‘missing link’.

It’s a piece that’s got quite an intensity, and a focus that takes you into it, and again, it’s just standing there on its plinth, and yet its quite alive to movement, and yet at the same time it seems to be anchored there — it’s almost as though it’s been put back on the shelf, and so that sense of play with time, and history, and our own relationship to it all comes into play.

PF: This is a piece called Pink, by Pat Thompson, an English lady, and I was living in Leeds and had shown very little interest in the visual arts in a career of teaching, and I was hurrying home and came upon this picture in an exhibition of works by WEA people, hierarchically arranged so the winners were all at one end, and the so-called ‘losers’ were at the other end.

And there at the end of the line was this woman showing this one particular work, and I just fell in love with it immediately, and had to cancel my plans of returning; missed the bus; came back and engaged her in conversation.

She couldn’t believe that anyone wanted to buy it, and kept pushing me – wanting me to go higher up in the line where all the ‘winners’ were. And I said ‘no, the others are extraordinarily bad, I think…’

But this is a piece that has always hung in my home, and when I faced the bushfires in 1994, with a policeman knocking on the door saying I had ten minutes to get out of the house, I took three objects with me and Pink was the first thing into the car, so it does have that special affection, but also now I look back on it. There’s so much in it; in it’s apparent sort of madness; apparent randomness; in its colour; in its line, that it is so in tune I think, with a lot of the collection, so I’m sure the psychologists could go overboard in working out where the sickness set in.

But it’s still a very affectionate piece, and the wonderful piece of conversation I had with the artist was when I enquired about it, because I tried to sort of make head nor tail of were these bodies in a bed, or were they standing – were they curtains or were they bedspreads – or whatever – wherever you went around the work you seemed to get a different reading.

I said ‘Ohh, Pat, why didn’t you paint any hands or feet?’ – on these particular bodies, and she just said to me ‘The night that they did hands and feet I was sick.’

I thought ‘Oh God, you weren’t feeling too good the night they did perspective, or whatever it might be, but it’s a work I’ve really grown very fond of’.

PF: Fiona was a young artist, along with a lot of young artists who were showing in the Mori Gallery in Sydney. And this was a work for a show which was site specific, at Elizabeth Bay House, in Sydney.

And it’s a wonderful colonial home with many rooms, and there were four or five artists showing work, and some had been allocated rooms, and there were hallways, and all sorts of things. And I’d got down there early, and in the library and also the specimen room of Elizabeth Bay House — there were specimens on the wall; there were insects, it was like being in a sort of a nineteenth century drawing room.

And at first I looked at Fiona’s piece, and if you get quite close to it all you notice are the butterflies; it’s like a series of specimen butterflies pinned to a board, and I just thought ‘Oh, that must be one of the works from the holdings from the house here’.

And then when you walked back from it this face came out at you, which was made up or composed of the butterflies, [which] then fell into and became part of the face, and if you stood at five paces, as it’s called, and moved your head backwards and forwards, this double image occurred.

And it was just so exquisitely balanced and beautifully small in a room where there were giant stuffed birds, and cabinets teeming with life, I just thought that this (piece) held the whole poetry of that building, and in a beautiful way it had such a delicate and very intricate making, and it was the first Fiona piece that I bought.

I had been looking at other pieces of hers but I’d often been a bit slow to get to the Gallery, and she was doing a lot of collage work in those early days, and so I was absolutely thrilled to have this piece.

PF: I came upon a Shaun painting at a Helen Lempriere Scholarship exhibition, in a sea of what was then termed ‘Grunge’, and here was this beautifully painted double figure; two historical figures.

And I immediately recognised an extraordinary talent in this young painter; found him out and became quite engaged with his work, and immediately asked him to do a piece of work, for a very small amount of money, and to get him to do something that he had not explored before.

After a couple of months Shaun rang me to say that the work was finished, and that it was a video. I thought ‘Oh, dear oh dear’ My heart sank. But I thought ‘No, this is good. I’ve got to support this, and I’ve got to be interested’, and he had arranged a studio at the Art School. He was still in the final year of his masters, I think, and he showed me this most extraordinary video piece of his skateboarding.

I didn’t even know he was a skateboarder. I was just transfixed by the beauty of this image of this skater pirouetting in slow motion, with the huge drama of the sea; the seascape behind him this incredible storm at sea. All these were elements of luck; the storm and so forth. And then with the rain falling on the lens of the camera transforming what was a video piece it becomes almost a pointillist, almost an impressionist painting, as the blurring, still with this figure eternally circling almost like an angel or some celestial body ready to return to another void; to another planet; to another world.

And taking its leave in this last gyration, which just goes on, and on, and on. It’s quite mesmeric, quite simple in its dynamic, and yet the poetry and the intensity, and the sense of drama that is captured.

I think it is an extraordinary video. This to me contained all the elements that I just think that great video art holds, and I just feel that in this young artist there is an extraordinary talent.