I should have written this review before I read Ian McLean's excellent catalogue essay but I must add that I saw the exhibition twice before consulting the catalogue. And both times, there was much to enjoy and digest. The exhibition can almost be read as an index of print-making activity in Australia, in that an amazing cross-section of techniques - traditional and modern (including the improvisational) as well as the very contemporary, ie. digital - are used to grapple with the conceptual concerns beloved by print-makers, working as they do between the worlds of image making and 'text'.
The winning print Body Armour or Char/Corps by Tasmanian artist Raymond Arnold is truly impressive in its combination of melancholy and its subtle combinations and variations of technique and detail. Gravure, engrave, grave; the artist concentrates quietly on controlling the amount of ink permitted to seep around the contours of the embossed patterned areas, and on the gridded tarlatan mesh overlays. The references to an inhumanising regimentation are inescapable. On the eve of the millennium and perhaps also, of the republic, and in the wake of our formal apology as a nation to the first people of Australia, this print is one of many in this show embodying a sense of artistic and cultural maturity.
There is a sizeable group of works that take historicism further into our collective 'dark side', creating the feel of an Australian Gothic. Blacks, reds, creams, a touch of gold or silver. Here we find weighty colours, dark subjects: shipwrecks, the corporeal, death, and decay. Amongst these are Maree Gullock's paired linocuts Bunarong Coast Series 1998, Raymond Carter's Narrative on a Nineteenth Century Incident, Milan Milojevic's extraordinary Index of Possibilities (Kilkenny), Geoff Winckle's work Transcient Echoes of Memory, which is comprised of many discrete small prints, Caroline Durre's The History of Burdens, and Harry Hummerston's 100 Words from the Happy Prince. This sensibility appears also in two of the book works; Just for Nothing, a painstakingly typeset book by Ruark Lewis and Nathalie Sarraute, and David Frazer's Howard and Ken were a Double Act with its equally meticulous wood engravings. Aarone Raymond Meeks' lithograph Birthole shares this sense of darkness and decay from the perspective of an Aboriginal interaction with history post 1788.
Still gothic but richly exotic and sensual are Michael Keighery's Red Memory and Shards with it's deep crimson flocked ink and Marine Ky's "The black satin ball gown". It interests me that Michael's work, for all its 'fin de siecle' affectiveness, remains cool and somehow detached compared to Marine Ky's sophisticated but blazing treatment of socially moderated passion. This girl is not shy! Well, I don't normally go for the Mars and Venus divide but these two works make one wonder. And what does it say about me that I really like, and could live with, both these prints!
Sharing an expressive robustness, Elizabeth Dobrilla's Set the Table, - Pull the Trigger V, and Lesley, Daen and Borun Murray's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Part Three, Death, passionately chronicle the violence of our times and our inability to avoid it's relentless invasion of our daily lives. These artists push their chosen techniques to achieve the drama they seek, extending the scale of their images across several sheets of paper, thereby referencing advertising and billboards. I am truly amazed by Lesley Murray's skill with collography, one of the most simple and improvisational of printmaking techniques, quite fragile compared to the sturdiness of classic metal plates, blocks and stones. I admire both these prints enormously but I would not wish to live with either of them for fear their message would eventually be dulled.
In fact, artist's books aside, it seems that most of the prints in the Award this time are Large Scale, for public spaces. They are all out there making statements, muscling in on painting, if not pinching its very support. Rick Partington's hyper-real digital print Citizens and Jackie Gorring's delightful narrative relief print The Trouble at 51 complete with references to TV sit-coms on a badly adjusted set, are both printed on canvas. Neither are framed thereby drawing attention to the supporting material. I was also intrigued to see the inclusion of a screen-printed textile Tuninga by Natalie Tungatalum, an Aboriginal artist from the NT, presumably on similar grounds to the inclusion in the National Aboriginal Art Awards a few years back of a very long silk batik from Aboriginal artist, Atipalku Intjalki. Hers made its point under the Category 'Painting'. Hooray for the judges! Natalie's work is quietly underscored stylistically by Jackie Fleet's elegant linocut, History 1, in which the support is a longish length of paper, extended laterally with chine colle. Jackie is also from the NT. For me, the work refers to traditional woven South-East Asian textiles in its choice of colour, the organization of its design and placement of motif. Once, I had a Timorese shawl replete with cherubs. Now Jackie's characteristic angels find another apt and tragic context for their song.
As this review is written for the web, I can jump to another link, so to speak, and go to 'fragility'. The Award contains some beautiful prints which have about them this quality, either literally as in the supporting paper, or in their essential thematics and poetics, in their minimalism and in their colour. You might dispute my choice but I mention the following: Sophia Szilagyi's delicate book Suspended, Pia Larsen's large but superbly minimal etching of a downturned shell, Vicki O'Shea's Tangible Space, and Heather Shimmen's wonderful small linocut Beauty Spot, 'shaky' and delicately coloured. Several of the digital prints successfully exploit this quality; the dreamily galactic Untitled by Lesley Duxbury, Marion Manifold's strange, redolently gothic but unfortunately titled photo-essay, "The dream of death begins. It is woman" (good grief Marion, what would the Mars and Venus lot make of that!), and two more digital prints which really satisfy my desire to see the artist begin to dialogue with their subject imagery within the parameters of their technique. These are Emma Stoneman's Figure One Posterior View - Atlas to Coccyx and Norman Wight's Of Transcience, - pears, Cezanne's cubism and impermanence analysed and pixellated.
The digital realm will continue to flower with works like those above and complex graphics like those of Rick Vermey (Private Glory), Dianne Longley (Cats, Lakes, Clothes, and Cups) and vibrant, bouncy statements like Presence (Bibi Viro), and Red Yellow Blue (Trinh Vu). Not all will be graphic illustration or hybrid monsters, gigantic cockroaches and ponderous multifaceted rhinoceri - the classic graphic icon of at least two community arts and academic support groups I know (and I know Olga Sankey knows this too). We're just surfacing from the stage where we've been blinded by the science of it all and embarking on the theoretical considerations, entering the arena where the dogs are "all arse" as in Milan Milojevic's An Index of Possibilities (Kilkenny)*. If ever there was an archetypically 'Printed' image, this one is certainly it. Watch out Milan, - it's got "icon" written all over it.
I am beginning to feel like a List Compiler here and there are still more to go. Oh the realm of digital technology, with its corresponding cornucopias begging order. But the count stops at 99, so there Mr. Taxman! (A printmaker's parable!) As Philip Adams would say, and I'd better quote him because he'll be here next week: "Dear Gladdies/listeners/readers, do go and look. Do some list compiling of your own."
But before you do, I just want to say that I love, as always, the strength and deceptive simplicity of the Aboriginal printmakers' work. The nineties will be remembered as the era in which these particular flowers were helped to bloom and Australian culture is infinitely the richer for that. (List readers, on the whole, their names stand out! But there's a few more there who'll give you a surprise, and you'll have to tell by looking!) I can't really review the books, except that I wanted to look carefully through every one of them, especially Angela Cavalleri's Quattro Pagine, because it must be opened out. But I, like you, "Dear Gladdies/listeners/readers" will have to wait until October 17th., the Last Day, for that. However, don't the sneak previews look good!
* Catalogue essay by Ian McLean