After two years of ‘the Covid Era’ I finally reached Australia to see my father who was very seriously ill. It was December 2021 but I was ‘stuck’ in Sydney. Not a bad place to be ‘stuck’, but I didn’t really want to be in Sydney, I wanted to be in Adelaide to see Dad as I hadn’t seen him for two years. Australia’s strict quarantine rules were in play and South Australia was particularly strict requiring a two week hotel quarantine. NSW was not so strict, so I sat it out with my daughter Olivia who lives in Sydney.
As this was all happening over Christmas, I was very fortunate to be able to tag along with their Christmas plans in Leura in the Blue Mountains for a couple of nights. It was during this time that I happened across the Lost Bear Gallery in Katoomba and an exhibition by Australian artist Jody Graham. The title ‘Getting Pinked’ exhibition featured a series of works on paper and sculptural installations.
The exhibition focussed on the extreme human physical and emotional toll and environmental impact of the Black Summer Fires (2019-20) that devastated millions of hectares of Australian countryside, flora fauna and livelihoods. (https://lostbeargallery.com.au/exhibition/jody-graham-getting-pinked/ ) https://jodygraham.art .
I fell in love with her work, the techniques she uses, her philosophy, the subjects and the story of the exhibition. The exhibition was extremely moving, her sensitivity to the horror of this tragedy and her tribute to all of the people who worked tirelessly during this time. It was simply brilliant.
An epiphany moment, in what was a very difficult trip and year, the ‘Getting Pinked’ exhibition provided me with a moment of clarity as to the direction I would like to take with my own art practice.
Roll on a little over a year and I am back in Australia. My daughter, now married and with her first baby (yes, my first grandson) meant my trips to Australia were not going to become less, but undoubtedly more and for longer. As luck would have it, Jody Graham was running a series of workshops in Sydney while I was there. So I signed up. And I fell in love again - this time with Jody. She is not only a brilliant artist, but is the most beautiful person. Super talented, humble, a fabulous teacher, funny and truly inspirational. It was a great day. I learnt many things that day, but ridiculous as it may seem the most enlightening thing I learnt was the use of erasers! And how many you should have, the different shapes and sizes, the different ways you can use them to enhance your work. That you clean them, sandpaper them, cut them up to a size to suit your task. In your charcoal armoury, they are an invaluable tool. Crazy, but it completely transformed my thinking when working with charcoal, and made me realise how limited I was as an artist. So many barriers came down that day.
We scrunched up paper, covered it in coffee, scraped it along the pavement and practiced all sorts all techniques that Jody uses in her work – it was liberating, fun and uplifting – but most of all I loved the erasers. I now have a vast selection of my own.
I finished this stay in Sydney by visiting the Art Gallery of NSW with Olivia. By pure chance the annual Archibald Prize (portraiture), Wynne Prize ( Landscape & Figure) and Sulman Prize (subject, genre or mural) finalists were all being exhibited. Standing in front of the Archibald Prize winning piece ‘Head in the Sky, Feet on the Ground’ a mixed media piece combining textiles, collage, paint and stitching, by Julia Gutman https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2023/30531/ were a large guided group. I overheard a couple of snippets. The guide ‘provacatively’ asked the question, ‘Why do you think this piece was the winner?’
Of course it was a rhetorical question, but there was a cacophony of commentary, huffing and puffing and guffawing by the group! One individual who was clearly dumbfounded by how this piece won the prize, proclaimed loudly ‘But it isn’t a painting!’
Again, witnessing this exchange made me realise how we can allow ourselves to be limited by perceptions and conventions in art yet here was a work that transcended those perceptions and conventions and was acknowledged for it. Well, there was paint in it – but there was so much more and I thought it was magnificent.