The room of many colours

If you walk away from the ferries, up the big front steps of the MCA and turn left, you will find yourself in an airy gallery with a feast of colour.

Tacked onto two walls are hundreds of spools of cotton, large ones like those on an industrial over-locker. Some tail end of threads trail into the air and flutter under the air-con breeze, but most extended out and away from the wall to stay fixed to garments piled on a table. There you can see everything from delicate crochets shawls to leather miniskirts and teddy bears.

This is the Mending Project by Lee Mingwei (Korea) in which visitors bring their clothes with tears, runs and holes and leave them to be mended. They will live in a pile on a trestle table until the end of the festival when owners  are notified by email to collect their items.

           

The installation has been staffed over the months of the Biennale by ten stitchers – mostly art and design students – who, true to the Lee Mingwei’s philosophy of celebrating the repair rather than hiding it as would a tailor, make their mendings more than just visible, but a feature of the garment.

Three large canvases by David Aspden hang on adjacent walls. Still feeling the warmth of the Mending Project led me to take in these huge oil paintings of red and yellow hues, throwing light and bright colour out into the room. Reminiscent of works by John Olsen it conjured up notions of deserts, horizons and blissful isolation.

It was a shock then to read the title of one piece: Mururoa. Painted in 1973, seven years after the first French nuclear test on the Pacific atoll, the reds and amber colours to me became bloodied. The splashes of blue became obscured, poisoned glimpses of a once-pristine ocean.

Knowing the subject of the work completely changed my attitude towards it. The happy room of many colours momentarily took on a darker feeling.

Not for long though.The prevailing ambiance was definitely light.

Hello

Hello from the Biennale of Sydney, otherwise known as BoS.

The tenacity of Kylie Eastley and the logistical nous of Steph Cahalan have got us here. I’ve come with my two daughters who are three and one, who were supposed to be staying with their NanTan but plans went elsewhere, so we’re all staying in an old-world pub in the Rocks, with music blaring from downstairs. These are the sidelines to seeing the A R T.

This evening we went for a peak. To the Museum of Cotemporary Art (MCA). Clean surfaces and friendly helpful staff wearing “Ask Me” badges. We didn’t need to ask them, they came and offered…

We walked into a room of vibrant colour including 800 spools of thread ‘randomly organised’ on the wall. There was no black. It’s The Mending Project by Taiwan’s Lee Mingwei. We met Grace, an assistant mender. Like long strands of silken cobwebs, the threads unspooled from the wall to their respective mended cloth, all placed in a pile on a table. Look closely and each mend is an eccentric flutter of colour to suit each garment.

The mend becomes the art.

We had something to mend. Were we prepared to leave it there till September? Actually no. We’re from Tasmania and this is my daughter’s only jumper. Ok. Grace, her namesake, sewed on a button and strengthened the others. The third button down now has a colourful spooly flower behind the button.

That’s her Biennale of Sydney Button. Otherwise known as BoSButton.

We would like to acknowledge and thank the Regional Art Fund for assisting us to get a team of Tasmanian writers to the Sydney Biennale. All the WriteResponse contributors volunteer enormous amounts of time, energy and resources towards reviewing of the arts. This type of funding assists hugely to what we all love to do; experience art of all kinds and write about it. Thanks RAF.

Here we go

by Stephenie Cahalan

The 18^th Biennale of Sydney began on June 27 and runs up to September 16. It occupies five different substantial venues. This means the people of Sydney have had 81 days to scrutinise what we are about to cover in about four. 

I feel like I am going speed dating with art.

We arrived, dumped our bags in our little Rocks pub at 3.30 this afternoon and by 4.00 we were excitedly drumming our fingers on the information counter at the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay.

Anything Can Break 2011 by Pinaree Sanpitak,
Thailand

And what a reception we got. From the girl on the front desk, to the beautiful lady in the gift shop searching menus on Cockatoo Island for us at one minute to closing time, we were showered with good jou-jou. A venue open to 9 pm (just like late-night shopping – only on a Thursday), gallery attendants explaining the MCA app, and offering samples to fondle of an installation that we are clearly dying to touch in spite of the stern warnings against doing so.

Really, as a starting point for a large and slightly intimidating event, my first impression of the Biennale is of an open, accessible and welcoming experience.

And that’s before I have even got to the artworks. We’re off to a good start.

Three Girls and a Biennale

by Kylie Eastley

Last night I felt the first glimpse of excitement at the prospect of hitting Sydney to see my first Biennale. Today I left a grey rainy Hobart and arrived to a warm, shiny and sunny city that seemed to buzz with energy. Or perhaps that was just me.

It was not only me experiencing the euphoria. I am joined by fellow writers Steph Cahalan and Lucy Wilson; all of us leaving our family and work commitments behind to throw ourselves on the Biennale sword. To see, experience and try to share a little of this with you.

Steph and Lucy

It was a chore to find accommodation as the Sydney to Surf is on Sunday and hotels are pretty well booked out. Many hours on the internet and sending emails had been fruitless, until Steph finally found The Australian Hotel in The Rocks. It would be remiss of me not to write about this place, because it is bloody brilliant. It is an old style pub, and as I write at around 10pm, there is a lot of noise coming from the crowd below. But it is really close to everything; has the most ornate breakfast room, lounge area and even an outside terrace with a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Not bad hey?

The Breakfast Room

Once settled, and having thrown off the Tasmanian attire for more suitable Sydney wear, we made our way to the Museum of Contemporary Art. This really was an opportunity to have a first glimpse at what was on offer. The MCA has provided a range of opportunities for visitors to not only view the art works but interact through workshops, seminars and tours. In the few hours we wandered the galleries the staff were incredibly obliging and informative about artists, exhibitions and other opportunities. There seems to be a strong desire to involve and include the public in this Biennale. Although, it has only been a few hours and there is still so much to see.

Over the coming days we will be posting numerous pieces about different works, but also about how we respond individually. It's going to be a wild and challenging ride at times, and already the discussion is hotting up.

Made in China, Australia

By Thomas Connelly

We went to the Long Gallery on a bleak bleary rainy sort of Hobart day to see Made in China, Australia. I took the entire family, as it is always helpful to get the viewpoint of children who can see through the hype of art and bring all the five dollar words back to the reality of mud and play with a response that is based on love and play first and foremost.

Anthology is from a Greek word, which literally means a flower gathering. This exhibition of sixteen artists is, in the best sense of the word, a gathering of flowers. Like all such gatherings it is a mixed collection of artists and artworks. Like any good gathering it lets us compare and contrast between the different artists, the different ways of seeing and the different ways of playing. China has existed for thousands of years and is a country of more than a billion people. That brings a wide range of attitudes, techniques and abilities and becomes an interesting vein of artistic ore to mine. Some of the artists come from China; some are new arrivals to Australia while others have been in Australia for generations.

En Route

one step at a time like this

Junction Arts Festival 2012

22-26 August

Take your time…

Would you believe me if I told you I love this city?

I am walking towards my first marker in a sneak-peek of the pedestrian-based live art experience that is En Route.  I put my trust in technology.  Headphones and IPod and my own mobile phone.  I am plugged in and nervous as I follow the sunlight on the Tamar and the instructions given to me by the En Route crew member.  Look for the steps. Is this the way? It's tempting to mistrust my memory, my own senses, to wonder if something is expected of me, something that I might fail.  But there's that sunlight and that water, that ambient music and poetic verse soothing me through wire and its lyrical direction.

Take your time…

What if I did?

What if I let myself be lead?

The Unsuitable Case of Me

By Kylie Eastley

Festival of Voices 2012

Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre

Dean Stevenson

As clichéd as it may be, there is a time for us all when we feel the need to revisit our past, reflect on our present and, depending on what we find, determine what our future will be. Cynics may call it a mid-life crisis, while Jungians may call it a transition period which requires patience and compassion for oneself as well as those around us.

After the house has lost its fullness, the pub has lost its history, the chairs have lost their comfort and tea has lost its heat, you find yourself doing the most dangerous thing-measuring the man you are, without the woman who left you.

Tasmanian playwright Finnegan Kruckemeyer has written a familiar tale. A man who when faced with the break-up of a relationship travels back through his history; the family home, his childhood friendships and loves to ‘find himself’.

He wrote the story and left space for the accompanying songs that were written and performed by Hobart musician Dean Stevenson. On the final night of the season as part of the Festival of Voices I sit behind Finnegan, who is seeing the finished work for the first time. An opportunity to gauge the authors response as well as my own.

Space Invaders

by Ben Walter

SAC Birthday party
31st March 2012
Salamanca Arts Centre Hobart

It is almost, it is not yet the serious time of year, when winter focuses our engagement with art and we require concentrated determination to leave the house. Today has been warm and long, there is time to dabble and lingering is on, we could (if we wanted) examine each brick and each beam; but not too closely, for in this climate it is all about strolling past these small installations. Aren't they spectacles we should expect to find when dallying?

Stompin's 21st Birthday Book Launch

by Wendy Newton

7.00pm Wednesday 11 July 2012

If only the floorboards could speak. 

I'm at Stompin's 21^st birthday book launch waiting for Premier Giddings to arrive and someone mentions the floor.  How it needs funding for repairs.  I look past my boots (embarrassed that I've only just realised they're muddy and the Premier will be here any minute) to the scuffmarks, scratches, gouges, the sgraffito of dance history that leaves its legacy etched in Braille on the pine. Stories on the boards. 

It's a pity they'll disappear. It's only sanding that's needed, I'm told.

Doing Lines

By Patrick Sutczak
Sawtooth Gallery 27 April – 19 May

Sonja Brough

Collective rainbow segments of a serpentine whole weave their way across the wall, hanging effortlessly (how, I do not know) upon the entrance to Sawtooth’s expansive Front Gallery. This is the first introduction to the exhibition by Sonja Brough. Although not immediately apparent, these cups displayed in their eclectic arrangement of sometimes end-to-end suspension suggest a pattern in motion, but not as we know it. 
They spoon together as if hinged by an invisible spine caught in a whiplash of flight across air, land, water, or, in this case, wall.

Sleeping Horses Lie

By Gai Anderson
Terrapin Puppet Theatre
Theatre Royal Hobart

Sleeping Horses Lie is Terrapin Puppet Theatres’ new school show, directed by Frank Newman and written by Maxine Mellor. An action-packed delight, this quirkily told tale, tells of the young girl Sally Saber, whose greatest desire is to be strong and brave like a tiger. But there is nothing to fear in Sally's house until late one night when her fantasy world begins to come to life.

Told in classic story-book fashion, but with generous lashings of pantomime, clown, slapstick, character puppetry and digital animation, the performers Bryony Geeves and Kai Raisbeck, as brother and sister Wilbur and Wilma, tell this complex but rollicking  tale with great vigor. Punctuated by moments of heightened physical theatre and delightful song the show is visually complex, with the feel of an old world nursery rhyme come-alive.

Appalling Behaviour

By Ben Walter
Professional Collective Theatre

Backspace Theatre

8.15pm Wednesday 23^rd May

Early in the piece, Stephen House's expatriate drifter latches on to a passing comment; a pedestrian observes that he seems to have an admirer. He's talking about a woman who wheedled the troubled homeless man from an altercation that was turning violent. It's an offhand remark, but for House's character it becomes a focus for hope among the dissipated inhumanity of his daily life among the Parisian underclass. The two days following are full of confusion, exaltation and disappointment as he interprets his relationships and experiences in the light of it.

Bijou's Secret and Legs Elbows Lips

By Ben Walter
HyPe; Sidespace Gallery

6.30pm Tuesday 22^nd May

The Sidespace Gallery proves a surprisingly cosy venue for two theatrical performances developed through the HyPe initiative, a program facilitated by the Salamanca Arts Centre for the development of theatre with experimental and cross-disciplinary tendencies.

Bijou's Secret, written and performed by Fiona Stewart, is an arresting one-hander exploring lost intimacies between three generations of women - an immigrant French woman, Bijou, her alcoholic, academic daughter and artistic granddaughter. Stewart is a compelling performer, confidently inhabiting the three roles and switching between them with ease; a slight adjustment of the hair serving as sufficient cue.

Art But Why at Space Invaders

A slightly divergent post this. To explain - Write Response was requested to contribute reflections on the developing work of three artists featured at the Space Invaders evening, which riddled the Salamanca Arts Centre as part of their 35th birthday celebrations.
Two artists had work on hand; the third was unable to attend, but the ideas in his work were explained to us beforehand. We were asked to provide creative responses, as opposed to traditional reviews. Two of these follow below.
This makes it a longer post than usual, but one that may frisk different pockets of your thinking.
Space Invaders

by Gai Anderson

SAC Birthday party
31st March 2012
Salamanca Arts Centre Hobart

A birthday party with a twist as the body of the charismatic host, (the historical buildings of SAC) was invaded, exposed, installed, interrogated, animated and endlessly celebrated by a collection of anarchic and bizarre installations, performances and exhibitions.

A giant game of snakes and ladders as party goers swarmed up and down stairs, through back rooms and attics, kitchens and bathrooms, workshops and trapdoors, queing in the semi- darkness with strangers who soon became friends in expectation of the chance to partake of the bizarre and wonder-filled cup cakes of art offered up for consumption.

The fabulously well-rehearsed, the seemingly spontaneous and the work still in- development all mixed together …

ism  breath she  who  with  I

By Patrick Sutczak


Work by Nancy Mauro-Flude

Sawtooth Gallery March 2 – 24, 2012

The written word represents a certain type of symbol, one akin to the image, but somewhat removed due to the strict parameters of shape that make it discernible to a broad audience who are able to instantly identify and read what has been assembled via a careful hand. Written words have structure because it is the individual letters retaining the rules that define them that makes the word itself possible. A word is but the sum of its letters. A word is but a sum of the context in which it is applied. ‘I’ means little. ‘I love you’ says a lot. It is the combination, the arrangement, and the art of formation that makes the written word so beautiful.

What happens then when the written word becomes type, and when the type becomes computer text, and the computer text becomes something more than the written word on screen? It becomes something that most of us are unlikely to access or even understand. It becomes code.

Some Kinds of Duration by Nicholas Mangan

By Anneliese Millk
Gallery 3, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George St, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Until 01.04.2012

What do an outdated photocopier, a demolished incinerator and an ancient Mayan Palace have in common? The answer apparently lies in duration, design and decay. Nicholas Mangan’s mixed media installation Some Kinds of Duration explores the symbiosis between these seemingly disparate components, seeking to reveal multiple histories simultaneously and a surprising continuity between forms.

Some Kinds of Duration is the outcome of Mangan’s archival investigation into the history of the Pyrmont incinerator. Designed by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney in 1935, the incinerator destroyed the waste of Sydney's population until 1971. Despite being a utilitarian, urban building, the incinerator’s design embraced delineated art deco and bold Mayan reliefs. The impressive structure was finally demolished in 1992, although remnants of its surface decoration have been preserved in the Powerhouse Museum.

2012 Glover Prize

By Kylie Eastley

Each year the Glover Prize interests and delights with its incredibly diverse collection of works that hang on the unassuming white walls of the Evandale show pavilion. It’s Australia’s richest landscape art prize and every few years it seems to attract controversy and derision when the winner is announced. 2012 is one of those years. Before we get into that I want to talk about a few of the works that struck a chord with me.

Each year I find paintings that I love, I hate and I feel indifference towards. While I could have reflected on most of them I have selected a few to discuss in more detail. The 43 entries ranged from photorealism to abstract and everything in between and I am drawn to so many of them for so many different reasons.

Paul Snell’s Lull #201201 is a large rectangular lambda* print on metallic paper. Hung in the traditional landscape format this is an abstract work with high gloss lush green blocks of colour book ending thin strips of contrasting colour which is positioned centrally. This work leaps from the wall and creates a beautiful sense of landscape and lusciousness.

through pools of light and words unspoken

Photography by Rowena Tame

On a recent escape to the rugged and beautiful Tasmanian south-west in search of some solitude and silence, I once again found myself sitting on the rocks overlooking the expanse of water that is the only Lake Pedder that I know. 

Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival Art Trail 2012

The Art Trail has been an integral part of the Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival since it resurfaced 4 years ago and serves as a welcome reminder of the core purpose of this event.

Jo Anglesey's work titled Rainbow

Positioned above the main site of the festival, punters are enticed onto the winding, bush track to experience an array of ephemeral works produced by both emerging and established Tasmanian environmental artists. Art is wound through this whole festival. Sonia Hindrum’s Pleiades (felt spheres) hang from the trees that greet those entering the staged area, Linda Barkers’ Dragonfly float from precarious branches next to the track that connects the camp ground to the gathering space and Rick Bindon’s Tree Tent takes shape positioned high in the branches of a large gum tree.

The surrounding bush is as much a part of the art trail as the artwork itself. The nature of the festival means that the theme of the work is about promoting sustainable living, protecting Tasmania’s forests and educating the community.