Elizabeth Fortescue
Elizabeth Fortescue is the visual arts writer for the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, and Australian correspondent for The Art Newspaper, London
Homepage: http://www.artwriter.com.au
Posts by Elizabeth Fortescue
Visiting Sydney Ball’s bushland retreat
Jan 1st
News that the late colour abstractionist Sydney Ball was to be represented in this year’s Sydney Biennale set me thinking about a boiling hot day in November, 2014, when I drove to Glenorie, a rural area 40km northwest of Sydney, to interview the grand old man of art. The interview was to be about Infinex III, Ball’s new show at Sullivan and Strumpf.
Cicadas were making a huge racket in the dry air as I opened the big swing gate to Ball’s property, its large notice declaring the place to be a wildlife sanctuary. Closing the gate behind me, I bumped my four wheel drive up the winding dirt roadway, seemingly into nowhere. But soon enough I came to Ball’s secluded home. It was utterly beautiful. Ball had bought this plot of land in 1976 with his then partner Lynne Eastaway. If they had wanted seclusion and privacy, they could not have chosen better. You simply couldn’t see any other houses. Native bushland sprouted everywhere from dry ground and between huge rocks.
Australian architect Glenn Murcutt designed the house for the couple, and they moved in on Christmas Eve, 1983. Ball’s studio was subsequently built within just a few steps of his front door. From about 1987, Ball told me, he had lived in the house alone.
Ball was a gentlemanly, quietly spoken man. Sadly he died in March 2017 at 83. You can read the Art Gallery of NSW’s tribute to him here.
After my idyllic trip to see Ball in his home, I wrote a story for the Daily Telegraph (reproduced below).
My interview with Sydney Ball appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 2014.
Here is the full transcript of our interview that day:
Elizabeth Fortescue: Why did you decide to live in this part of Sydney (Glenorie)?
Sydney Ball: The studio I was in at the time was on Broadway. It was owned by the Sydney City Council. They decided (to renovate). So I had to move from the studio and because it was one of the many studios I had to shift from I felt that was enough, I’m not going to get another studio and get the boot out of that. The city council offered me a beaut studio in Oxford St Darlinghurst and it proved a good space; access was a little difficult, up a flight of stairs, which makes it difficult for painters to move big stretchers around. But anyway at the same time I decided that I wanted to buy land, build a house and studios and that would be it, I’d stay there forever and ever. I went out and bought the paper and it had its real estate listed and I picked out one place that seemed pretty interesting. 25 acres of bush which they said could be easily cleared. I didn’t want to clear any bush; that for me is sacrosanct. At the time I hadn’t met Glenn Murcutt. We had a mutual friend who was a landscape architect; I met him in New York when I was having a show. He bought one of the first paintings that I’d sold. We became friends when he moved back to Sydney. I was living in Adelaide but we kept in contact. When I moved up here I met up with my friend again. I said are you interested in designing a house and he said no I’ve got too much work on. I said there’s an architect (who designed a house at Kempsey) and it turned out to be Glenn Murcutt and it was a beautiful space. It had what you required in a house. So for me this beautiful open space, which is just a nice feeling to live in. So my friend arranged a luncheon with Glenn and we discussed the situation and he said I’d be delighted to do it, but the work he had on at the moment would take him a couple of years at least and I said that was OK because it would take me two years to get the money together.
Ball said the house is very cool with wide door openings, adjustable louvres, blinds and good insulation. It had no air conditioning and Ball didn’t want any.
SB: I’ve got to sleep with a doona because it’s chilly at night and early morning. (The studios are not like that; when it’s too hot he comes back and does bookkeeping or housekeeping.) I wait until the ants leave a message on the floor!
I admired the Oceanic art objects that were on view all around the house, like the one in the picture below.
A snap I took of Sydney Ball’s home in Glenorie, showing some of the Oceanic items he so clearly prized.
SB: That came from very early days back in Adelaide. I was with Kym Bonython gallery. Kym used to import pieces from PNG and Africa. He made it an exciting place; not just showing one type of work, it was a whole mix of what the world consists of and other societies’ work of art. For me they’re tribal works of art. People call them “primitive” work. I really back up against that. They’re highly socialised works of art to represent the society that they live in; all the needs and things of that society.
EF: Did your art change when you came up here (to Glenorie)?
SB: Oh, it did, yes. I bought the land in 1976. Myself and my partner used to come up and camp up here. And we’d go around doing lots of drawing. It was a unique experience being in this type of landscape with all the marks and the symbolism of the bush and that whole drawing capacity of the trees interlocking with the branches and things like that. It was a lovely energy process that the environment had. I just felt it was something that I wanted to explore because I’d always been somebody living as an urban artist looking at something way out there but not being part of it. For me to be feeling that we’re right in it amongst it, and the changes that you realise are there which you haven’t experienced before are enormous. I mean, those little things that happen underfoot. All those little plants and mould that grows on dead trees. Just the whole exquisiteness of the environment. I thought there’s enough there. Because I work in series; I don’t want to just be tied down to one series throughout my whole life. I see it as a whole creative situation where you work through what you think is important to you at that particular in time. Once I feel I don’t want to go on any more from that point because I’m only going to repeat myself, I want to go to that next problem. But it’s what that next problem is. So along comes the landscape. Wow, you know, I’ve got enough there to warrant a whole range of series if I want. And the marvellous thing that one thing leads to another. Once you get into the bush, well OK, who are the other people that live in the bush? Indigenous people. Are they the only people that are here in the world that do that sort of thing? No, you have the people in China, in India, right through Asia doing the same thing, of working out signs and symbols and totems to explain what they’re about, what their society is. So one thing led to another. Because I’m living here I felt also that I wanted to bring back a figure into the landscape to tie up with indigenous people; the totems, the symbolism of totems. Who are the people that use these type of images to explain themselves in totem? So all the time it’s opening up the horizons of what is there, what is capable of being used in your sense as a painter.
In his studio, Ball had a big box of beautiful native things like a wasp’s nest, banksia and amazing seed pods. There was another basket of shells.
A box of objects from nature in Ball’s studio.
EF: What about bushfires? (It seemed to me that Ball was taking a major risk, what with bush growing wild right up to his house.)
SB: One came close. It was what I call a secondary fire. It started about 12 o’clock at night. That came off another major fire which was right at the back of the property but it came up the gully but didn’t come on to my side but the embers set up another fire as such on my side but a very low fire because it was starting to cool down and by the time it got to me it was a very low fire, burning bushes but not up into the trees but still pretty scary. While I’ve got tanks and sprinkler systems on the house it was during a season where there wasn’t much rain so the tanks were just about empty so my plan was to turn the sprinklers on when the fire really got close. At that time when I was ready to do it the electricity went off and I couldn’t use the pumps. But at the time the “fireys”(bushfire fighters) were moving down each property, house by house. It didn’t take much just to protect the whole area.
Sydney Ball’s Glenorie home was situated in bushland.
EF: When was that?
SB: That would have been 2002.
Ball said the whole property was “a field of flannel flowers” after the fire went through.
EF: You have had exhibitions of the present Infinex series already. When did that series begin?
SB: That started at the end of 2009, 2010. I started to plan for the extension of what I was doing. It was that thinking of putting down little notes and little thumbnail sketches. I have a book where if I’m sitting down watching telly, I can doodle along in a sense. I’m always intrigued by Frank Ghery, the Canadian American architect, his way of working where he’ll crumple up a paper and from that it comes out, the idea, you know? Wow there’s something in that particular shape that I can use. And it grows.
EF: Is that how this series began?
SB: Pretty much so, and through the thinking of Frank Ghery. I see what’s important in his work, how he brings in shapes that while not fully realised at that stage start to develop after a number of those shapes come together. There’s that growth of shapes which come together; a synopsis of shapes which all come together in the end to become a holistic building.
EF: I can see that in your wall works.
SB: Yes. While complete in themselves as that particular shape, they start to take on the importance once it comes to the next one and the next one, and start to build up this whole synopsis.
EF: I read that you don’t fiddle about with colour. Your use of colour is instinctive and intuitive.
SB: I guess I have the ability to know what I want before I begin. Occasionally I’ve got to change a colour, which I don’t like doing, because it’s just the wrong colour. But I’ll go into work knowing how I’m going to plan not only the shape but the whole of the painting with colour. That in the end is the most important part of the picture for me. How the colour comes together. The shape is important, but that’s a vehicle for the colour.
EF: Colour has been vital to you all your career?
SB: Oh yes, since I was in New York as a student. I guess it was seeing the great paintings of both the European artists and some of the great American painters at the time. It suddenly grew on me that that’s what I wanted to explore. That was, for me, just the natural part. I just had that natural ability to concentrate just on colour; not worry too much about the shape. If it was going to be one whole area of canvas in red, that was what it was going to be. That’s what I wanted out of painting at the time. But that grew over time as well. Going to Europe on one of those study leave programs, seeing that whole array of great colourists.
Inside Sydney Ball’s Glenorie studio. I took this picture when I visited Ball in 2014.
EF: Were you influenced by Mark Rothko (who Ball knew in New York)?
SB: Oh, yeah. This beautiful relationship of colour. The subtlety. The sublime of the colour which a lot of New York artists were searching for at the time. For me, Rothko and Barnett Newman were the two great colourists of New York at the time. What also was there which I saw as a student at the Museum of Modern Art was the Matisse Red Studio where the whole (inaudible on tape) painting of colour came into existence. That for me was a revolution; it was different from Cubism. Because you don’t see these things in magazines. You tend to lose touch with the artist, the subtlety of the paintwork. Standing in front of the Matisse Red Studio you could see it was a very loose handling of the colour. It was one of the great experiences at the time; everything you see in a photograph ain’t going to be true.
The guy that I studied with, Theodore Stamos, was very concerned with edging. How one colour reaches the edge, how it butts up to the next. (Hard, or blurred. Affects whole painting.) (Ball said, In his current series, he wanted to make a clear delineation between colours to create “speed” in the painting.) That’s what I like about Ghery’s work; you’ve got speed. A radiance. I like that.
EF: What about Pop art? Were you exposed to it?
SB: Yes. Like a lot of forms of art, Elizabeth, it’s difficult to say ‘this went to that point and finished and this thing took over’. There were artists like Rauschenberg and Johns who weren’t really in the Warhol mode but had sort of moments of it.
EF: What did you think of Pop art?
SB: I didn’t like it; I thought it was fairly slight. But it takes time to sort out these things, and there’s much stronger moments for it now. Artists who gave their soul to what they did. Some people like it, some won’t.
Ball said one of the great exhibitions was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, featuring David Smith sculpture, several Hans Hoffmans, and Jackson Pollocks, all in the one room.
SB: Too much for the brain to take in. Following that you had the next room of Rothkos, de Koonings, Barnett Newman. And so it went on right through the whole Metropolitan, virtually. But what the artists including myself thought was, ‘wow, abstract expressionism is not completely dead’. But it didn’t want to repeat what had gone on. It was time to bring in different processes. It was time to bring in enamel (and other new materials). It was termed by Aldrich ‘lyrical abstraction’, which is a terrible term. He (Aldrich) opened a museum in Connecticut. They bought one of my Cantos.
EF: Chuck Close. He’s seven years younger than you? Were you aware of him in New York?
SB: Yes, I’d seen Close’s exhibition.
EF: Did you meet some of these artists? What about Rothko? He was a lot older than you.
SB: Oh yeah, I knew Rothko. I had Thanksgiving dinner with him. I was in his studio and this is during my first trip as a student because the guy I was studying with, Theodore Stamos, he knew that I was living off rice and Puerto Rican kidney beans. So he got me some odd jobs because I wasn’t allowed to take a full job because of the immigration problem. You had to do a morning or afternoon class. So I did printmaking lithography in the morning, had the afternoon free, and then came back to the Art Students League in the evening to paint in Stamos’ class. He teed up some part time odd job work in Rothko’s studio. Just shifting stretchers around and helping other people hold things and all that sort of business.
Sydney Ball’s beautiful, Murcutt-designed home had gorgeous views over virgin bushland.
EF: What was your impression of Rothko?
SB: I always feel the artists I met there, the major ones, so to speak, their work reflected the person. I remember meeting de Kooning in his studio down at Long Island with Stamos again, it’s the enthusiasm of the person. Jumping around, getting enthusiasm. He was finishing off his building at the time. One of the things he was excited about when I met him was he had these sliding doors but they weren’t in place at the time, and he’d painted a woman series on them. And he was so ecstatic because they had handles on the side that he could pick these up and carry them around. The whole floor was littered with drawings and that. I said to Stamos, ‘gee I would have loved to get one of those drawings’. He said, ‘you should have asked, he would have given you one’.
With Rothko it was the same .Very deep, you know? There wasn’t the outgoing-ness as such. But incredibly erudite. He reflected his work in a sense. In a way I can see that sense of working out a Greek tragedy; that tragedy was going to happen at some time, I think.
EF: Rothko had a tragic life?
SB: He had a very difficult life where he emigrated from Russia with the family.
EF: Did you meet Chuck Close?
SB: No, they were a different element to what I was interested in at the time. I kept mainly to the area I was consumed with, the colourists. Even with the lyrical abstractions were still using colour quite prolifically. That’s where the stains paintings came from, that whole second period of lyrical abstraction.
EF: It’s interesting to think of you being in that lineage of Rothko and de Kooning.
SB: It was being in New York at the right time, believe me. There hadn’t been very many Australian artists. And the Americans always wondered, who is this guy? He’s got a different dialect from us. Some would say, you speak very good English, don’t you?
EF: Were de Kooning and Rothko interested?
SB: They were inquisitive. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open. (At the Thanksgiving lunch at Rothko’s home, Ball met Rothko’s wife and children, one of whom was a baby. They said ‘Australia’s about the same time as Texas, isn’t it?’.) I was going to say it’s a bit bigger than Texas, mate!
EF: Your exhibition includes for the first time some works that are meant to be displayed outside?
SB: It’s about taking it to that next stage. Instead of using acrylic paint, what if I used spraying enamel that motor vehicle people use to spray their cars with. It’s durable and has a beautiful depth of colour to it. ( He outsources the spraying.) The opportunity exists for this type of material to be shown outside. What I do in the way of scale can be easily increased from that one panel. And people would like to show smaller works outside on the patio. You’re not restricted to having it inside.
The view from Sydney Ball’s house back towards the long dirt drive that connects it to the road.
EF: Change is important to you?
SB: Patrick McCaughey a dear friend of mine says I could have been the Josef Albers of the Antipodes because of the Cantos. I could have stayed with them because they started to make a hell of a lot of money for me, believe me. But I didn’t, I went into the Persian series. It was a similar process but it was to do with Islamic architecture. But it was a good point to make. That’s how I feel with every series. With the Cantos, I’m sorry in a sense that I didn’t paint some very large works to envelope the viewer. The AGNSW has just bought one of the big stain paintings which is 20’ wide by 9’. For me it’s the scale which envelops the viewer; that whole nebula of colour, the ocean of colour, which just soaks you in. (Wayne Tunnicliffe bought it for the AGNSW.)
EF: Why Infinex as a series name?
SB: Just the infinity. The idea I can either keep on doing these (laughter), or change.
EF: Is the series now over?
SB: Let me say it’s getting towards the end. But again I think, and there’s one piece in it that reflects what is possible for the next group of paintings. It’s a similar work but different. (Sprayed with lacquer.) I’m contemplating what to do (next). I just have to let it settle down in my mind before I go on.
So that was my visit to Sydney Ball’s place. There was a rectangular blue arch leading to the house from the front, which you can see in the picture at left. Ball told me it was the portal between fantasy and reality, and he wasn’t sure which was which. It didn’t really matter. Whatever Sydney Ball’s reality was, it was wonderful.
Posted by Elizabeth Fortescue, January 1, 2018, Sydney, Australia
Marc Etherington interview
Dec 30th
Today I’m digging out my interview with artist Marc Etherington, done in March this year (2017) at Michael Reid’s new gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney. The show was titled Take Me Home, and my story about it was used in the Daily Telegraph and can be read here. Marc subsequently achieved great success, selling 40 artworks at the Sydney Art Fair at Carriageworks, according to Michael Reid.
I really wanted to meet Marc, having admired his Archibald Prize portraits of fellow artists Ken Done and Del Kathryn Barton. Both of those portraits had an honesty and rawness about them that appealed to me a lot. There was almost an Outsider quality to them, as though their maker were doing it for his own reasons and blow everyone else. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Peter Fay had been something of a mentor to Marc, Fay being one of the biggest collectors of Outsider art in this country and the man behind the big Home Sweet Home exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. Fay also helped start Shaun Gladwell’s stellar career, having given Shaun a small amount of money which the artist used to create his breakthrough video work, Storm Sequence.
I was a bit out of my depth in this interview because I found that Marc’s inspiration, at least in part, is derived from movies that I’ve never seen and are not really my “thing”. These included The Great Lebowski, The Goonies, True Grit, and True Detective. Despite not understanding many of the references, I very much enjoyed meeting Marc and I got some good insight into his work and what got him painting in the first place. And I did know one of the films he referred to – The Shining, with Jack Nicholson. (Here’s Johnny!)
Take me home told a loose narrative about a detective who witnesses the death of his wife and undergoes a journey of revenge in which Care Bears, monsters and other strange creatures play incidental roles. Finally, we see the detective returning to his wife via a rainbow stretched between two clouds. The paintings I loved best from the show were unrelated to this theme, and slightly separate. They were paintings of fish in fish tanks, representing a new departure for Marc. One of these fish tank paintings was subsequently chosen to be a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize, and it can be viewed here.
Elizabeth Fortescue: How long have you worked on all the paintings in this show?
Marc Etherington: Since September/October last year. If I go a few days without painting I start to go a bit crazy.
EF: You were already a mature person when you discovered art?
ME: Yeah, we lived in Canada for eight years (2001 – 2008) and I was looking for something to do in the winter. We lived in Edmonton and winters are just brutal. I started painting, and couldn’t stop. (He started painting in about 2006.)
In Canada, Marc did “crazy shifts” at the airport, from 7am until midnight. During the day he was often snowbound and confined to home. He took to painting for “something to do”.
EF: You were looking after the kids?
ME: Not so much over there, but when we came back (to Sydney) and my wife went to work I was looking after my son here. That’s when I continued painting over here when I was at home looking after him. He’s at school now but I’m still at home painting. Working intermittently, installing shows and things like that. I have a 12 year old and a seven year old (the couple’s son was born back here).
Marc said he had a breakthrough when he and his wife were doing pottery classes together at Gymea TAFE in about 2011. It was just so they could get out of the house and do something together.
ME: Mum would watch the kids and we’d go off. I told Lynda I painted and she said show me. I bought in a photo book.
On Draper’s advice, Marc showed his work to Peter Fay who subsequently included Marc’s work in a show at Sheffer Gallery.
The painting from the series, Take Me Home, by Marc Etherington, where the detective is reunited with his wife. Courtesy Michael Reid gallery.
Marc painted Peter Fay for the 2013 Archibald. He did artist Frank Nowlan the following year, which made it into the Salon des Refuses. Then in 2015 Marc was hung in the Archibald with Del Kathryn Barton, and in 2016 with Ken Done. This year Marc was successful again, this time with a painting of artist Paul Williams.
EF: You grew up in Gymea?
ME: Yes.
EF: What’s going on in the painting called Dragging the River?
ME: They’re all about a detective. Have you seen True Grit, the western? It’s based on him but he’s a detective and his wife gets killed, that’s the Care Bear one. They go in a bit of a series but it’s about his life and his work. That’s Dragging the River. True Grit has kind of got nothing to do with this show, but he kind of looks like him. He a rough sort of old (knockabout detective).
EF: Why a detective story?
ME: I watched True Detective a while ago, so I don’t know if something stuck in my head with that.
Marc pointed to another painting and said: This is a scene from a movie called The Goonies, my favourite movie in the 80s. It’s like my imagination and my childhood and detective in a mish mash. Anything in the 80s.
EF: You paint in acrylics. How did you learn to paint?
ME: It was just trial and error.
EF: Tell me about your new fish tank paintings. Why did you start painting them?
ME: We just got one with a fighting fish. I really like the fish. It’s got a real personality I didn’t expect.
EF: I really enjoyed both your Archibald Prize works.
ME: Getting into the Archibald was just crazy. Ken Done was such a good guy. I just Googled him and found a phone number for his assistant. I live in Gymea — I don’t drive to Mosman very often. I left at 7am and had to be there at 10. I slept in my car for a coupe of hours. I was so stressed but Ken is an awesome guy. I grew up with his work. Love it. Bright colours and fun. I just bought a painting of his. Paying it off in instalments. It’s a painting he’s done of his studio.
Posted by Elizabeth Fortescue, December 30, 2017, Sydney, Australia
Harrie Fasher, Beersheba and Sculpture by the Sea 2017
Dec 28th
Harrie Fasher with her biggest sculpture to date, The Last Charge, at Sculpture by the Sea in Bondi, Australia, 2017. Image courtesy of Sculpture by the Sea.
This year I had a great interview with rural NSW artist Harrie Fasher about her work for Sculpture by the Sea, titled The Last Charge.
The story was for the Daily Telegraph, and you can see it here.
For the record, however, here’s the interview in full.
Elizabeth Fortescue: Harrie, what materials did you use for The Last Charge?
Harrie Fasher: Corten steel and mild steel.
EF: Did you use oxyacetylene to put it together?
HF: This has been a real battle. It also has industrial I-beams and RHS which is rectangular square section. It’s MIG-welded together and plasma cut. Then ground back using angle grinders.
EF: It sounds very physical.
HF: We’re up and down off the scaffold and the other day I was having a joke about going to step classes at the gym. It is a hugely physical process. There’s no way I could do it alone. I’ve got a team with me in the studio. I’ve got a studio assistant, Megan. She’s been working with me for three and a half years. My farmer next door has been (helping). It’s been very much a team effort. Every artist needs a farmer, is our joke. I live in the middle of a working farm. He’ll help me twist the I-beams or we were heating pieces of steel in a bonfire at one point and he was whacking it with a sledgehammer whilst I was moving it on the chopping block. He has no previous art experience. He’s not overly engaged with the art. But everybody wants to be a part of it. It’s this amazing thing that so many people want to be a part of making art. It blows me away.
EF: Has he helped you with other works for SxS?
HF: Yeah, he’s always helping me. He brings down the tractor so we can move stuff around and load trucks. Metal Land in Bathurst sponsors me and gives me a fair chunk of the steel that goes towards SxS and they lend me their truck. This time it’s going to take two trucks to get it to Bondi. This will be the fourth Bondi that they’ve been involved in. They love it. I don’t know if it’s just a rural thing that there’s all these people that want to be involved in it, but there’s a woman I went to art school with and she lives at O’Connell and she comes whenever she can and cuts pieces. It blows me away how many people want to be a part of things like this. I have a huge network. I think sculptors need friends. I can’t move the sculptures by myself.
EF: What’s the farmer’s name?
HF: Geoff Salmon. And Steve Hogan was my first farmer. (Now he’s making his own sculptures.) He does one or two days a week (for me).
EF: Tell me about your assistant.
HF: My assistant is Nicole O’Regan. She’s a steel fabricator by trade. She’s two years younger than me. Been working with steel since she was 16. Working with another woman is just fabulous. Working with men is quite different. You constantly have to assert yourself a little bit. She’s a crucial part of my team.
EF: How far from Geoff, the farmer, do you live?
HF: I live in the middle of his property of 1200 acres at Oberon. I live in the middle on 12 acres on a property called Essington Park owned by the Logue twins, Joanna Logue and Simone Logue. King Street (King Street Gallery on William) have just taken me on board. I’m going to have my first solo show with them in June. Joanna has the other half of the studio I’m in. The girls’ block, Essington Park, is in the middle of Geoff’s place called Ambleside. Geoff’s son Tim now manages the family property. Sheep and cattle.
The Last Charge, by Harrie Fasher. Sculpture by the Sea, 2017. Image courtesy of Sculpture by the Sea.
EF: Tell me about The Last Charge.
HF: Eight horses, slightly larger than life. I don’t think I knew what I was taking on. Seven of them are in full gallop. I started the project with a maquette, but I started without a notion of how it was going to look. I wanted to create an emotional response which is to feel what it would have been like to face a full cavalry charge, being over-run, what it would have felt like to be in the Turkish trenches and have these 800 horses galloping at you. And at first I thought I’d make 800 and fill Tamarama Beach and then I thought that would be a bit ludicrous but in reality eight is quite a lot.
One of the horses is fallen. That horse has a real beauty about it. Something quite poetic about the fallen horse. Sometimes I relate to them and I feel them as the men. My mum’s always told me not to anthropomorphise my dogs, but I think I do that with the sculptures. The sculptures are the men, and they embody all these different characteristics that go into making up the myth that’s become part of the Australian culture. They have the courage and the fear and the determination, but they also have a strange ghostliness. Some days I relate to them as this powerful, charging, conquering mass of horses and some days I relate to them as being ghostly.
It was a very successful charge, and one of the only ones because the Light Horsemen actually fought on foot. One person would hold five horses and the rest would fight on foot. Rarely held an old fashioned cavalry charge. It meant the Turkish weren’t able to realign their gun sights. They weren’t prepared for them. The horses were desperate (thirsty). If they didn’t take the town they had a 12-hour ride to water, and there’s that real thing about survival where the men depended on the horses as much as the horses depended on the men. There’s great stories about horses falling in battle and the men then retaliating in revenge for the horse.
EF: All the horses had to be shot at the end of the war, because they couldn’t be brought back home to Australia.
HF: I’ve read how calm it was when they put them down but because the horses trusted the men so much and they were used to gunfire, there wasn’t any panic. They cut their manes and tails and took their shoes off, and hides, because all of that was worth money to the army. Can you imagine skinning your own horse? It would have been heart-breaking. All the time you’d be thinking, ‘oh when I get back with my horse’. People do ask me why I have to have a dead one, a dying one, and I say ‘well it’s a reality check. War isn’t pretty’.
EF: You have two horses on the farm, Dusty and Evie. Did you use them as models for your sculpture?
(Harrie said she saves pictures from the form guide, and also uses horse books.)
EF: Tell me about your forebear who was in the Battle of Beersheba.
HF: Major Lachlan Alfred Macpherson, (known as Alf). He was mum’s great uncle so he was my great great uncle. Born in 1884. We have portraits of him in uniform. I have his medals which I wear on Anzac Day. He won an MC and a DSO. He was at the Battle of Beersheba. The eighth Australian Light Horse. He fought everywhere. He survived the war and came home and settled near Goulburn. I think he was near Gundagai before he went to war. On a property where he grew up. We’ve only just started investigating this connection. It is rather amazing. I went to France on a field trip with a whole lot of landscape painters from King St and Stella Downer and Watters. In May. We were going to do an exhibition on the Western Front. France and Belgium. It gave you a real insight into what they faced and how impossible it was, the missions they were on.
EF: Do you sometimes help Geoff on the farm, the same as he helps you with your sculptures?
HF: Geoff asked me to come and help him pull a cow out of a bog.
EF: Did you get it out?
HF: Yep. She’s out.
Posted by Elizabeth Fortescue on December 28, 2017
Ron Mueck discusses his NGV Triennial installation titled Mass
Dec 27th
For those who are travelling to the NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria (and you won’t be disappointed) one of the most ambitious works to enjoy is Ron Mueck’s largest installation to date, a new piece commissioned by the NGV for its inaugural NGV Triennial.
Titled Mass, the piece is comprised of 100 giant-sized skulls positioned within the 17th and 18th Century halls of the NGV. Its impact is huge.
I interviewed Mueck for The Art Newspaper, but of course the entire interview could hardly be used in an article. So I reproduce it here for those aficionados who love to hear from the horse’s mouth about an artist’s process and thoughts as they make a work.
Mass, Ron Mueck’s largest installation to date, is a key work in the inaugural NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
Here’s the interview:
Elizabeth Fortescue: What are the skulls in Mass made from?
Ron Mueck: The skulls are made of fibreglass and polyester resin.
EF: Were you able to make them yourself in your studio?
RM: The short answer is: I started them in the UK and they were completed in Melbourne. The long winded version is: I started the project in my studio in the UK where I sculpted the original skull in water based clay and made a couple of silicone moulds that would ultimately be used to cast multiple copies.
Initially I cast five skulls from these moulds to ensure they worked and to determine the best process and materials.
Because the original clay model gets destroyed in the moulding process, I cast out a ‘master skull’ in resin to make additional moulds from.
This master skull and the two moulds were shipped to Australia.
While we were making the moulds, the NGV were looking into setting up a workshop in Melbourne where the skulls could be produced. This was clearly going to be a better solution than shipping 100 large scale sculptures halfway across the world.
We looked at a few different possible set ups and ultimately decided it would be best to work with an established, specialist fibreglass company with all the necessary facilities in place rather than setting up a workshop from scratch. The NGV found a Melbourne-based company (King’s Fibreglass) who fitted the bill.
I came out to Australia shortly after the moulds and master skull arrived and spent a couple of weeks at King’s working with the skull crew. The skull moulds were quite different to those they usually worked with and we worked through the idiosyncrasies and complications and cast out the first couple of skulls.
Timing was always going to be a major consideration and it became clear that we would need a separate crew dedicated to cleaning up and finishing the casts as they came out of the fibreglass workshop. The NGV put together a group of technicians from their pool of art handlers. Initially there were two but this team expanded to about eight people.
With two moulds it was possible to launch into the casting process but moulds deteriorate as they are used and we knew that we would need additional moulds as the work proceeded. I spent three weeks with another company, Idea Productions, making a third mould and they subsequently made a further two giving us a total of five moulds which meant that at one point there were five, occasionally six skulls being produced a week.
With the production process established I went back to the UK to clean up the studio there and start preliminaries for the next work. Progress reports and images sent to me in the UK kept me up to date. We discussed problems that arose and figured out solutions as necessary but on the whole, due to the talent and dedication of everyone involved, it all ran pretty smoothly.
I arrived back in Oz a couple of weeks before the end of production to join the NGV finishing crew for the final burst of activity.
The Australian end of the project took about eight months.
An extraordinary amount of work achieved to a superb standard by a fantastic team.
A detail of Mass, by Ron Mueck.
EF: Did you use any particular skull as your model for the work?
RM: I made a point of not using a specific skull type. The sex, age and ethnicity of individual skulls is visually apparent and I tried to come up with a somewhat ‘universal skull’ so that the interpretation of the work would not be confined to a particular narrative.
EF: What is the scale of the skulls compared to an actual skull?
RM: I haven’t figured out the exact ratio.
The skulls are about a metre tall sitting on the floor.
I generally just go for what feels right to me when I’m making the work.
I sketched out a couple of different sizes on large sheets of paper, chose the one that felt a good size to stand beside, and then made a three dimensional cardboard mock-up of that size so I could get a sense of it in the round.
EF: Is this your largest work to date?
RM: Yes, although it is a work of variable dimensions. It will be reconfigured each time it is displayed. I imagine the size and atmosphere of each venue will influence the arrangement.
EF: The depiction of the human skull as a memento mori dates back hundreds of years. Can Mass be viewed as a giant memento mori?
RM: Certainly. Memento mori and the vanitas tradition in art remind us of the brevity of life.
EF: Did you have any particular human or world events in mind when you made it? I was reminded of the terrible piles of skulls left behind by Pol Pot’s regime, for example.
RM: Over the years I have collected a number skull images from various sources…from Paul Cézanne’s Pyramid of Skulls to Cambodian killing fields or the catacombs of Paris. These have all played a part in the development of Mass.
by Elizabeth Fortescue, posted on December 27, 2017
Sydney, Australia
Guo Jian and Ah Xian
Aug 1st
Guo Jian. A picture I took at White Rabbit gallery earlier in 2016.
An extraordinary thing happened at the Casula Powerhouse last Friday night.
It was the opening night of the new Refugees exhibition, which includes the now Sydney-based Chinese artists Ah Xian and Guo Jian.
Cast your mind back to 1989 and the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters by government armed forces.
Ah Xian and Guo Jian were both there, both witnesses to the slaughter.
Guo Jian was a student protester and hunger striker inside the square. Ah Xian, a commercial artist at the time, had cycled to the perimeter of the square every day to see what was going on.
Ah Xian had told me a few weeks ago about his memories of Tiananmen Square. He had seen many bodies stacked on top of one another in a bicycle shed at Fuxing Hospital. He presumed that the hospital was overflowing with the dead and dying, and that the shed was a makeshift morgue. I asked Ah Xian who would have put the bodies in the shed, but he wasn’t sure.
Fast forward to last Friday night at Casula. I’m chatting with Guo Jian, telling him about my interview with Ah Xian. When I tell him about the bicycle shed with bodies in it, Guo Jian says: “Yes, I was one of the people putting them there”.
Ah Xian in a photograph I took of him in July 2016.
Guo Jian recalled slipping on blood an inch deep on the ground, and seeing people die before his eyes.
So here were these two men, 27 years after they had both been at Tiananmen Square. Somehow, to me, it seemed quite remarkable.
Ah Xian did his first piece of performance art on opening night of Refugees. For three hours he sat completely still in a purpose-made box. Only his head and chest were visible through a perspex display case at the top of the box.
Those who know Ah Xian’s porcelain painted busts will immediately recognise the similarity between them and the performance.
Guo Jian’s work in the Casula Powerhouse exhibition included a picture that he made especially for the show.
Picturesque Scenery No. 27, by Guo Jian. Hanging in Refugees exhibition at Casula Powerhouse.
Titled Picturesque Scenery No. 27, the work is a pigment print on photo paper in 26 panels. It exactly mimics a famous, Song-dynasty painting of fish swimming in a pond.
However, get up close to Guo Jian’s version, and you can see the picture is made up of literally millions of tiny photographs of people’s faces.
These came from Guo Jian’s home town, which is noted for its beauty.
But Guo Jian was appalled to return there after many years to find enormous amounts of rubbish in the river whose pure water he often drank as a child. He photographed the celebrity faces on wrappers discarded in the river, and now uses them as elements in giant collages. It is only up close that the viewer can see these tiny faces, not much larger than a match head.
Elizabeth Fortescue, August 1, 2016
