“I do find them kind of cringey,” he admits. “Someone will say to me,‘Oh,you’re a sculptor,do you work in stone or wood?’ And I say,‘Well,I work in pompoms!’ If I’m trying to make myself sound serious and important though,I’ll use the word ‘textiles’.”
Emery is known for creating often uncanny sculptures of animal forms – faceless and covered in fur,fringing or other textiles – that explore our historic relationship with animals and the aesthetics associated with natural history;think taxidermy,but with vibrant,tactile pelts. His sculptures tend to be based on domestic animals,rendered at a life-size scale,but this commission is,he jokes,“on a dinosaur scale”.
Mountain Climber appears to be walking off its plinth,caught mid-movement;Emery was inspired by old-school museum dioramas.
“I’m interested in the tropes of traditional figurative sculpture,with the plinth and the museum furniture as almost part of the work,” he says. “I wanted to exhibit this piece on a classic museum display device,and have[it] be kind of … breaking free from that.”
Emery’s work has always blurred the line between art and craft,but he says he’s not “participating in a craft dialogue”.
“As with anything,there are different parameters. Craft leans towards a technical tradition,which I’m not really engaging in,and craft also leans towards a kind of home,decorative arts – I’m playing on that … I suppose it’s art about craft,rather than craft itself.”
As an animal lover,Emery says they were his entry point into the appreciation of the experience of museums and public institutions such as zoos.
“And the idea of things representing bigger ideas,” he says. “You visit the zoo and you learn about endangered species,and you visit the museum and learn about extinct species. I’ve always thought the idea of something representing a bigger idea translates very neatly into how we look at contemporary art.”Kylie Northover
Mia Boe,For the angels in paradise,2022
Mia Boe describes the courthouse scene portrayed in one of her recent paintings as “the jury cake”. Piled up in three cake-like tiers,however,the jury looks neither sweet nor celebratory. The black,elongated hands in the foreground,reaching out to that stony jury,speak of desperation. They evoke First Nations people’s experience of trauma and violence,both historical and contemporary.
The painting,one of nine in a series being shown as part of the artist’s mural-based installation,has a powerful resonance for Boe,whose family has Indigenous and Burmese heritage,and some members in the legal profession. The works deal specifically with how the Australian justice system operates in terms of deaths in custody,and the violent treatment and oppression of Aboriginal people and culture.
Boe’s paintings are mounted at eye level beneath an enormous temporary wall-based mural at The Ian Potter Centre – a mural,she says,which is redolent of the Australian landscape,featuring blue skies,ochre-coloured earth,dingoes,trees and even a Hills Hoist. The mural faces works by 20th century social realist artists Noel Counihan and Russell Drysdale,drawn from the NGV collection.
“I have a strong interest in that social-realist tradition but wanted to interpret the issues for myself,looking primarily at the relationship between Aboriginal people,police,courtrooms and the justice system,” Boe says. While she references real events,she keeps the details and figures non-specific out of sensitivity to those who have lost family. The human forms in these paintings,she says,are more like representations of ancestral spirits,embodying historical figures.
With an edge of surrealism,Boe’s paintings refer to events such as an all-white jury letting off a white accused person,despite the evidence of a crime,or authorities forcing Aboriginal people off a cliff. “This is one of the most violent of the images,but it is based on events … that have happened,” Boe says. She also refers to Aboriginal people hiding in rivers and waterways to evade authorities during colonial times.
Boe considers herself fortunate as an artist to be able to research and talk about these issues. “I feel this weird sense of ‘who am I to tell my story?’ But storytelling is important and necessary in all cultures.”
While she finds it difficult to read about traumatic historical and contemporary events,it is important to her and her family to tell the truth in this way. “And I’m proud to do that.”Andrew Stephens
Meagan Streader,Sky whispers
Meagan Streader transforms space with light. For more than a decade she’s created large-scale immersive light installations that are otherworldly,like a science-fiction realm,orBlade Runner set. Yet they are also,in Streader’s words,“magical and sublime”.
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Describing her work forMelbourne Now,she says:“Imagine hundreds of tall,towering,slightly angled lines of warm white light which come down from the ceiling,down the walls and across the floor,completely covering the space;you’ll get to immerse yourself within it.”
As with her previous light installations, Sky whispers is informed by the architecture of the site,in this case The Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square.
“The gallery is filled with unusual angles,nooks,voids and walkways,” she says. “It’s very fragmented architecturally,and I wanted to explore that by bringing in the exterior experience of light into the interior space of the gallery.”
In a darkened corridor on level three,Streader is installing thin lines of light,created with light tape. The work features slanted walls to enhance the fractured sensibility. Streader wants to affect viewers physically and emotionally. While she finds working with light grounding and calming,she’s also drawn to a sense of impossibility.
“It takes you out of reality,” she says. “Light is completely affecting;physically,visually,psychologically. It has so many different qualities and powers to it.”
Streader’s practice links to conceptualists such as Fred Sandback,Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin,whose works influenced her during a New York residency in 2016. These artists created sculptural or light-filled spaces centred on the movement of the spectator and how this alters their perception of the work.
While many conceptual pieces of the 1950s and ’60s have a spiritual quality that Streader aligns with,many also contain an implicit masculine energy. She envisions something softer,gentler:“We need to make space for a different kind of feeling.”
Her work is a meeting of natural and artificial light,all activated by a visitor walking through the space,and ultimately culminating in one idea:connection. “It’s expanding our sense of the world and each other,” Streader says. “I think there’s something fundamental about installations as spaces for connecting people.”
We spend our lives in light,from the sun to streetlights to neon signs to digital screens,and while light is implicated in the history of capitalism and modernism,Streader is more focused on its emotional quality. “I’m interested in elevating our experience of the world,” she says. It’s almost primal;the first and last thing we see,supposedly,is light. Tiarney Miekus
James Lemon,Swarming
New Zealand-born artist James Lemon’s commission forMelbourne Now may be one of the exhibition’s most playful works. Described as “part installation and part playground”,this participatory work fills an entire room.
Principally a ceramic artist,Lemon has also embraced other media for the project,including soft sculpture,painting,textiles and digital media,to celebrate the part bees play in our ecosystems.Swarming invites viewers to “become” a bee;after entering what Lemon describes as “little hobbit doors – one for adults and a small one for kids to crawl through”,visitors can experience a bee’s-eye view.
“The project is an imagination,or an interpretation of what it might be like to be a bee within a hive,” Lemon says. “I mean,technically if you’re in a hive,it’s complete darkness,so there is a bit of artistic licence there. I’m drawing from the different sensory experiences and using that as a jumping-off point – I’m using a lot of UV-reactive colours and fabrics and finishes,because bees see in ultraviolet.”
He’s hesitant to describe the work as having an environmental message.
“I think it’s more a celebration of the wild complexity of life,” he says. “For me,I look at insects and it’s such a different type of life form,yet there is unmistakable intelligence and genius within it. I think for me it’s about repositioning the eye and kind of … looking through a slightly different lens.”
Insects,he says,are “the canary in the coalmine”,in terms of environmental damage. “It’s not just bees – it’s all insects. The decline of insects has been pretty rapid from the 1970s. Without sounding too dour,I feel like I’m just bearing witness. I feel a little bit powerless,and I think that’s maybe what I’m trying to express;I don’t really have anything else that I can do.”
Swarming is a departure from Lemon’s early work making often-functional ceramic pieces;making art,he says,was always his “destination”.
“The functional stuff,the design side of my work has definitely blurred and dissolved into my art practice,” he says. “But at least I know that in the apocalypse I can make sure we have clean objects to eat out of.”
Swarming is his largest work to date. “And it’s also my first all-ages work,and a participatory work for everybody,” he says. “It’s made me look at things from a few different perspectives.”Kylie Northover
Lee Darroch’s message sticks
On her regular walks through the bush,Lee Darroch often finds branches that look like animals. A few added teeth and there’s a crocodile;an upturned wing or three and suddenly,a trio of flying ducks appears. The Yorta Yorta,Mutti Mutti and Boon Wurrung woman’s message sticks,fashioned from found objects near her home on Raymond Island in Gippsland,will form a striking centrepiece ofMelbourne Now stretching almost 10 metres.
“The message sticks themselves turned into different things,so I just collected them as sticks and took them back to my studio and started working with them using a wood burner,” she says. “They’re different to what you’ve seen;it’s using found objects in nature,saying ‘this is what you’re missing’.”
Traditional message sticks were used as communication between tribal groups or clans. One side would be notched with the number of people invited to a gathering,and the other would be the reply,saying who was coming. Traditionally they were painted or carved,but Darroch’s are burnt. “All I’ve done is embellish it … If it looked like a crocodile,I’d just make it a bit more croc-like,” she says.
Speaking via phone from her home near Paynesville,Darroch is struggling to hear me above the sound of koalas mating outside her window. “It sounds like a pig crossed with a baby crying,” she says,laughing. Where she lives is like a nature reserve. Her work is inspired by the natural world,and this one in particular by the threat posed to it – and to all of us – by climate change.
Having been hit by extreme bushfires and unseasonal floods in the past few years,the area from Orbost to Eden includes tens of thousands of trees that will never regenerate,she says. “It looks like they are dancing in anguish.”
The crisis led her to think about “a way to show ‘doota guntha woka’,which means ‘save Mother Earth now’.”
“I was playing around with that and thinking about ways to strengthen our people.”
The artwork took about 16 months to make,and includes 100-odd message sticks,along with 38 women and 38 men made from driftwood,representing the 38 language groups of Indigenous people in Victoria. The figures represent elders who are “connecting the songlines together for strength in these times of really grave adversity and hardship on the earth”.
Darroch would usually return such a piece to country,but this will remain with the NGV. “That’s probably good because that’s where the environmental message needs to be heard;it goes straight to the heart of Melbourne,” she says. “People in the cities tend to be more disconnected from the environment.”
Darroch worked mainly outside at home to create the piece,laying out the message sticks for the men and then joining them to the message sticks of the women to create one continuous line. “I could see what they represented to me but I was going to leave it to whoever comes to see the exhibition to see what it means to them.”
She says it’s time to stop and listen to our First Nations elders around the globe. “It was an environmental message,I suppose,but it’s also about survival;we won’t survive if we keep going like this. I think we’re all distracted by Netflix and we’ve been drugged by things that don’t matter,like consumerism … issues that aren’t really at the heart of what the world needs right now.”Kerrie O’Brien
Christine Johnson,Eremophila,2022
“An invisible magnet” drew Christine Johnson to the work of pioneering Mallee botanist Eileen Ramsay. As she pored over Ramsay’s writings and specimens held in the National Herbarium of Victoria,she was struck by an inexplicable sense of sadness. It seemed odd,given that Ramsay’s massive contribution to preserving and celebrating the indigenous flora of the regions around Mildura seemed full of positive results and joyous enthusiasm.
She discovered that Ramsay’s life (1887-1961) had been overshadowed by the deaths of her two young brothers at Gallipoli. Perhaps,Johnson wonders,Ramsay dedicated herself to so much productive fieldwork as a counter-measure. A love of nature and of life,after all,is the antithesis of war.
Since 2015,Johnson’s creative output has focused on what she describes as Ramsay’s “redemptive act of botanising”. Her botanically themed work forMelbourne Now,Eremophila (common name,emu bush) references a plant spread over all the semi-arid parts of Australia,where its habitat is at risk. Johnson’s layered work has been described as both a celebration of the desert-loving plant and a plea for its conservation.
Eremophila is considered sacred in Indigenous cultures and has widespread medicinal use. It is one of the plants that Johnson,with the help of Mallee plant enthusiasts and field naturalists,has located while trying to determine which florae from Ramsay’s surveys still exist in the region’s ecosystem.
Johnson always begins her work by drawing specimens – a practice that aligns with her curiosity about the links between art,science and ecology. “You do connect deeply with nature through drawing,never mind what your scribbles look like,” she says. “I noticed this when I went out botanising with these complete plant enthusiasts:their dedication to the landscape was awe-inspiring and they had this capacity to see detail in the same way you do when you draw. It is just by immersing yourself in it.”
Johnson has been transformed by her experience of this landscape – which,her research confirms,was described with a mixture of wonder and horror by early colonial explorers. “One of the things about going out into that desert landscape is that it appears to be hostile,yet it embraces you. You can understand why this was something Eileen Ramsay ended up dedicating her life to,by identifying and collecting everything she was able to in order to help preserve it as a legacy.”
The work of Ramsay and her cohort of field naturalists led to the proclamation of the Hattah-Kulkyne National Park. Johnson,with her exquisitely evocative prints and drawings of plants,continues it as well:upcoming projects,including a botanic-themed laneway installation in Dandenong and a solo exhibition in Red Cliffs in September,enmesh beautifully with Ramsay’s legacy.Andrew Stephens
Grace Wood
When Grace Wood was searching the National Gallery of Victoria’s internal image archive – more than a million snaps recording everything from openings to collections to conservation – she found a particularly curious set of photographs. Inside a loading bay,in front of a black curtain,was a set of artfully arranged,glaringly yellow delivery cases. “There’s no information on who took these or why but I found something so compelling,almost David Lynch-like,about them,” she says.
These photographs,alongside more than 600 archival NGV images,feature in Wood’s collages forMelbourne Now. Six framed pieces will hang from thick coloured rope,the collages printed on fabric and vinyl. In one,the yellow cases appear alongside a woman with brightly coloured teardrops collecting in buckets. Another image plays on snakes and ladders,while another features an exquisite jumble of ropes,ancient artwork,a gilded frame,birds and more,all set against velvety blue backdrops.
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Over the past decade Wood has created digital collages from archives and internet searches. In a world of perpetual image creation,she is partly questioning the divide between professional and amateur photography – “today everyone and no one is a photographer,” she says – where photography emerges as both an art form and utilitarian practice. She’s also highlighting the imperfection of archives as a “true” record of reality and history;they are,she points out,filled with personal bias.
Yet Wood’sMelbourne Now collages ultimately revel in aesthetic allure. “When I visited Monet’s works on Naoshima[Japan’s art island)] I read that when Monet was going blind,he created paintings he said were ‘grand decorations’. I like the idea of all art being a grand decoration.” The purposeful seduction of Wood’s refined layering and colour palettes is motivated by her desire for “anyone to get the work”.
Wood also gravitated to collage for its historical alignment with women’s craft. While theMelbourne Now collages are half printed on textiles (another form historically seen as women’s work),they’re also composed digitally:Wood belongs to a generation raised on the early digitisation of images,Dolly magazines,Tumblr pages,Pinterest boards and Instagram.
Wood contemplates how contemporary culture functions on endless images – most of which we’ll never see – and creating within this. “When everything has been photographed a thousand times,does it need to be photographed more?” she asks. “Instead,I shifted to using found images.”
When questioning what a “true” image is – especially when a reverse Google search can yield thousands of matches – Wood is more interested in the fallibility of originality.
“I know it’s nihilistic!” she says,laughing. “But I have no desire to add to our canon of images – collage is a more interesting vehicle to comment through.“Tiarney Miekus
Zhu Ohmu,Organ pipe mud dauber,#10,2022
Zhu Ohmu was being driven across town with her latest ceramic work steadied on her lap,when she noticed the coiled vessel was “about torso height”. That’s how she measures her creations,in relation to the human body. Using her hands to loop lengths of moist clay upon one another,she has discovered that torso height is about the limit of the physics involved:after that,the sheer weight of the material forces it to collapse on itself.
Ohmu is part of an ancient tradition:coiled pots have been around for thousands of years. But her interest is also very contemporary as it has a focus on the use of 3D printer technology to replicate coiled pottery. In one project at RMIT,Ohmu scanned one of her own coiled vessels and tried to get the 3D ceramics printer to copy it. But the machine could not manage the extreme overhangs Ohmu tends to have in her work:the technology could not replicate her intuitive understanding of what clay can do.
Ohmu is quick to point out she is not “anti-machine” – rather,she is interested in examining the limitations of emerging technologies. Her work is a commentary on the virtues of the “slow” movement in response to our age of rapid automation and mass-production.
“A point of difference between the 3D-printed vessels and mine is they are all pre-programmed … mine are made intuitively in that I have to respond to the weight of the clay and the way it likes to move … it is like a collaboration with the material.”
She describes the “slow” approach to art-making as a “creative flow state” where there is a feeling of being deeply in the present,where “you are so immersed in that moment,so undistracted” that time seems not to exist.
“I feel like a lot of athletes feel that during peak performance and a lot of creatives feel it,too,while doing their work. I feel like that is somehow linked to intuition.”
While Ohmu is fascinated to see how emerging technologies might start to replicate human abilities such as intuitive making,for now she says she is harnessing our special suite of powers:curiosity,playfulness,empathy and observation.
“I have no doubt the technology is developing exponentially. That is why I like to keep my practice evolving,not only for my own intellectual stimulation,but also as a creative practitioner. I need to keep my finger on the pulse of what is happening.”
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Part of that has included her research on the organ pipe mud dauber wasp which,she discovered,coils mud during nest-making in the same way humans have long made coiled pots. With their machine-like buzz,these wasps also evoked the hum of the 3D printer.
“A part of me lit up[at] this deep interconnectedness not only between us and the natural world but also with the machine world. Machines come from us and we are nature. The world is a giant web. If you touch one bit it will ripple out to other parts of the web. The wasps build coil upon coil … it brought me such joy and delight.”Andrew Stephens
Melbourne Now is at NGV Australia,March 24 - August 20,free.ngv.vic.gov.au
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