ARTS

‘An inscrutable and open-ended riddle’: the life and art of Jeffrey Smart
First published in Guardian Australia, December 2021
One reason Jeffrey Smart paintings have gone up in price is because that’s what happens when there’s a big show, such as the one at the National Gallery of Australia celebrating 100 years since the late artist’s birth. Another reason is love. Specifically, how the love for Smart’s paintings stays unrequited because it’s never wholly fulfilled. “I’ve really noticed with this show that private collectors hold on ...
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The artist who turns roadkill into fine art
First published in Australian Financial Review (Life & Leisure), December 2020
Wearing scuffed boots and leather motorcycle pants, poet and artist Judith Nangala Crispin is pointing to a print on a wall in her home. “It’s called Lily returns to Altair, the brightest of Aquila’s stars, wearing the body of a crow,” she says. The name alone is worthy of a moment’s silence. Crispin’s arthritic labrador wheezes, while outside chooks scratch the soil near a veggie patch. ...
‘Until recently, this work was in a shed’: NGA surveys 120 years of art in search of gender parity
First published in Guardian Australia, November 2020
Being asked to serve dinner. That’s a key memory for Adelaide artist Margaret Worth of a landmark 1968 exhibition of Australian abstract art, The Field, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Worth was an artist of excellence herself, and married to Sydney Ball, whose work showed in The Field. The curators knew she was a painter when they visited the couple’s home but “just asked ...
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Under the spell of Santa Fe, home and sanctuary of Georgia O’Keeffe
First published in The Australian Financial Review (Life & Leisure), March 2020
Some call painter Georgia O’Keeffe the mother of American modernism. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe – one of just a few in the world dedicated to a female artist – describes her simply as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Either way, her paintings of flowers and New Mexico landscapes, in particular, are luminous and unforgettable. “There is a huge interest in O’Keeffe’s life ...
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False positives
First published in The Saturday Paper, February 2020
Preserved beneath glass at Vienna’s Beethoven Museum are the composer’s unrequited love letters to a woman known only as his “immortal beloved”. Seeing his raw scrawl sweeps you up, a little, in the agony of it all. “Oh god, why must we distance ourselves from what we love so much?” he wrote. The museum is in the house where Beethoven lived from 1792. The floorboards ...
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Desert mob scenes
First published in Art Guide Australia, January 2020
First held in 1990 at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, Desert Mob is the oldest of Australia’s thriving annual program of Aboriginal art fairs. With its 30th anniversary coming up in September 2020, Kate Hennessy looks back on Desert Mob 2019. The first thing to know about Desert Mob is that the artists wholly select the works exhibited. The second thing is those artists come from what Araluen curator ...
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True colours: ‘All Auras Touch’ at Carriageworks
First published in The Monthly, January 2020
“I’m going to tell you about the colours in your aura portrait,” says artist Kate Mitchell. She holds the Polaroid by its edges as I materialise face-up from the depths like a drowned woman surfacing a noxious algal bloom. “What is visible is a lot of orange,” says Mitchell. “You’re bathed in it.” I’d seen one of Mitchell’s portraits on a friend’s Instagram. Her face was ...
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Packer & Sons review – John Howard is a brutish Kerry Packer in generation-spanning play
First published in The Guardian Australia, November 2019
Tycoon. Dynasty. Newspaperman. Mogul. They’re dated words in Australian discourse yet the story of the Packer family men, told in Tommy Murphy’s meticulously researched and generation-spanning new play, breathes life powerfully back into them. And into some other words, too; few of them kind. Words such as “when I want my balls touched I book a bordello”, from an older Kerry Packer (John Howard), who ...
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Girl In A School Uniform – Terror lurks on the edge
First published in Sydney Morning Herald, September 2019
Kings Cross may be quieter these days but sirens still blare outside during Girl In A School Uniform. Or is it the play’s sound design? It’s hard to tell because UK writer Lulu Raczka’s action is set in a bar amid streets steeped in sinister mayhem: blackouts keep happening and, during them, women keep disappearing. “It’s the future,” reads the program. “But only slightly.” The dystopian ...
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The Chills: The triumph and tragedy of Martin Phillips (documentary)
First published in The Wire Magazine, August 2019
The story of the tortured male rock ‘n’ roll genius is barely even a ‘story’ anymore. It’s a trope we have awoken to. A film that tracks this trope, in 2019, needs to not once whiff of cliché. It needs to prove there’s life in the old rock dog (story) yet. Julia Parnell’s documentary on New Zealand band, The Chills, is proof of life, while ...