Home Sweet Home

To be part of this exhibition Home Sweet Home: works from the Peter Fay collection is to be part of an adventure. This exciting show of predominantly Australian and New Zealand contemporary art is about a collection that comes from a domestic context and examines the way the idea of ‘home’ — and by extension our hearts and minds — can be transformed by art. It is an eclectic, idiosyncratic, at times iconoclastic collection that reveals the passions of a collector who is himself an artist. It reveals a collector who has supported emerging and outsider artists as well as others who are well known. This exhibition challenges established conventions through bringing together art by both mainstream and marginalised artists to blur the boundaries between the two. Roger Cardinal’s comments in a recent catalogue, Marginalia: perspectives on outsider art, might equally relate to Peter Fay’s vision: ‘The art offers us the prospect of an alternative and potentially revolutionary way of seeing.’ It is work that ‘may provoke a steady rapturous ache in the beholder’.²

It was with something of this kind of ‘rapturous ache’ that Peter Fay acquired his first work of art, Pat Thompson’s Pink for £1 in 1972. At the time, Fay was working as an English teacher in the UK and recalls rushing to catch a bus through freezing sleet past an Art Society event ‘where the prize-winning works were under cover and the lesser works were hung outside’. Outside was a woman wearing mittens, wrapped in blankets, who had work that caught Fay’s attention: ‘I had my eye on the bus and yet I had to go back. It was one of those road to Damascus moments.’ Although the artist herself tried to guide him to the winning works, he remained intrigued by her painting of two figures in a bed. ‘I said to her, “Pat, why didn’t you paint the faces and their feet?”, and she said, “I was sick the night they did faces and feet.” ... But it is a painting that holds its own through all its   internal qualities, ambiguities, contradictions.’³

In the early 1970s, however, Fay was still a way off becoming a serious collector of art. His early years and family background in Australia had not prepared him for a life in art. There was never much money and life was lived by conventions. One touchstone that he believes is a metaphor for his later life occurred around the age of 12. At the time, he was given a copy of Dickens’ David Copperfield by a Brother at his school. The prospect of reading such a large tome was daunting but through the experience he suddenly found that it was possible to enter another world. He recalls his sense of immersion and empathy: ‘I was going into the city in a double decker bus one day, and I was at the point in the book where Dora’s dog died and I burst into tears. The lady sitting next to me said, are you all right, and I said, the dog’s just died, and she said you poor thing I’m sure your mother will get you another one. For me it was real, I was in that world … When the art kicked in, it built on the same foundation, the same passion.’⁴

After his stint in the UK, Fay returned to Australia in 1974 and started teaching at the Kings School in Sydney, at which time he met Mick Blunden who introduced him to a whole new way of living:

It was in the early 1980s that Fay’s passion for collecting art really came to the fore. He began frequenting galleries in Sydney on a regular basis. Also important was a large show of work by emerging Australian artists acquired by Director James Mollison with the Philip Morris Arts Grant for the National Gallery of Australia. ‘I remember how excited I was about the National Gallery coming onto the scene. They’d been in those sheds for years and it was a real opening up of contemporary art for me. I went around the gallery making copious notes, taking down artists’ names.’ From the start of the 1980s Fay experienced considerable enjoyment in the work of emerging artists Narelle Jubelin, Fiona MacDonald, Susan Norrie, Peter Cooley, Tim Maguire and Adrienne Gaha. ‘I became friends with a lot of them and I’d have lunches in the mountains on a Sunday. There might be fifteen of us all sitting around the log fire and going for walks in the garden. I also showed some of their works in the shed up there.’

Among Peter Fay’s early acquisitions were works by Noel McKenna and Peter Cooley, whose art he has continued to collect in depth over the years. Another was Peter Atkins. Fay acquired, among other things, works on pieces of found slate and the artist’s first ‘journal’ work, United States journal 1990. This work is significant to the wider context of Fay’s collection because of Atkins’ identification with outsider artists and his use of found materials. This journal reveals Atkins’ perspective as a traveller, searching for meaning and connections from a plethora of intimate encounters and personal associations. Incorporated in the journal is Atkins’ homage to the black American folk artist Bill Traylor and a collaborative work with a woman Atkins met outside the White House who had lost her son in Vietnam. Also included in the journal is a found painting For Baltimore that is, in Atkins’ own estimation, better than anything he could have come up with to encapsulate ‘the achingly desolate atmosphere of a place made famous in one of Nina Simone’s songs’.⁵

With hindsight it is possible to discern strands of interest evolving in Fay’s collection including his fascination with artists who are also ‘collectors’ of objects such as Atkins, Mikala Dwyer, Fiona MacDonald and Robert MacPherson. As Trevor Smith wrote of MacPherson: ‘Certainly the activity of the collector is parallel to the artist in one important respect, which has to do with the intensity of “looking” — of examining artifacts for particular qualities or resonances.’⁶ Fay also responded to the playful humour and conceptual rigour of the artist’s work. Initially, he acquired some of the Robert Pene drawings (works in which Pene becomes MacPherson’s 10-year-old alter ego) and, more recently, an important painting, Mayfair: fresh cut 2 frog poems and a rose for William Neaves 1998, ‘a painting about a painting, a big double board: one half is a bowl of flowers, and the other half is black. It’s about the mark — a black square with a white edge that picks up the reverse or the obverse of the flower, black, red, white’.⁷

In the course of collecting, an important person in Fay’s life was Ann Lewis, who became one of his closest friends. As he recalls, ‘Ann’s house was like a cornucopia ... art covered the walls and ceilings. It was just a part of her life. I’d known her as a parent when I taught her boys at King’s School. She is a person who has opened up so many lives through her generosity … This sense of generosity has also been true of Colin and Liz Laverty who have shared their enthusiasm for collecting. They have been great role models.’

Peter Fay notes that he met Rosalie Gascoigne through Ann Lewis. He recalls that the meeting occurred at a fortuitous time when he had begun to move towards a greater focus on objects, both in his collecting and own object-based work. For Fay, Gascoigne was a kindred spirit, like Mick Blunden. Their friendship grew in the 1990s through Fay’s visits to Canberra and through their correspondence and mutual encouragement. Fay felt a real affinity with Gascoigne’s early work ‘her boxes of dollies, a sideshow banner depicting Jim Sharman’s boxing troupe salvaged from the tip and old jugs ... things invested with time and memory’. The works that he acquired reveal this preference, such as Down to the silver sea which marries so-called high and low art. It was also a catalyst for Fay’s own art. As John Cruthers notes:

‘Amazingly, it was a single act of creation that showed the way forward. On one visit Rosalie pulled out a work to show Peter. It was a box called Down to the silver sea, 1981–82, comprising three black and white cut-out figures based on Georges Braque’s monumental cubist Grand nu, 1907–08, set against a sheet of corrugated iron. It was her homage to ‘the one that got away’, Braque’s Nu debout, which James Mollison wanted for the ANG in 1976, only to have it quashed by the Fraser government.

Struggling to make it work, Rosalie had attached a pink plastic leg onto one of the flat, cut-out figures. It was a creative leap that worked, moving the piece away from the literal and bringing the whole construction to life. Seeing Rosalie make art like this, working intuitively with old materials, released Peter into what his art would become.’⁸

It is precisely this sense of adventure that appeals to Fay in the works he collects and in his own art. As the collection has grown it has come to encompass an extraordinary range of media: painting, drawing, photography, video and domestic-scale sculpture. Among the array of objects are Louise Weaver’s remarkable birds, Lola Ryan’s shell Harbour bridges and a variety of dolls.

There are, for example, knitted dolls representing friends and family by artists from the Narrogin community including Mavis Bolton and Jean Riley, Val Sutherland’s expressive dolls at times encrusted with shells and Michelle Nikou’s haunting figures. Obsessive passions suggest darkness and luminosity. For Fay there is also a pervasive sense of poetry in the use of materials: ‘I’ve seen it in Rosalie’s work … and in Bill Culbert’s art: weaving magic out of found objects laden with memory … Then there are artists like Mikala Dwyer who can make the Winged victory out of seemingly very little or Neil Roberts who worked with unglamorous materials and found the poetry within it’.

Fay has always agreed with Rosalie Gascoigne’s maxim, ‘Make chance your friend’. In 1997 he took the opportunity, on the suggestion of a friend who knew of his interest in outsider art, to visit Arts Project Australia in Melbourne.⁹ Arts Project is an organisation dedicated to the creative development of artists with disabilities. There is studio space where artists can work and a gallery. The organisation also keeps exceptional archives of the artists’ works.¹⁰ From the start, Fay was excited by the way the place was run: ‘They are treated like artists ... You wouldn’t tell a so-called 'normal' artist (I say this dripping with irony) what to do and they don’t there. It was a key moment for me. It was all there. The works I saw were living testimony of the power of the mark on the page and what a strong thing that can be.’ Among the artists Fay acquired were John Northe, Jimmy Fuller, Dorothy Berry, Wayne Marnell and Leo Cussen.

It is has been remarked that Cussen has a deep fascination with aspects of popular culture including the ‘Dr Who’ character from the television series of the same name and has produced a strong series of works based on this theme: ‘His work has an obsessive quality resulting from repeated use of words or phrases or in his intensive use of media. Within the context of art such focussed obsessions become a positive creative force.’¹¹ Cussen’s charcoal on paper drawing Xena is composed of a densely worked sensuous black rectangle, with the white edge allowing the text to read through. In its mingling of abstraction with traces of the real and in its bold mark-making, a work like this provides striking parallels with other works in the collection such as those by MacPherson or a spirited drawing by the well-known British artist, Roger Hilton.

By the mid 1990s Peter Fay had moved back to Sydney, to a house in Leichhardt. In recent years he has become passionate about the work of Slim Barrie, an artist introduced to him by Nigel Lendon. Lendon’s son Axel had found Barrie’s work in an op-shop in Lakes Entrance: a jewel-and-trinket-encrusted cardboard fishing boat. Fay’s collection reveals the range of Barrie’s art from brightly painted wooden sculptures to highly inventive works made out of cardboard decorated with all manner of found objects.

An important part of supporting artists is Fay’s need to expand awareness of their work and to this end he played an significant role in organising exhibitions of Slim Barrie’s work at the Helen Maxwell Gallery in Canberra and at Room 35, a space within the Gitte Weise Gallery in Sydney (where he has supported other exhibitions by emerging artists). Fay has been instrumental in introducing the work of artists to others such as Gallery Director Darren Knight. At times the critical responses have addressed the issue of showing the work of so-called outsider artists with their mainstream peers. In a review for the Sydney Morning Herald, Anne Loxley noted her enjoyment in thinking about ‘the similarities between Slim Barrie and such celebrated contemporary artists as Anish Kapoor and local heroes, Jenny Watson, Hany Armanious and Mikala Dwyer’ but ‘felt uneasy about the chasm between his art world’ and ‘the art world’ concluding, ‘Maybe that chasm is insignificant’.¹²

Peter Fay, too, seeks to overcome the idea that any perceived ‘chasm’ works against the art being seen on an equal footing by inviting the viewer to focus on the art itself and the artist’s passion for what he is doing. Of his own thoughts about Barrie, he says:

On a recent visit to Fay’s home prior to this exhibition, new works by an artist Gina Sinozich had appeared on the walls. Painted on immaculately worked surfaces they depict, in turn, a brilliant field of poppies and memories of her son as a child. Memory also figures strongly in a quite startling work by Lisa Reid from Arts Project: a striking portrait of herself at three months. As always on such visits there are surprises and multiple connections opening up between a range of art works in this continually rotating art ‘library’. As we talk and contemplate many of these works — in all their edginess, humour, energy and raw beauty — it becomes apparent that the exhibition Home Sweet Home: works from the Peter Fay Collection will convey, perhaps more than anything else, what it is to be human: our shared joys, passions and struggles seen through the artists’ diverse points of view and through the risk-taking and vision of a remarkable artist-collector.

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator
Australian Painting & Sculpture

With thanks to Peter Fay and Consultant Curator Glenn Barkley, University of Wollongong

All quotes from Peter Fay are from an interview with Deborah Hart, 30 May 2003