Artists' Artists

Jude Barlow: Today we're all gathering together on Ngunnawal country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. [In language welcome to country] I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are listening to this podcast, and I pay them my profound respects and thank them for their many outstanding contributions to the life of this nation. Thank you. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this recording may contain references to deceased people. Where possible, permission has been sought to include their names.

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Archie Moore: I'm interested in that idea of everyone on earth being part of a kinship system, and Indigenous people traditionally would include all living things on the land as part of that kinship system.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Archie Moore is an Australian artist who was born in 1970 in Toowoomba, and is of Kamilaroi and Bigambul heritage. He works across media in research based portrayals of self and national histories. His ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity, skin, language, smell, home, genealogy, flags, and the wider concerns of racism, belonging, and community. In 2024, Archie Moore represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. His exhibition, kith and kin, was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The National Gallery of Australia has collected Moore's work since 2012. Archie, welcome to Artists’ Artists and thank you so much for being a guest today. Can you remember the first time you realised that art was something worth spending time with?

Archie: Well, I grew up in an area that there were no art galleries. And the only art that my peers were interested in were tattoos, very realistic, photorealist kind of paintings and drawings, things like that. I wasn't very sociable, and I've never been a very sociable person. But that was further impacted by being Aboriginal, I guess. People didn't really want to socialise with you, or have much to do with you. And the house we were living in, you know, was kind of run down. So people said we were poor. That marginalisation made me draw inwards, I guess. So I spent a lot of time in my room reading books and doing drawings. I think I kind of, as a way to cope with marginalisation, sort of got into fantasy worlds. By drawing things, watching those cartoons on TV, and I guess mark making. I think I've always been intrigued by what materials do, so I was always intrigued by mark making. I remember a neighbour gave me a bunch of oil paints to do painting with. But I just had these rubber stamps and I'd stamp the oil paint onto the surface (laughter). Yeah, I used to be interested in music as well. I remember having tape players and sampling bits of a song and then looping it, repeating it. I used to drop things on, or near the speaker and it would record it. It used to take me into another world, I guess, because I'd cut things up and glue them back together.

Jennifer: Now, of course, you've had four major works bought by the National Gallery in Canberra. What did that mean to you to be acquired by the national collection?

Archie: Um, well, I could go out for a dinner (laughter). But, um, yeah, no, that was… I was, it felt very privileged and honoured to be, in the collection of the National Gallery or, you know, just people buying your work, even though I've never really focused on that, like, that wasn't the first consideration when I was asked to do a show or have a work in a show, I was always thinking about what do I want to say? I'm always thinking about what materials to explore and what art could be.

Jennifer: Currently, your major work, Family Tree from 2021, is on view. It's looking literally at family and history and memory. Could you describe it a bit to our listeners who might not have seen it?

Archie: Well, there's three versions of it now, but they all, involve blackboard paint, a panel of some material, or just a wall itself of a building, and then drawing my family tree in white conté to mimic the classroom. This is how they taught me at school with a blackboard, just referencing that because when I was at school there was no Indigenous history taught, so talking about what's missing from the curriculum. And also I like the kind of ephemeral nature of the chalk where you could rub it and you could try and erase the information, but it'll always leave a trace as well. Looking at a family tree, researching it for over four years now, looking into archives, finding information about family members, trying to work out how I came to be here, despite all the things that happened.

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Jennifer: The first work you've chosen is the Aboriginal Memorial, and it's an installation of 200 hollow log coffins that was created between 1987 and 1988, which was, of course, Australia's bicentenary. By Bandjalung man Djon Mundine, who worked with 43 artists from Ramingining and its surroundings in central Arnhem Land. It commemorates Indigenous people who, since 1788, have lost their lives defending their land. The path through the memorial imitates the course of the Glide River estuary, which flows through the Arafura Swamp to the sea. And the hollow log coffins are situated broadly according to where the artists' clans live along the river and its tributaries. Archie, tell us about this work.

Archie: Well, there's 200 logs standing upright in a vertical position with designs that come from Arnhem Land, from the Ramingining area, Yolŋu people. In a rarrk style with the ochers painted in ochre colours. Looks like a forest. Logs were living things once as well. They were trees, now preserved for this artwork. So that talks about that reincarnation or immortality idea, a past life being in the present tense, the formation I'd seen you could walk in between them and feel very much immersed. Djon Mundine is a curator, writer, and activist, and he worked with 43 artists from Ramingining in Arnhem Land. Together they created a memorial to all Indigenous people who lost their lives defending their country in the Frontier Wars. And I think the memorial is a great work of political art in that it reminds viewers of another side of Australia's history, that this place was not empty and people resisted the colony. The celebration of a nation, as it was called, bicentennial celebrations, failed to mention the 250 plus Indigenous nations that were here when the British arrived. Yeah, and so it's not only about death, but survival and immortality, the past and the present and the future. I'm interested in that idea as Indigenous idea of time with the past, the present, the future coexisting in the same plane, happening at the same time.

Jennifer: You know, although it was made in 1988, it feels as relevant today and, you know, moving into the future as it ever has. It's got a very powerful resonance for the contemporary moment.

Archie: Yeah, and it still looks brand new, it looks like it could have been made this year, so it's everlasting, feels like it's a permanent thing, like, whitefellas monuments are made out of huge blocks of stone and intended to be a permanent thing. Something that strikes awe into you and overwhelms you, stands out and something that can't be destroyed so easily. I get the same kind of feeling looking at the Aboriginal Memorial.

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Jennifer: The second work you've chosen couldn't be more different in scale from the Aboriginal Memorial. Suprematist people by Australian artist Lucy Griggs, who was born in 1976, is a small watercolour and pencil drawing that she created in 2011 and it depicts two figures with shopping bags walking away. It was painted on a Soviet school book in bright pastel colours. So, Archie, what are we looking at here?

Archie: These were produced when Lucy was living in Kazakhstan and mostly featured scenes of daily lives of people in the capital of Almaty. And I was drawn to the Cyrillic script on the front of the notebook. Russian was a language I attempted to learn once.

Jennifer : What made you want to study Russian?

Archie: Well, I was very much interested in Soviet art and film. Not so much socialist realism, but artists who worked around the strict rules to say things that they needed to say. It's like filmmakers like Tarkovsky, just immediately drawn to his filmmaking, but yeah, I like the small, delicate work that I chose. Looks like an elderly couple coming back with their shopping. So, she was painting the scenes of ordinary people that she saw on the streets. But slightly abstracted. Looks like it could be from a Malevich painting or something. I'm drawn to the quietness of Lucy's work as well. I think they're very beautiful, well painted, quiet and humble kinds of works. I was also drawn to the use of the school curricular material as a part of the medium, which also I'm very interested in.

Jennifer: I'd love to hear more about that.

Archie: Well, my own work were collected textbooks. I still have them, that I have from high school. I have them in display in my HouseShow, memories of my childhood home. Now I'm just interested in what's not taught at school. And seeing as Kazakhstan is colonised by Russians, I'm sure the native Kazakhs may feel the same way out of their culture being diminished or superimposed by the coloniser's view of things.

Jennifer: And that is very much a theme of your work that, you know, within the grand narrative of history, it seems that you are constantly reiterating there are individuals who make up this story. We're each of us unique in the way we experience the world. With your house exhibitions, you're really focusing on looking at the overlooked. Would that be fair to say?

Archie: Yeah. Overlooked. Suppressed. Marginalised people. I always think putting the personal stuff out into the public. Some people ask, how can you do that? But it's not just my story, I think it's a lot of people's stories. It's lots of different marginalised people, whether it's because of their race or sexuality or gender. You can have these same kind of perspectives on things, so with my HouseShow, I like to try to include all the senses, so there's lots of things to look at and listen to, but you can also touch the objects, and you can also smell things. So I used Dettol in a couple of house shows. Very strong disinfectant smell. Mother used to make us have Dettol baths, and I used to think like now, I think that it was her fear of having children not clean enough. They'd be taken away by authorities and it might have been a fear passed down from her own parents. And as Aboriginal people, you could probably never be clean enough. For some people, you'll always be dirty, infectious. I remember having a response to that, from a young gay artist in Brisbane who said that he came out to his parents, and since he came out, his parents started washing his clothes in Dettol, so the smell sort of conjured up a similar feeling, like it's meant to clean you, but you feel dirty. It's very paradoxical.

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Jennifer: The third work you've chosen is by Leah King-Smith, a Bigambul artist born in Australia in 1957. Untitled Number 3 is a photographic work from the series Patterns of Connection and it was created in 1991 and it's a direct positive colour photograph. Most of the photographs in the series were taken between 1860 and 1910 by professional European photographers, however in this series King-Smith has superimposed archival images of her own photographs of the Victorian landscape, while also painting over parts of the image. Archie, can you tell us why you chose this work?

Archie: Leah is another fellow artist from Brisbane, and also a Bigambul person as well, same Aboriginal nation as myself. I only recently confirmed my Bigambul heritage by looking into materials and the archives as part of my family history research. Leah was also mining the archives for this photographic series. So, she was looking at nineteenth century photographs of Aboriginal people, ethnographic material of the colonisers, which she melded with photos of her own to produce haunting scenes where the past, present, collide. And mainly figures in a landscape, Australian landscape, and you wonder who these people are, where are they now? In traditional beliefs they are here right now, forevermore. The past, present and future are happening at the same time. This everywhen idea. And the photograph also took me back to something I read on Trove when I was looking into the archives, a digitised newspaper site. So I saw an article from 1919 where they were talking about graves and funeral customs of savage tribes. And it said, 'the Bigambul belief was that people after death went to and fro, the shadows of what they were in real life. These glories they called "matu"' I don't know if ‘matu’ is a thing, but I like this idea of coming to and fro from who they were in, in their life. Because the subject of Leah's photograph is certainly doing that every time it is reproduced, hung for an exhibition and discussed, coming into the present. And his image is mostly shadow too, the blackness in the photographic image being the absence of light.

Jennifer: As you said, it's an image that operates on so many different levels because it was created in 1991 and she's taken this nineteenth century photograph which is of this man with his boomerang. But then she's put it through some kind of process where you're almost looking at it through almost like the clouds of time, that's a bit what it feels like. And then, of course, we're looking at it now, 30 years after it was made, and it still feels very contemporary, and it feels very, very old. It's from a series of Patterns of Connection, and in a way, that's what your work is too, with Family Tree. It's looking at connections across time.

Archie: Yes, and the Family Tree is a large network of relatedness, and if we go back far enough, 3,000 years we all have a common ancestor. I'm interested in that idea of everyone on earth being part of a kinship system. And Indigenous people traditionally would include all living things on the land as part of that kinship system. And also, some geological features.

Jennifer: Yeah, and in the scheme of things, 3,000 years isn't really that far away, is it?

Archie: No, it's not far back at all. Aboriginal people have been inhabiting this continent for 60,000 years, at least.

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Jennifer: The final work you've chosen is the wonderfully titled, Unless goats are fenced properly they will eat trees and sculptures, and it's an ink drawing created in 1976 by the Australian artist John Armstrong. It's a small, simple sketch of goats, a tree, a fence, and two sculptures. Archie, can you tell us about this work?

Archie: It's a very simple pencil drawing on paper, just a graphite pencil, no colour. And the page is divided by a fence, one side with a tree and an easel standing, and on the other side, a decimated, masticated tree, chewed up by the goat, and the easel also destroyed by the goat. I just thought it was funny. Made me smile, and made me remember John, he was the head of visual arts at Queensland University of Technology when I was studying there. There's a kind of funny story about how I got to go to university. So, I remember getting a call from John asking me, am I coming in for an interview? And I said, 'Oh, I didn't know I had an interview, and, uh, my portfolio is still with Queensland College of Art', where I had been accepted for animation, but I decided I wasn't going to do animation. And so I got this call from John saying, 'are you coming in?' He said, 'oh, do you have any drawings at home?' I said, 'oh yeah, I've got a few lying around', but I didn't. He just said, bring in like 10 drawings and come in for the interview. So I did like 10 pastel drawings of different styles, like a realistic version and then an abstract one. And I took them in and had the interview and got accepted. Big surprise to me. And I used to overhear many times that people would look back at this and say, these people were part of the John Armstrong school. I remember him being very generous and supportive of everyone and wanting to include everyone, had a very compassionate nature about him, and nurtured people. So that was really good. But I haven't seen much of John's work before, I remember seeing some, a few pieces and I always thought they were thought provoking, humorous with like philosophical ideas and titles like this one.

Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, I know that art is under threat in lots of ways, but I've never thought about goats eating the sculptures. It’s never been something I've heard that's an anxiety.

Archie: Yeah, so I wasn't sure whether the goat was a metaphor for something else, something that needs to be contained or it will destroy nature and art.

Jennifer: Archie, thank you so much for being a guest today.

Jude Barlow: Today we're all gathering together on Ngunnawal country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. [In language welcome to country] I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are listening to this podcast, and I pay them my profound respects and thank them for their many outstanding contributions to the life of this nation. Thank you.

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Juz Kitson: You know, I don't know whether it's bleeding, but it's bruised. It's sore, it's tender. So to have a comment like that, and so I kissed you, it's this kind of, it's not final, but it's just like that little statement that comes after something kind of brutal.

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Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Sydney-born Juz Kitson divides her time between the Australian South Coast and Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China. Her intricate evocative sculptures, which she creates from materials including porcelain, fur, paraffin wax, silk, resin, glass and bone, begin, she says, 'from gathering resources, experiences and connections, human connection, connection to the land, and connection to different customs and culture.' The result is a body of work that explores, in the artist's words, sex, the nature of humans and animals, ideas of womanhood, birth, and death. Juz, welcome to Artists’ Artists.

Juz Kitson: Hello. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Juz, can you remember the first time you experienced looking at art, and it meant something to you?

Juz: I actually recently asked my mum this question. When was the first time she could remember taking me to a museum? And she couldn't remember. And I don't remember. I never really had that exposure, but for me, what I do remember is being, you know, one of those kids crawling under the restaurant table, drawing with crayons or playdough, squishing it between my fingers. So for me, it was very much a way of life, a way of processing what I was experiencing as a child.

Jennifer: So, what was your journey to becoming an artist? How did that happen?

Juz: Well, I went to art school to actually pursue photography and, you know, more in the conventional sense of the manual, traditional black and white, working in the darkroom at the National Art School. And then all of a sudden when I got to art school, I realised wow, I didn't want to spend three years of my life in the darkroom. And I just found that I was very much into two dimensional painting. But then when I came across ceramics and working within that department, there was a certain potential limitlessness to the material that I just found so malleable and so exciting and the cross contamination of working, for example, with ceramics, but dipping it into latex or, you know, drawing on the surface or doing all sorts of other things that weren't as, you know, sort of traditional.

Jennifer: Given that you use your materials in a very radical way, are you attracted to the work of artists who are sort of pushing what a material can do?

Juz: Oh, absolutely. You know, I was looking at a lot of painters, a lot of sculptors, performance artists, and for me it's, you know, painting with tomato sauce or with blood or, you know, it's just so ridiculous really, but things like that I find certainly very attractive in contemporary art. Definitely not ceramics. You know, I felt a bit like I just never belonged really in that environment. You know, I'm not a purist per se with the material.

Jennifer: Do you ever listen to music, Juz, in terms of when you're looking at art or thinking about art or making art?

Juz: When I'm making art? Absolutely. I actually recently thought I'm going to buy a bit of a DJ set up. Each project that I do, or each exhibition, sometimes each work, but generally a collection of works will have an album of tracks of music that go with it. And yeah, music, I don't know, has a massive impact, but it also elevates my work, I think, and my practice. And I don't know, it keeps me, with the journey, I think as well, whether the music takes me while I'm making.

Jennifer: Can you remember the first time you visited the National Gallery in Canberra?

Juz: I think I was probably maybe 12 or 13. So I would have been on a school trip. You know, for me, it was like even now going back and seeing my work in there, you know, that was such an extraordinary feeling really to walk through. It's always a bit of a pat on the back for any artist, I think, when you walk into your home gallery and see your work on display.

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Jennifer: The first work you've chosen from the national collection is Sarah Lucas's wonderfully titled TITTIPUSSIDAD from 2018. Over the past 30 years or so, Sarah Lucas, who is British, has built an illustrious career challenging social constructs of gender through sculpture, photography, and performance art. She uses quite crude and humorous imagery. So Juz, what are we looking at with this sculpture?

Juz: So the materials that are used in this work are bronze, concrete, cast iron. It's an interesting piece actually. So those of you that are familiar with Sarah Lucas will probably know this piece, bulbous breast forms, almost spawning like mushrooms. The way that they sort of just bubble away with these long, kind of elongated legs, you know, it's a very abject piece. And I think why I was attracted to it. I find, you know, it's just that idea of the mother, this sort of all-encompassing mother figure that's almost like slumped, you know, at the end of raising children or bearing children. I don't know, but it's also got this sort of tender, kind of nature to it as well. But I thought it was just interesting because I do have a poster of this work on my wall, which I know it's a bit of a faux pas, really. You know, I should have original works, right? Not a poster or a print of the work itself. But I thought it was just such a beautiful piece. It was something that I actually bought from the National Gallery a couple of years back. And it's just a really wonderful thing that's hanging in my lounge room. And so it's a piece that really speaks to me on many levels. And I think it is that sort of nurturing, very feminine, but almost, it's just this sort of like prostitution as well, where it's kind of, you know, it's so open and unrestricted, the posture of this figure. But yeah, I think it's just outrageous. And I love Sarah Lucas's work.

Jennifer: It's interesting too, that it's quite a sensual figure. It's made of curves rather than angles, but it's made from bronze, concrete and cast iron so it's actually a very tough sculpture.

Juz: Oh, I think that's interesting. And that's the attraction for so many artists is the idea of, for example, working with ceramics. It's a soft, malleable, very rich material to work with, but then turning it into a form that's then hardened and solid and tough and, you know, dangerous really, like if broken, it could slice somebody open. But I think that that kind of a juxtaposition, if you will, of different materials. And, you know, even for me, I'm looking at it and it's almost like a stocking material. It's kind of soft and neon like, you know, that texture, but you're right, it's cement or metal or how do you sort of deceive the audience? And I think Sarah Lucas certainly does that with her materials.

Jennifer: I always think it's amazing when we live in this sort of culture, when we're overwhelmed by literally thousands of images every day, that an artist can still come up with something that is absolutely unique. You know, we've never seen this form before.

Juz: I think that's what sets contemporary art apart and what makes a good piece of art. Like often, if people ask me, like, what is it that you actually make? And it's like, if I can make an object that can sit on its own terms and exist on its own terms and not have, you know, the human brain wants to categorise it and say, this is where it belongs or historically, or whereas for an object to exist on its own terms, I think that's definitely a successful piece of work. There is like a certain satirical dark humour to a lot of her pieces, but you know, it's also like a childlike play. TITTIPUSSIDAD, you know, is very comical (laughter).

Jennifer: I mean, I guess like the sculpture, the title itself is made up. It's a little bit filthy, it's a little bit playful, it's quite funny.

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Jennifer: The second work is by the wonderful Rosemary Laing, who sadly passed away this year, and it's a photograph, Flight Research No. 6, from a series she created in 1999, where she photographed a woman wearing a bridal dress, suspended in the air. It's quite a mysterious body of work, and in some of the images she's hovering over a mountainous landscape. She seems to be flying, defying the laws of gravity. Juz, why did you choose this work?

Juz: Rosemary Laing came to mind because like you said, she passed away this year and I thought it was a nice, you know, little homage to her. I love her work. And I thought it was just interesting to mention that when I was quite young, maybe 18 in Berlin, I was on the Brunnenstrasse that has a lot of contemporary galleries. And one night they'd all opened their doors and all the punters were sort of going from gallery to gallery hopping. And I managed to get lost and found myself down a small alley and saw a curtain and there was a show of these works of Rosemary Laing's in the front room, which, you know, it was quite an amazing experience to go, wow, like this photographer looks really familiar because I'd remember, being exposed to her work in high school, but to actually see it, you know, when I was sort of 18 in this context. And that's always had a lasting memory for me. These images, I feel like they're just so iconic and her practice and the things that she did. And she's such an icon, I think, for contemporary Australian photography.

Jennifer: Can you describe to our listeners what it is you can see in this photograph?

Juz: So there's a figure quite literally like flying through the air, but there's a sense of, you know, a moment captured in time as opposed to like a falling or a protruding or, you know, it's quite a still moment and there's an elegance to it as well. The bride captured in this sort of free fall moment. But yeah, it's quite an ethereal piece.

Jennifer: Do you think that there's a feminist element to this image? The idea of a bride flying through the air? She could be crashing, she could be flying.

Juz: I think so. To me, I do look at it as being a bride's dress probably later on. It's not something that I see straight away. I think for me, it's more of the dress representing this sort of pure, almost Godlike, angel like character flying through the air. And there is a sense of, you know, sort of ethereal, Godlike presence.

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Jennifer: Your third choice from the national collection is actually a collaboration between the great American artist, Louise Bourgeois, and the British artist, Tracey Emin. It's a work on paper titled, And so I kissed you from the series Do Not Abandon Me, which was made between 2009 and 10. Many critics have commented on the overlapping themes and materials in the works of Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois, even though they came from different generations and different parts of the world. They were both exploring themes around sexuality, female subjectivity, motherhood, the use of fabrics and embroidery. But it wasn't until the final years of Louise Bourgeois's life, she died in 2010 at the age of 98, that the two came together for an artistic collaboration. And it's a beautiful sort of cross generational conversation. Juz, could you describe to our listeners what this picture looks like?

Juz: So it's a watercolour of a, I would say, dismembered, looks like male torso. But it's also quite ambiguous. It does have these beautiful sort of curves in the back line and around the buttocks. But then what really lends itself to, mmm, it's probably, definitely a masculine piece is this…erect penis just right there. You know, on first look it could be bloody, but it's almost bruised and battered and wounded. So it's got this quite, you know, sort of harrowing feeling, this piece. But again, it's provocative, but it's also quite subtle, because of the text as well, And so I kissed you.

Jennifer: What was it that inspired you to choose this image?

Juz: For me, I feel like it would be like a usual suspect of like, oh yeah, I can see Juz would take influence from Louise Bourgeois, you know, in the past and there were certain references there. But for me, I think it is her absurd, sexualized, psychosomatic sort of quite disturbing, trauma based, you know, the works that she did make and, you know, the pieces that she does. Like even this, it is so overt, you know with Tracey Emin, but it seems so fitting as well for the two of them to come into collaboration to create a piece like this. And I could even imagine it as a tapestry or carpets or something or rugs, which is what Tracey Emin would definitely do with it.

Jennifer: Apparently the way it was made was Louise Bourgeois would make a drawing or a watercolour and then she would send it to Tracey Emin, who would then add her own take on things. And so you can see the writing that Tracey Emin's written beneath the drawing, which is And so I kissed you. Given it's sort of quite fleshy, even brutal, it could be a bleeding torso. Do you see that as a tender statement, or is it an aggressive one, do you think?

Juz: I think it's that sort of statement said after, you know, there's that kind of conflict or things get a bit tense in a fight or build up and, it's that comment that comes after because there is a sense of, you know… I don't know whether it's bleeding, but it's bruised. It's sore. It's tender. So to have a comment like that, And so I kissed you. It's this kind of, it's not final, but it's just like that little statement that comes after something kind of brutal.

Jennifer: And I guess a lot of great artworks are ambiguous. But how do you interpret the sort of contemporary relevance of this work?

Juz: You know, it is relevant. Louise Bourgeois was relevant. I think that's a testament to her work and who she was as an artist. She was always at the forefront of everything that she did and was constantly pushing and challenging, not only herself, but the material. And she did that right up until the day she died. So I see this as being so relevant and her work will continue to be relevant. I'm not sure about Tracey Emin so much, I still love her work as well. You know, obviously she's still a living artist and she's still very much practising and trying and, you know, failing and doing all sorts of things along the way. So I think that objection and ambiguity to any form makes it, I don't know, not, maybe not classical, but makes it universal. You know, it's more relatable. It's kind of timeless in a sense.

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Jennifer: Your fourth and final selection is a ceramic work from the 1970s, Sumo and Sabrina by Paul Greenaway, who was born in Australia in 1955 and actually worked as a ceramicist until he became a gallerist over 30 years ago. Juz, what's the story behind this choice?

Juz: I thought this was quite fitting because Paul has held his gallery for 32 years. I've shown with him for 10 and this year he's closing his gallery. And I just thought it was rather fitting because I remembered in a conversation that he'd said that the NGA had bought a piece of his ceramics from when he was like 22 or something at art school. And that's why he was always so interested in my practice, you know, so enthusiastic and yeah, it was just amazing to work with him at the beginning, but he never actually showed me these pieces. And so I just searched his name and they all came up. There was probably about five or six different works. And I thought about the fact that obviously I'm connected with them. So I ended up messaging him on WhatsApp and said, 'Oh, Paul, I'm going to do it. I have a conversation about it. I've picked one of your pieces. Can you give me a bit of information?' And he ended up sending me three images of a work which, you know, when I look at it, I think, oh, it makes sense why he wanted to exhibit my work and why he was attracted to it. Because there is a shared sensitivity in the piece as well, which is quite funny.

Jennifer: And he did it when he was very young, as you mentioned, when he was only 22, which is amazing. So do you know why he stopped being an artist and decided to become a gallerist?

Juz: I think he realised he was better at talking to people and he was a better sort of networker and wanted to be out and about more than, you know, in the studio itself. But I think that's why, for me personally, it was so attractive to work with him at the beginning because he had a different understanding, a different brain around how artists work and the creative process. So it's always been a blessing working with him because I'd say, 'Oh, Paul, you know, things are drying. It's going to take two weeks, something slumped. Oh, this has happened.' And he actually understood, whereas a lot of commercial galleries have absolutely no idea, you know about the kind of logistics or technicalities of working with ceramics, whereas he definitely does.

Jennifer: I almost feel like there's a bit of a revolution happening in ceramics. I think a lot of artists are beginning to use ceramics in a really interesting way and sort of pushing the boundaries of what the medium can do. And so do you think there's a possibility that this work is maybe more relevant now than it was in the seventies?

Juz: Yeah, I think it certainly is. It's still very kitsch and it's still very 70s, you know, when I see it, I go, oh, certainly got that little tinge to it, but I think it's, yeah, it's a wonderful piece.

Jennifer: Oh, this has been really wonderful, Juz. I've loved talking with you today.

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Juz: Oh great!

Jude Barlow: Today we're all gathering together on Ngunnawal country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. [In language welcome to country] I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are listening to this podcast, and I pay them my profound respects and thank them for their many outstanding contributions to the life of this nation. Thank you. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this recording may contain references to deceased people. Where possible, permission has been sought to include their names.

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Urs Fischer: Everybody can read into an artwork whatever they want. I love that about artworks. The artwork is just there. You bring it on. You tell me what I'm about. And the next person, bring it on, tell me what I'm about. That's what's cool about artworks. They can just be.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Born in Switzerland in 1973, Urs Fischer first trained as a photographer. Now based in Los Angeles, he creates his artwork from materials as varied as gesso, photography, latex, paint, bronze, clay, steel, dirt, and even food. His wildly original, often humorous images and objects can disorient, bewilder, and often amaze. He's possibly best known for his monumental ephemeral wax candle sculptures, which gradually burn down while they're on display, before being recast. In 2019, the National Gallery staged an exhibition of Urs's four metre high waxed candle sculpture, Francesco, a portrait of the Italian curator Francesco Bonami looking at his phone. Over several months, the constant heat of candle flame reduces the sculpture to a pile of debris. This exquisite metamorphosis is a gradual process that evokes the grains of time sliding through an hourglass and stands as an allusion to life flickering for a mere moment in history.

Welcome to Artists’ Artists, Urs. It's great to have you here.

Urs: Thank you for having me.

Jennifer: In the introduction I just read out about you, I spoke a bit about Francesco, the piece of yours which was acquired for the national collection. What kind of reaction are you hoping museum goers have when they walk past one of your giant burning candles?

Urs: I don't think much along the lines of what somebody's reaction looks like. I do like the idea that they have a reaction. If you have no reaction, that's usually not so good. You know, Francesco is an old friend of mine and whenever I see him, he stares at his phone. I make a photo of him in exactly that pose and some other people send me a photo whenever they see him doing exactly that. So that work was first made and shown in Florence where Francesco is from, outside the Uffizi, where you have all these idealised bodies like from the Renaissance. And instead of a pedestal, there is a fridge. It's also made out of wax and in the fridge, there are all these fruits and the fruits are also made from wax. Francesco is also a person that is full of mystery and surprises. And so in a way, it's like the fridge has this thing, it's a hollow pedestal with a lot of surprises inside, like all these candle portraits, somebody embodies an image that is less about them. It's more like a general image, you know, rather than a portrait.

Jennifer: Considering that you use so many different kinds of materials, and your work is incredibly inventive and playful, can you remember seeing an artwork where you suddenly thought, I've got permission to do whatever I want to do? Was there someone or something that inspired you in that way?

Urs: There are various moments of how you get in contact with art. I remember my grandparents had some kind of almost like a Taschen type series of 30 artists, like from Bruegel to Caravaggio to whatever Raphael, you know, and I remember as a kid, I liked these books because they were kind of low on the bottom of the shelf, you know, so you can reach it is where they put candy in the supermarket, where the kids see it, you know, so always think what you put on the bottom shelves of your house is that's what your kids will pick up later in life. (Laughter)

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Jennifer: We might move on now to your first choice, which is a very beautiful small painting by Charles Conder, and it's Bronte Beach, and it was made in 1888. The English born artist, Charles Condor, was part of a celebrated group of Australian Impressionists who painted landscapes around Sydney and Melbourne during the 1880s, a time when seaside leisure became a crucial part of Australian imagery. Condor visited Bronte Beach in Sydney where he created the painting we're about to discuss, and the high viewpoint and flattened perspective and sketchy figures recall the influence of both Japanese art and French Impressionism. But the quality of light and the vast expanse of sand, well, they really evoke a very Australian sense of place. Urs, could you describe this painting to our listeners?

Urs: You have a very high horizon line and you have a high vantage point, as you mentioned, which makes the sandy part of the beach almost taking up two thirds of the composition. And then you have these figures which somehow are often used in the nineteenth century on the beach for scale, like a little figure. So this kind of smallness of people. I mean, seascapes are always interesting because they automatically generate a strong composition because you have a horizon and it's active, you know, it's not like if you paint the desert and it's just like, flat, and the sky doesn't really make an image. But what intrigues me about this painting is, first of all, it's a very pretty painting. There's a whole bunch of things like how people dressed and lived and then they went to the beach. So, some kind of the beginning of leisure, people were afraid of the sea, I believe for a long time, you know, these outfits are amazing, you know, like a big, I don't know how you describe this. It's pretty full on. So that's kind of what intrigues me, together with this thing about information. If you like, how did images travel before you could share images? Like how did some artists in Australia pick up on Impressionism that happens somewhere else in the world, but somehow they always, the information always finds you and the interpretation of that. And then maybe you just see one painting or somebody brought one painting from somewhere and you have to go look at it or somebody describes it. That gives you a kind of an idea or a permission to do something along these lines and in your own way. And that's another reason why I was fascinated by this painting.

Jennifer: What can we gain from looking at paintings that were made over a hundred years ago, do you think?

Urs: We can actually look at it without having to think about it. I do like that when artworks age, that the context just falls away, you know, and then it becomes just a painting. I mean, it also, at the same time, you don't connect with an older artwork, because the context is gone. I mean, you see that, you know, when you're a kid and you get dragged around to look at old churches and you're like, yeah, great. I mean, I couldn't be bothered. And then it becomes interesting. I'm really into cathedrals and stuff like that at the moment. So that's beautiful to me now, but as a kid, I just couldn't be bothered. What I like about art is that it doesn't age, it changes, but it doesn't age. It's different than a song or a movie, even crazier because you really have so many reference points in a movie. It doesn't take long until it looks old. And the painting is a little boring to begin with. I find art boring in a pleasant way. So it never gives you really this big sensation, but it enters your brain and then it lives in there for a long time. So it's more like a plutonium, like it slowly radiates after you see it in a way.

Jennifer: So when you're walking through a gallery, you've got all these so-called masterpieces everywhere. What makes you stop? What do you think holds your attention?

Urs: I don't know. Also, it comes down to your mind. Some days your mind is open. Some days your mind—nothing goes in. So I couldn't really find a pattern in my experience. Just sometimes I like to look at the people. I like to look at the people looking at art. The best place to look at the Mona Lisa, for example, is when you stand on the side of the Mona Lisa and you look at the people looking at it.

Jennifer: There's a great story about when the Mona Lisa was stolen in the 1920s and that more people came to look at the absence of the Mona Lisa than at the Mona Lisa itself. Crowds of people looking at nothing. I love that story.

Urs: Yeah, it's just, I mean, what a weird painting, you know.

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Jennifer: The next painting we're going to discuss is Water Course from 1972 by Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra. He was a Luritja and Warlpiri man and he was born in 1932 in Kalipinya in the Northern Territory of Australia. After working as a stockman when he was around 40, Long Jack, and he was called Long Jack because he was indeed apparently a very tall man, he moved to Papunya in the Western Desert, where in 1972, so the year he painted this picture, he became a founding member of the Papunya Tula Art Co-operative. The group began by painting murals at a local school where Long Jack was actually working at the time as a groundsman, and he passed away in 2020. Could you describe to our listeners what we can see in this picture?

Urs: We see a very reduced colour palette. Just imagine a brown painting with white marks and black marks. And that's pretty much what you see. There is a little different tonality. There's some different browns here, but it appears like a monochrome thing. So, the wiggly line being black and white, and in the middle of the painting, there are these three vertical stripes. There is a round circular thing. I don't know what I look at, but I really love it, you know. I don't know much about art in Australia and its whole history, but I mean, it's so different than I grew up, but it's so striking, but like this painting, because a painting is a strange thing in itself, a painting is like an image. Like sculpture and painting both have a strange history, you know, you first have to understand an image to make an image that is mobile, that you can move it around, you know what I'm saying? So where the image is not part of the place, like, let's say, but what I love about street art is like, it's always a place that it's these things are where they are, it doesn't even matter, good, bad, or whatever, or murals versus a thing you make to be moved around and show. The context where things are made always shifts. So that's something I really have no idea with Aboriginal art on, like how else that expressed its whole pre-story, this thousands and thousands of years of story.

Jennifer: And does the fact of not really knowing about it in the sense of knowing its traditional language and its relationship to ancestral knowledge, do you find that intriguing? Would you like to find out more about that, do you think?

Urs: I could, but I'm okay with just looking at something. That's what paintings do, you know?

Jennifer: They're for looking at.

Urs: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are books that talk about all kinds of things, but I like the nonverbal. I'm okay with a nonverbal experience. It's just so beautiful, you know?

Jennifer: What do you think makes it beautiful?

Urs: I mean, it's a very good composition. You have an order and you have movement. That's what makes it so striking.

Jennifer: And you have lots of different qualities of marks as well, like you've got the dots, you've got the sort of cross hatching. It definitely evokes a sense of landscape, I guess, a hot landscape.

Urs: Yes, and you don't know what's inside and what's outside. You see, between these shapes, between the very vertical lines and the curvy ones that almost look like winding rivers, or there is always an inside and an outside, and there is this white line that divides. I don't know. It's just, I mean, mark making is probably one of the oldest arts, cultural forms of expression there is on this planet.

Jennifer: It's likely that Australian Aboriginal people were making art for 65,000 years.

Urs: This language, when that came, like, when it started to spread outside of Australia, that was a very big thing.

Jennifer: You mean the language of Aboriginal art?

Urs: Yeah, of Aboriginal art was immediately, everybody kind of understands something. They didn't understand what it meant, but as a visual thing, it was so striking. It still is. I think it's amazing.

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Jennifer: The next work that you've chosen from the national collection is by the great Sidney Nolan. And it's a very interesting work that I've actually never seen before. It's called Collage from “The disciple” and it's very early, it's from 1939. Sidney Nolan is one of the most instantly recognisable Australian artists, but this 1939 work is quite a mysterious one, and it couldn't be further from his most famous series, the Ned Kelly series. And of course, Nolan was incredibly prolific and he often worked in mediums other than painting, something that isn't perhaps widely known. And yet here we are with a Swiss artist talking about it. So Urs, what attracted you to this little gem from the national collection?

Urs: What I see is we have a found image, basically, it looks like out of a book or something, I don't know, and then in the middle there is a weird shaped geometric type cutout of another image that's on top of this head. I just think somebody was thinking when I look at this, so this is not like you make, Oh, I'm going to make a piece of art that looks like X, Y, Z. Somebody here is actually thinking about something, you know, it's like trying to work something out or has some kind of vision. And the fact that the whole face is cut out of the image of the main photo or lithograph, and then put another image there. It's almost like it makes the whole thing interesting. It opens something up and I don't know, it's just somebody was working something out, what's worked out here? I don't know, but you can see it's like, it's some of the intimate thing you do in your studio. You just try to break through to something else, another form of expressing yourself or a visual language, or I don't know. So, I just thought it was intriguing because I don't think it's really made to show. I think it's more made because you want to make something.

Jennifer: It's quite a disturbing image in a way, isn't it? Because it looks like it's using images from premodern times. It's black and white. It's very smudgy. I mean, do you think it's sinister or do you not see it like that? You see it just more as someone thinking.

Urs: Oh, you can think in a sinister way, too. I mean, it's like feelings don't often be good ones, too. You can feel shame. And you have a lot of feelings. It's like it doesn’t, I don't really know. I mean, I see there is a simple story here. You have a profile of what's most likely a bearded kind of dude from the side. And in that opening in his head, you have a woman exposing her shoulder and the second woman or whatever it is that we don't really see, we just see a fragment of it. So you can also just think that's what's on the guy's mind, you know. But I think there is a violence to cutting the dude's head out, the face out. That's intriguing, you know.

Jennifer: The date, of course, it's made around 1939. So the beginning of the Second World War. And Sidney Nolan famously went AWOL. He was conscripted and then he ran away. I wonder if they were thoughts going around his head, too. Like a sense of foreboding or a preoccupation or a longing for something. I don't know. Now I'm reading too much into it.

Urs: I don’t know, but that's good. Everybody can read into an artwork whatever they want. I love that about artworks. The artwork is just there. You bring it on. You tell me what I'm about. The next person, bring it on. Tell me what I'm about. That's what's cool about artworks. They can just be.

Jennifer: Yeah. Were you familiar with Sidney Nolan's work before?

Urs: I was always intrigued by this famous Ned Kelly character that just pops up in all kinds of circumstances. It's definitely an alter ego of an artist kind of moving through different scenarios. So it's just, you can basically show up in any painting with your alter ego. It's not like Where’s Waldo, because it's way more active than hiding. I don't really know what it does, but it's intriguing to just show up in your own work this way, like Hitchcock showed up in his movies.

Jennifer: Do you think that most artworks are a kind of self portrait of the artist?

Urs: Inevitably, yeah. It reflects the self portrait element is basically as an artist, I believe you're more of a transmitter or a medium. I don't think original creation exists. Then there are just two ways to go about it with the self portrait in, if you are more interested in your own character or in who you are, where it's really about yourself, or if you're interested in the outside and whatever that communicates, you know what I mean? So, it's either about you or it's about everything.

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Jennifer: The fourth and final work that you've chosen is by an artist who I think very much believed in the magic of art and the idea of transmission. It's Salvador Dalí’s Lobster telephone from 1936, and the Lobster telephone was actually created for the British poet, surrealist, and patron of the arts, Edward James, who was Salvador Dalí's main patron from 1936 to 1939. And amazingly, it functions. So 11 of these plaster lobster receivers were made to fit telephones at James's home in London and in Sussex, and seven of them were painted white and four were painted to look like a cooked lobster. If you could describe the work for our listeners who maybe have never seen Salvador Dalí’s Lobster telephone before.

Urs: You have a 1930s, probably a Bakelite type black telephone with a big dial, I don't know what you call the relay thing. And instead of a receiver, you have a lobster that's sitting on top of the phone. I didn't know the story about it, that it was actually functioning in somebody's house. That's hilarious. I mean, I love it.

Jennifer: Are you a Salvador Dalí fan generally, or is it just the Lobster telephone?

Urs: No, I love Salvador Dalí because he just made his own thing. I showed these images to my eight year old and we talked about it, and that's the one she has really picked. She's like, 'oh, I love that Lobster telephone', you know?

Jennifer: So Salvador Dalí obviously is a surrealist and is Surrealism generally something that has influenced your thinking?

Urs: I think Surrealism has influenced everybody's thinking.

Jennifer: In what way?

Urs: It's just like where reality starts to crack a little bit. Or the collective idea of what reality is starts to go, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense as it, you know, it's like horror movies make sense because people have fear and this and that you kind of, it's how you depict that. Horror movies are great in a way that they depict feelings, you know, I think it's great for pop culture, actually, which I love.

Jennifer: Do you think this sculpture telephone, do you think it looks dated or do you think it still looks really fresh?

Urs: Every sculpture image lives off the photography of the, you know, when you think of the Duchamp Bicycle Wheel, there is one angle which is way lower than what you see when you stand in front of it. And that creates like an icon of this sculpture. So, I don't think it looks dated because the image looks so fresh. If it was an old photo, it might be interesting to look at it. I think it doesn't look dated, I think it looks brand new to me.

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Jennifer: We've come to the end of our four choices now Urs, and this has been so brilliant having this wander through the national collection with you.

Urs: Thank you.

Jude Barlow: Today we're all gathering together on Ngunnawal country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. [In language welcome to country] I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are listening to this podcast, and I pay them my profound respects and thank them for their many outstanding contributions to the life of this nation. Thank you.

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Jenny Watson: You wouldn't give yourself the authority to make a work of art if you didn't have an ego. And you get that in various degrees, with different artists, some way out of control, some very timid, but it's there. You need it to make art.

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Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Jenny Watson is an Australian artist who's been painting for more than four decades. Born in Melbourne in 1951, her work is inspired by punk and feminism, her memories and dreams, fantasies and fears, and in particular, her love of horses. She employs collage, text, self portraiture and humour to create powerful narratives about growing up in the suburbs and making her way in the world. In 1993, she was the first female artist to represent Australia in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Jenny Watson once said, 'I've always held the position that art should somehow be about being human and reflecting the human condition'. Jenny, welcome to Artists’ Artists.

Jenny Watson: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Jennifer: It's wonderful to have you here. The National Gallery of Australia has a large group of your prints, paintings, and drawings in its collection. As a younger artist, what did it mean at that point for your work to be acquired for the national collection?

Jenny: It meant a lot. I think the first one was purchased by James Mollison at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, so that would have made it early 80s.

Jennifer: What was the painting that was bought?

Jenny: That was called Swan Me, and it was a variation on a number of works I've done over the years where I'm morphed into something else, either a horse or a dog or an older woman on a walking frame. This was a beautiful sideways view of the swan but the head was sort of about me.

Jennifer: Could you tell us a little bit about the inspirations of your painting?

Jenny: Well, people are often surprised to hear that I work on a large trestle table that is freestanding, which means I can walk around the work as I'm doing it. Not unlike Pollock, one of my favourite artists. I can get into the painting and look at it from four sides and throw pigment if I feel like it and throw water if I feel like it. It's actually much more like action painting than people would imagine. It's certainly not easel painting. And then when I finish the work on the trestle table, where I'm working downstairs in my house, then I carry it upstairs and put it on a big piece of cardboard with two bulldog clips. And that transformation of having been made flat and then coming up so that you see it as an easel painting, it's quite magical, because there's a slight distortion that changes it a bit. I also get to look at it under lights, so I'm seeing it as someone will see it in their house. The looking at is quite different to the process. I know some artists love to have a work static, stable, on a big easel, and it's not touched until it's going to a gallery, but I really like the robustness of the way I do it.

Jennifer: Do you know what a painting will be when you start painting it or does it become something else in the making?

Jenny: It does become something else in the making and I often say that when I read about writers, they say that characters in a book or a play take on a life of their own. And that happens with my images as well. I have a pretty clear idea of when I start, but the proportions, the additions, the colours, whether it's paint or whether it's pigment, whether it's going to be very free form, or have a lot of detail, that happens in the making.

Jennifer: So Jenny, you were very much part of the music scene in St Kilda in the 1970s and 80s. Is music still important to you? Do you listen to music when you're painting?

Jenny: No, I like the studio quiet and it's open air and I can look out and see horses grazing and birds. And the weather, because it's the lower level of the split level house in Queensland, so you're very aware of outside.

Jennifer: Horses have been very important to you throughout your career. You've painted many paintings of horses. What is it about horses that you keep returning to?

Jenny: I was one of those lucky girls that desperately wanted a pony when I was maybe 12, and my father bought me one. And then we moved back to the city when I was a teenager. Sort of didn't do any horse things until I was 30. And then at age 30 went out and bought a horse to revive that interest. And also because I had decided that I wasn't going to spend my life sitting around waiting to sell paintings. I find that a lot of artists are very depressed by spare time when they're not actually working. So, I knew I needed something else, and that was, went back to my first love, horses.

Jennifer: So when you paint horses, do you see them as symbols of something or is it just because you love horses?

Jenny: No, I think they are symbols. I think that whole teenage girl thing with horses, that's a kind of freedom. When I was 13, my freedoms were The Beatles and my horse, you know, you could just ride off to anywhere with no questions asked. Not a dissimilar feeling to playing music really loud in your bedroom. And they were both symbols of rebellion and it was rebellion because my parents were very conservative and I had to rebel somehow.

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Jennifer: So now if we move on to the first of your choices from the collection at the National Gallery, and it's Blue poles, which is one of the most famous paintings in Australia that was created in 1951 by the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, who lived from 1912 to 1956. And it was acquired by the gallery in 1973 at almost five metres wide and two metres high, it's a really wildly energetic abstract work made from enamel and aluminium paint with glass on canvas. And it's an image of dark blue poles against a dark background, which is sort of animated with swirling red and yellow white lines. So, what was it about this painting that made you select it as one of your inspirations?

Jenny: People are often surprised to find that Pollock is one of my favourite artists, and I've read probably everything you can read on him, and I went to see the retrospective at MoMA about 20 years ago, and for me what's important is not only the sort of dancing around as he painted, but the fact that he drank a lot for long periods of time. So for him, painting was connected with a kind of alcoholic energy. If he was drinking, he wasn't painting. If he was painting, he wasn't drinking. But it is the flip side of that energy, which I find fascinating, when their lives seem to be quite chaotic, but the order is in the fabulous work they make.

Jennifer: And what is it in particular about Blue poles that you admire?

Jenny: I just think that's a fabulous painting for the time. I was very young when it was purchased by Canberra. So it was in all the newspapers and it was a big event with everyone having an opinion. And I happen to know that Pollock worked in a very small room. In that retrospective at MoMA, they had paid for his studio at the Springs to be recreated. So within MoMA, they built a timber room about no bigger than 12 by 10. It was no bigger than a room that I was working in. He stretched the works to the very corners, the entire size of the floor, and then danced around painting. And that was a revelation.

Jennifer: And have you ever been tempted to make an abstract painting?

Jenny: No, I have to have an image there to make my meaning.

Jennifer: There's an argument that could say that Blue poles isn't an abstract painting. Even its title, Blue poles, implies that there's something concrete there. Do you see it as an abstract painting?

Jenny: Yeah. Well, because I teach, I'm quite often having to talk about the process of how people make paintings. And for Pollock, the physical moving around, the almost, that was it, you know, to get away from easel painting. His ego was incredible, but fantastic. A critic said, you should go to Paris. And he said, 'let Paris come to me.'

And I actually like that ego because you wouldn't give yourself the authority to make a work of art if you didn't have it. An ego. The ultimate sort of, this is me, and this is important to me, and this is what I do. And you get that in various degrees. With different artists, some way out of control, some very timid, but it's there, you need it to make art.

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Jennifer: Your second choice from the national collection couldn't really be more different to Blue poles. It's Grey grid from 1974 by the Australian artist Robert Jacks who lived from 1943 to 2014. And it's really small, it's only 66 by 50 centimetres and it's a very minimal screen print of a very quiet grey grid. Why this choice?

Jenny: I love Robert Jacks’s work and he was one of the first professional artists I met when I was in my mid twenties on my first trip to New York. He had been living in New York for some time, maybe 10 years. So a friendship was born.

Jennifer: So what does this screen print Grey grid evoke for you?

Jenny: The minimal elegance of Robert Jacks’s work at the time, because he was very influenced by being in New York. He knew Brice Marden, he was experimenting with wax, he got around to see all the shows in all the galleries, and minimalism was, you know, that was a big thing. So was conceptualism in the mid 70s. There actually wasn't that much figurative art you could see. I thought minimalism was the thing and I thought Robert Jacks was doing it really well.

Jennifer: Even though you were obviously exploring a figurative language, did that kind of minimalism impact on your visual vocabulary?

Jenny: Funny you should ask that. When I got back from that trip, which was mid 1976, I showed four works on paper at Power Street Gallery. And you could sort of say that they summed up what I was interested in. Each one was a hyper realistic watercolour and Derwent pencil of a cat's head. And then I put a square of colour over the top of it. And I only did four, but it was in a way trying to use that, minimal, formal input.

Jennifer: I mean, it's interesting to think that in 1968, he'd participated in The Field Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road in Melbourne. That was really the exhibition that sort of launched colour field abstraction in Australia. So he was already doing quite well.

Jenny: I was lucky enough to see the Field as a 17 year old high school student.

Jennifer: Did that have an impact on you?

Jenny: It sort of gave me the idea that you could live a life as a professional artist, that obviously these people were making big, serious, important paintings, and that maybe that was all they did, and that that was a possibility for life. Because my brother and I, we had a really nice suburban upbringing, with a big family, but we hated the suburbs, and we knew that life was elsewhere. And we used to call the suburban people sleepwalkers (laughter). Yeah, I was an absolute candidate to get into some sort of art scene and go overseas.

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Jennifer: So your third choice today is a painting by the Australian artist Geoffrey Smart, who lived from 1921 to 2013. And it's from 1951 and it's titled Playground (children playing). It's quite a lonely image in a way, despite the fact that it depicts children playing. You know, one is swinging from bars, there's another in the distance standing beneath a slide. But there's this rather forbidding wall. What is it about this painting that you've chosen?

Jenny: I read an autobiography of Geoffrey Smart, and I really respected the fact that he worked as a cook on a ship to get to Europe and then stayed. So I always respected that and I always loved the work, and I loved that work in particular. I'll say again that in the early to mid 70s, there wasn't that much figurative work around that was of interest to me. The focus was on large colour field painting, art and conceptual. The only figurative work we did was life drawing. So it was, yeah, I thought it was hard to see great figurative work, and I think Geoffrey Smart is one of those people.

Jennifer: What is it about this painting that you admire?

Jenny: It's just a, you could say an innocent scene of childhood and an incidental scene. Probably something he saw as he was walking past a playground. And in my work there's a lot of just incidental things. A horse in a rug in winter, grazing. They're not heroic subjects, you know, they're just things that are there. As an artist you see, and sometimes it's quite filmic. I would imagine walking past a playground, it would be quite a filmic sort of experience.

Jennifer: It's really sort of honouring the everyday, isn't it?

Jenny: Yeah, that's right. The beauty of everyday life.

Jennifer: And do you see something ominous at all in this painting with that big wall, or do you see it as quite a simple scene?

Jenny: There is something ominous about some of Geoffrey Smart's work. You could say maybe it's a tiny bit like some of de Chirico, a sort of Italian sensibility of shadows and, but no, not, not that one in particular, no.

Jennifer: The sort of psychological element of a painting, is something that you think about when you're making your own work?

Jenny: Yes. There's a painting I did called He'll Be My Mirror, and I'm grooming a horse, but as I'm looking into the side of the horse, I'm seeing my image. He's so shiny, it's as though I'm looking in a mirror. And that really didn't happen, but the psychological element of it being a possibility, and that a lot of people feel that their animals are a sort of mirror of their life, in that they share life and they have an animal till it dies. Yeah, the psychological aspects are quite important to me.

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Jennifer: Your fourth and final choice today is a black and white gelatin silver photograph titled Artist’s outing Sydney Harbour, from 1969. And it's by the Australian artist Hal Missingham, who lived from 1906 to 1994. It's a shot of a woman from behind. We don't see her face but the wind has lifted her short skirt and we see her bare legs and it's either her bathers or her underpants, and beside her is a man's leg in striped trousers so it's quite an intimate image. So, what was it about this photograph that caught your attention?

Jenny: I really like looking at things from the back. And I think probably what happened with that photo is that he had his camera and he was out for the day taking photos and the wind just lifted that skirt up and in a split second he took the photo. So there's just something lovely about it that says a lot about a windy day in Sydney. It's slightly erotic and people are going out for a picnic or something. There's just something wonderful about it.

Jennifer: What is it about looking at things from behind that engages your attention?

Jenny: Well, the subject is not engaging. To me, that's what's interesting because traditional portraits is the ultimate experience of engagement. You've got people looking at each other in the eyes. It's a very one to one situation. I like the fact that from the back, you don't have that engagement. You're just seeing something in a very passive way, I think you could say. And you get, you know, the beauty of the shape is more evident if there's not an expression.

Jennifer: The title, Artist’s outing Sydney Harbour, also implies that these people are maybe his friends, they're part of a group. So it's not so much about voyeurism, it's about ‘this is a bunch of us’.

Jenny: Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer: Is photography something that you've done at all, Jenny? Do photographs inspire your work?

Jenny: In the 70s, my short few years of super realist paintings were done from source photographs, but then I gridded them up to get it a blocking in, and then I painted fairly freely with a lot of minute detail that wasn't in the photograph. I was just making up highlights and things like that. I mean the one time I had a class where you could hear a pin drop was when I was describing painting a super realistic eye and I was saying that, the white of an eye is not white, it's pale blue or pale green, there's a bit of yellow, it's bloodshot. Once you zero into something to that extent, it's quite different to what you think.

Jennifer: Jenny, you've chosen works from the 50s, 60s and 70s and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the relevance of the art of the past to the present.

Jenny: Well, I think a good work of art is always as fresh as it was first made. But for me, being a student in the early 70s, I couldn't have ended up doing the work I did without conceptual art happening, because that was a fantastic time where art didn't have to be on walls. It could be on floors, it could be outside, it could be video. I mean, the whole thing was just upended. And that allowed me to start working with text in the late 70s. The idea of the infusion of text, whether it was just something that said an original oil painting or whether it was highly emotional text. That could be done because conceptual art had broken down the barriers of what a painting might be. And something I still ask myself with every painting is, what is a painting? Can I put this huge layer of pigment on? Can I stick on this little piece of image I got out of the newspaper? Does it have to be canvas on a wooden stretcher? No. Does it have to be domestic size? No. Can it have other things stuck on it? Yes. It's a really interesting philosophical question as to what is a painting. I always call my work post conceptual painting. It wouldn't have happened without conceptual art happening.

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Jennifer: Oh, it's been great Jenny, talking with you. Thank you so much.

Jenny: Oh, thank you. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Jude Barlow: Today we're all gathering together on Ngunnawal country on which the National Gallery of Australia stands. [In language welcome to country] I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you are listening to this podcast, and I pay them my profound respects and thank them for their many outstanding contributions to the life of this nation. Thank you. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this recording may contain references to deceased people. Where possible, permission has been sought to include their names.

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Ben Quilty: I really think of those big museums as churches to visual language, they're a place for us to worship the most esoteric and wildly wonderful human pursuits.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Born in Warrang, Sydney, in 1973, Ben Quilty lives and works in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. He emerged in the early 2000s with a breakthrough series of 14 paintings of his beloved 1972 Holden Torana. Wildly gestural, the car emerges like a personality in its own right. The series is something of a play on words. An auto portrait is, of course, a self portrait. Working across drawing, printmaking, sculpture and installation, Ben's approach is at once personal, political and cultural. The National Gallery of Australia has been collecting his work since 2007. Ben joins us from his busy studio, so you may hear some bumps and bangs throughout. Ben, welcome to Artists’ Artists.

Ben Quilty: Thank you so much for the very generous introduction, Jen.

Jennifer: I'd love to hear how you became an artist?

Ben: I often think about that. I think I probably have never stopped being an artist. My mum was adamant the three of her sons were given access to art materials like most kids are. We're lucky enough to have parents who see the benefits of giving kids that creative output before they can speak or communicate in other ways, they’re drawing. And I just kept doing it. I didn't stop. I decided I'd go to art school for various reasons. I was feeling that I was probably outside of the normal parameters of what society expected. I wasn't fitting in very well. I was very rebellious. I went to a Catholic school and it's quite well known, I think, that I had a pretty awful time there. A very, very violent year 7, when I was 12 years old, from one particular brother who was a real sadist. And I'm only now starting to make works about that period of my life. But I think that the silver lining from that very violent first year of high school was that I had a total disrespect for authority by the time I was 16, 17. And when the careers advisor asked me what I was going to do, the question in my head was what do I want to do? And all I really wanted to do was continue to make art. But then to go off to art school at Sydney Uni was just a wonderland.

Jennifer: Suddenly you had a sense of possibility about what you could make or what you could do.

Ben: Yeah, I think that's right. And probably more than that, thought this is more than just a hobby. This could be a philosophical pursuit, a new way of thinking and engaging with the world. And it was a very exciting period for me. Of course, at the end of it, I was totally unemployable and I was a builder's labourer for four years straight out of art school, until I thought I should go and study again. And I went back to university and did a second undergraduate degree in communications and digital media.

Jennifer: So what happened after you graduated from that?

Ben: Halfway through that I got work as a TV/film editor. And I ended up working in news at Channel 7 for some years, and finished the degree while I was working full time as an editor. It was a very creative, very exciting place to work, very dynamic. Very intense and very stressful. And I had one of my first panic attacks during that period of my life, because the stress of cutting a last minute story is like nothing else that you, your job was literally on the line. Your career is on the line if you don't get that story to air. It was very intense, but a great space to work with other creative people. And a year or two after that, I'd been entering the Brett Whiteley's travelling art scholarship. It was my fourth entry. I was 28 years old. I won the Whiteley scholarship. Then I left and went to Paris and I never went back to work.

Jennifer: Then you are up and running. When you go and visit a museum or a gallery, what do you think you're looking for when you go there? Is it to discover new remarkable works of art, or is it to visit old friends?

Ben: Great question, Jen. I think it's both. In the NGA, I don't think there'd ever have been a time where I haven't walked past Blue Poles, for example, and it's always up. There's just such a sense of wonderment around that work and completely mind blowingly ambitious to walk away from and come back and make work in response to. And in a sense, the Indigenous collection at the National Gallery is similar for me. It changes so often. Recently I was there and saw a massive Tony Albert work, and I hadn't seen those works on that scale and it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. So I really think of those big museums as churches to visual language. They're a place for us to worship the most esoteric and wildly wonderful human pursuits. So the architecture plays a big role in it as well, and the way that NGA is really making those spaces. The first time I walked into the bottom space at the back, it absolutely took my breath away. And to be honest, I know there's a Koons in there, but I can't remember most of the works. I was just so blown away by the magnificence of this space. I'm an atheist. For me, that's as close as I come to really having a sense of not only my own spirituality, but that shared sense of human spirituality, that they're my favourite spaces.

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Jennifer: The first work you've chosen from the national collection is an extraordinary painting, Yam awely from 1995 by Emily Kam Kngwarray. She's one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century. A senior Anmatyerr woman and a founding member of the Utopia Women's Batik group. Kngwarray, who was born in 1910, didn't really begin making art until she was in her 70s, and then it was as if the paintings just poured from her. Yam awely is a swirling, vibrant work with overlapping lines of red, yellows and oranges on a black background. It's made with synthetic polymer paint on canvas and it's enormous, almost five metres long. Could you describe in greater depth what we're looking at?

Ben: It's a five metre monster of a painting made by a person in their 80s who'd only been painting for five years and made something that is completely and mesmerizingly unique. And I think that's why it really is my favourite work. Emily is one of my very favourite artists, if not my favourite artist, but this thing is just, it has so much depth and yet it's flat. It's two dimensional. It's made with acrylic, which I find an impossibly difficult medium to use to give such lustre, which she has pulled off. You feel like you want to fall into it. You want to climb through it. And at the heart of it, it just feels so unbelievably joyous. It's hard to explain. It's so beautiful. We all should go and see it. Emily's show recently at the NGA blew me away. Her first solo show I'd seen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales many, many years before, equally blew me away. For me, it was very foundational. At art school, not once were we taught about Indigenous painting. And I don't think there are many in the nineties who did. So then to see a show like that and think, yeah, what have I been taught? I've been taught about the Western canon and that we're right and everyone else is wrong. And yet this 80 year old can start painting and within five years, make that, and shift her direction and shift her course and completely rearrange and reorder and re-imagine her visual language year after year after year, for the short eight years that she made work. Well, there's something there that we need to understand and I'm still striving to find how human creative process works, that an elderly person like that can make those works. Now, at the time that first show came out, and at the time Emily made this painting, I'd never been properly to remote communities and spent time with any Indigenous artists. I mean, to start to slowly now having lived on the planet for 51 years, to spend time with people and to start to understand what that connection to country actually means. And in that connection, that 60,000 year old connection, there's hints at how a woman of Emily's age could make a work that mesmerizingly brilliant.

And I recently had a conversation with a fabulous young painter, Georgia Spain, and we talked about how, for us, what are we making work about? What is the goal for us? And for me, I think, and for most great artists of my community that I respect and look up to, we are trying to work out who we are. We're trying to find out how we fit into the world.

Because I've had 160 years of genetic familial history as an Australian, and before that completely unknowable Irish descendancy, which I know nothing about, and Emily or Tony Albert or Noŋgirrŋa Marawili or Sylvia Ken or Nyunmiti Burton or any of these extraordinary artists have had a familial history and a cultural lineage and knowledge that goes back 60,000 years and there it is. That's where it sits and is unknowable and exciting and really, for me, the greatest privilege of living here, is them and those works and a painting like that not only inspires me, it's earth shatteringly humbling in a sense to know, yeah, you can work hard, but you haven't even got through that brittle layer into the universal mass of what 60,000 years of cultural knowledge can give to someone.

Jennifer: Ben, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the different ways a painting like this can be read.

Ben: It is still a part of the reading of remote Indigenous painting that is weaponized into the culture wars that we shouldn't even consider these paintings because they're not fitting into this canon and that's such bullshit, we just don't understand the work. But for Emily in those first times that I stood in front of her paintings, for me, a great painting is a great painting. There is nothing more to be said. The yam dreaming, the stories that us white people have forced out of her to explain her work. For me, they're very much secondary to just, the most of this all reading of looking at the work, standing in front of it and thinking one human being let this out of her for us all to see. I just think that a work like this one that we're speaking about speaks directly to an incredible strength. A cultural strength, a flamboyancy as well. I think she was a very quiet, humble human being but under her skin, this unbelievable flamboyant strength of cultural knowledge. And for me, it just speaks to the direct mark making that is showing us that inside her head, there's a universe.

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Jennifer: The second painting you've chosen is also a landscape, a small, beautiful, very delicate painting on cardboard called Evening Landscape from 1925 by the wonderful Australian artist Clarice Beckett, born in 1887. Very sadly she died at the age of only 48 and her work really disappeared for about 40 years until she was rediscovered by a curator who'd been alerted by Beckett's sister about some paintings stored in Benalla and this is one of them. Could you describe this painting to us?

Ben: Yeah, like Clarice's works, it's a very moody, quite filmic sort of a work of dusk, of the sun setting, hazy sky, the sun's below the horizon. You can feel the temperature in her work, you can feel the air with the most simple, and I think that's why I'm so drawn to her work and I have been for many years. It takes me a lot of gesture in terms of how I push coloured mud around the thing with a bristly brush, whereas Clarice, it just feels like such an economy. And there's an extraordinary poeticism to that, I think, with such simple mark making she just gave us so much sensation. I first saw her work, Kylie and I were living in Melbourne, and I'd never heard of Clarice, but we lived in Elwood near the bay. Back then it was very cheap and I had a studio on St Kilda road and we found Clarice and I was obsessed, absolutely obsessed. I remember at Drysdale selling at auction back then for 800,000 dollars and thinking that Clarice Beckett's a hundredth of the cost, what's going on with the world? And it really is as you said because she'd been overlooked and I've become intrigued with her. To be honest she's my favourite character in the play of Australian art, there's so much mythologising about how she was overlooked and she was poorly treated and mistreated by her father particularly. She was very much a part of the avant garde in Melbourne and hugely celebrated by her peers. The mythologies often point to these terrible reviews that she received from male reviewers. It's what happened after she died. It's the most intriguing, the way history did just wipe her out. But if she lived longer through into the 60s, 70s, I think she would have not been so overlooked. And look, speaking from my own personal experience, she had the unbelievable adrenaline rush of being able to paint like this and hang out with a group of crazy Melbourne avant garde people. It was just the way history treated her that I think is so telling about the way this society has worked for so long, that such a great painter was just relegated to a shed and now found this little box, these exquisite little paintings on board. And lucky us, we get to keep finding more and more about Clarice.

Jennifer: Her work really is a testament to this idea that art history is a work in progress, really. It's not carved in stone. It's constantly being rewritten and we're looking at the exclusions of the past and bringing them into the story, which I think is very heartening.

Ben: Absolutely.

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Jennifer: Your third selection is the oldest painting you've chosen. It's Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point, and it was painted in 1834 by John Glover. He was born in England and, interestingly, he chose to migrate to Australia when he was 64. It portrays a looming Mount Wellington, the broad expanse of the River Derwent, and a group of Aboriginal people dancing, fishing and swimming. You can see hints of the British colony, only very faintly in the distance. What was it about this painting that caught your eye?

Ben: Glover's taken my eye for many years. I've been intrigued with his work. In fact, I studied John Glover in year 12, HSC level art, and I was intrigued then. He made this work after the Black Lion had been pushed to Hobart. He made this work after the Indigenous people were pushed off their lands in family groups into Hobart. The historical reading, I think, is that he thought that was probably a good idea. They were being slaughtered on the lands, that they would be safer in Hobart. But within a year, they're all taken to the island where they were all decimated by disease. So, Glover made these paintings of Indigenous people and the full title of this painting, Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point, and then the inscription following that is these natives danced and bathed at the artist's request. The females are very expert in the water. The heels of one woman are perceptible above the water. I can't help but read romantic yearning for a past time in the way he's made a work like this, and there's several of them, that the Indigenous people had been swept out of Hobart and put onto a, basically a prison island years before he made this painting. I'm intrigued by the histories, and so the fact that he made these paintings, I just think they're a treasure. They're an absolute treasure for the memory of people who were absolutely decimated by the British and by us. So it's a very moving, very spectacular and magnificently painted, beautiful thing with this intriguing history, and many of his contemporaries would paint similar landscapes, but never refer to any human existence in the landscape.The landscape was devoid of these people. I read The Secret River some years ago. Glover planted the seed and then Secret River really made me adamant that from now on I couldn't, in good faith, make works in or about the Australian landscape without at the very least acknowledging the sadness, I don't want to sound too pessimistic, I don't want to add fuel to any cultural war fire, but the sadness that comes with the knowledge that those voices are gone and have struggled to survive. But then you go and see what Emily does or Tony Albert and they have more than survived, they've thrived in another form.

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Jennifer: Your final selection is the only painting that isn't about the Australian landscape, it's about an American landscape. It's a monumental work, A Bigger Grand Canyon by the British artist David Hockney, who was born in 1937. It was painted in 1998 and comprises 60 small canvases put together to make the whole. It's a vividly technicolour work of Powell Point on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Can you walk us through why you chose this painting?

Ben: I think it was acquired in ‘99. I went down with mum and dad to see it. I would have been a still full time builder's labourer then, maybe at uni or working in television, but I was so excited to see this painting. Many, many years before I was in primary school and dad worked with a man named Phil and I remember one night dad saying Phil Hockney's brother is an artist in England, and it was David Hockney. And I was young but I knew David Hockney was a pretty serious figure in the art world of England and the world even back then. Phil had had David over to their place, which was near us, and Phil had a swimming pool, which was empty at the time, and apparently the myth is that David painted the bottom of the swimming pool with stripes and swirls, which is an intriguing story, lost now to the development of northwestern Sydney. I'm a huge fan. There's such a raw honesty to his work, which I'm very drawn to. There's also a beautiful facility with the craft of drawing that underpins such great paintings. And I remember I had a show in London at the Saatchi Gallery after winning a prize in Singapore. And I went for the first time to see a Hockney commercial exhibition. And they are the digital prints, which the NGA has in their collection. And I've messed around with an iPad, having studied communication and worked in TV. And I remember one afternoon sitting at my mum and dad's trying and trying and trying and then put it aside and said, this is too hard, it'll never work. And at that same point, Mr. Hockney was clearly invested in mastering it. And he absolutely mastered the drawing tools, and made these big digital prints, which absolutely blew my hair off. My tiny mind almost fell out. I was so mesmerised by those works, but he's just such a fastidious skill of being able to create and to keep re-imagining his practice to use video screens of the, I'm sure you've seen those snow covered roads, him driving down the road with the video cameras filming the entire landscape. The collage is many years before, thousands of photographs stuck together to make these works. For me, the most poignant thing about all of his work is that there is this brilliant underpinning of fabulous drawing ability, and it's the language that the poetry falls around, I think.

Jennifer: They've got good bones.

Ben: They have great bones, and this one has elephant sized bones. (Laughter) I mean, it's a huge work, seven and a half metres long, and mesmerizingly exciting.

Jennifer: I mean, one of the remarkable aspects of this painting is that it's a recognizable landscape. It's recognizably the Grand Canyon, but the colours he's chosen, you know, these incredibly vivid scarlets, greens, it's almost like a very hallucinatory cartoon. What are your thoughts on his use of colour here?

Ben: It's a really good point and often I think the best art skates along that knife edge of kitsch. And this is skating right on the sharpest point of the sharpest knife and it falls beautifully into fine art. But you're right, there's colours in there that shouldn't exist in the world, but he's such a master colourist that there's orange and purple are on beautifully dichotomous opposite sides of the colour wheel, and if you look through that painting there are subtle tones of orange and purple all the way through and then this green just pinging off the foreground. Most of the criticism for this work and because it made worldwide news that the NGA would spend 4.6 million dollars on it, was criticisms about his use of colour, which is my favourite part of it. It's the bravest part of it. The stupendously mad way to make a landscape painting. I remember him saying, why the Grand Canyon? He said, 'it's the biggest landscape you can see that has an edge', which is such a great way of looking at it. The edge can come back up and push the landscape down into the bottom of the canvas. And who doesn't love a big painting?

Jennifer: I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, looking at this painting? It's 26 years old, but it looks as fresh as if it was made, you know, yesterday. And I was just thinking about all of these paintings you've chosen, they're all different ways of looking at, at inhabiting, at experiencing a landscape. I mean, Glover was made in the 1830s. This was made in 1998. Do they all still feel very, all of these paintings, very contemporary to you?

Ben: Absolutely. I think that's a funny thing about art school. The theory department was reticent to respect really anything after the modernist period that was seen as not contemporary. But Clarice, for example, or John Glover, at the time they made those works, were mavericks, were ahead of the game. Were often put down by the establishment, criticised by the critics. I think once you have a creative process and a creative practice, you won't stop because of those criticisms. And none of them did.

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Jennifer: This has been an amazing conversation, incredibly enriching and illuminating. Thank you so much.

Ben: It's an absolute pleasure, Jen.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series, I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Today I'm talking with Julie Rapp, an Australian artist who was raised in the Yugambeh region of Queensland on the Gold Coast. From the mid 1970s, Julie's involvement with body art and performance expanded into photography, painting, sculpture, and video in her ongoing project, exploring representations of the body. She has 15 works in the national collection, including Persona and shadow: puberty, which is currently on display in the National Gallery Touring Exhibition. Know My Name: Australian Women Artists. Julie, thank you so much for joining me.

Julie Rrap: My pleasure.

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Jennifer: The first work you've chosen is by the Australian First Nations artist, Tracey Moffat, who was born in 1960 in Meanjin, Brisbane. First Jobs Pineapple Cannery 1978 was created in 2008 from archival pigments on rice paper with gel medium and depicts rows of workers in green and pink uniforms at a pineapple cannery.

When did you first come across Tracey Moffat's work generally, and why did you choose this work specifically?

Julie: Well, I've known Tracey's work probably from her first... exhibitions. And I've known her since that time and I regard her as a good mate. But I decided on this one because I thought it was quite a quirky group of work she did, this first jobs idea. And I guess we all can respond to that. We've all had a first job, which was usually not the job we've ended up with. Sometimes I try to send myself to sleep by going through all the jobs that I've done. So I'd be just particularly related, but more significantly, that particular work I chose from was the one in the cannery because I actually worked in that cannery.

Jennifer: Oh, amazing. You're not in the photo, are you?

Julie: No, this was when I was going to university. That cannery sticks in my memory because... It was piecework, meaning there was no union attached to that cannery. So it was a pretty kind of, Dickensian scene, if you like, because you just have to show up and hope you got some work. And you can imagine many more people more desperate than I was because I was a student. But the incredible thing about that cannery was there was just no health and safety whatsoever. And I remember when I first went there, nobody tells you much, but I just followed everybody else. And they were all putting. It's kind of pink cream on their hands and on their arms, and then you could put gloves on, and I'm like, I just copied everybody else. And then when I got into the, was put on the line for the pineapple shooting down, and our job was to dig all the kind of slightly bad bits out of the pineapple, which had been skinned obviously at that point, and that fell into a trough. And then the rest went off and were cut into slices or pieces or whatever.

But two things came out of that was one, I realised what the cream was because some of the women in the line who'd worked there for a long time basically had open weeping sores from the acid from the pineapple. So that was the first sort of horror. And the second was that the bits that we dug out of the pineapple, which were slightly bad, became pineapple juice.

Jennifer: Oh no, I'm never, I'm never drinking it again.

Julie: Anyway, it's like just a funny story connected to the fact of that cannery. When I look at those rows of women, I thought, that's a true thing. You know, that is what it was like. And there were other sections of it where we got hauled off to do other tasks. But that particular photo depicts all the women in the rows.

It's not necessarily my favourite image of hers or even that series, but, you know, she's a really, really important Indigenous artist. I know that her work's quite broad in a way, and that's what I like about it. That work is not about being Indigenous, that's just, like any human being, what are your first jobs?

I, I love her work because it's got that kind of, it's got lots of depth, it can be about many different things, and many different stories, but yeah, I chose that one just purely because it's just amusing that it happened to be one of my early jobs.

Jennifer: I'd love to hear a bit more about your thoughts more generally about Tracy Moffat's work. I mean, she's obviously a very important Australian artist. She's worked across various media over the last few decades, she's represented Australia in the Venice Biennale. What do you see as her sort of importance?

Julie: Well, I think in some ways her importance grows because there probably weren't a lot of Indigenous artists exhibiting in a contemporary sense, full stop, when she started. And she's obviously an urban Indigenous artist, unlike artists working within their kind of traditional context on land. And at that point in time, when I started working, we weren't seeing that kind of work either. That sort of came later. I was first drawn to, and probably the work she's now still most famous for, is a work from a series called Something More from 1989.

So, that's a very famous series. And the interesting thing about photography, being a photographer, or some of my work, not all of my work's photography, but artists work with series, but interestingly enough, if you ask many people about Something More, they probably could remember that image and not necessarily the others, which is always fascinating to me because particularly with Tracey's work, there's always a kind of narrative element to it. There's a kind of story unfolding. And the photos are very staged in the same way and could easily be stills from a film. And so I think she would think that herself, that in a way they all operate like that, as kind of stills from a potential film. But it certainly suggests the narrative form. So yeah, that's probably perhaps the first work of hers or first series of works that I was most aware of.

But yeah, she's a really important Australian artist and as I said earlier, in some ways her importance grows because of understanding and emphasis on Indigenous art generally in Australia. And she was really at the forefront of all of that. But I think it's broader than that. I think she touches upon the human condition that means we all can relate to that, regardless of whether we're Indigenous or not. So yeah, she's a really, really important artist.

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Jennifer: Another artist who works with photography is the Australian artist Sol Wiener, who was born in 1961. And for your second choice, you've chosen his photograph, Mother and Daughter, which was created in 1985. And it's quite an eerie photograph. It's black and white, it's just under half a metre tall. And even though it just says mother and daughter in the title, there are actually three women in the composition. What is it about this artwork that drew you to it?

Julie: You know, it was interesting when I was asked to look through the collection because there's plenty of works I could have chosen that I love as well. I don't know Sol Wiener’s work at all, I've never heard of him. I still haven't heard of him, except now I have, because I found it in the collection.

I intentionally haven't looked up anything because I just felt I wanted to choose something that I responded to very naturally and viscerally without having any background, very different to Tracey whose work I know intimately and I've seen a lot of. I don't even know if Sol Wiener is still practising as a photographer.

I have no idea because that photo is from 1985 so quite a long time ago now. It's an interesting one to choose. It reminded me, you know, of other kinds of practices in its kind of strange, surreal, uncanny quality. As you said, it's called Mother and Daughter, but there's three figures. So it's quite mysterious and there's some of the other photos from that series, also black and white, were also very surreal. And he obviously might've done a bit of double exposure or whatever, I don't know. It has that kind of slightly Diane Arbus sort of quality and I'm sort of a little bit intrigued to know more about him, which I guess one of the things about looking into a collection is that it whets your appetite to find out more, and it's also nice to think that an image lives outside its time, and even whether that photographer or artist is even working anymore, or frankly is even still alive.

And I like the fact that an image can jump out of a massive images like that and stay with you. There's a kind of narrative intention there, completely different to how I work. I'm not at all interested in narrative in my own practice, but many photographers are interested in it because photography, as soon as you have a series, you have a kind of narrative, and I guess his work certainly has that, because as I say, there was another really strange one of he and his father. Photography's kind of a, it tells the truth and it also lies at the same time, which is why it's a very intriguing medium. Just through lighting and maybe a little bit of manipulation with double exposure or whatever, he's created a sort of very uncanny image. Because it's a photograph we want to make it sit in the real, but in actual fact, it's surreal.

Jennifer: Is surrealism something that has influenced your own practice?

Julie: Well, people often write about my practice in that context. And interestingly, I'm working with the writer Drusilla Modjeska at the moment, who's writing a new book about Claude Cahun and a number of other Surrealist women artists from the past. We've been able to find lots of images of mine that in a way would work within that Surrealist register if you like. I can't be a Surrealist because it's a movement from many moons ago. But I guess photography, you know, you thought about someone like Magritte for example you would go, he'd be a photographer now because photography lends itself to those illusions. So it does interest me. I think, as I say, photography broadly probably can work with that sort of language of surrealism quite easily.

Jennifer: I mean it's interesting that this work was made in 1985. And sometimes works that are made in a very specific time are very much of their time, and other works transcend their time and become timeless. Do you think that this work is dated or do you think it does have a timeless quality to it?

Julie: I don't think it's, I'd say dated because you could probably have a young photographer working in that mode today. Black and white. I teach and run an art school and we have a massive analogue darkroom that students love using. So, old techniques don't go away. So that, that part of it always can be made fresh as it were. But I guess the subject matter is pretty,universal. I wouldn't regard it as documentary photography. Oh, it's just, it's recording people in that way, but it's obviously trying to bring in, as we said, this kind of surrealist edge.

So it does belong in a time, I think, of thinking in terms of photography, of not just using photography as the truth speaking medium. But on the other hand, because I think of the subject matter, it's fairly timeless.

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Jennifer: For the next work that you've chosen, we're moving from photography to a really extraordinary abstract painting by the Australian Pintupi artist, Yukultji Napangati, who was born in 1969 in Lake Mackay in the Northern Territory, Western Australia. And her painting, Untitled, was created in 2006, and it's a large square work made out of synthetic polymer paint on canvas. And it's intricate, shimmering tones of yellow and orange, a beautifully hypnotic painting. When did you first come across this artwork?

Julie: What I loved about, and I'm sure it's a kind of regional thing, the Pintupi people paint in this particular way, always when I go to shows of Indigenous art, I'm always drawn to that particular way of painting. And what's interesting is you use the word abstract, and of course it is abstract. But then is it abstract? That's our language. And so I try to kind of view it outside that lens of how I would look at it with a Western eye. And I do see it as quite performative. I think their work is quite performative in a particular way because they're mark making and they're transcribing something which is an experience of their landscape onto a two dimensional surface.

And when I look at those particular groups of paintings, from that region, I just find they're just so energetic at a kind of movement level, because there's, they're done by hand and there's no straight lines really. But when you first look at it, you feel like it's much more gridded up, but it's not. And there's something about that, I think that I have to try and think around that lens of abstraction and the history of abstraction within Western art, and try and in a way, just feel that painting and not try and analyse that painting.

But I guess I chose these ones because it's a kind of energetic response to it, would be the only way I could really frame it.

Jennifer: I think it's interesting what you say about, you know, the word abstract, which of course is a very complicated word because it's used in a very specific way in the history of Western painting. And of course, for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, a painting will represent deep knowledge and a mapping of the land and a kind of knowledge that we don't necessarily have access to. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the different levels that a painting can operate on.

Julie: From my background, I can only almost take it at surface values. My way of entering that is, I mean, you know, I could go and read up about what they are trying to make or what the painting addresses, but I do often try to just look at them outside of that framework in a way. So it's not didactic for me. And sometimes with painting like that, I mean this is just how I operate is, I imagine if I was painting it, the kind of movement of the hand and the kind of intention and I don't know if this is true or not, but I imagine if it is a sort of mapping, it's a kind of translation between a three dimensional physical world translated onto a two dimensional surface. But that's a kind of mind transfer in a way, which is really interesting. And then you're applying it by hand. So, is it like a kind of writing form? You know, if you imagine we were writing in a kind of Western sense of writing, you're writing a word, but as you're writing it, a story's unfolding. And so I see it like that, so I often look at those paintings quite up close, like that distant perspective, which is the kind of over, the washing of it over you, the kind of movement that you have to step back to see the flow, because it's often very subtle.

It almost looks like they are very abstract in that sense. And then you step away and you see these rhythms in it. And then when you go up close and you, you know, I sometimes do that. I imagine if I was painting, making that line, yeah, I mean, that's, I can only really, I guess describe my own experience of how I look at a painting like that.

Jennifer: It's a very just physically beautiful painting. It's very rhythmic. There are these warm, pulsating colours. And do you ever use art as a sort of form of solace? To look at a painting, to calm down, to meditate, to find a place of calm?

Julie: I don’t often go to art to find that. I o ften go to art to surprise me, challenge me and so on. But with those paintings, not that they're not unchallenging, but because I think, as I said, I approach them more as a kind of performative physical space. Which you can do with a painting, because it is performance acting. It's done by hand, there's a body involved doing it. I think I'm more drawn to that particular sort of region of Indigenous painting because I think it does let me stand still and watch, and whether, I don't know if it calms me down, but it certainly places me in a still space which doesn't mean other painting wouldn't do that for me. I think painting is an interesting medium in that it's physical and it probably does ask us to stand still in front of it. More than a photograph, I mean a photograph can intrigue us, but I often think a photograph makes us go in search of information. It's an info medium because, you know, it's predominantly used in the world in that function, where I guess for me a painting does provide that other space for me, depending on the nature of the painting.

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Jennifer: Your fourth and final choice is definitely something entirely different. It's the opposite, exactly. And this work is called, wonderfully titled, TITTIPUSSIDAD from 2018 by the British artist Sarah Lucas, who was born in 1962. And she created her sculpture out of bronze, concrete, and cast iron. And it's a chair with a very sort of distorted bronze body lying over it that looks as if it's been maybe cast from balloons. So it's a very irreverent, wildly funny and strange work. When did you first come across this artwork?

[00:20:46] Julie: I've known of Sarah Lucas's work for many, many years. She is one of my most favourite female artists and partly because I just have a strong connection through my own practice to that type of work. I fell upon her work, I can't even remember when it was, but it was like the ones with the photo with her sitting back with the fried eggs on her breasts and one with the chicken open between her legs. And I guess because I try to not use ha ha humour, but to use humour and irony and parody in my own practice while trying to say something quite political about, obviously, women's positions in the world, etc., etc. And so I think I was very drawn to that immediately because, yes, it made me laugh, but it made me go, ooh, that's cutting through in a really straight arrow sort of way. And so I just was completely drawn to her practice. And then the other thing that I loved about it was she just lays a hand on all sorts of materials.

And that's definitely something I've always worked with. I mean, I've worked with bronze since, I don't know, the 2000s or something when everyone said, why are you using that material? That crappy old material that's loaded with classical references. And I'm like, that's why I'm using it. Cause it's a fantastic material to pull apart in that sense and to make people think about it as a material again, but also quite obviously her use of the body and casting of the body is completely exactly where I am coming from. In fact, her work is just a natural fit for me. I love it. And I just think she's quite courageous. Like she's really out there, but she's got a very fine aesthetic at the same time. And that obviously doesn't appeal — I know people who can't stand her work because they find it really affronting and confronting. But I don't, I just, I see a humour in it and I see a kind of playfulness as well. Like she's a trickster. And I often describe myself as that within art and I like the fact she roams where she wants to and there's a kind of sense of freedom and spiritedness to her practice that I really love.

Jennifer: I mean, as you mentioned, there are correlations between your work and her work, and obviously humour is a very strong connection. And I'd love to hear more from you about what you think is the revolutionary power of like humour in contemporary art.

Julie: Well, I think it's unguarded, you know, people could find themselves laughing at something. And then they're like, why am I? You know, like it's a sort of, it's a great opener in a sense. And it puts people at ease in a way, because they've got a way to approach a work in a sense might be actually having quite a sort of hefty punch behind it.

I'm a feminist. I've worked in that space for a long time. At the same time, I'm not only that. But I think when you want to talk about things that are tricky in lots of ways, there's a lot of different approaches to it. I always knew that I wanted to speak into that space. But I didn't want to feel like I was giving people a lesson of a way to be, or to be too didactic about it. And I think that irony, parody, humour, whatever, is a fantastic way to still make a strong statement, but come at it from another angle where people can get something from it. But at the same time, you know, be aware that I'm, you know, as Sarah Lucas is, is trying to make quite a strong point. And I guess women and humour hasn't always been put together either, just generally speaking. And why is that? You know, it's kind of a curious thing. I think that's also part of it, that there's no reason why women aren't just as good at using irony and humour as a way to speak to these more political issues. I mean, it's not like, you know, you make a decision; Oh, I'm going to make a funny artwork. It's more, I think it's a way you are yourself. I like to think I've got a pretty good sense of humour. I'm sure she probably has too, I’ve never met her, but it's kind of being playful, I guess, and using mischief in an interesting way.

Like years ago, I did a work or a series of works under the title Thief's Journal, which I ripped off from Jean Genet, but I kind of loved his idea of the thief breaking into someone's house, but actually not taking anything, just roaming around. And it was the kind of occupancy which was what that person took away. And I always thought I wander around in art history like that. I come in, I'm a thief because I haven't been invited, for most centuries. And I wander around, I take what I like in my sense of not physically taking it. And then I go away and I remake it in another way. So I create a kind of alternate to that.

Jennifer: You mentioned that this work makes a strong point. What do you think that point is?

Julie: I think it's in the representation of the female body because obviously there's a whole lot of associations. Like a lot of her work, it's over an abundance of tits. It's kind of excessive. And I think it's a very scary thing, the idea of the excessive woman. I think she goes right to that space, and so she multiplies breasts. The body's kind of intertwined, I think in this case it's through a chair. So, you know, it's not lying there passive.

It's sort of disturbing at the same time as it's funny. And I think she puts those two things together very well. Also, so we kind of laugh at it because it's odd and then we're going, but what are we really looking at here? What is this female body doing, you know? And so I like all, I like those sort of disruptions to the general flow, if you like, of how women's bodies have tended to be depicted in the history of Western art within that Western context. They're either very passive or they're romantic or sensuous or whatever, but they're not often disturbing. I mean, there's obviously, there are works in which women's bodies, I'm thinking of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde and so on, which I think I've referenced, I made a big neon work out of it.

So there are disturbing works, but then, there's something very different when it's a woman who decides to own that space. I think that's a very different position to take. And it is an astonishing fact to think that when Gombrich did the story of art in 1950, whenever it was, it had not one woman artist in it. And then it took 1996 to have one. I guess I'm a little bit older than Sarah Lucas, but I think we're still within a generation where we still have to, I mean, I have young women students still needing to do that kind of work. You know, it doesn't go away in a sense. It's still, you're against a very big force in society that wants just to pick women in certain ways. And so it's always unfinished business. And so I think as a kind of offering back to art history, it's good to have women like Sarah Lucas coming in and making work that has a kind of light touch. But it comes with a heavy message, and I think that's a really good blend.

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Jennifer: So my final question for you today is, in what ways do these works by Tracey Moffat, Sol Wiener, Yukultji Napangati, and Sarah Lucas resonate with your own artistic practice?

Julie: Well some, as we just discussed, like Sarah Lucas, on the same page, you know, I'd see that as a kind of a mate in art and I think Tracey's work also because I strongly respond to her themes and she's an Indigenous artist from Australia so that's a very important thing.The same with the other Indigenous work, it's not work I would make. But that's a great thing. I love to look at things that I wouldn't be making. Then I go on a different sort of journey, if you like. And I guess the Sol Wiener was just this stray work that I fell upon. And I thought, Oh, now I know who that photographer is. I know that name now. And I probably will look up and see more work. What is he doing today, etc. So that was the sort of unknown and the others…One was just this beautiful visceral thing to do with painting from a region, Indigenous region, that I have always loved when I go and look at those shows. And I guess I'd like to see the other two as my women in arms, creating…I guess throwing things back into art history and blowing it up a bit in certain parts and bringing fresh stories to it.

Jennifer: Julie, thank you so much for joining me. I've so enjoyed our conversation.

Julie: Thank you. Good questions too.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of the series, I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Today we're talking with Danie Mellor, an Australian artist of Najon and Mamu heritage who was born in 1971 and lives in Bowral on Gundungurra Country. There are 33 works by him in the national collection. Danie works across various media, re-evaluating, in his words, iconic landscape traditions informed by his connection to place, through his Aboriginal heritage. Danie, thanks so much for joining me.

Danie Mellor: That's a pleasure, Jennifer, and thank you for that introduction.

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Jennifer: The first work of art you've chosen is by the Australian Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul, who was born in 1952. At almost two metres tall, Rainbow Serpent's antilopine kangaroo was created in 1991 from natural earth pigments and binder on eucalyptus bark and is braced with wood and natural fibre string. Danie, could you describe the work for our listeners? What does it actually look like?

Danie: At around two metres, it's an imposing bark or a rarrk painting. And what struck me about this work in particular was both its scale, but also the intricacy and vibrancy of the artwork itself. I found it fascinating to be looking at something which had this almost obsessive detail and there are various kinds of comparisons you can draw across all art traditions where artists are so engaged with that minutiae of detail and telling a story through each footprint of their paintbrush or pencil or whatever medium they're working with. But this one, towering as it is for a bark painting, has quite an intense vibrancy to the colour, even though they're very earthy. So this is another thing that really attracted me to this piece, is the way the work describes in a really congruent sort of way, just that mystery of the story, but also connects it back in a very powerful way as well to country and landscape.

We have a sense as viewers that in fact we're looking at something that came from the earth as well as from the artist's imagination, and from that community's storytelling around the understanding of creation, around their understanding and relationship with country and landscapes. My understanding with these bark paintings is that they come entirely from country, so the materials are derived from the landscape around the artist. I understand as well that John Mawurndjul introduced PVA, or an archival PVA, to actually I think it would have strengthened, or if you like, given some sort of archival longevity to the material and the fragile nature of the ochres that he was painting with.

Because bark paintings and these kinds of ceremonial paintings were not meant to be objects or images that lasted. They were ceremonial, they were used for storytelling, perhaps for education, but in that sense they were... Not temporary, but short lived compared to, you know, some of the things that are used now and kept and stored in museums and institutional archives.

Jennifer: Can you remember when you first came across John Mawurndjul's work, and what your response to it was at first sighting?

Danie: I recall seeing paintings by him when I was an art student at the Canberra School of Art at the ANU. And this was in the early 90s. And a lot of my first encounters with some of these really quite significant and important artworks came about through visits to the National Gallery. It was really quite interesting for me as a young artist to begin to trace relationships that were perhaps not so obvious between work that came from remote communities and was held in the same institution and the same collection as other works that were perhaps more internationally or informed by different kinds of cultural contexts. At that stage there was a fairly clear delineation, geographically and culturally, between works that were displayed at the National Gallery and other galleries too, I should add. So the conversation between works such as this and other pieces is more of a recent kind of thing where I think it's really amazing to begin considering that artists' voices, not just their work, but their voices over time, are now in conversation with each other.

Jennifer: And how do you think that experience of first seeing this work impacted on your own creative development?

Danie: It's interesting, I found that a lot of work that impacted me deeply didn't necessarily have the kind of impact where it shows itself readily in my work. I found that it seemed to have, almost like a... an invisible or intangible impact, which I couldn't quite read or make sense of at the time. So, what seemed important about the work at the time kind of got held in a memory and over time I began to realise that in some elements of my work it mirrored not particularly in form but perhaps either in gesture or intent that there was a connection that I could perhaps more personally realise and understand that actually it was seeing this work 20 or 30 years ago.

Jennifer: You've written, what is especially hypnotic about Mawurndjul's bark paintings is the rhythm and metre of the imagery, its symphony and song. And you've drawn a comparison between his work and that of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, so artists who lived on the other side of the world many decades earlier, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, if you could elaborate.

Danie: When I look at works like this, I'm conscious that there is a particular kind of formal evaluation which includes movement and rhythm, in this case the movement of the forms in the work, but also the rhythm of the way medium is applied and the intervals between certain things and the spaces that are actually left. And as part of this ceremony of painting, there would also be accompanied by song and a remembrance of the legend and the oral history. So, there's a multifaceted kind of approach to creation. What I found very interesting about that period of European modernism where Klee and Kandinsky were active, there was like a move to give form to the expression of music through painting. And that in a sense was a visceral or bodily kind of response. It was an imaginative and perhaps almost spiritual way of showing that form and how the world might appear with colour, with shape, with abstraction because it dealt with intangibles. There was a recognition of the immaterial.

And so even though it is a sort of a stretch comparison across time and space or time and culture, there are these things that artists work with and it seems that we have a lot of things in common, even though that we're working in different times. I kind of regard artists in the collection and artists working now and artists who have come before us as colleagues in a way.

Jennifer: In a way, you might have answered my next question, which is, you know, this was a painting that was made 32 years ago. How do you interpret the contemporary relevance of this work?

Danie: Relevance is always a very interesting question and thing to consider. This would have been an extremely exciting time. I think to begin to see work coming from communities and artists such as John, where it's almost like outlier forms of painting and really exciting approaches to relaying cultural narrative and story would have first entered collections or become a more considered part of them.

And to begin thinking at the time it was acquired, how it then developed a conversation with other works, and to consider also if curators and audiences actually had a well developed enough visual language or way of talking about the relationships between works, to begin that process of connecting it to the whole of the collection. And it's an ongoing discussion because there are new discoveries and new kinds of things to realise about artworks. They have a particular way of living through time and they bring up different things. I see them as having a very important signature at the moment they are brought into the Gallery, but then they have a life beyond that initial introduction, both to works around them and also to audiences.

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Jennifer: Well that's probably a good point to move on to your second work of art. It's a small oil painting, Boy and the moon, which was created between 1939 and 1940 by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan, who was born in 1917 and died in 1992. And it's a really deceptively simple image, a stylised ochre yellow head and neck against a dark background. When did you first come across this artwork?

Danie: I saw this artwork quite early on in my career as well. It was an interesting kind of encounter because in a way, I'd seen a picture of it in a book first, and so there's a sort of mythology that builds up in one's head about, well, what's this work going to be like and how will it sort of reveal itself to me and how will it impact? And it's, as you say, it's a very deceptively simple painting, but at the same time, the materiality of the work, like a lot of Nolan's images and paintings, is very engaging. The way he uses brushes, the way he brings washes and puts down his paint and medium and uses oil paint in general is very interesting.

Sometimes it's quite scrubby and at other times it's quite refined. But there's this whole variation of marks and shade and tone and wash that exists on a continuum between those two things. And I find it fascinating the way that he has an urgency in his storytelling and narration, which is quite obvious in a lot of works. But in this one, it's more quiet and contemplative. I found that very interesting. Quite often his work is filled with gesture, and filled with you know, the artist's voice of urgently telling a story. And I'm thinking of his Kelly series in particular. And I really enjoy the way it's quietly reflective and the fact that he talks about it as a silhouette of his friend against the moon or against the night sky is a beautiful pathway to almost an intimate moment where he has a realisation of something and quickly puts it down and artists may have those sort of instinctual flashes and think right, I've got to put this down or explore this or tuck it away for a later exploration, but in a way, it's sort of like a, it's a reverse silhouette because the silhouette in this case is the illumined sort of yellow of the moon.

Jennifer: When Sidney Nolan painted this, he was a young man, he was around 22. Australia had just entered the war. And of course, Sidney Nolan went on to become one of the best known Australian artists in the 20th century. What's your take on his life and work?

Danie: The importance of Nolan's work within the Australian landscape of art history at the time, it was a really important moment for the country in terms of its modernism and the way that artists began to explore that. So I'm thinking of Nolan, but also his very close friend and colleague, Arthur Boyd, and to some extent, Clifton Pugh, perhaps I should mention Drysdale, of course, as well. And, you know, there are other female artists who begin to play an important role here, but Nolan, Boyd and their colleagues, that group, the Angry Penguins, really began to sort of shift things around at that time in Australia in quite a remarkable way.

I always look back and think, well, it's really interesting to consider the way that these artists were innovating and what were people or artists thinking about the work of First Nations artists and Aboriginal people and they were landscape painters and artists and establishing their own voice, but what was their awareness of Aboriginal art, and those kind of profound relationships with country that communities and artists from those places had as well.

And so I wonder as artists kind of how they felt, sometimes in that space, exploring and doing the things they did with relative, you know, freedom and being able to develop a story around the landscape and understanding in their own way. When we think of Nolan's work around the Kelly Gang, it's fascinating as well. He's building a myth that has its layers within, I guess, Western contextual history on the landscape of Australia. Sid Nolan had a particular way, I thought, of entering into some of those intangible elements or stories that were often embedded in landscape and bringing them to life in a way with his own kind of overlay of story and narrative and tackled in some senses some of those big questions that non Indigenous artists at the time were perhaps asking about the landscape around them.

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Jennifer: I think that’s a really good point to segway into the next work that you've chosen which is a small landscape work on paper, Shoalhaven Gorge from 1953, which was created by the Australian artist Margaret Preston who was born in 1875 and died in 1963. And in terms of what you're talking about, the intersection of Aboriginal languages and Western languages, this is something that Margaret Preston is trying to explore to varying degrees in this work. And in a way, she's trying to combine an Aboriginal approach to the landscape with a Western style, but of course, this is a very controversial approach. It's been read variously as an acknowledgement of First Nations art, but also as rather thoughtless appropriation of it. What's your reading?

Danie: I agree with both and in some ways an intellectual position around either of those kind of negates the other. But actually I think they both exist and so this is part of the complication of reading Preston's work and encountering and understanding it. Margaret Preston, I see her as a remarkable artist in the sense of scope of her ambition, what she was trying to do. The way she went about it, her work was acknowledged very early on as being of some significance and relevance. And this happened, I think it was 1923 in London at an exhibition of Australian artists' work. And the exhibition was generally not well received. Most of the work was seen as somewhat derivative, but actually Margaret Preston's work and interestingly Thea Proctor's work were singled out as being quite original and dynamic and offering something new that wasn't sort of bound up in the tradition.

And her approach in terms of actually bringing about this national language or identity as she was so determined through her work, I tend to see it as a heartfelt position. Misguided as perhaps looking back, we can now see that it was. In some ways, it was of her time. And so I tend to bring a degree of tolerance into the way I look at what she was doing. From our vantage point now, we understand some of those, if you like, incursions into cultural appropriations were deeply inappropriate. But looking at the visual language and the way she began to try and bring things together was, it was almost like a research exercise on her part. I find her work very interesting as well because she and I have been to some of the same places. I mean, I'm within a stone's throw of the Shoal Haven, where this painting sort of derives from. And so I felt a connection in that sense, but her attempts, if you like, and that controversy around appropriation really missed something. And that was the relationship with people. I felt having, you know, sort of read and researched over years that there was a really enthusiastic engagement, if you like, or involvement and appreciation of the way First Nations artists were dealing with image, with form, with material, with medium. And it always seemed to be based on an appreciation of the work and the style and their approach rather than an engagement with people.

And this comes back to the really important thing of relationship. I was often asked in the time that I was lecturing by students of, well, you know, we're really interested in Aboriginal art and want somehow to explore it. So how do we actually do that? And I said, well, firstly, you need to ask what's the reasoning behind this, and often it's not what, it's how. So the process of actually bringing that into the own space of your work is very dependent on relationship and talking. And that needs to happen with Aboriginal artists or communities. And in Preston's time, perhaps that wasn't even something that was considered. It was, I think in some ways, not a blind incursion into it, but a…almost like a journey into that space where it was blinkered. Basically, there just weren't the kinds of cultural lenses in place where she would have an understanding or artists and audiences had an understanding that, in fact, this is a ground or a cultural landscape that needs to be approached with a very different set of parameters around understanding, around discussion and insight into the relationships people had with the land and which Preston in a way derived some of her forms from.

Jennifer: Given that this work was made in the 1950s and our reading of it now, more than 60 years later is very different, have the complexities that are embodied in a way in this work of art, have they impacted on your own art making, given your own exploration of landscape within Australian history?

Danie: It was perhaps more about the process of thinking and awareness on her part that gave rise to those works and which influenced me when I began to understand more of the complexity of Preston's work and some of the issues surrounding the way that she was painting and talking about an Aboriginal landscape, for instance, or an Aboriginal still life.

It actually helped me understand how to begin moving my own sense of evaluation and analysis into areas where I had an appreciation then, perhaps, of cultural boundaries. And what it was about that process of creating and making, that artists now almost need to have in mind. It adds an extra layer of consideration and complexity. But those layers are things which make a work richer.

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Jennifer: The final work that you've chosen is also an exploration of landscape and history, but it's on the other side of the world, in Germany, and the work is Abendland, or Twilight of the West, by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, who was born in 1945, obviously a very significant date for Germany. Created in 1989, and it's an enormous work, it's almost 4 by 4 metres and it weighs over 300 kilos. It was created from a mix of synthetic polymer paint, lead, ash, plaster, cement, earth and varnish on canvas and wood. Danie, when did you first come across this artwork and what was it about it that held your attention?

Danie: Again, student days. And it was one of the first works that I stopped in front of, and it held me spellbound. If there was ever a moment where you could sort of quote Burke and the Sublime, that was it. It was, it was almost like a moment where speech and thinking... had no place. It was a moment for a young artist, as I was then, of sort of profound silence and realisation that art could convey incredibly powerful, significant messages without the need for verbal communication.

So this in a sense was a work for me by Kiefer summarised in a lot of ways the work of his career. There are different layers of history in that there's a sense of the sublime and spirituality. But there's also a strong sense, too, of a story being shown or revealed, or perhaps even concealed by that drape, by that curtain of lead that almost shuts us off from two thirds of the painting.

So it struck me as being this, ironically, a veil of some sort, and a veil that was almost placed in front of our eyes over a scene, railroad tracks that we connect. Now with the Holocaust and with that horrific event and chapter in recent history, I find it very interesting that Kiefer, as an artist, was quite prepared to explore that particular element of German history, which was very recent for him, and very recent for Germany when his work was shown at the Venice Biennale. And, you know, he was accused of supporting that particular form of Nazism. And because of the work that he was doing, it was very controversial and very raw at the time. And so, Kiefer's work brings together a lot of historical complications, but he does it in such a way that it's sort of foregrounded by a really fascinating history as well of German romanticism, where he's talking not simply about a visible world, but the experience of the artist, of the world around him, and how then to convey the intangible as a material thing.

Jennifer: You mentioned politics and political readings of this work, but you know this is a work that is dealing with a sort of mix of abstraction and figuration. We can see the train tracks and we can literally feel or see the weight of this image. What is your reading of the politics inherent in this picture? Or is it even right to ask about politics in a picture?

Danie: In some ways, reading those political layers in an artwork can often preempt the artist's intent or their position. I tend to see the artist's job as exploring and making work about those difficult chapters that humanity has found itself passing through or experiencing. And quite often, it is with a retrospective look back at that time. For Kiefer, it was very recent. Without sort of understanding his own personal reasons or his own personal politics, it becomes an important, almost like a message that conveys, actually, these are some things that are worth thinking, considering, and remembering. And works such as this do it. You make the very interesting observation, Jennifer, of the weight of the painting. I'd also say that has a symbolic weight. It's that symbolic weight of history. And you know, the heaviness, and the sadness, and the poignancy.

Jennifer: And would you say that that continues to make this painting very relevant to, say, contemporary politics and contemporary history?

Danie: Yes, and this is a really interesting thing about paintings or works of art that have a particular significance, you know, in the discussion or making at a particular point of time, while the form has a very significant and specific temporal relevance. Because they have power and quality and deal often with timeless issues. They are in a sense that the things that they're dealing with are transportable. So it tends to be that these things repeat in human history, and so they are always relevant.

Jennifer: In what way do these very disparate works by John Mawurndjul and Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston and Anselm Kiefer resonate with your own artistic practice?

Danie: They take a closer look at the world. And, they all, as artists, there's an archaeology about the way they're looking, about the way they're thinking, and retelling. So all the work of these artists occupies a particular space, I felt, both culturally, but also in their emotional and intellectual investigation. And for me, that was what made these works significant and have a certain resonance and power that I hope is seen and felt by audiences as well.

Jennifer: Danie, thank you so much for joining me. This has been absolutely fascinating.

Danie: Thanks Jennifer, that was great.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of the series, I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Music Fade Out

Bridget Riley is one of the most innovative and radical painters of the modern period. Born in London in 1931, she still lives in the city. In her 1996 essay, Painting Now, she declared that painting without its problems can no longer be painting, it depends upon them for its existence. The National Gallery of Australia has 15 works of art by Riley in its collection, including a new acquisition, Dancing to the Music of Time, from 2022.

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The first work you have chosen to talk about today is by the Australian artist, Howard Taylor, who lived from 1918 to 2001. He created No horizon in 1994 from synthetic polymer paint on marine plywood. It’s a curved piece, entirely white, and is just shy of two metres in height. When did you first come across this artist?

Bridget Riley: It was during a visit that I made in the late 70s to Australia. It was planned that I should have an exhibition at the new art gallery in Perth. I was very keen to go and look as I have always been very anxious that my work is presented so people can enjoy looking at it, and it is that experience of enjoyment of looking and seeing, that is the bridge between me and the viewer.

But when I got to Perth, there was a strike on the airline and it lasted three weeks. During that time Australian painters appeared to help pass the time, which was simply marvellous. That visit to Perth was the only long stay in one part of Australia that I've ever had and we went out to see Howard Taylor, who they thought, quite rightly, I would very much like to meet and see what he was doing.

So we drove through this landscape of Western Australia, this blonde landscape and arrived at a very small house, clearly built by hand, where Howard lived with his partner. It was extraordinarily dark inside, which was a huge relief. So your eyes became adjusted to seeing things in a different way, and I think that was a very important thing for him. This difference separated the studio and his working life from the landscape.

Jennifer: So it sort of encouraged an interior world in a way?

Bridget: Yes, it did. A reflective one, I would say. The house was very small, but every single little space in it was doing something. And he showed me two things, rather like palettes that he was working on, which could also be seen as tree shapes. You could hold the stem and look in different ways, which was a nice way of looking at an image.

Jennifer: And what was Howard’s background? How did he end up here?

Well he’d been in England. He had been in the Australian Air Force and had taught in an English art school. I think that one led to the other.

We talked about the outback, but not a great deal, because it was simply there. It was not something that you could discuss. When I look now at No horizon, this work of his, I find the title very, very interesting. I feel that I can see No horizon.

Jennifer: Especially given that he was in the outback, which has huge horizons. And what do you think the title indicates?

Bridget Usually, a horizon implies a sense of space and a limit to that space. In nature, these are variable, horizons between land and sky, between sea and sky, or a combination of both.

The horizon is determined by the eye, by the viewer. One goes somewhere, walking over cliffs, down paths, across beaches and the horizon accompanies you. And for an airman flying wherever he was flying…Well, where is it? It shifts enormously and it can drop out of sight.

I think that there's a feeling of great space in No horizon, a space which curves, a space which also contains and has an absoluteness. It’s so well seen and I think that’s why I feel so drawn to it.

Jennifer: And were these concerns that you were exploring in your own painting at the time in terms of, horizons or no horizons, and the quality of light, and your own perspective on those?

Bridget: Yes, I have used vertical lines, diagonal lines, horizontal lines in themselves. They don't symbolise, they fulfil a particular range of functions.

Jennifer: So in terms of Howard Taylor, how do you think No horizon reflects his relationship to nature?

Bridget: I think it must be part of his experience of flying over such enormous spaces.

Music Fade In

Jennifer: So speaking about horizontal lines and vertical lines and horizon lines, your own painting, Gamelan, which you made in 1970 using synthetic polymer paint on canvas, is a striped painting, which is almost three metres wide. And how do you feel that that painting explores not only these ideas around horizontality and verticality but also about the experience of being in a certain place?

Bridget: Well in fact, I made Gamelan in the 70s, soon after I met Howard Taylor. On the way back to England, I stopped off in Jakarta to see Borobudur. Borobudur is a great Buddhist temple. It's built on a square, and it has an open centre. It has a promenade lined with Buddhist statues that one can walk around. It is a wonderful, great monumental and very still place. On that same visit to Jakarta I heard the gamelan played. It is sparse, sharp, percussive, and a very pure instrument. And it seemed to complement the spirit of the temple. Full, rich curves and weight is there. Weight, nothing like the lightness and sharpness of the gamelan. But that contrast was the key.

Jennifer: And how did that experience of music influence your choice of colours in your painting, Gamelan?

Bridget: I used three strong colours – red, blue and green - on a white ground. Green is the constant, surrounding both the others. The proportion of the red varies. They draw back from the centre, slowly exposing shade, gathering a shadow, a veil, even a softness - creating a contrast, a source of energy, if you like.

Jennifer: And have many of your paintings been influenced by music in this way?

Bridget: Yes, I would hope so. I introduce what one might call the theme, the form or the colours, and then their opposite. Then I return to what I've introduced and develop it a little. Then I return to the opposing thing and develop that considerably. Last of all, I close with a return, a reminder of what you have seen or what you have heard.

Music Fade In

Jennifer: One of your major influences in your painting practice has been the 19th century French artist, Georges Seurat, whose painting, Study for Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp is in the National Gallery collection. He painted the work in 1885 with oil on canvas. What is it about Seurat that has kept you coming back to him throughout your career as an artist?

Bridget: I think that my initial interest in Seurat has developed and grown through a shared preoccupation in how we look and how we perceive, and a love of contrast in painting. He not only created work that is extraordinarily beautiful, but work that inspires. It inspired Van Vogh, Matisse, Delaunay, the Futurists, and many others – and it gave me a start. I still feel a thrill whenever I look at The Bathers in the National Gallery here in London, quoting to myself, which I do, Felix Feneon’s famous dictum ‘Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning.’ It is a battle cry! But all this would not have been possible without Monet – he went first.

Jennifer: And so what did Seurat take from Monet, and then what did he do with it?

Bridget: Certainly working out of doors, ‘sur le motif’, like this study for the Bec de Hoc. The final painting, the Bec de Hoc itself was painted in the studio. The study provides visual material, the information Seurat is going to need to make his painting. It's very carefully analysed, he uses an optical mixture of colour - Le Melange Optique - the French call it. And, if you take this mixture apart, you see that this wonderful colour of reflected light inside the cliff has deep purples, reds, oranges, and also lighter colours within it to help the luminosity. These are notes, visual notes, painterly notes for the making of the painting.

Jennifer: And this was an approach that you were exploring early on in your career too. I mean, we're sitting beneath a painting that you did on a journey that you took, I think was it in the 60s?

Bridget: Yes, it’s Pink Landscape and I painted it in the late 50s but before that I had copied a small painting in The Courtauld, but I copied on a larger scale so that I could follow Seurat’s thinking.

Jennifer: A small painting by Seurat?

Bridget: Yes, The Pont du Courbevoie. It’s a painting of a bridge over the River Seine seen early on a chilly autumn morning. Seurat divides his colours and applies them in with the pointed tip of his brush in separate touches of pure colour, so small that they blend and mix together as you look. So your eye will be doing the mixing. And this active looking engages you. The viewer plays a major role in the making and realising of a work by Seurat.

Jennifer: So in terms of this wonderful artist, in a sense, taking notes when he's making a painting, it's a form of investigation. Which is something that has deeply informed your work of course, which has always been a form of investigation into looking and a response to looking.

Bridget: Yes, it has. It is a thrilling and mysterious thing. Looking, what one can see and understand, can be honed with exercise and interest. It is an extraordinary and rewarding journey for anyone able and willing to undertake it.

Jennifer: One of the themes of our conversation today, I think, has been about journeys. We’ve been to Indonesia, Australia and France.

Bridget: Travelling and looking.

Jennifer: So maybe we could finish off with another journey...

Music Fades In

The final artwork you’ve chosen is Blue poles by American artist, Jackson Pollock, who was born in 1912 and died in 1956. And he made Blue Poles in 1952 with oil, enamel, aluminium paint and glass on canvas. It’s a huge painting, at almost five metres wide, and two metres high, and I’d love to know how you first came across Pollock’s work.

Bridget: Painters in England had heard about Jackson Pollock and new American painting for quite some time before I had the opportunity to go to America. There had been an exhibition, The New American Painting at the Tate. We had been, of course, either growing up, or those of us who were older, preoccupied by the war. But we were aware that America, having had relative peace, had been able to carry on, to keep the flame burning. And so we were really very, very interested to see what they had been doing.

Jennifer: Could you tell us more about this exhibition at the Tate?

Bridget: It was altogether thrilling, that American show at the Tate. But the one painter that stood out was Jackson Pollock, hung towards the end of the exhibition. He was far more advanced than anyone else. A little while later, Bryan Robertson put on a spectacular exhibition of Pollock at the WhiteChapel Gallery. It was the WhiteChapel in its original form. You came in straight off the street and walked into a very large exhibition space, with a few specially built low brick walls, painted white. Towards the end of the exhibition all the walls were painted black. Bearing in mind that none of us had seen these paintings, which we'd heard so much about and longed to see, this way of introducing us to what was, startling, amazing and extraordinary, by presenting the work in two different ways within the same exhibition, helped people enormously… to see his work, the ideas, the thoughts and the same passionate intensity in two contrasting visual contexts.

Jennifer: And it was the major U.S painter Barnett Newman I think, who introduced you to Blue poles on a trip to New York city?

Bridget: I had seen Barney’s painting in the Tate exhibition in London and I was delighted to meet him at the opening of my exhibition at Richard Feigen’s Gallery in New York. It was the beginning of a good friendship. He and Annalee took me to see three wonderful Abstract Expressionist paintings in Ben Heller’s apartment, one by Mark Rothko, one by Barney himself and Pollock’s Blue poles. We talked about the paintings and Annalee pointed out a new colour in Barney’s painting and we studied Blue poles for some time in silence. It was physically stunning, and exactly what it should be.

Jennifer: And what is that?

Bridget: A great painting. It was thought that Barney might have suggested the poles to Pollock.

Jennifer: Did you ask Barnett Newman if he had suggested the poles?

Bridget: Yes, I did. He didn't answer immediately but standing back, straightening himself he said, “Jackson’s painting”…..”Jackson’s signed it”, and pointing to the corner, “down there”.

Jennifer: I want to thank you very much, Bridget Riley. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Thank you.

Bridget: Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists’ Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of the series, I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the National Collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Today we're talking with Janet Laurence, an Australian artist who was born in 1947 and lives in Warrang / Sydney. In 2020-2021, her work was included in the National Gallery exhibition, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Part 1. Janet has nine works in the national collection, including the large scale installation Requiem, 2020.

Janet's practice examines our physical, cultural, and conflicting relationship to the natural world. Employing different media, and at times performance, she creates immersive environments that, in her words, navigate the interconnections between organic elements and systems of nature. Janet, thank you so much for joining me.

Janet Laurence: It's a great pleasure.

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Jennifer: So Janet, the first work that you've chosen from the national collection is Contingent by the German American artist Eva Hesse, who was born in 1936 and died in 1970. It was created in 1969 using cheesecloth, latex, and fibreglass, and it's an enormous, enigmatic, golden and white sculpture that stands over three metres tall, and it appears to float in the air like mysterious sails. When did you first come across this artwork?

Janet: I had seen quite a bit of Eva Hesse's work when I lived in New York. I'd been very interested in her. But I think that particular work I'd seen imaged, because I actually studied her work under Pincus Witton, but I really think the first time I actually saw it was in the National Gallery because I can remember walking in and just feeling incredibly emotionally attached to it, feeling a bit overwhelmed by it. I can remember seeing it there. It was some time ago and I used to wonder why it wasn't more often hanging, to be honest.

Jennifer: And what was it about this work that you found overwhelming and that you found really moving?

Janet: I think it's very, very much about finding a way of expressing an emotional state that I immediately could read. I think knowing a lot about her obviously makes a huge difference, you know, because I can't look at her work without her story. And also, I respond so much to the materiality or matter of art. And that combination that she has there and the likeness of it, is something that really is very – it's not earthed at all, but it's materials that you can relate to life on Earth as well, even though, of course, we know that they're horrible, chemically formed matter that in the end was what killed her. So, there's a strange dichotomy there, in the purity of the work, and it's, really, it's toxicity.

Jennifer: You mentioned that it's hard to look at Eva Hesse's work without being aware of or thinking about her life story. Could you tell our listeners a bit about what Eva Hesse's life story was?

Janet: Well, she was German. She married young and started to develop her work and maintained a very strong relationship with some of the minimalist artists, particularly Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. And there's a great correspondence of letters as she's starting to develop her art. But she has this kind of agonising experience in trying to evolve the art and trying to accept herself and become an artist. But I think it's quite common, and particularly around that time, for women artists to have this. But she was being very encouraged and I think she really found an incredible language to embody the emotions, in such a strange and experimental way of using materials and I guess that's what I was really interested in. But there is always this emotional overlay of her life that is talked about and especially later when she was back in America and she was teaching at Yale I think she became very ill and died very young and all the works she produced, I think, are quite extraordinary. I remember travelling to a German town to see a show of hers that really was remarkable. But it's always overlaid with this feeling of her whole life because that was made so public.

Jennifer: The works are so atmospheric and they are very delicate, but they're also robust. Do you think that this knowledge of her tragically young life, which she may have got the cancer that killed her from the very material she was using, how does this affect your reading of the work?

Janet: Oh, I think it's inseparable. I mean, I think we always carry all that knowledge with us when we look at art. And I think as artists, when we look at work, well, I find that naturally you gravitate to what you love because of your own interest in it in some way. So, you never really see it very objectively, of course. But I think... That particular work in the Gallery is my favourite of all her works anyway. And I think it is the incredible way it both floats and still has a sense of materiality about it.

Jennifer: And do you feel that Eva Hesse's work has influenced your own treatment of materials or approach to using materials?

Janet: Yes, I'm sure. I looked at her a lot because I was a student in New York at the time when I was seeing her work and I definitely was interested in materials and matter and also in how the material can speak itself and I definitely saw that in her work and also the strangeness of some of her materials. Of course a lot of her work ends up looking quite surrealistic and some of the forms she developed, but overwhelmingly I think I was interested in the fact that she could express emotion through them.

Jennifer: So this work was of course made in 1969, but it also feels very contemporary in many ways with its sort of radical use of materials and its ambiguity. How do you see its relevance today to the 21st century world?

Janet: I see it as very relevant. I mean, it can be seen as something that's quite abstract or quite emotional, as I've said, but I do feel it's a very contemporary work in its use of materials, in the way it hangs, in the way you have to move around it, in the way that it's not like just one iconic view of it, and it sets up all sorts of interesting possibilities. The juxtaposition of those materials and what are they? Yeah, I find it still very contemporary and that it's a work I've always loved and I still love it. And it's funny, you know, bringing in that word love, but I guess I just chose works that you know, I love like that, they mightn't be the greatest works in the Gallery or not. But yeah, that's an important element in the work.

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Jennifer: We'll move on to the second work that you've chosen. And it's Rocks and Mirror Square II by another American artist, Robert Smithson, who was born in 1938 and also died too young in 1973. And it's a very mysterious mirrored cube that is surrounded by basalt rocks and mirrors. And it's just over two metres wide. So, when did you first come across this artwork?

Janet: Again, I was looking at Robert Smithson a lot when I lived in New York. Philosophically, I really responded to him and to his bringing natural history into art. It's something that I had been so interested in and to see an artist like him being accepted for doing this, I thought it was very exciting what he was doing. I love his writings and I love the way that he moves outside the whole gallery and museum into real sites and this work obviously when I saw it in the Gallery, I was just so pleased that the Gallery did have a work of his. I think it represents his work really well though, because it becomes like he had site works and non site works, but this work is so ambiguous in the scale of it because of the way the mirror sort of works in the space. If you remove the gallery space from around it, it just can become immense or quite miniature. You know, you never really know, again, it's a work that you walk around, that you are embodied into. I mean, going back to Eva Hesse, that's the thing about that other work, is that you're so embodied into it yourself. It's that human scale, almost, of those hanging forms. I also feel with the Smithson, that you walk around, you are within the mirror in parts of you. And it invites you into the nature of a place. And I suppose that's what interests me a lot. That I can enter into the being of nature in a place. And I think they're very, um, spatially, very exciting and clever and the use of the materials and the matter of the earth, I find really engaging.

Jennifer: And what do you see as the role of the mirror in this work? You know, he's got objects, the rocks that he's brought in from the outside, but the mirror is obviously made by humans. And so what's its symbolic function here, do you think?

Janet: Well, I think the mirror is also a way of… it disappears as well, you know, so that in fact, it's the immateriality in the work. So again, it distorts the scale of the work. I would have thought that that was the main thing for doing that. I agree it's the man made thing in there, but, I don't know, I'm imagining it's just to try and amplify the ambiguity of the scale of the work so you can concentrate just on that matter and the mirror will disappear. But the funny thing is of course it puts your own reflection into it so it brings you into that space, but it is still immaterial.

Jennifer: When you first came across Robert Smithson's work and his work as an earth artist and a sculptor and a writer, what was it about it that you think influenced your own artistic imagination?

Janet: I didn't get the opportunity to see very many works. I just was reading his writings a lot. I'm so interested in matter and the transformation of matter. I mean, I love alchemy and I'm an animist, you know, I want to animate the world. But I was terribly excited by this sort of writing. You know, I might've gone up the wrong path in being an artist, I probably should have been a scientist or something because I sort of really wanted to make work out of things in nature. I'd sort of always done that when I was very young and I wanted to kind of continue doing that. But I was always discouraged because it wasn't the way you should be working. And in fact, I got severely criticised as a woman for working with nature in my first review ever. Can you believe it? So I think what appealed to me is that he was really doing that. And I mean, I love the other earth artists, but I found they were kind of making more big sculptural statements, whereas I think his was much more philosophical and engaging.

Jennifer: Given again that this was a work that was made decades ago, what do you see as the contemporary relevance of Robert Smithson today?

Janet: I was always interested in Arte Povera and the use of materials in art too. And I still think it's very, very important that we do connect with matter and materials because I think we need that, we need to be connected to earth. I think he’s very, very important today because I think we need it so badly today to understand and animate our earth in order to care for it. And I think art can help in that way to bring attention, you know, to the elements of the earth. So I think he's very relevant.

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Jennifer: The next work you've chosen is Feathered Fence by New Zealand born Australian artist, Rosalie Gascoigne, who was born in 1917 and died in 1999. Feathered Fence was created in 1979 from white swan feathers, galvanised wire netting, and synthetic polymer paint on wood. And it's just under a metre tall and almost eight metres wide. And to my mind, it looks a bit like a white wave about to crash. When did you first come across this artwork?

Janet: I first came across it quite a long time ago, when I was in postgraduate studies, I saw images of Rosalie's work and immediately looked for others, and I saw these works in an exhibition and it could have been that specific work or it could have been a similar one because she often made whole series of works of different things. But I remember so much of her work I really responded to it, and I loved how it connected to the landscape that it was made in. So I probably really didn't examine that work properly until I did see it in the National Gallery. But I was so chuffed that the work was hanging in front of mine and reflected in a mirror in my work during Know My Name. I just felt that was a beautiful connection because as a student I used to visit her and talk to her and, you know all of these things count for, you know, how you feel about an artwork, don't they? Definitely then I have to say an emotional response to this work, but also I do love the fact that they're swan feathers and you sort of think that they were collected from that lake and there were all those swans on that Lake George where she used to wander and collect all her materials and again, I love that connection to the elements of that place.

Jennifer: And Rosalie Gascoigne, like Robert Smithson, had a very deep connection to the land that she worked on. Could you tell us a little bit about her life? You just mentioned Lake George.

Janet: Yes, she lived in the hills above Canberra, and she started quite late in life, and she studied Ikebana in the Sogetsu school in Japan, and I think that has had such an enormous influence on her work in being able to create an order for materials. That these restrained gathered materials that she uses, but she loved this place she lived in and collected, as I said, all these masses amounts of materials from around there. She had a studio there with accumulated things like everything from as we know well, her road sign works and boxes and feathers and all sorts of other natural materials. It was quite a sensational experience to walk into her studio. And she was very… she was just an incredibly natural woman, very connected to the land and an important sense of place in her work, I think.

Jennifer: Do you feel that her approach to the beauty and imperfection and transience has influenced your understanding of landscape art?

Janet: I'm sure. I'm sure. I was always looking at her work. I mean, you allow these influences to come through, of course. And I love the fact that, yeah, like works can decay and this transience, as you mentioned, is an element of it that gets expressed in the work. But she also has this use of the materials all have a memory. The materials that she selects, they have had a former life. And she uses you know, much more what I call materials rather than matter. I sort of think of Smithson using the matter of the earth. But Rosalie using materials that have had already a cultural belonging or, you know have had some other development beyond just Earth's matter. Yeah, so I think she's very different in that way, but they still connect to place very strongly.

Jennifer: And it's interesting to think about Rosalie Gascoigne's work, I think, in terms of our contemporary interest or, you know, need for things like recycling or reusing materials rather than constantly manufacturing materials. Do you think that this is one of the reasons that her work still feels very fresh today?

Janet: Yes, well, I think that's a huge thing to read into the work about this recycling. People are always very curious about what they've been recycled from as well. I don't even know that that interested Rosalie so much as just the way she could order materials so that they speak so strongly. And that's an incredible skill she had, I think, visually in being able to see that, that sort of incredible pattern that could come from her juxtaposition of things. But I think she's a very relevant artist. I mean, they're very powerful works. But very humble too, because of the, you know, the wabi sabi nature of her work, it’s such a Japanese thing, but it fits in so well, you know, with our lives today. I think it's very important to learn that lesson of the humility of things, it’s so important.

Jennifer: Could you possibly explain what the wabi sabi approach is? What does that philosophy entail?

Janet: Oh, the wabi sabi is how something can look. Well, it looks like it's had a whole life, it can look quite old, it has its own story attached to it. It has a patina, it's not fresh and bling, it's nothing like that, it just has this sense of age and story to it. Yeah, and that's considered a beauty in Japan. I consider it a beauty too.

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Jennifer: So Janet, the final work that you've chosen is White painting #2 by the Australian Gumatj artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, who was born in 1945 and died in 2021. And White painting #2 was created in 2010, using natural earth pigments and binder on eucalyptus bark. And it's just over a metre and a half tall and half a metre wide. When did you first come across this artwork?

Janet: I saw some exhibitions of hers at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, actually, in Sydney. And I found them spellbinding as paintings. I guess they're paintings, quite sculptural too because mostly they're on bark and there's a beautiful shadow that gets created around them. I found them – it wasn't that long ago, probably three years ago, I had an emotional response really to these works.

Jennifer: And why do you think that was? What was it about these works that moved you so?

Janet: There's an incredible direct, it's not like painting trying to form anything, it's just like the painter's material on the bark, with these big gestural marks, often in the form of stars that look like flowers almost, but I find that they seem to be like a connection to the cosmos. I don't know how to explain that except that they are so, such materiality in it, let's say as a painting, they just seem much more of an object. And I think the way the white paint is often slightly pink or sort of pale brown comes into it, the way it gets different degrees of fluidity on the bark, so that at times it's quite transparent and other times it's quite built up. What I feel looking at those paintings is that they are just done so directly, as though there's some incredible voice speaking to her. Straight away, she just puts it all down and I imagine afterwards she says, that's it. I find that so powerful, you know, there's no deliberation, no going back. I think there was a time when she was trying to tell us some stories, but then she went and allowed them to be much more free. Yeah, I love that. It's so fresh, and you feel you can see the bark, and I mean, of course, like a lot of the bark paintings, but somehow that, the way she painted so directly onto it, just the white and the bark, very, very simple in some way, and yet very deeply connected to some force.

Jennifer: Again, how would you interpret the contemporary relevance of this extraordinary work?

Janet: They're very powerful, and I think powerful art is always relevant. They really speak like a chant or a prayer or something that's just so there. I bought a tiny drawing of hers. I was so transfixed by them. Incredibly beautiful, I think. There's an ability, I mean, sort of like with Rosalie or something, the way the materials work, there's an aesthetic that gets developed that's very engaging. That appeals to the senses, probably than the intellect.

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Jennifer: So all of the artworks you've chosen to highlight seem to be connected to the transience of a changing world and they explore materiality simultaneously with a kind of idea around perhaps transcendence or an idea that something can't be fully articulated. How do you interpret the connective tissue between these artworks?

Janet: Yes, I think they are all very much, as you really so beautifully said, they are all using materials or matter to create something that is really more than what they are. And I think that they are all very powerful because of that and well, three of them are much older works, but I still think that they speak strongly today. I see them very linked by materiality and matter. And as you say, it's the idea of transience and transcendence. I think. What it is, is how we embody those materials and how we feel haptically connected through our bodies and through our senses to the materiality of these works. And I find that's obviously the sort of art I respond to. So I think that whole embodiment is such a huge element in the work and why I get a certain sensation from those works. They all enable me to breathe deeply or to want to embody them. They live somewhere in my memory, but they also live somewhere in my body. This sort of materiality is something much more than just a visual.

Jennifer: And these are themes, of course, that you've explored deeply in your own work. Do you see that all four of these works in some ways have impacted on your creative imagination, and perhaps directed you to new explorations?

Janet: Yes, I do. I mean, you know, these things filter into you and it's not that I'm sitting down writing notes or anything, but it's just that when you have that experience of love of works, they just enter into you and they live in you and connects into your own language and, you know, they sort of occur at different times, I guess, when you're making work, the associations, perhaps, They are important artists to me, yeah.

Jennifer: Janet, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been fascinating hearing about your influences and choices.

Janet: Thank you Jennifer.

Jennifer Higgie: Artists' Artists is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I'm Jennifer Higgie, and over the course of this series, I'll be chatting with artists about works of art from the national collection that inspire, move, or intrigue them.

Born in 1983 in Indonesia, the artist, Albert Yonathan Setyawan, is based in Tokyo, Japan. Although he works primarily in ceramic, he also translates his ideas into drawings, performance, and video. The National Gallery acquired Albert's monumental work, Shelters, from 2018-19, which comprises 1,800 terracotta components in five architectural forms: mosque, church, temple, stupa, and ziggurat arranged in a five metre grid. Art making, he says, is a way to meditate and contemplate on certain issues. Albert, thank you so much for joining me.

Albert Yonathan Setyawan: It's lovely to be here.

Jennifer: The first work you selected from the National Gallery collection is by the Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi, who was born in 1890 and died in 1964. Natura Morta, or Still Life, was created in 1956. It's a small, dreamy oil painting that depicts a series of everyday objects in muted colours. When did you first come across this artwork?

Albert: I think I first came across Giorgio Morandi's work in an exhibition in Tokyo. I've become quite familiar with his work through, you know, art books and websites and magazines, but I've never really experienced it looking at them in person since that exhibition. Morandi has the kind of, you know, repetitive method where he decided deliberately to paint the same object. Even though they don't come out as the same, there's a kind of similarity between, and also continuity between one painting to another, which I think somehow I didn't plan it in my own work, but I think over the time I realised that it sort of exists also, from one work to another. This idea of continuity with one another. I know that each work has, you know, separate titles. But I really liked the idea that if one work can connect to another over a certain period of time, it creates this, you know, kind of continuous movement. So I was quite impressed by that idea of familiarity and strangeness at the same time by working with repetitions.

Jennifer: It's really this idea of repetition and renewal, isn't it?

Albert: Yes.

Jennifer: The idea of looking at something so that you can constantly keep reinventing it or seeing it afresh, like in your work Shelters, which is a really monumental work, you examine these forms and you repeat them and repeat them and repeat them. And so there's this sort of almost hallucinogenic repetition of forms.

And so what do you think is the relationship in terms of repetition between your work and Morandi's?

Albert: I think you put it beautifully, repetitions. Over time, I'm working on the same thing. The object that I make comes from the same mould, for example, comes from the same source, but then every tiny little action that I do with the object alters the shape, makes them different. For example, I would, you know, reproduce one stupa shape like in the case of Shelters. Then whenever I try to carve it if I translate it to painting, I think whenever Giorgio Morandi tried to paint a spot or something, I think in the same way that, like, he could paint, like, ten straight lines and they never really become the same straight lines.

Jennifer: Mm.

Albert: I think in that way probably I can translate, I can connect with his work, because it's very organic, it comes from the hands.

Jennifer: It occurred to me too that Morandi's palette, even though of course he's a painter, it's very earthy, it's almost like a kind of ceramic, and often he was painting ceramics too, and he's got those beautiful muted earth tones, and I assume that's something that attracted you as well?

Albert: Yes, I think that's also, I mean in terms of colour I think, It's quite appealing, right? I mean, when I look at the paintings, like, magazines sometimes don't really do justice to the works. Like, when you finally see the works in person, and not only the colour, but also the textures of the paint, the canvas, like the physical quality of the work, really quite appealing to me when I first saw it.

Jennifer: And of course this is a painting that was made about 70 years ago. It's small, it's intimate, it's handmade. What do you see is its relevance to the contemporary moment? Our hyper connected, hyper technical world?

Albert: I think it's about slowness probably, a sense of slowness. I think... That's what really speaks to me with this type of work.

You know, it makes you want to just slow down a little bit and enjoy the shape. Enjoy the painting. Enjoy the colour. And just like really pay attention to what appears in front of you, visually. In comparison to what's going on right now, like everything appears to us on screen, layers, you know, we can open like several different screens on our computer at the same time. So like, there's too many informations, everything moves so fast. So I’m really quite drawn to a type of work that produces a sense of like, slowness.

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Jennifer: The next artwork you've chosen is by the German artist Wolfgang Leaib, who was born in 1950. Milk stone was created in 1980 out of marble and milk. A minimal white rectangle, it's nearly a metre long and weighs 52 kilos. So when did you first come across this work?

Albert: I first came across Wolfgang Leaib's work, again, through through magazines, but I finally got to see the marble and the milk. They also pour the milk. It was quite fascinating. Like I saw the work - it's so, it's so ordinary. You know, nothing really gets grandiose about it. Like it's a slabs of stone, a warm colour white with like a really thin layer of milk on top of it. It's so simple. It's so ordinary as if there's nothing going on. But at the same time, there's a lot going on if you are willing to really just stand still and look and think about the work.

Jennifer: You wrote that it reminds you of silence. And what do you mean by that? How does milk and marble remind you of silence?

Albert: I can understand that it sounds very abstract, but I stumbled upon this book called The World of Silence by Max Picard. It was written in 1948. Silence, in Picard’s definition, is not the absence of sound or the absence of noise or the absence of anything. He says that it's something where language comes from.

He says that it's like language or anything that is part of our phenomena comes from silence. So he was trying to explain the silence as something that is... really primal, really deep down inside where something that cannot be communicated, something that stays in between, that cannot be conveyed through words. So it was really abstract, but at the same time also I can relate to that idea.

Jennifer: Does silence for you in this rather sort of philosophical framework, does it have a spiritual dimension? I mean in many ways what you're describing sounds like a kind of Zen Buddhism.

Albert: For Picard himself, because he is a Catholic, I think obviously for him there is a lot of spiritual meaning in it. But for me…over time I've gone through some changes in terms of understanding my own work. I realised that a few years back, around five or six years ago probably, I was still thinking in my works in terms of expression of spirituality. But now, I've begun to realise that it's probably not about spirituality at all.

Partly because... I have a problem with the definition of spirit and spirituality itself, because spirituality seems to look at the world in two opposite aspects, like the dualism. It seems to point out the dualism between material and materiality, the spirit and the body. It's always like that. And there's an emphasis that the spirit is always the true essence, the real self.

So I have a problem with that because the more I work with ceramic, in which everything is very physical and my body is in whole, it's very intense, then it’s not about whether there's the spirit, which is the essence, and then the material is just the shadow of the reflection of the essence. It seems to be like they are just two components. They have to be there for things to work out. If you bake something, for example, you have the flour, you have the water, you can't separate the flour from the water once it becomes bread. So I feel like existence is almost like that, like it's a combination of several different things that have to be mixed. Through that understanding, I understand silence a little bit differently from Max Picard. Although I can connect the way he tried to point out silence as in the ability for humans to, kind of, to express something poetically. Something to feel something, to understand something that cannot be explained through words. So in the case of Wolfgang Leib’s work, I think that's how I can connect it. Like it's so primal, based on material itself, the materiality of the marble and the milk. It's not about concept anymore. It's like, it's beyond concept. I think in that case, that, that's why it reminds me of like Max Picard's Silence.

Jennifer: I'm very curious actually, to hear more about your choice of places of worship in Shelters and how that might relate to what you were just discussing about the nature of spirituality and religion.

Albert: There's two sides, I think, in Shelters, two aspects I'm trying to represent, try to express. One is that I don't really deny spirituality, but at the same time I'm trying to question it also. Like, is it really spirituality or is it just something else? I think the reason why I chose the title Shelters is also because I wanted people to think that it's a space where people can, you know, like a shelter, they can find refuge. But at the same time, I arranged it in a way that it's actually trying to trap people. Like, once you are in, it's kind of almost impossible to get out. You're like trapped in the maze. So, there's these two aspects that I'm trying to express, I think, through that work.

I want to know why people have faith and how, how can you reconcile faith and reason, for example, how do you find balance between faith and reason? And also in the context of religious practice in Indonesia, for example, there's all this diversity in different religious traditions, trying to find the balance between it.

Jennifer: So how do you interpret the contemporary relevance of Milk stone, you know, which was created, as I mentioned, in 1980? How can it nourish us? How can it fascinate us? What's its function now, do you think?

Albert: I think this primal quality, this materiality of the quality of matter and substance is, I think, always relevant. I mean, we live in an era where everythings like, digitised. Uh, you know, this AI and stuff like physical matter, physical substance seems to matter probably for some people, but they've actually, it actually becomes more relevant I think right now. You know, everything is just fabricated and easily made, you know. So what I find really fascinating, which I think would always speak to any people who was willing to look deeper in the case of Wolfgang Laib’s work for instance, I think it's materiality.

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Jennifer: The third artwork that you've chosen is by the Austrian-British potter Lucie Rie, to whom touch and material and the handmade was also extremely important. She was born in 1902 in Vienna and she died in London in 1995 and her work Vase was created around 1979 and it's quite small. It's only about 30 centimetres tall. It's a wheel thrown vase. And it has a very simple, almost black glaze and a wide trumpet lip. Tell us about Lucie Rie and how you first came across her work.

Albert: Yeah, I first came across Lucie Rie’s work when I was a student. So, yeah, it was quite inspiring to see her works at the time. I was really fascinated by how delicate it was. Even just looking at it through pictures as this like really, visceral quality. It's almost like you can feel traces of her hands, like on the surface of the pots. I think even more so as I learned how to make ceramics myself, I began to understand how difficult it was to do it in terms of technicalities, how to achieve those types of lines, for example, shapes or the thickness and the thinness of the body of the ceramics. I began to appreciate even more the works and it began to inspire me even more.

Jennifer: In terms of the contemporary relevance of this work, it was made more than 40 years ago, but what do you see as its relevance to the here and now?

Albert: I think in relation to materiality, whenever I'm in the studio working, somehow, clay or ceramics it reminds me of the idea of a body, like an embodiment of something. So, when it comes to Lucie Rie, that's what I feel. It's like the constant concentrations of energy or like, or whatever, her experience, and then she directed all those things into making into this object. And so that object somehow becomes an extension of her body. And when it comes to relevance to our present situation, I think a lot of our experience have been - we are actually, there's a lot of disembodied experience, I think they say, you know, it's almost as if with the development of technology, it feels like the body, it's becoming less and less important. Our corporeal body, our physical body, the fact that we exist in the world through this body, the fact that we have senses and we have any, like all kinds of perceptions that we have over the world. We get it through our body. It is really impossible to not have a body. If I take the questions a little bit further to its extreme, like, can I have a body or not? Then if we have all the technology, if we're able to say, transfer our brain to sort of, you know, technology that can store our memory and can replicate how the mind works into AI or something like that. Is it really possible to live in a world in which we don't exist as a bodily, you know, as a corporeal body? So, whenever I deal with some work like this, like Lucie Rie and Wolfgang Laieb’s, it always reminds me of their quality. I think in that way, it's still relevant. It will still be relevant given, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.

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Jennifer: The final artwork you've chosen, which is Untitled No. # 4, created in 1977 from gesso, ink wash and graphite on canvas by the American artist, Agnes Martin, who was born in Macklin, Canada in 1912 and died in Taos in New Mexico in 2004. And in a way she was exploring many of the ideas that you've been talking about with these other artists. Her language was quite minimal, but it's very handmade. She was deeply interested in the role of the body and the spirit and the relationship between the two. It's a square work, it's just shy of two metres, and it's an off white colour inscribed with a very delicately drawn grid. When did you first come across the work of Agnes Martin?

Albert: I've never seen this work in person, although I've seen the other work. What I always like about Agnes Martin's painting is that this really radical way of building, you know, physical compositions. Nothing really speaks louder than anything else. Everything is just unified. You know, all lines are made the same, the same distance or the same thickness. But then, even though it's mechanical, there is a human quality in it. You know, there's the fact that it's not the same line. The more it goes to this really symmetrical, arranged, mechanical geometric forms, the more you feel that it's very human somehow. I don't know why it's a weird effect.

Like, sometimes the asymmetrical structure seems a bit too superficial sometimes for me. So I tend to gravitate towards something that is really symmetrical, which is, I think that is actually even more human to me. It goes beyond the superficial, it goes beyond what is pleasing to the eye, for example. I think it can be quite hard, right? When you look at something that's really symmetrically arranged, some people may feel uncomfortable. I think it's the same way also when people look at my work. And because I try to do that also in my work, I try to arrange them in a symmetrical way. Comments for example, like, do you have OCD? Or like, are you… like, do you have, things like that. It's as if, like, what I do is actually not as natural or even as a human being can be, you know, like, not a natural act to do that. It is something that is forced because it's mechanical. When I feel it’s the opposite actually. I think we need structures, we have structures. And the way I do it is I'm just trying to express the structure in visual. So that's what I see in Agnes Martin. It's really radical in a way that there is no hierarchy at all. No top, no bottom, no left, no right. You can almost flip it. And it's so fascinating. I really like it. It's so enigmatic also because it's very simple, you know, nothing much going on in the painting, it's just lines. But at the same time, you know, it's not about the lines itself, it's about how she draws the lines. It's about how she paints the painting. It's about how the painting came to be.

Jennifer: I mean, this really relates back to what you were saying about the importance of the body being involved in a work of art, in a way that, ostensibly, if you look at it from a distance, her work often looks quite mechanical, as you say, but when you get close, they're, you know, exquisitely beautiful lines. Often wobbly lines, very hand drawn lines. And so there is this sense of the individual within technology. And would you say that that is one of the many reasons that her work is still relevant today?

Albert: I think so. What I see in Agnes Martin's work, it's about existence. It's about the particular. It's about the way the line is drawn, and it's located in the body. Like, it is impossible to get that line without imagining the artist herself drawing it, doing it, painting, or like, moving her hands in a certain ways, positioning her body in a certain way. That, to me is quite fascinating. But it doesn't remind me right away of essence, but it reminds me of the body.

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Jennifer: If we think about the works you've chosen from Giorgio Morandi, from Wolfgang Leaib, from Lucie Rie, and Agnes Martin, artists from different countries, different generations, with very different approaches. What do you think, very simply, links the work of all of these four artists?

Albert: Materiality. I think that that's one thing that sort of connects all of these ideas. I was, it's a term that I've been thinking about also quite a lot of times, because I just love substance. I love working with matters because it’s, something's really intriguing to me when I think about how the body works or how our senses work, for example, how we can see. It always makes me feel anxious whenever I think about how I cannot see what is inside of my body. Like I have an eye, ear, that can hear all kinds of sound outside and see all kinds of things outside. But it is so annoying that I can't see myself inside. Most of the time we pay attention to the outside world. I realised that when working with matter, and we're dealing with materialities of any substance, clay, or you know, painting, canvas, wood, or whatever it is, metals. There's always this quality in the matter itself that sort of wanted to draw us inside of it, not physically or not scientifically, but poetically, or metaphorically, or imaginatively, probably, through our imagination. We want to be inside.

So I think it speaks to the conditions that our existence is really finite, it's really limited. And our senses are so limited also. And the way that we can reach into this really, you know, this unreachable area in which our senses cannot reach. It's by working on something, by making something.

So by doing that, dealing with matter, the matter itself creates this sort of reflective quality that reflects our conditions in a way. It has, it becomes like a mirror to me.

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Jennifer: Thank you so much, Albert, for joining me today. I've really enjoyed talking with you.

Albert: My pleasure.