National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: I was very fortunate to meet Rosalie. I met Rosalie at a time when I had left teaching and was starting to make work myself, and had struggled with painting, which I was not happy with, and it wasn’t right for me. And I met Rosalie and we just hit it off so well, and she immediately invited me down to her house, and to her studio, and this became a regular monthly event, and I used to really look forward to it, and I’d even take my own fledgling works down there, and Rosalie would give me a very severe but very wonderful crit., about work, and about what I was doing, and enormous encouragement, and it was as a result of seeing this piece, Down to the silver sea, which had been done in sort of a reverence or a sort of homage to James Mollison, reflecting the piece by Braque that the Gallery had tried to buy. But after the brouhaha of the Blue poles purchase there was an embargo on certain works over a certain value, and this work which Mollison desperately wanted for the Gallery; Grand Nu by Braque, was denied him. And Rosalie’s done this piece based on it; a collage, and it was that doll’s leg that she detached - the moment I saw that I knew I didn’t want to be a painter; I knew that I wanted to be involved with the placement of objects. It was the most delicately placed leg, just coming off that collage. And suddenly the whole impetus in my art-making went from my shoulder down into my fingers, and I suddenly felt so liberated, and so alive to the sensibilities of touch, that the painting certainly didn’t show anything of. So I’m thrilled that the piece has come back to the Gallery, because it was obviously meant to be there; it has so many references to, as you said, Rosalie and her work in the collection, the extraordinary collection that the Gallery holds, as well as the personal journey that I’ve come across through this work, and I’m really thrilled that it’s in the collection now, and it has those sort of personal references for me.

PF: MacPherson’s work I have looked at for a long, long time. This particular work; I’ve never really looked upon it as being an image of a vase of flowers. To me this is very much a painting about painting. I mean, there’s the whole history of the Black Square. To me this is a painting about mark-making, and what it is that an artist does. So this is about what it is when a painter faces a board, or a canvas, and the way in which a mark is made, or the paint is moved over an area. And there’s no point in this painting that MacPherson lets you get away from the fact that you can see the board through it; you can see the rather clumsy; the rather direct movement of paint — there’s no attempt to follow edges; it’s a very wilful painting. There’s so much movement here, and ideas about what the painting either is becoming. Is it becoming a flower painting, or is it becoming a Black Square? This sort of very tenuous hold, and how an object; a painting, can, at the lick of a brush, change completely. This particular work is, again, at that moment — where there’s at least a double potential of what it might become. So something which is so sort of still, and crude, is to me a very sophisticated; a very intellectual debate about the very nature of the thing that we are looking at, which I think, is one of the things which great art can, and needs to, and does address.

PF: Val is a New Zealand artist who lives in the sort of hinterland of the North Island, and almost through a rural isolation and very straightened circumstances which she lives, is somebody whose whole culture comes out of television, and the series of dolls that she made came from a workshop that she went to in the town of Masterton, where somebody was giving a lesson in making papier-máchê, or using papier-máchê, and they made papier-máchê dolls. So Val’s first doll-making was in that area, and she made the things from television. She made The Simpsons, she made cartoon characters, all of these various things at a much reduced scale of course. And then there were people working in the studio who were doing some raku firing and she thought she’d have a go at making some dolls in that way. The sophistication that she’d built up through the papier-máchê suddenly was, what shall I say, not threatened, but challenged by using clay. I think you can see in this that crudeness, or the apparent crudeness, is turned into a real sense of vulnerability in these dolls. That she transcended just being dolls of television characters, and although they are in some ways deformed, again there’s the humanity, and there’s also a playfulness, and there’s a sense of youth, and age, and dressing up, and also that crossover when a doll in the young child’s mind is not a doll, but is a person; a living object. I think Val’s magic is to infuse into these dolls that she’s making that sense of the human. They sort of become metaphors for our own feelings of awkwardness, or ‘not quite fitting in’, or not feeling right in terms of the advertising world saying what we must look like. They are very vulnerable, and very human, and yet at the same time, with their sewn-on arms; the little buttons to attach the arms and legs, they’re very much like that moment at midnight when the dolls become human. They’re very much like that for me. They’re at that point of becoming.

PF: A very great friend of mine, Nigel Lenden, found one of Slim’s boats in an op-shop in Lakes Entrance, and he rang me immediately and said ‘I’ve found something here that you’re going to be absolutely interested in — it’s right up your alley’. So, down I went, and met Slim, and found a man who for the last three years has done nothing, and I mean nothing, else but make his art, twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think the man ever sleeps. He has been making a series of boats, and the boat that we are looking at here is called Lady driver. Its form and function would scream ‘boat’. It’s made out of cardboard, and decorated in the most idiosyncratic way. It also doubles as a penholder. Slim’s a great one for making sure that we’ve always got a pen, because, as he says, you never know when you’ll want one. So, it doubles as that, but at the same time it plays around with that idea of the various problems of incorporating found objects, whether they be gum nuts, or yoghurt, or biros, or jewellery; all of this sort of detritus that was firstly from his mother’s collection, and then around the streets of his little town. It becomes a problem of incorporating the well-known and very strongly associated objects into something completely different. And what Slim has done is to transcend all of those things and create a boat. And although the things, if you look at them individually and out of context, they just don’t make sense, within the logic of his structure of his world, the whole thing does make sense, and so it’s almost right at the heart of what so much of art-making is about. It’s the rawness and the immediacy of what he is doing. It’s so in your face. It’s only cardboard; it’s only this, and yet there’s that other part of the brain that’s screaming at you ‘NO, it’s not, it’s something else’. What might look to be a humble, crudely put together boat has an extraordinary magic, and at the end of the day Slim would always take his boats down to the lake to float them, to make sure that he had actually made a boat. And so one is aware that it comes back into that playful realm; these are boats to play with.

PF: I’d gone into Darren Knight Gallery, and this tiny piece high up on the wall, just so tiny and vulnerable, and yet I actually didn’t know the reference. It’s a reference to a Charles Ray performance piece, and I just thought it was just a fun, fun piece, and I really was quite amazed when Darren said ‘Oh, that’s one of Ricky Swallow’s little pieces’. I knew I had to have it, even though I didn’t know who had done it. That didn’t worry me. This, to me, was just the artist at play. This was a very playful… almost like a warm-up piece. This had a real ‘limber up’ feeling to me, and yet, if you look at it very closely the figure is there, the feet are there, and even though it’s quite tiny, ten or so centimetres, you can see the man in the clock; he’s trapped in there. So it is, I think, a great testimony to the artist’s skill, to be able to be so playful, and yet at the same time there’s the sense of the imprisoned character behind this sort of ‘clock face’. It’s a lovely, little moment that has a very big metaphysical dynamic to it.

PF Laurence is a New Zealand photographer, and on this occasion the museum was moving in New Zealand and had been closed down, and Laurence was allowed in behind the scenes to photograph the objects ‘in waiting’; to go into their new home in the Te Papa Museum [of New Zealand], which was later to open. And so this was a wonderful opportunity for him to have carte blanché with the collection, and this particular piece, with Laurence’s extraordinary eye for detail, using — and I’m not terribly technical here, but the plate that he uses in his camera is the size of the image. So it’s one of those old-fashioned things that weighs 90 or 100 pounds, however much, and you lug it around, and in this particular piece Laurence is meticulous in capturing, in this instance… In this particular piece it’s impossible to tell. The gaze of the birds is so intense and it’s so still; they’re so real; they’re there, and yet the grouping and the clustering is a museum thing. In other words, the power of the image transports you beyond what you know it to be into the possibility that these owls, these morporkes are there. They really do put an edge on me, and they really do make me feel quite ill… not ill, but quite on edge. And yet you know the scale of them is quite tiny, and they’re all clustered there, and so it’s been an interesting thing within the New Zealand connection which came through a meeting with Geoff Thompson, famously making corrugated cows, to start with. He was a great introduction to things New Zealand, and over the years I’ve been going back there and have developed quite strong links with artists there, and I just think Laurence is beautiful, not only in the setting up of the shot, but he did all his own development, to the point of killing himself in the dark with the various chemicals that he used. But the attention to detail and the care I find as mesmeric as the beauty of the image under his gaze. You know they are dead, and yet they are screaming out to you ‘I’m coming to get you’, you know… DH Exactly! PF ‘One false move and you’re gone’. And they are at that moment of becoming. They are at that moment. They are neither alive nor dead, they are really held in that thrall.

PF: I was travelling through the United States and had stopped off in San Francisco, and there was an art fair on at the hotel I was staying in. So, I thought ‘Oh, I’ll have a look through here’ and was aware that most of the stuff there was way out of my price range, but that’s an interesting way of being able to look too, and I went into this room, and in the bathroom and in the toilet every spare inch was taken up with stuff being displayed. There were these couple of photographs, this particular one showing the Titanic being attacked by a shark in a fishbowl, and I thought it was extraordinary. I just loved it; it was just so wacky and wild. And it was so inexpensive. This was model-making being photographed with a rather savage dimension to it. There was menace, and play, and threat, and harmlessness all in that one moment. And within the dynamic of the photograph, which of course stops things dead, the great sense of energy and ongoing drama continues. This is like a kid’s nightmare, and it combines all of our own senses of ‘shark’, especially with the Australian dynamic, drowning at sea, in peril… all of those things. DH: That’s right, it really has the feeling… you see the shark… it’s as if it’s waiting for the Titanic to go down. PF: All that food.

PF: I suppose it was through Rosalie that I really got to look at these Ken Whissons and just adored them; they were fantastic. I eventually met Ken, and had bought a series of drawings, and then another work came up which I bought, which I knew that the Gallery wanted, so I knew that it would eventually go to a good home. And Ken was so overcome by that he just said to me ‘You go into Watters Gallery in Sydney and you take any work of mine that you want. Seeing you’ve given a work away I would be very happy for you to have it.’ And I couldn’t believe it. So in I went and there was this large holding of his work at Watters [Studio], and I looked through it all and oh, it was easy to pick a work, but which one? And then I noticed that there was another, where they’d pulled this work out way back in the stock room, and there was a work still sticking out from somebody else’s stack of paintings, and I said ‘That looks like a Wisson!’. And I pulled it out and it was this Dark sail painting, and I just went weak at the knees, and I said ‘That’s it. It’s fantastic’. And I wrote to Ken straight away and I said ‘Ohhh, I’ve just picked this extraordinary painting. It’s just so raw, and strong, and immediate…’ and all of these things, and Ken wrote back and he said ‘You picked the best’. And really, I’ve had a very long correspondence with Ken over the years and he’s so strong in his opinions, which I really like, and he’s got an extraordinary mind for detail; he remembers at seventeen being in Nolan’s studio when Nolan was painting his really great works, so there are lots of sort of references back into other objects and other paintings in the collection through Ken, and he’s a great repository that way, but I just think this painting is an absolute ‘key’; it’s one of the lynch pins in my collection, and I’m just thrilled it’s come my way, especially in the way it was given to me. A very important piece.

PF: Here is this dog… someone’s pet… lost. And what Noel has done here is to recreate in paint the dynamic of the poster, mainly that which has come into play since home computers and desktop publishing. Everyone can now publish a photograph or print a poster up of their lost dog or bird, or cat, or whatever it might be, and what Noel has done is to try to recreate somebody else’s art, which wasn’t in painting, and yet at the same time, through his painterly skills, bring out the humanity of this dog. It’s someone’s particular pet. You get to know this Heathcliff. And someone’s lost it, and there’s the address and the phone number; all of those things are there. We might find it tomorrow, for this person. And so it doesn’t become a dog, in a way; it almost becomes someone in our own lives, even though every street post in Sydney has got someone’s ‘lost’ story. After 9/11, when the ‘lost dog’ poster as we know it became the ‘lost person’ poster, of loved ones who were never to return. It’s such a poetic evocation of that sense of what ‘lost’ is, and I look at just the word ‘lost’, and the word means nothing; the meaning dissolves in front of you if you just stare at it, and yet the stare of the dog does have a huge humanity that is us, it is not the dog. And I suppose, in a way, I’ve always felt a bit lost, myself.

PF: Arts Project is an artists’ space in Melbourne, which has been going now for about twenty years, where people go to work. And there are trained artists there to assist. I’ve been going to this space for the last ten or so years, and it reinvigorated the direction that my collection was taking, and some of the artists working there I would consider to be the very raison d’être of why I collect. Working there is a young girl called Lisa Reid, and I’ve only really discovered her work within the last six months, but I’ve recognised in her an extraordinary talent… and her painting of herself at three months; the moment I saw that… I just think that is nothing short of a masterpiece. In the flatness of the paint; the two-dimensional ‘plane’; in the painting of the dress, you have an extraordinary explanation of space; a dynamic of interiors and almost architectural depiction of space, and yet it is so flat. Everything about the painting makes you realise the visual tricks and the visual conundrums that are involved in the two-dimensional world which is so three-dimensional. And then the face of herself, an artist, and it’s so lovely; looking back at herself, so, almost, ‘warts and all’, at herself, as she imagines she was at that very young age. I just think that in that particular portrait; in its spacial organisation within the plane of the painting; within that visual space, the daringness to leave so much blank. I think it’s a very sophisticated and a wonderful work.

PF: This square, the text, and the black object are vying for attention, vying for story telling. Whose story is it here that we are looking at? What is the relationship of the so-called ‘dimension of television’; of these fake characters, in our own lives? All of these sort of dynamics played out as we see within the picture frame; we see this tension the object and the text. And this of course is a dialogue which has run right through painting and mark-making at the end of the twentieth century, so it’s an extraordinarily intellectual picture, yet at the same time it delivers a message coming out of the pop culture. And I think this sense of the relationship of the relationship of the pop culture to the ‘high’ culture is something which has certainly interested me, and as I look back at this collection I can see it sort of coming through in so many of the works that are on display here.

PF: Bill Culbert’s light box is interesting, because the yellow in it is a very intense yellow, which reminds me of the reflector pieces that Rosalie made so famous. It’s also three or four found objects; an old biscuit tin, a soap dispenser, and oil dispenser and a yellow cup, with two of them inverted with a light source under them. And they just glow like the sun. They have sense of light emanating from them. And it is a theme that runs through this collection; it’s the way in which the found, the discarded; the refuse of life… the detritus… There are artists out there who can turn that so simply, at just a turn, into something that is so beautiful and is so poetic, and never attempting to disguise what those objects are. And you can see a sense of age, and mark, and use in this particular piece and yet it transcends that, and creates [its] own magic, [its] own poetry, without attempting to subvert the elements therein. And that is the magic; that is artifice of art, and it’s right in front of you, and you can see it happening, and yet it’s such a delicate and such a rare touch, when it does happen, and I think it happens mightily, in this piece.

PF: The moment I saw this particular work… It’s from a series that she did. Maybe about fifteen or twenty images, where she photographed housing estates in New Zealand, and then collaged figures onto those particular houses, and I had been totally oblivious to the fact that these images, when they were first shown, had caused an uproar in New Zealand; really quite virulent attack. And she was attacked for denigrating welfare housing by suggesting that people of extraordinary sortof physical dimensions lived in these buildings. I had exactly the opposite response. When I saw this photograph it was my parents’ wedding. The whole tilt of the man’s head… It was just like the one photograph I have of my parents’ wedding. You could never see my mother’s face in the shot because the hat she had came right over her head, sort of at 45º, and I always remember my father saying ‘Your mother was a beautiful woman when I married her’, and I thought ‘well, you can’t see that from the photograph because all you see is this hat’. But I just thought there was a real mark of fondness and quaintness in this couple, and here they were as bride and groom at the beginning of their life, but depicted as being at the end of it, and still together and clutching, so I found most of the images in the show quite touching, rather than scarifying, or vilifying, or whatever it might be. And it’s been a very, very fond work of mine, and I have four or five images of hers from this series, but this is one that I particularly like, and I have a great fondness for Invercargill; it comes in at many levels, this particular piece.

PF: Gina, in terms of artists who have joined the collection, or joined the family, or whatever it might be, is certainly the last at the end of a long line. Somebody had rung me; an artist friend of mine who had judged a competition, and hadn’t awarded Gina the main prize, but had rung me to say ‘You should get out there; there’s something there that’s you’. And I went to an enormously large… I think nearly six hundred works in this exhibition held at the Casula Powerhouse, and I walked into the space and bang! There was this poppy piece; luminous, large, crying out amongst this host of landscapes, and personal dilemmas, and dioramas… and here was this piece that was just so lovingly beautiful. Yes, they were poppies, but they were something else. They were just so much an elemental flower, without being anything. They were quite magical; I mean, I really didn’t respond to them as poppies, but they were just as if you had stepped into some Arcadian field, and the Gods and the pan pipes were all there, and I think piping too out of the Western Suburbs of Sydney, much maligned as they are, was this object of extraordinary light, and lightness, the whole lightness of being, and I was absolutely hooked. And Gina’s work has gone on to look at more serious subjects of late, but in this particular painting is (such) a delicacy of touch that many, many artist friends of mine can’t believe that it has been painted. There’s not a mark out of place on it. You can smell the flowers breathing. I always remember Keats’ great poem about spring. And this has got this moment of new life, but as we are reminded by Keats: The flower will fade And the scythe will go through the paddock. But this to me is just a wonderful celebration about life and its potential for great beauty, and with all those buds still to come out, still more and more, it’s just such a wonderful celebration.

PF: Dallas would primarily be a visual artist; a painter, but every now and again he’s made models, and in an age today of model-making, they are very, very crude. But to me that sense of crudeness is not a criticism, it’s something that I particularly enjoy. And in Dallas’ work we’ve got a doll that he’s made, or, a figure of a man in the scale of a doll, and then just coated it; covered it with fake fur. And it’s got an ape-like look to it, and yet it’s obviously one of us. It’s quite an unnerving piece, because everything about it is so ‘bad’, and yet there’s a magic that comes through, where it makes us think about the chain of being we might be in, and the idea of the ‘missing link’, and this well could be the ‘missing link’. It’s a piece that’s got quite an intensity, and a focus that takes you into it, and again, it’s just standing there on its plinth, and yet its quite alive to movement, and yet at the same time it seems to be anchored there — it’s almost as though it’s been put back on the shelf, and so that sense of play with time, and history, and our own relationship to it all comes into play.

PF: This is a piece called Pink, by Pat Thompson, an English lady, and I was living in Leeds and had shown very little interest in the visual arts in a career of teaching, and I was hurrying home and came upon this picture in an exhibition of works by WEA people, hierarchically arranged so the winners were all at one end, and the so-called ‘losers’ were at the other end. And there at the end of the line was this woman showing this one particular work, and I just fell in love with it immediately, and had to cancel my plans of returning; missed the bus; came back and engaged her in conversation. She couldn’t believe that anyone wanted to buy it, and kept pushing me – wanting me to go higher up in the line where all the ‘winners’ were. And I said ‘no, the others are extraordinarily bad, I think…’ But this is a piece that has always hung in my home, and when I faced the bushfires in 1994, with a policeman knocking on the door saying I had ten minutes to get out of the house, I took three objects with me and Pink was the first thing into the car, so it does have that special affection, but also now I look back on it. There’s so much in it; in it’s apparent sort of madness; apparent randomness; in its colour; in its line, that it is so in tune I think, with a lot of the collection, so I’m sure the psychologists could go overboard in working out where the sickness set in. But it’s still a very affectionate piece, and the wonderful piece of conversation I had with the artist was when I enquired about it, because I tried to sort of make head nor tail of were these bodies in a bed, or were they standing – were they curtains or were they bedspreads – or whatever – wherever you went around the work you seemed to get a different reading. I said ‘Ohh, Pat, why didn’t you paint any hands or feet?’ – on these particular bodies, and she just said to me ‘The night that they did hands and feet I was sick.’ I thought ‘Oh God, you weren’t feeling too good the night they did perspective, or whatever it might be, but it’s a work I’ve really grown very fond of’.

PF: Fiona was a young artist, along with a lot of young artists who were showing in the Mori Gallery in Sydney. And this was a work for a show which was site specific, at Elizabeth Bay House, in Sydney. And it’s a wonderful colonial home with many rooms, and there were four or five artists showing work, and some had been allocated rooms, and there were hallways, and all sorts of things. And I’d got down there early, and in the library and also the specimen room of Elizabeth Bay House — there were specimens on the wall; there were insects, it was like being in a sort of a nineteenth century drawing room. And at first I looked at Fiona’s piece, and if you get quite close to it all you notice are the butterflies; it’s like a series of specimen butterflies pinned to a board, and I just thought ‘Oh, that must be one of the works from the holdings from the house here’. And then when you walked back from it this face came out at you, which was made up or composed of the butterflies, [which] then fell into and became part of the face, and if you stood at five paces, as it’s called, and moved your head backwards and forwards, this double image occurred. And it was just so exquisitely balanced and beautifully small in a room where there were giant stuffed birds, and cabinets teeming with life, I just thought that this (piece) held the whole poetry of that building, and in a beautiful way it had such a delicate and very intricate making, and it was the first Fiona piece that I bought. I had been looking at other pieces of hers but I’d often been a bit slow to get to the Gallery, and she was doing a lot of collage work in those early days, and so I was absolutely thrilled to have this piece.

PF: I came upon a Shaun painting at a Helen Lempriere Scholarship exhibition, in a sea of what was then termed ‘Grunge’, and here was this beautifully painted double figure; two historical figures. And I immediately recognised an extraordinary talent in this young painter; found him out and became quite engaged with his work, and immediately asked him to do a piece of work, for a very small amount of money, and to get him to do something that he had not explored before. After a couple of months Shaun rang me to say that the work was finished, and that it was a video. I thought ‘Oh, dear oh dear’ My heart sank. But I thought ‘No, this is good. I’ve got to support this, and I’ve got to be interested’, and he had arranged a studio at the Art School. He was still in the final year of his masters, I think, and he showed me this most extraordinary video piece of his skateboarding. I didn’t even know he was a skateboarder. I was just transfixed by the beauty of this image of this skater pirouetting in slow motion, with the huge drama of the sea; the seascape behind him this incredible storm at sea. All these were elements of luck; the storm and so forth. And then with the rain falling on the lens of the camera transforming what was a video piece it becomes almost a pointillist, almost an impressionist painting, as the blurring, still with this figure eternally circling almost like an angel or some celestial body ready to return to another void; to another planet; to another world. And taking its leave in this last gyration, which just goes on, and on, and on. It’s quite mesmeric, quite simple in its dynamic, and yet the poetry and the intensity, and the sense of drama that is captured. I think it is an extraordinary video. This to me contained all the elements that I just think that great video art holds, and I just feel that in this young artist there is an extraordinary talent.