Meditation on a Bone: Albert Tucker beyond the Modern, Heide Museum of Modern Art
For this exhibition, artist and curator Glenn Barkley has mined Albert Tucker’s library and archive to explore how Tucker’s fascination with art of the past and other cultures informed his painting over the decades.
The exhibition title cites a poem by A.D. Hope that Barkley found bookmarked in the library, a text reflecting on the way a handcrafted object links two people across several centuries. Central to Meditation on Bone is the motif of the mask, another culturally loaded device that can have meaning in both the past and the present. The display includes books, photographs and archival material from Tucker’s personal collection, together with works by a range of artists who use the mask literally and conceptually as a way to obscure meaning, invite nostalgia, and connect histories.
Exhibiting Artists: Laurence Aberhart, Tony Albert, Glenn Barkley, Dorothy Berry, Karla Dickens, Lynda Draper, Scott Duncan, Ruki Famé, Caroline Garcia, Simon Gende, Tarryn Gill, Raven Halfmoon, Glenda Havilah, John Havilah, Adrian Lazzaro, Louise Meuwissen, Ramesh Nitheyendran, Jason Phu, Tom Polo
Bad Mannerism
2 - 27 May 2018, Galerie pompom,
Chris Aerfeldt, Chris Dolman, Lynda Draper, Drew Connor Holland, Chelsea Lehmann, Madeleine Preston, Bruce Reynold.
Lynda Draper’s ceramic works in Bad Mannerism combine the monumental with the playful. As objects, they suggest both ‘body’ and ‘world’ in their looping skeletons of pinched clay adorned with various protrusions. Draper’s artworks have been described as possessing a certain ‘economy of touch’* evident in the sensitive consideration of colour and distribution of shape, yet they are also exuberant manifestations of invention and process. In the work Spring, the Janus-like head appears to sprout tentative forms that resemble flora and fungi, while Black Widow’s improbable anatomy is more imposing, though this is offset by her spidery pink crown and delicately formed embellishments. Draper’s objects invite an empathic response from the viewer elicited by their tenderly moulded anthropomorphism and a sense of tactility that indexes both the artist’s hand and imagination.
Curated by Chelsea Lehmann
