A selection of my arts writing

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Formwork: Samantha Haničar and Janice Haničar

At Muswellbrook Regional Gallery, 31 October 2022 – 18 February 2023

Artworks about motherhood or portraits of the artist’s mother or daughter are common, yet finding historic examples of two-person exhibitions of mother and daughter artists is surprisingly difficult. Formwork, an exhibition of drawings and sculptures, is a duo exhibition by just such a pair. Individually, the works are fascinating and hold their own, yet together, it becomes a conversation between two artists who share what is perhaps the most defining relationship of people’s lives.  

Janice Hanicar is an avid and indiscriminate collector – a ‘hoarder’ according to her daughter- her sculptures are born intuitively, inspired by the forms and materiality of her vast collection of discarded “junk”. Her minimal sculptures deny the chaotic association of their origins. They echo Brutalist architecture in their showcasing of the materials and structural elements, yet feel too intimate- exuberant and quirky, even- to be classified as such. 

Few surfaces are sleek and polished as we’ve come to expect from concrete: collected objects like plastic strips from electrical cords are used as aggregate. In Fenestra No. 1, the materials that inspired its form are missing, their absence creating the windows alluded to in the title, like a half-remembered dream, teaching us to pause, to ponder, to hold both weight and weightless light simultaneously.  

The organic, unplanned nature of Janice’s practice has not been passed down to her daughter: Samantha is more organised, planning and sketching her sculptures before beginning. The result is works that are palpably more intellectual than intuitive. There is the same emphasis on negative space, the same use of concrete and collected materials, but whilst Janice uses the materials more as a means to explore the basic elements of sculpture, works such as Samantha’s Architectonic No. 12 engage more with their materiality, its symbolic and visual potential. It is almost a sculptural drawing, the construction-recalling steel rods vibrating with staccato rhythm in the concrete composition.  

Samantha’s genre-defying drawings take the archetypal combination of paper and graphite into truly new territory: they become self-referential sculptural objects, something akin to a poem about poetry. A folded sheet of paper is placed over a raw concrete surface. The pressure of a graphite stick repeatedly drawn over the surface embosses the texture of the concrete into the paper, with the graphite built up to such a density that its materiality is simultaneously highlighted – graphite's beautiful lustre- and denied: the result is physically heavy in appearance. 

Janice and Samantha do not live, or create, near to each other, a distance only multiplied psychologically as it was for us all during the lockdowns of recent years. They collaborate and assist each other through texting images of works in progress, or via phone calls, giving each other feedback and support as they worked separately yet together towards this exhibition. Formwork is a rare chance to view not only the exceptional output of two talented artists, but also to witness the relationship between them, one not only artistic but familial; formative and universal.  

JODY graham, ‘Salvage’ catalogue essay

Lost Bear Gallery, Katoomba, 26 August – 18 September 2017

Jody Graham’s exhibition Salvage sees a return to a subject matter that, whilst by no means her only one, has become synonymous with her name: Sydney’s urban landscapes, especially its historical buildings. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, a façade is either: 1) the front of a building or any face of a building given special architectural treatment; or 2) a false, superficial, or artificial appearance or effect. Jody Graham draws neither.  

If given only a cursory glance – which would be highly undeserving – her works might seem to portray the fronts of buildings, but they dig deeper than that. They anthropomorphise, and they unearth the lived histories of a building; the capacity for brick and mortar to be story-teller, memory-keeper. These new works in particular are a creative defiance of our throw-away, consumer culture, and a call-to-arms to value the old; to mend instead of disregard. Interspersed with construction sites, a reminder of the erasure of the past and the development of the new, much of the show is comprised of reworked – salvaged – older drawings in which Graham has built on the existing history of marks to create a new work.  

After focussing on the three-dimensional for a while, Graham embarked on a self-imposed regime of creating one drawing a day for sixty days. These works would become Salvage, and they evolved organically out of that often-fruitful combination of structure and free play. In The Only Window (Day 42), a quiet but forceful work, layers and scratches and more layers of mark-making overlap like the many paint colours uncovered when sanding old walls. All those lives, the building has absorbed and still holds. The exterior of a building is a container of mystery and possibility. They can become ours more readily than the interior does, which always belongs to the owner. The façade is perfect then for creating meaning: less personal, they are more symbolic, almost archetypal. They present a face to the world that is carefully cultivated, much like we do, and Graham unmasks them. She treats her inanimate subject as something alive, healing the wounds of her aging building with tender, expressive stitches. Those stitches say: “there is value here, if you choose to look”.  

Unexpectedly for the subject matter, Graham’s work has none of the cold rigidity and formality of architectural drawings; instead they tremble with energy and emotions ranging from exuberance to existential doubt. I see in this contrast her revolt against the lack of humanity in the quickly and poorly made apartment blocks of today, her esteem for the history and personality of the older buildings, created with more care and artistry. Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1 per cent remain in use six months after sale. Graham uses her art to show us that our redemption lies in seeing afresh and repairing what we already have. 

In keeping with these concerns, Graham has made her own drawing tools out of found materials, repurposing the discarded and overlooked to create something both functional and beautiful. Used to create the works in this show, they are also exhibited alongside them as art objects in their own right. Making your own tools, like growing you own food, is a political act; you are bypassing the wheel of neoliberal consumerism. In these tools, like the works created with them, we can again see artistic creation as an act of resistance.  

The few landscape works are a predominance of red ochre, dark as dried blood. Seam I (Day 36) features, amongst a multitude of smaller cuts, one large vertical scar, serious, hastily mended with sutures like the strokes of some half-remembered alphabet. They tell of coal seam gas mining and the bulldozing of our natural world for the sake of short-term financial profit.  

Scars make a unified whole out of what was damaged, like an old bowl with cracks resurrected in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi with veins of shimmering gold. The works in Jody Graham’s exhibition Salvage are uplifting in their assertion that whilst we may be broken, individually and certainly collectively, our salvation is possible.  

Making Ground exhibition review, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba, NSW

September 2013

The interpretation or imitation of nature has long been, and continues to be, a central concern in the search for a definition of, and system of valuing, art. In Making Ground: Blue Mountains as Material, at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba, until 6 October, the problem of interpretation or imitation has been, to some extent, eradicated. What connects the works in the exhibition is that they no longer take nature as inspiration or subject matter, but utilise it as material for creation.  

The catalogue for the exhibition opens with an explanation of the Aboriginal perspective on using natural resources. It describes the cultural practice of seeking permission from the custodial ancestral spirits of the place, and from the entity itself, be it tree, rock or clay. Such entities are seen to possess an animate spiritual presence, as well as existing as a home for a range of living creatures. Implied in the introduction is a world view that sees humans not just in harmony with the natural environment but part of it. We live in a world in which, all too often, humankind and nature are seen as two sides of a dichotomy. The falsehood of this dichotomy is revealed in Making Ground.  

Ceramics, since its inception as an art form, has always occupied a rare position in art, in that it has the capacity to be simultaneously medium as well as subject. As such it is unsurprising, however much it is refreshing, that three ceramicists were chosen for inclusion in Making Ground, as it is this merging of medium with subject, usually the preserve of ceramics, which makes the other artworks in the exhibition successful.  

Simon Reece’s Escarpment Rocks are interpretations of the rocks that are, to Reece, the essence of the Blue Mountains. Their powerful beauty resides in their simplicity, in the elimination of the inessential. They are almost purely organic looking, except for the occasional deep clefts formed by fingers, which serve to separate them from mere imitations of escarpment rocks; they are instead spiritual offerings to them. The clay is not treated gently; it is torn, smashed and roughly manipulated. Yet in the serendipity of the textures and shapes formed by their making, and in their submission to the kiln, they echo the shaping of the escarpments through their surrender to weather and the movements of the earth. Whilst these works are maquettes for larger sculptures commissioned by the Cultural Centre, their smallness increases their power. They are mountains, distilled to a size that allows an intimate contemplation. They are more subtle, and thus more human than the sublime reality of their stimulus. They are unfinished sentences, but so too is the constantly changing landscape of the Blue Mountains.  

Bill Samuels’ works utilise clay as well as materials found locally. Studio Road 3, formed from fired road base, sits precariously on its rock tripod, speaking at the same time of nature changed by man, as well as the fragility of the relationship between the two. His works are full of transformations and contrasts, much like the human occupation of the Blue Mountains; the disparity of roads destroying the environment, whilst at the same time allowing access, and thus appreciation, of it. 

Jacquline Spedding’s Green Dreams, installed in its own corner of the gallery, confronts the viewer on one side with an almost post-apocalyptic vision of old, broken bricks and strange, semi-decayed garden pots. These mysterious objects are formed by dipping weeds and domestic plants into clay slip, pressing them into moulds of common garden pots, and firing them. The organic matter burns out, punctuating the clay with their loss, at once absent and present. They speak of memory, as well as the relationship of humans to nature. Spedding’s work touches upon an aspect of this relationship that ceramicists are already familiar with: working with clay makes evident the power of the material itself, how it maintains a degree of authority over its own use. The use of natural materials in Making Ground similarly exists under this condition; nature may be reorchestrated, but it cannot be fully tamed or mastered. As such, Spedding’s work, along with the most successful works in the exhibition, highlight the folly of our perceived authority over nature, and the reality of our place in, rather than above or separate from, the natural world. 

As the introduction demanded, there is an expression of gratitude to the environment conveyed in all the works, but more than that, they demonstrate the brief illusion of power over nature that we are permitted by nature herself, before she reabsorbs us. The works are thus cyclical, depicting the fragility of life and death, giving new life to dead matter and implicating our own place in this cycle. The artists repay the debt of their use of nature by shattering the man/nature dichotomy and by showing its viewers what can be gained by this. Humanity, like art, cannot exist without nature.