Artist statements and biographies
Curator Tanya Voges
Wish you were here…’
A postcard is sent from a place you visit, not the place you normally inhabit.
For this exhibition I’ve invited mothers who are practicing artists throughout the early years of motherhood to create work about the process and time of life we are in. The resulting works across a broad spectrum of mediums are influenced by inhabiting motherhood, yet not prescriptively about the act of mothering. This exhibition embraces the connections that these artists have to their families and because of that focus on creating life, respects that there is multiplicity at play in their practice.
Multidisciplinary Artist Tanya Voges creates choreography for theatre and gallery spaces which invite audiences to engage, participate, feel immersed and explore trace. Tanya works and resides on the unceded lands of the Peramangk peoples of the Adelaide Hills. She is part of the Artist Residence in Motherhood and has created an alternative mothers' group MAMAA- Mother Artists Making Art, Australia which has both an online community and studio sharing in Adelaide. Engaging with collaborators of various disciplines Tanya brings her experience in dance, drawing, community engagement and dance film making to make multimedia performance works, live dance pieces and dance for screen.
Bridget Currie
Image: ‘one.another’ 2020, durational performance with 10kg weight Media: series of digital photographs of movement sequence, (photographer: Morgan Sette, courtesy of the artist)
‘one.another’ references documentation tropes from Conceptual art of the 1960s. This work invites you to imagine the act of carrying a baby as a durational performance, made by the artist everyday from her child’s birth to their mastery of walking. The movements in this sequence are derived from everyday activities undertaken while carrying a child in arms. I am interested in the forms created by sharing weight, interruption and balancing; considerations that have been a large part of my sculptural and performance practice for many years. Approaching the process of childcare and mothering through formal aesthetic and conceptual considerations feels freeing, while these images are certainly of a mother and child, with all the emotional baggage that can bring, they can also be read as reclaiming the territory of motherhood as part of a history of conceptual and performance art.
Bridget Currie works across a range of modalities including sculpture, performance, drawing, writing, public art and installation. Her art practice is process oriented. Currie explores the representation of abstract states of being and systems of thought, with a focus on social theory, art history and ecology. Her central concern as an artist is bringing invisible things, such as thoughts, emotions, states of being and dreams into the physical world of objects. Currie’s practice utilises intuition, chance and meditative states as origins of form. It foregrounds embodied states that call attention to materiality and the relational to consider the dynamism and vitality of life forces. How do we move through the world? How do we make meaning? She has a particular interest in the history of Modernism and early Post Modernism, the emergence of disciplines such as psychology along-side alternative spirituality and how Modernist artists sought to represent emotional and spiritual states and religious ideas through abstraction. She is based in Adelaide, on the Kaurna lands of South Australia.
Zoe Freney
Image: Linen Mother, 2020, digital print, dimensions variable (Photo courtesy of the artist )
This body of work was conceived as part of my PhD research into depicting the lived experiences of mothering. The structures and images I create focus on the embodied memories of negotiating one's own identity in conjunction with the physical and emotional demands of small dependent others. Even as small children become larger children a mother's body and behaviours are disciplined by societal expectations here imagined as "intimate structures."
Zoe Freney is an artist, writer and educator based in the Adelaide HIlls. She is currently Head of Department (Art History & Theory) at Adelaide Central School of Art. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University, Canberra, where her research explores representations of feminist mothers and mothering. Zoe’s work has been shortlisted for several local awards including the Tatiara Art Prize, 2019; RSASA Portrait Prize, 2019; Heysen Art Prize, 2018 and the Fleurieu Art Prize 2018. She has exhibited in group and solo shows in Adelaide, Tennessee (USA), and Edinburgh (Scotland).
Alana Hunt
Image: Mother, 2013, still from video, 38m20s (photo courtesy of the artist)
Mother is a 38 minute video produced over 24 hours of a dog named Babygirl giving birth to 11 puppies. I shot the video in 2013, a few years before I became a mother myself. This video is raw, fierce, painful, vulnerable, dirty and purposeful. It conveys the messy and powerful essence of something so fundamental for our world, full of life and death.
Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams. Alana studied in Sydney, Halifax and New Delhi, and since 2009 she has led several award-winning art and publishing projects. These have circulated in the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament, as a reading in the history department of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, as a newspaper serial in Srinagar, Kashmir, and as an unofficial street sign at the base of Australia's most under-utilised dam wall. In late 2020 Alana's decade long body of work Cups of nun chai (2010-ongoing) will be published as a book with New Delhi based Yaarbal Books.
Rochelle Haley
Image: Pitch #1, acrylic, resin, dye and metallic pigment on board, 2018, 60x45cm (photo courtesy of the artist)
'Pitch Forward' is an abstract painting and mural installation exploring the tension between form and movement. The work comprising acrylic paint, dye, metallic pigment and resin is made with a technique of layering translucent and opaque pigments on board, building the illusion of depth into a material thickness. The painting is installed directly on top of a large scale mural that extends the lines and colours of the painting out into the gallery space. The shallow depth of the abstract painting transforms the surface into a dimensional realm, that is able to suggest movement and depth beyond the flat picture plane.
Rochelle Haley’s practice is engaged with painting, drawing and movement to explore relationships between bodies and physical environments. Working with dancers and choreographers, her painting installation and performance works investigate space structured around the sensation of the moving body. Haley is interested in merging compositional strategies of painting and choreography, experimenting with abstraction at the boundaries of disciplines to discover how movement of bodies can be expressed and felt by audiences.
Tania Mason
Image: How it started, 2020, Archival Print on True Rag Etching 300GSM, 24cm x 18.5cm (courtesy of the artist)
Drawing and painting is the basis of my practice. Without it there is no image making. Understanding tone and the rhythms of mark making to create an image is something I work really hard to achieve. The works sit like an inverted version of each other. A process of drawing in one dimension focusing on the delicate spaces of tone. While the other inverted version is a concentrated version of what it looks like to draw in space and in time. I have always thought that animating is about drawing in time. Creating delicate moments where your own marks and tones move and meld on a page. When watching the image it transforms and comes alive! Flora drawings in time, explores neuroscience and flora within the landscape. My aim within these new works is to help the onlooker to stop and see the natural world for what it holds, a diverse and strong environment even when impacted upon just like our synapse and pathways within our wonderful minds! Through a variety of consideration's, I found I could draw on parallels of how neural pathways and nature survives when impacted upon. My aim is to try and connect the wonderful flora that we see daily and showcase how amazingly adaptable it can be sometimes!
Tania is an artist that works with works on paper and canvas. She started her career at the National Arts School and also holds a BFA she has exhibited extensively for Australian Galleries including Art House Gallery and Liverpool Street Gallery and group exhibitions in Paris, Saint Tropez, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney.
In 2016 Tania, was the winner of the Calleen Art Award for Painting and the Cowra Art Award for Painting and a finalist in Fisher Ghost Prize, Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, Banyule City Council and Hazlehurst Regional Art Prize and is regularly invited to Bundanon, Hill End and The Gunnery as an artist in residence many times. Tania has several significant public art commissions including an eighteen metre installation in Bondi Junction, commissioned by Waverley Council. This work was concerned with our colonial development and the story of an introduced species such as the Pine trees within that area. Currently selling limited edition prints through Olsen Gallery.
She has received several significant grants for her work including her development with The Australian Ballet ‘Fire Bird and Other legends’ which were then aquisitioned for The Arts Centre of Victoria Collection and toured regional Australia. Another Australia Council grant allowed her to produce a series of new work in response to our colonial past. Tania Mason’s work has been mentioned and presented in many high profiled magazines, art journals and newspapers including Paris ‘la revanche Des Genres, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Vogue Australia, Vogue Living, and recently an essay ‘Creative Australia and The Ballet Russes’ to name but a few.
