WRITING

1967

Critics respond to an exhibition with intensity, one describes it as "pure, obscene horror"; Rodney Milgate wrote "have a double brandy, grit your teeth and see it".

The exhibition in question was the first solo show for a young painter Vivienne Binns, held at Watters Gallery in Sydney.

180 years ago, the French painter Paul Delaroche viewed an early daguerreotype and uttered his famous words: "from today, painting is dead." Rather than killing the medium, the invention of photography forced painting to reinvent itself: as expressive, durational, self-reflexive and confessional.

Louise: Something shared across your practices is this idea of redoing; revisiting, restaging and recycling pre-existing imagery and tropes. What attracts you to redoing as a creative strategy? And who are you thinking about or referencing, both explicitly and secretly?

Anna Gonzalez’ photographed dioramas belong to a world without sunlight. Strange cut-out figures navigate her dark interiors and landscapes with disturbing fear, menace and glee. In Running Away (2020) a husband flees the scene.

Out the front of QUT Art Museum, a wooden bench painted in Rainbow Pride colours marks the gallery as a safe space, and the university as a place where art, design and architecture effortlessly combine. Just beyond the seat, an installation by Emma Coulter extends from the gallery’s windows.

Kate Bohunnis and Kate Power’s material investigations drip with the delicate tensions of two art practices combined. To see them is to encounter a universe of antonyms and oxymorons, and to get lost in the liminal spaces where contrasts balance, overlap and coalesce.

This exhibition follows a bright red ball of wool. Here, it appears in the hands of the artist. There, it tangles around chairs. And everywhere we imagine it in our own hands. To make this sensation real, Mieke van den Berg sets a ball of wool in a wicker basket and invites us to unwind and rewind it’s thread.

Moving through this exhibition, drawing shifts from figuration to abstraction, photorealism to hastened sketch, scribbly line to neat typography. Collectively, Drawn champions the multiplicities of these lines, and favours art that is open to iteration, redoing, re-seeing and starting again.

Louise: I'm really interested in your visual vocabulary. Your works feel equally fresh and familiar. Your secret language reminds me

of Egyptian Hieroglyphs while your sculptures recall the angles of Pablo Picasso and your dreamy paintings conjure Paul

Delvaux.

Leonard Brown once lamented: “A sale is a sale”, as Gertrude Stein would say. When an institution buys a work, that’s great; yet it comes with a kind of sadness, a future sealed, seen usually under fixed lighting and, when not on show, committed to life in a rack, seeing the light of day or the artificial light but occasionally

At the metaphorical heart of Stok’s exhibition is Vault (2021). The sculptural installation is a materially fascinating form, comprised of large geometric panels and embellished with small decorative stitches.

Close observation of the physical threads on show offers one method for engaging with Drawn Thread. Find the smallest neatest stitches. Observe the radiant colour and possibilities of sequins.