…recent MPhil graduate of the ANU School of Art Pam Lofts is showing with Helen Maxwell Gallery at Silvershot, in Melbourne.

Visit Megan’s blog and see what ANU School of Art postgraduate alumna Natali Rodrigues has been up to… (Saves me all that assembly!)

by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax’s new exhibition at CCAS Manuka. Her drawing of a flock of starlings creates compelling illusions, as well as gritty surface qualities, as it swirls around you. It’s an irregular space which lends itself to surprising effects.

Sarina (a PhD candidate in Printmedia) explains: Time can be experienced in different ways. It can be quantified by the sweep of hands around a clock face, or experienced through the ongoing cycles of Nature. These seasonal changes are easily observed in recurring events such as the waxing and waning of the moon, but can also be noticed in ordinary moments such as the flight of birds across the sky.

This exhibition of charcoal drawings contains the traces of such a chance encounter. Transposed onto the gallery walls, the flight of a starling flock takes place within a unit of imagined time. The ghostly silhouettes contain the memory of their flight, and recall Rilke’s poetic concept that ‘silently the birds fly through us.’ This form of experiential time is not quantifiable, as it cannot be measured as a length of distance over time, for the starlings are simultaneously both here and there.

Her show (titled here + there) is open from this Wed (30th) til Sunday (4th May) from 11 – 5pm

Lia was an MPhil graduate (in Ceramics, obviously) in 2006. This piece (from the ‘Nudibranch series’, mid-fire porcelain, 2006, photo by ANU photography) is characteristic of the work she did in the program, and is currently in the border, an exhibition at CraftACT. Lia gives the following account of her motivation in works such as this:

Aesthetically, the visual inspirations for the work are natural forms including plants, coral and sea creatures. This work does not set out to replicate the specifics of particular organic forms but seeks to capitalize on the strange, complex, richly patterned and brightly coloured beauty of the natural world. That said, there are elements of the work that are often confused with actual organic things, and in this way act as a kind of mimesis or an imitation of nature. This creates confusion between representations and the real.

The nudibranch or sea slug is a delightfully strange and weird looking thing. I am drawn to its flamboyance and extravagance – why is a sea slug so ornate? It seems like a fine thing to try to combine with an object that alludes to function in that it acts as a setting off point between the understandable reality of a functional object (vase) and something beyond easy understanding –the animate and inanimate together.

Don’t we love seeing what people do along the way? Here’s Hanna Hoyne (PhD, Sculpture) building a what? If you’re patient, we’ll show you how it turns out.

calls his show at ANCA Gallery Dickson “I wish I was David Bowie”. The title’s allusive. The show is more about getting under your skin. Catch it before it closes on April 13.

It seems only yesterday that our Norwegian Glass alumna Lene Lunde was just down the corridor. Since then, back in Norway, she’s been working like crazy for a show that translates as “Glass and Plastic and Stuff: something for the very smallest of us”.

She’s been blowing in the glass studio at the Ebeltof Glass Museum, and the cold work and engraving is done on the farm “accompanied by one dog, seven cats, and twenty chickens”. All very nervous, no doubt, as they watch what happens to all these other animals!

If you’ve been reading the weekend papers, you will have seen both John MacDonald and Sebastian Smee competing to qualify their appreciation of the NGA current exhibition Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape. Now to enjoy a really fine exhibition review by Holland Cottier (in the NYT 14 March 2008) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to read Chinese Paintings click here, and then click the RELATED article button to The Art is in the Detail. Thanks to Max for alerting us.

Congratulations to two ex postgrads Catherine Woo (Painting) and Ken Yonetani (Ceramics) who’ve been selected for Handle with Care: 2008 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, currently on show as part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Ken’s work is featured on the cover of the Broadsheet, Catherine gets a rave in Sebastian Smee’s review (Weekend Australian Review, p18-19). Ken will also be profiled on the ABC program ‘Sunday Arts” feature story, on air between 5:00pm and 6:00pm on Sunday.

“Sweet Barrier Reef” ‘Handle with Care’ The 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Contemporary Art, 3.6mx12.5m, Sugar, Icing Sugar, Polystyrene foam, Ceramics with a performance by 2 costumed girls serving edible sculptures (coral shaped cakes).

Ken gives the following account of the work: Sweet Barrier Reef focuses on the event of coral bleaching. Coral bleaching refers to the process leading to coral death. River waters containing high levels of suspended sediment cause coral death and bleaching. This sediment often comes from harvesting sugarcane, and is known to be one factor leading to bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. Many large sugarcane fields are located beside coral reefs, leading to coral damage across the globe. In this project, I focus on the connections between consumption and human impact on the environment by creating a reef out of sugar. Here, I do not focus only on the impact of the sugarcane industry; rather sugar is used as a much larger metaphor for our desire to consume and its environmental impact. Sugar becomes a metaphor of human desire. It is also strongly connected to processes of “colonization”, “modernisation” and “consumerism”.

…is to the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden as the Dubbo Zoo is to Taronga Park. It’s where the wild things are. ANU School of Art postgraduate sculptors (Amanda Stuart, Hanna Hoyne, Sally Simpson), together with alumnae Rachel Bowak, Rosalind Lemoh, and Jacqui Bradley and erstwhile Graduate Convenor Nigel Lendon, all headed east to participate in the weekend’s events. And refugee from Sculpture to Glass Workshop, alumnus Phil Spellman was also an invited artist, and Rachel and Nigel also spoke at the Sunday Symposium.

Curiously, the metaphor of the edge stimulated the Canberra artists to contribute works which evoked limits and boundaries in more ways than one. Testing the limits of the park-like setting of Bermagui’s Endeavour Point Headland, Amanda Stuart’s pack of wild dogs (Bush Pack) tore along the edge of the escarpment beyond the lawn, causing fright to the local puppies and their owners, reminding us of forms of life beyond the city limits. Hannah Hoyne’s spectacular Soulsearchanaut about to be Born is an angelic astronaut in a bubble threatening to fly out over the bay, towards Mt Dromedary. And sculpture graduate Rachel Bowak’s work Container terrorized the grey nomads in the caravan park next door with simultaneous images of paradise, and a way to get there… Cryogenics is not everyone’s idea of the perfect holiday destination!

Your reporter thought he was hallucinating when his view of the Bermagui Community Centre Hall from the world-famous Bermagui Gelati Clinic was momentarily eclipsed by some of the participants in the Bermagui Seaside fair, which was all happening at the same time. When the effects of his extraordinary gelato (fig with lemon lime and bitters) had worn off, he visited the site of the second part of the Sculpture event, an exhibition of small scale works.

Here he found Sally Simpson’s work Duality B , the Islamic reference of which complemented the Christian iconography of her other work. And Rosalind Lemoh put her fist down with Hands Like a Hammer, one of the three works she contributed to the exhibition.

Now click across to glasscentralcanberra and ArtWranglers for more images and commentary…