February

TOLARNO GALLERIES

FLYING OUT (FIRECRACKER)

featuring

Hannah Gartside
Guruwuy Murrinyina
Georgia Spain
Justine Varga
Elizabeth Willing

“… five distinct voices, but they share a quality found in the most special art, where the works exist in excess of themselves, overflowing with feelings, ideas, stories and desires. Yet the right to this aesthetic intensity for women was never a historical given. As art critic Jennifer Higgie makes clear in The Mirror and the Palette, for hundreds of years women artists fought for the space and time to fulfill their curiosities and drives—it’s a lineage that leads to exhibitions like Flying out (firecracker).”

Tiarney Miekus 2024

10 – 24 February 2024

Read the exhibition catalogue

April

Hannah Gartside

“She uses deadstock fabrics, clothes found in skips and op shops or given to her by friends, garments of dead relatives and fur from pets. For the artist, clothes are psychic objects that not only have history (a faded menstrual stain, the scent of a beloved) but presence; material has its own life… In this sense, the sculptures are about fabric itself, the singular way in which material is able to articulate the immaterial – a current of air, an undertow of desire. Fabric also has its own sound world and Gartside is listening to what it is saying, ‘pulsing, sighing, calling to us’.”

– Hannah Fink, Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art catalogue essay

Read: Hannah Gartside,  This Body Is Experiencing Pleasure Catalogue essay – Tiarney Miekus 2023

Read: Short story Frances, the moth – Hannah Gartside 2023

March

Wanapati Yunupiŋu

… the stunning set-up for Wanapati Yunupiŋu’s first ever solo exhibition (Melbourne or otherwise), sets a special corner of the [Melbourne Art] Fair on fire. The south looked jealously to the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin late last year when the exhibition Murrŋiny surveyed eight artists from Yirrkala, all working in the medium of engraved “steel” (found metals). Now we get a piece of it ourselves, with Yunupiŋu’s murrŋiny paintings that overlay images of marine life (from deep and shallow water) with ancestral designs of fire.

These works do appear both hot and cool. The exposed aluminium twinkles innocently, but I wouldn’t touch the murrŋiny surface; cut with a rotary drill, I bet it’s sharp as hell. – Victoria Perin, MeMO Review, February 2022

Wanapati is a Yolŋu artist who lives in the remote Gumatj homeland of Biranybirany, North East Arnhemland in the Northern Territory. This is a coastal community set amongst sand dunes and stringybark forest at the end of a lonely gravel road three hours from the nearest small town, Yirrkala. There are approximately ten houses here but no mains power or store. The residents live a life dictated by the ceremonial and seasonal calendar supplemented by regular 6 hour round trips to the mining town of Nhulunbuy for supplies.

Wanapati is the son of deceased artist and spiritual leader Miniyawany Yunupiŋu from whom he inherited rich ceremonial instruction, and was trained in the art, Law and cultural practice of his and related clans while living between the homeland communities of Waṉḏawuy (his mother’s clan land) and Biranybirany. Wanapati has been strongly influenced by peer and artist Gunybi Ganambarr who radically embraced the use of found object in his practice. Gunybi is fifteen years older than Wanapati but a very inclusive and warm mentor to younger artists. He has always actively encouraged them to find their own path, as he was, by his own mentor, Djambawa Marawili AO.

Wanapati has quickly forged his own style, etching his sacred Gumatj clan designs and narratives into the face of discarded street signs and twisted metal and aluminium surfaces that litter the landscape of North East Arnhemland. He is a physically large man but quite shy, very gentle, friendly, humorous and soft spoken. He is popular within the Yolŋu community who recognise his natural humility and respect for others.

Watch a Wanapati Yunupiŋu video here.

August

Georgia Spain

Pinned to Georgia Spain’s studio wall is a cluster of postcards, photographs and magazine clippings. There are images of dancers, a game of tug-of-war, a hot-dog eating contestant hunched over a mound of food, tables laid out with feasts, a group of cheese-rolling competitors throwing themselves down a hill with their limbs outstretched in unlikely directions, and a Pieter Bruegel painting that Spain is attracted to for its ‘chaos’. While Spain doesn’t directly replicate this source material, she captures the dynamism in these scenes, and, to quote one of the scribbles on the wall, the ‘messiness of bodies’. She’s interested in ritual and ceremony, spectatorship and crowds, myths and legends, and the things that draw humans together… Spain’s ‘messiness of bodies’ truly captures the chaos of our time.

 – Lucy Hawthorne, Artist Profile, Issue 55, May 2021

Georgia Spain Time is the thing a body moves through, exhibition essay by Tiarney Miekus, 2022

Georgia Spain’s Abstract Paintings Capture The Chaos Of Our Times The Design Files, 3 October 2022

August

Kieren Karritpul

In Daly River artist Kieren Karritpul’s art there is no escaping the woven lines of inspiration. The woven form is both subject and metaphor in his work, and also to some extent part of their process. In his first solo exhibition, Karritypul, the titles of his paintings, prints and textile-based work all indicated a particular woven form including the yerrgi which is actually a pre-woven form, yerrgi being the Daly River word (Ngan’gikurrungurr language) for the ubiquitous Sand Palm (Merrepen, Livistona humilis), the main sources of fibre for Top End weavers.

In essence, Kieren’s yerrgi bundles symbolise the potency of weaving and the woven form and become a metaphor for the very idea of potency. Perhaps this is an autobiographical touch from someone so young who is in the early formative stages of realising his own potential as an artist. And yet there is a delightful and seasoned ingenuity in Kieren’s choice and varied rendering of the yerrgi bundle.

Like Monet’s haystacks – vehicles for the study and celebration of light, Kieren’s yerrgi-‘stacks’ are a meditation on and celebration of Aboriginal culture.

In these abstracted views, the woven form almost becomes mandala-like with the imagery built up from radiating bands of short parallel lines. In this sense the line can be seen as a faithful transposition of the coil weave technique rather than the traditionally longer, looser stitches though it is in effect more about Kieren’s visual-poetic licence in the process of translating one form into another to become something much more than what it represents; to transcend. – Maurice O’Riordan, Director, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 2015 (Woven Lines catalogue essay excerpts)

Download the Painting my Landscape, Painting my Culture essay by Dr Cathy Laudenbach

Watch Kieren Karritpul 2022 an intimate film portrait of the young artist from Nauiyu, Daly River in the Northern Territory.  Exquisitely filmed and directed by the award winning Naina Sen, it is narrated by Kieren Karritpul who speaks about his family, art, culture and the land on which he lives: The land is part of us and we are part of the land. Commissioned by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) with support from Merrepen Arts Centre, the film shows Karritpul creating the works for Making the Ancestors Smile, his 2022 exhibition at Tolarno Galleries.

Read Kieren Karritpul Texere, Melbourne Design Week in Yellowtrace 2023, Interview with Kieren Karritpul on ABC RN The Art Show, 2022, Kieren Karritpul’s Portals to Nauiyu on Ocula, 2022, Read more in Art Collector, 2021.

July

teamLab

teamLab (f. 2001) is an art collective, interdisciplinary group of ultratechnologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world. Various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects form teamLab.

teamLab aims to explore a new relationship between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world through art. Digital technology has allowed art to liberate itself from the physical and transcend boundaries.

teamLab sees no boundary between humans and nature, and between oneself and the world; one is in the other and the other in one. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life.

March

Justine Varga

When we think of photography we naturally think of a camera, even if it is just as an icon on our smart phone. The two go hand in hand. But we can take the camera out of the equation and still have photography. All we need is light. Indeed, the Greek roots of the word literally mean ‘drawing with light’. – Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography, National Gallery of Australia, 2016

Varga… has, in essence, updated the metaphysical angst of mid-century action painting for our own chaotic age, when renewed anxieties around the politics of mass media have put pressure on the fidelity associated with photographic representation. Her works dismantle the expectations that those forces cultivate by breaking down the conventions that we otherwise expect to see in photographs. In so doing, she reasserts the photograph as a trace of the world. Her rubbed, scratched, and stained surfaces have been exposed to today’s disintegrating social and ecological climate, resulting in a grand mix of personal inscription and environmental trace. – Andrés Mario Zervigón, Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers University (USA), 2020

Read Tachisme exhibition catalogue essays by Andrés Mario Zervigón (2020) and Susan Best (2021), Professor of Art History and Theory at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Read the Justine Varga Artist Profile cover story.

Read exhibition essay, Justine Varga, End of Violet by Saul Nelson

November

A&A

A&A is the collaboration between Australian industrial designer Adam Goodrum and French marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur.

Adam Goodrum
Australian industrial designer Adam Goodrum has worked with global brands including Cappellini, Alessi and Veuve Cliquot. He was among the first to recognise Seigneur’s unique skill not long after the Parisian arrived in Sydney in early 2015. Goodrum invited Seigneur to collaborate on a reinterpretation of Arne Jacobsen’s iconic Series-7 chair for Cult furniture. The Bloom cabinet is the first of their purpose-designed pieces and marks the beginning of an ongoing collaboration. Goodrum won the triennial Rigg Design Prize in 2015, the highest accolade for contemporary design in Australia.

Arthur Seigneur
In the tradition of 17th century French decorative arts, Parisian Arthur Seigneur has spent the past decade refining his craft. A graduate of the prestigious École de la Bonne Graine furniture-making school, he honed his hand as an apprentice first to a harpsichord maker, then to a master restorer. But it was while working alongside marquetry artiste Lison de Caunes, grand-daughter of renowned Art Deco designer André Groult, that Seigneur developed the craft which would become his calling: marqueterie de paille – straw marquetry. Watch a video about Arthur Seigneur’s straw marquetry on SBS.

Download the Mother and Child 2022 exhibition catalogue.

Read the Exquisite Corpse/ Cadavre Exquis exhibition (2020) media release. Exquisite Corpse is a Dezeen Awards 2020 finalist.

Read more at Wallpaper magazine 2023, 2021 and 2020, FT Weekend How to Spend It magazine UK 2021, Yellowtrace 2023, 2020, Dezeen, Australian Financial Review magazine 2020, Art Guide 2020, The Design Files 2020, Vogue Living 2020, AFR Life & Leisure 2020, Architectural Digest India 2020.

July

Amos Gebhardt

Gebhardt presents a filmic dance of an entirely different kind. In this multi-channel video, Lovers, 2018 – Gebhardt celebrates the drama of powerful thoroughbred horses, performing a courting ritual of extraordinary intimacy. Gebhardt’s poetic meditation on the animal language of consent and desire connects the viewer to a force and emotion, in which we become complicit partners to an act of passion.

– Erica Green, Divided Worlds, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018

Download the media release for Night Horse.

Download the Evanescence essay by Joanna Kitto.

February

Elizabeth Willing

“Exploring the sculptural and multi-sensory potential of food has been a key focus of Elizabeth Willing’s practice. Her work includes sculpture, installation, performance and participatory dining events that engage audiences through sensory dimensions such as smell, taste, and touch. In creating her work Willing is not only an artist, but a cook, designer, engineer and scientist, testing and manipulating the material qualities and limitations of food and applying her highly refined aesthetic sensibility.”

– Rachael Parsons, Director, New England Regional Art Museum 2018

Forced Rhubarb exhibition – Elizabeth Willing artist statement May 2022

Listen to Elizabeth Willing interviewed by food writer Dani Valent on the Dirty Linen podcast  and on ABC RN The Drawing Room with Andy Park (both June 2022).

20 Questions with Elizabeth Willing in Art Guide Australia May/June 2022