art reflecting back at us what it is to live in contemporary Australia
- Written by: Dominic Redfern, Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University
When I was asked to write about Arts Project Australia’s survey show at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Intimate Imaginaries, the term “outsider art” popped unbidden into my mind. As a term it is truly unwanted here, and indeed anywhere in contemporary art discourse.
Despite its origins, in the book of the same name by Roger Cardinal, for use in describing art that emerges outside of the official culture of the art school and gallery system, there is something exclusive about this designation. But let us name it to tame it.
The idea of the “outsider” is instructive in the sense that it draws our attention to the margin and by extension, the centre. The insider is, by definition, at the centre of things. The outsider is on the margins, in some way less representative of the whole. This simply doesn’t hold water when applied to Intimate Imaginaries.
For this is art of immediacy, this is art at the heart of where we live.
Reflecting Australia
Arts Project Australia has been supporting artists with intellectual disabilities for more than 50 years.
Their work in championing these artists cannot be underestimated in terms of its social impact, nor the quality of art. While their artists are characterised by their diversity, they punch above their weight in painting, drawing, ceramic and soft sculpture.
Much of Intimate Imaginaries put me in mind of the small revolution wrought by artists of the post second world war period who brought the industrialised, urbanised, capitalist society into focus through their choice of material and subject matter. Think of nouveau realisme (Daniel Spoerri, Arman), neo dada (power couple Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) and pop art in Britain and America (Claes Oldenberg, Marjorie Strider, Rosalyn Drexler).
Intimate Imaginaries cleaves very close to that democratic vision. This is art reflecting back at us what it is to live in contemporary Australia. We see people, places, things and experiences close to our everyday suffused with a vitality often left wanting in more overtly political or theory burdened contemporary art.
A selection of works by Samraing Chea, installation view, Intimate Imaginaries, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2024.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia. Photo: Andrew Curtis
While the idea of the everyday is very present in the show, there are also examples of other forms of contemporary practice.
Seriality, in the form of diaphanous circular forms, are a daily practice for Fulli Andrinopoulos, in their untitled works across many years. The practice of repeating key motifs or icons can be found throughout Modernism in the work of Josef Albers, who painted squares almost exclusively for the later part of his career, or in the work of our own John Nixon.
Fulli Andrinopoulos, Untitled, 2015. Ink on paper. 18.5 x 19 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia
Andrinopoulos’ practice recalls Om Kawara’s Today series of date paintings as well as the Japanese art of Shodo, specifically the ensō , the circular form which symbolises the universe (Dharmadhatu), the zen mind and mu (emptiness).
In video performance from multi-disciplinary artist Chris O’Brien, O’Brien inhabits the police procedural, scaffolding his characters with catch phrases and poignant improvisations. His work calls to mind the deft mix of surrealist banality found in the work of Heath Franco and his sometime collaborator Matthew Griffin.
The televisual for O’Brien is an extension of his wider engagement with suburbia as evidenced in his ceramic and soft sculptural work.
Chris O'Brien, 328 Clarke st, 2024. Cotton, cotton thread, foam, material, string, stuffing, thread, twine, wool. 20 x 40 x 23 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia
Soft sculpture, and the ceramic renderings of soft forms, is also a highlight of the show in the work of Terry Williams, reminiscent for me of the work of aeroplane obsessive, Hans-Jörg Georgi.
Achieving authenticity
There are too many great artists to single out in the space available but if this exhibition has a uniting thread or theme, it is that of authenticity.
These are artists seemingly untroubled by what they “should” make. These works positively thrum with affect; these are artists deeply connected to their subject matter.
While there is humour, there is little in the way of cynicism or ironic posturing. There is no shopping for the topical, no virtue signalling.
A selection of works by Lisa Reid, installation view, Intimate Imaginaries, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2024.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia. Photo: Andrew Curtis
This is work that puts me in mind of Claude Levi Strauss’s notion of the bricoleur. French for “handyman” and the name of a chain of hardware stores in France, the bricoleur transforms the “at hand” into a model of their own vision, their sense of what it is that makes up and animates the world.
This is work that finds the sacred close at hand.
Not a transcendent, other worldly significance, but the sacred present in the stuff of the everyday. To take one of many examples, look at Lisa Reid’s ceramic work, Mum’s 1971 Elna Supermatic Sewing Machine (2024). I am transported to my mother’s side as she helped me make a tunic to be Richard the Lion Heart.
Lisa Reid, Grandma, Aunty Shirley and My Dad, 2002. Gouache on paper. 50 x 66 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia
This work captures the talismanic quality that such objects can impress upon us. More than nostalgia, Reid confers upon this household object an alchemical power.
A related practice takes on another level of poignancy in the work of Alan Constable, a legally blind artist whose practice consists of meticulously transposing cameras into clay: equal parts a fascination with technology and artifice, and a redemptive curiosity.
Alan Constable, Untitled (AK SLR), 2008. Earthenware. 20 x 28 x 17.5 cm. Collection of Norman Rosenblatt.
Courtesy of the artist and Arts Project Australia
Talking to curator Anthony Fitzpatrick, he addressed the title of the show, Intimate Imaginaries and spoke of the imaginary as constantly mediating our encounter with the material world; an overlay of meaning we interpose, so it reflects meaning rather than chaos back at us.
Magical realism seems another apt reference here. In this exhibition the world is seen with great clarity and yet not reduced to mindless matter ticking into entropy.
Rather, it is suffused, stuffed with liveliness and intra-personal significance.
It is no surprise Fitzpatrick chose to bring this important show to TarraWarra. He has form through his work with the DAX Centre which collects and exhibits the work of artists with mental illness. He clearly has a feeling for art as a matter of urgency, a sense-making necessity for us as humans. Here is a curator with a passion for art’s deep connection to the fundamentals of our humanity.
Intimate Imaginaries is at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, until March 10 2025.
Authors: Dominic Redfern, Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University
