In Aquacurl Power Station, Henry Jock Walker has stitched wetsuit material into abstractions that memorialise time spent in the ocean. The neoprene surfaces carry the weathering of their former use with a method that brings together pattern making and painting. In the studio you can see it: mounds of used wetsuits like discarded skins, collected by Walker in parallel with his mobile performance practice. The fabric is organised according to colour and texture, a kind of process integrated into a studio engagement.  

 The wetsuit seams are used as linework that interrupts the flat colour as a fragmented drawing. The works are getting more complex, balancing between an exploration of composition and pop cultural reflection. The shifting textural qualities have a softly sculptural presentation encased by the painted frames. Walker maintains a connection to his action surf painting (made in the ocean in a very different way), but this exhibition offers a counterpoint through its labour intensive ethic. The piecework sewing might be a contrast to his action painting but the free poetry of Walker’s titles takes us there – steamer, new entry or even metallic skin equals Time Travel via superluminal speed.  The intense colours hold onto an earlier era of surfing, the nostalgia bleached by the sun.

Henry Jock Walker’s was a recent finalist in The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize and his work was presented as part of Sydney Contemporary 2019. This year he launched his film “Little Penguin Cup” which documents his collaboration with artist Nampei Akaki (Japan) and the interactive work Kintsugi Supermarket. 

-Melody Willis

With over 90 Galleries and 450 artworks all made in the year 2020, Sydney Contemporary presents 2020 is set to be a dynamic contemporary art initiative custom-designed to support the arts community of Australasia, in the most direct way possible. This year, Sydney Contemporary will showcase each participating gallery online through a selection of five works, each from a different artist. The Egg & Dart will exhibit a group of new works from each of our chosen artists at our Thirroul gallery in real time and space.

The exhibition will include the work of; Christopher Zanko, India Mark, Georgia Spain, Julia Flanagan & Aaron Fell-Fracasso. Our chosen artists show the diversity and calibre of the broader group of artists represented by The Egg & Dart.

CHRIS ZANKO’s works are evolving, as the artist looks closely at his representations, and stretches his skills and technique. By carving and chiseling line and pattern, Zanko nods to the production qualities of the print. The printmaking quality suggests the multiple, much as the buildings selected are houses of a type, reproduced with variation across suburbs.

GEORGIA SPAIN, based in Tasmania, she had her first solo exhibition with the Egg & Dart in April 2020 and the response was overwhelming. In Spain’s paintings, physical connection is explored through bodies in groupings. Each work touches on an instinctual engagement between people in crisis or communion.

JULIA FLANAGAN’s fascination with patterns and colour stems from a background in textiles making and design. The pieced together shapes within her paintings and sculptures allude to the many scraps of material found in the studio and reference the decorative arts. Her work was most recently used as part of a collaboration with Australia fashion house, Gorman.

AARON FELL-FRACASSO is presenting a new body of work this year at Sydney Contemporary Presents. His dynamic, large-scale, compositions involve colour blocking, pattern generation and direct gesture. Loading colour on studio-made implements, he drags substance across surface. The abstraction explored by Fell-Fracasso offers serious thinking while encouraging visual play. Aaron also works as an independent curator and is the Director of The Egg & Dart.

INDIA MARK is presenting three new pieces in this exhibition. The artist continues her investigation of the still life genre. She begins to look even more closely at and through the objects in her view. The layering of colours depict what is on the surface, what is beneath, what is within, and how objects alter and obscure each other. Simple compositions that investigate more complex surfaces, patterns and colour palettes. Mark was a finalist in the Archibald Prize 2016 and 2018 and a finalist in Brett Whiteley’s Travelling Scholarship 2018 and 2019.

Mignon Steele paints to understand painting. This paradox compels her to search for an unfamiliar arrangement of colour and mark, a shifting expanse. She feels these current works are a reflection of who we might be in the world right now, further apart yet tethered to home. Her “night drawings”, contained and delicate meanderings under lamplight, reveal this domestic tethering. The larger works in Nearer By Far are informed by these drawings. In the studio, Mignon further describes how her recent paintings “unfold like vines and stand up by themselves”. She plays painterly tricks to find something new, “edging up to it … catching a glimpse, losing it in the bushes”. She enacts surface disturbances to ensnare “ubiquitous pre-verbal shapes and voids that skulk from recognition”.

At the beginning of a new sequence there are always a few works kicking around with early potential before an emergent sensibility presents itself. An obliteration phase occurs then where previous work is cancelled through active methods of applying paint and rebuilding the surface. A partial clean ground might emerge, aiming for a state of potential with something promising coming through. 

There is an essential searching quality in Mignon’s practice. This depth of experience is like walking along a well-known bush track but discovering new elements each time, ambient sounds, shifts in weather and moisture levels, always pushing away from the habitual. In a conversation about art, our resolutions stutter. Mignon wonders, “We’re not in nature asking it to explain itself”. There’s an unknowable element here, and discourse and writing can’t meet it. 

Based in the Illawarra, Mignon Steele’s recent exhibitions include shows in Melbourne and Sydney. She shifts effortlessly from her well-established painting practice to work as a colourist and mural painter with design duo Barnacle Studios. 

- Melody Willis

YOUR FUNNY MOODS investigates the layering of process and play of light in the works of Rob Howe and Gabrielle Adamik. Transparency, change and fluidity playing against solid/static form, process and observation. Each artist starts at opposite ends, with the works meeting here in the middle.

Rob Howe works from a moment he has captured, a fluid sky landscape stopped, investigated/dissected and recreated. The artist making obvious the information otherwise unnoticed, and giving over to paint and colour to represent the light and form. The intricate investigation and deliberate layering of colour manipulates the viewer and the artist’s ‘seeing’ of these sky landscapes. These works particularly investigate the balance between solid form and ‘empty’ space within landscape, the play of light and colour on both and the relationship between them in the compositions.

Gabrielle Adamik starts from the material itself, molten transparent glass, and allows the fluidity of the material and the process she imparts upon it, to create the form. Her lines in ‘Loop’ become a wall drawing of layered components; shadow playing against the texture of glass, flocking, and wall. Evoking a tactility and sweetness connecting the viewer directly to material, but as always the unpredictability and ‘funny moods’ within the alchemy of glass-making dictate the final work. Her gridded works feel like pulled fabric. The shapes represent moments when the material is pushed, pulled, held or collapsed, in the kiln and through hand forming. The work completed by the relationship of the glass against the wall, and away from the wall, and in shadow. 

Gabrielle’s works change as the sky does; capturing light, as colour and cloud move across our visual space.  

Rob’s works capture a static mood or moment, through the artists’ constant observation of the ever-changing light, against form, within the landscape.

The Egg & Dart emerges with a new collection of work from Lee Bethel, At This Point In Time. There is a grandness to the scale in these pieces but the engagement between body and surface remains time-based and intimate. There are few gestural or performative movements. We have a slippery sense of materiality here. Rag paper and wax is worked hard to evoke concrete formwork, circles punctuating the paper irregularly. In other pieces, the paper feels like stacked and undulating strips of calico. There are surfaces suggestive of layers of shale that might cut the skin, but these too are paper with pigmented wax applied. 

Bethel has a motto: “Draw it first to know it,” and many of these works are established via the grid which then dissembles through process and layering. Some grids disappear and then one work re-establishes it in a punkish gesture with thick white brushmarks crossing a jagged ash grey. (It is a revisiting – a new magnification of the crossed line pattern from her father’s handkerchief.) The edges of the works are resilient but feel delicate and workable. Take a note of the engagement between work and edge and frame and wall. Some surfaces float, others suggest monolithic forms, housing, containment, a floor or a wall thoroughly worked over. 

In lockdown, Lee Bethel returned to reading The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard’s inquiry on the home as phenomenological site. Bachelard proposed the house as “a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining”1. I saw in Lee Bethel’s home studio a more condensed version of that: a space for the collection of fragments, projects and contemplative sensibilities. The natural light in her studio also seems to emanate from these paintings. A cream white encaustic grid piece glows from within like the skylights that illuminate her studio. 

There is sculpture too. A construction of encaustic on paper with bamboo supports is the most direct nod to Bachelard’s poetics of the home. The folly is a design intended to look like a romantic ruin, but Bethel brings us the Folly as an ambiguous dreamscape structure. 

All the works are named. (Lee would feel cheated if a work didn’t offer a name.) The titles provide a little attachment to language that we might use to enter these surfaces. Then we go under and find a slippery materiality where rag paper and wax suggest something much heavier. What is also exciting now is the sustained investigation of luminous grids at a larger scale. The new scale is evocative of construction and transformation. As Bachelard might wonder, “How, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence … the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?”2
-Melody Willis

1, 2 Bachelard, Gaston 1964 Poetics of Space, The Orion Press, Inc. p6, p9.

Nick Santoro’s absurdist genre paintings bring together an uneasy alliance of characters. The illusory depth has expanded in these latest works with an overlapping of bodies, settings and timeframes. Santoro is reasoning with a proto perspectival space of shifting vanishing points. These wonky structural techniques are intended, offering undulating surfaces on which figures are precariously wedged, swallowed up, catapulted and cropped. Santoro talks of the selections he makes as a kind of distillation, an editing and recombining of forms, both architectural and figural, which reposition the global within the local. 

The artist’s perspectives are skewed like a tableau of early Renaissance imagery. Figures are often positioned at the apex of his compositions, other activity in the picture plane descending into fragmented cultural and historical references. Santoro’s painted frames draw on other disparate references. The frames another form of containment for these stray figures. The artist is intrigued by different cultural worlds and their coding. His paintings let those separated worlds cohabit. 

His work gives a big nod to the history of genre painting but Santoro does not speak in weighted historical detail. The flattening of art and cultural hierarchies in his works is a reassuring anchor for the viewer. The young artist might mention his interest in the Dutch Golden Age in the same conversation as contemporary artists like Dan Arps or Jonathan Meese, various art blogs, or the composer Mort Garson. 

Santoro is getting recognition. Born in 1994, his work was shown in the 2018 Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was a finalist in the Kilgour Art Prize and Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award 2019, and has recently shown at the Wollongong Regional Gallery and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. 

-Melody Willis

In Georgia Spain’s painting our complex physical interconnection is explored through bodies in groupings. Each work touches at an instinctual engagement between people in crisis or communion. As figures emerge in the paint through gesture and layer, their dependence on one another is palpable. These are expressive bodies, human and animal, in relation.

Spain’s studio lies in the bush near Hobart, Tasmania. The Beginning in blue (left in red) paintings were made there during Australia’s most recent bushfire season. I found a clue to the show’s title on her studio wall: blue = known, red = the unknown. This seems both an observation on the puzzle of painting and a note on the shifting colour of a bushfire sky. Pinned to the studio wall are a few pictures documenting the recent fires. The beach and related paintings have located their deep red settings via these colour references. Spain may look to a family photo or media image to begin but soon diverts and immerses into the space of the painting. The surfaces show the malleability and adjustment that oil paint offers. The central embrace in Comfort becomes a kind of double figure. Limbs, torsos and faces reform dynamically.

Two catastrophes have directed and now redirected our movements. Georgia Spain’s work binds together these new forms of association as shared physical and emotional states: vulnerability, separation, loss, communion. And while her work explores crisis, there is a deep sense of care and connection evident here. 

Georgia Spain was born in London and graduated from the Victorian College of Arts in 2015. She has shown in various group and solo shows. This is Georgia Spain’s first solo show with The Egg & Dart.

-Melody Willis

Amy Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives. Flowers, food, a window framing the sky, these are images that bind, as clearly as their colours shift under changing light. Her everyday assemblages weave with lived experience and the natural world. Begun in December 2019, the comforts of home are pictured here in their intimate objecthood. Cuneo’s colour is instinctive and wonderfully surprising. Tinted complementary pairings describe shadows cast by the moon. The shimmer and optical mixing connects her to the modernism of Pierre Bonnard but her acrylic painting is more planar. This leaves her gestures intact as she moves across surfaces.

 Titles like “Silent Night / Egg Toast” suggest the way the works have emerged around the activities of family life. And although the artist’s studio is now separate from the daily workings of the home, the images maintain a loose anchor with that world. There is a lot of responding as she goes which allows her to build density in certain areas while leaving other surfaces washy. The paintings are composites, a meshing of invention and record. They generate an echo of objects lived with and understood from various angles and qualities of light.

-Melody Willis

Now & Then shows Frank Nowlan’s eclectic thinking through his distinctive painting style. Nowlan treads lightly with heavy subject matter, addressing attempted political assassinations and a series on a local bushranger gang. The straight presentation leads to a wry assessment of these encounters and their settings. 

The “Attempts” series observes historical patterns and punishments. The event pictured in “The Attempt on Prince Alfred” led to hanging in April 1868. The attack on Prince Charles in 1994 resulted in a community service order for the assailant who later became a barrister. Nowlan has painted assassinations before including a focused look at JFK but these Australian instances are different. Each is a kind of failure and even the Hilton bombing that unfortunately led to deaths seems botched, with the intention remaining mysterious. 

Previous series have focused on sport and there is a similar staging of the events pictured here. Figures are treated like actors in a play confronting one another armed with props – a shotgun, a musket, a starting pistol. In a stand-alone painting (after John Brack’s “Collins St., 5pm” from 1955) we see figures on a train, each gripping a mobile phone or tablet. The flatness of the images leads to this sense of a stage set where actions are choreographed. Prince Alfred encounters his assailant on a green patch in Clontarf where the diminutive hills wrap around and enclose the figures in the foreground. Nowlan’s Austinmer Beach landscape tucks into the frame on either side like an operatic set with the escarpment behind. And each picture in the bushranger series seems lit in the round. 

Frank Nowlan is always looking, whether at historical images or the work of other painters. For the current landscapes he is looking from a train window as it travels across the Nullarbor. He is also reinspecting his knowledge of events as a history teacher. This exhibition shows divergent interests but the title Now & Then reveals an absurdist’s approach to the repetitions of history.

-Melody Willis

The artist would like to acknowledge that the landscapes and stories depicted in this exhibition exist within the countries traditionally owned by the Gunditjmara and Girraiwurung peoples. This exhibition is held on the lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal nation. The artist and The Egg & Dart would like to acknowledge their elders emerging, past and present.

n low light the eye preferences blue tones. Madeleine Peters latest exhibition uses a phthalo blue to bring us into a dusky environment of indeterminate time. She presents paired images that contemplate human impacts on the landscape and the strange stories associated with them. Geological formations are used as substitutes for standard architecture – the cave is an opera house; the hill is a crypt. She continues her connection with the landscape around the Shipwreck coast in Victoria but this time follows leads on colonial stories.

Currently in Melbourne, Peters is not walking the Shipwreck area as closely but is instead reading and uncovering. A lot of images articulate stories the artist has heard documented in particular locations. She might focus on a site and then research it. For events where there is no photo, she generates hybrid images from her own found sources of old books and personal photographs. This is a deliberate attempt to reproduce a substitute reality and in the process acknowledge our inability to step into it. Madeleine Peters wants people to think gently about associations between things: the bluestone and weathered volcanoes of the area, activities of early mining and wool production.

In painting, mimesis is a play with an illusionistic appearance of things, but Peters has then swathed her scenes in an eternal blue. The consistent colour asserts that these disparate images occupy the same world and the viewer is entering into a particular zone. Human activity is seen in its variety and strangeness as shimmering lights on the horizon, a diva singing at the mouth of a cave, stacked chairs awaiting guests, all evidence of gathering and ritual. Her painting becomes a record of events that, as the artist says, “feel like a poem or a dream”. One work in particular highlights this mimesis: two men in Victoria are making an early recording on an Edison tube – and the sound recorded is one of the men imitating a chicken.

Heaven Below explores a nexus of belief, place and technology. The paired images document the undocumented. Here are paintings echoing events, standing in for operative performances that were never recorded in landscapes reformatted over time. And here is a contemplative painter making work during an extreme bushfire season where she felt the need to avoid easy statements. Rather the works are a slowed down space for reflection that uses painting as a way of stitching time together incompletely.
-Melody Willis

Julia Flanagan’s work is colour and shape colliding across painting and sculpture. Forms instinctively vibrate like a Broadway boogie-woogie. Her tightly packed paintings and constructions reference essential forms of architecture – the arch, the turret. Dazzle is her first solo show at the Egg & Dart, an opportunity to see the dynamic interaction between her paintings and cut out sculptures. Drawing pattern ideas from her own textile library, she multiplies and layers these up, working outward in a search for harmony in colour.