Indrani Perera

poet, publisher & mentor

Tag: art

Balancing Act

After doing the Uglieland Walking Tour, I popped onto the Art Gallery of Western Australia on the way back to my Northbridge digs. There's something about galleries and visual art that speaks to my soul. I can't quite put what it is into words but isn't that always the way with great art? It touches something inside you and challenges and changes you. I guess you don't always need words, sometimes it's okay to just go with the feelings.

The gallery space is a gorgeous, modern light filled building with a series of large rooms housing different exhibits from the gallery's permanent collection. I checked out Balancing Act which featured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. So many great pieces!

I then wandered upstairs to the Exquisite Bodies by Bruno Booth exhibition where I sat and drew exquisite corpse style picture. For those of you who don't know, exquisite corpse was a game played by the French surrealists in the 1920s. Players took it in turns to draw the head, body and legs of a creature on a piece of paper, without seeing what the pother people had drawn. It was lovely to be sitting at a table with other visitors, doing some art after wandering through the gallery and seeing all the works on display.

There were also foam bricks you could use to build sculptures and I wished the family were here with me so we could do it together. They would have really loved it when they were little.

September 13, 2023
Art and About

While my gorgeous girl was at Sovereign Hill learning all about being a school student in the 1850s, I headed into the centre of Ballarat to visit the Ballarat Art Gallery. They were showing a special double header exhibition entitled Morris and Beyond. The exhibition showcased the work of artists from the era as well as contemporary artists inspired by the work of Morris. This exhibition was so popular that they sold out of the exhibition catalogue within a couple of weeks as people from all around Australia ordered their copies!

It’s the first time I have seen the past and present exhibited in art in this way and it was great to see the art works in this context. Fashion designers like Alexander McQueen drew on the past in their clothing and I really enjoyed seeing sculptures, installations and fabric being displayed alongside paintings. How could you not, given that Morris was heavily into the Arts and Crafts movements (you could even say he was a huge driver of the revival) dabbling in furniture design and wallpaper among other things.

But the best thing about this visit was all the wonderful people I met who were working there. From the man who opened the door, to the ticket seller and the gift shop attendant, they were all super happy to chat and spend some time with a visitor.

July 28, 2023
Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion

This was my first visit to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (or ACMI as it's better known) at Federation Square and I was really impressed with the enticing looking exhibition spaces leading off from the main entrance and foyer. We were there to see the Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion exhibition but I could easily have spent more time exploring the rest of the gallery.

The start of the exhibition featured glamorous goddesses and screen icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Madonna wearing iconic pink dresses symbolising femininity.

The exhibition included posters, magazines, costumes, photographs and moving images from a wide variety of films with women in starring roles. There were Hollywood and Bollywood stars, African and Asian actors as well as gender busting pioneers. We saw sultry screen sirens such as Marelne Dietrich and Mae West who got around the Hayes Code for morality with innuendo and double entendre. The Hayes Code forbade among other things the portrayal of mixed race relationships and sex outside of marriage.

I often think that the funny thing about the past is the way that we think people were less enlightened, less progressive, less everything really. But it's not the case as you can see from the movie poster above of When Roaring Gulch Got Suffrage, made early last century. Women have fought for equality for a very long time.

My favourite parts of this exhibition were the clips and exhibits about films in other languages. There was a short from the Indian film, Pakeezah (1972), starring Meena Kumari that took an incredible fifteen years to make. Unfortunately Kumari died three weeks after the film's premiere and she didn't live to see its success in both India and Pakistan. Audiences fell in love with the costumes and would buy their tailors tickets to the movie so they could make them clothes based on those of the film.

You've probably never heard of Anna May Wong. Don't worry, I hadn't either but we should know her name. She was an Asian American actor and movie star working in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately she was limited to playing either the villainous Dragon Lady or the subservient White Lotus. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act which fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment, Chinese characters were viewed as villains. Any nuanced Chinese roles went to white actors such as German Luise Rainer who won an Oscar for her 'yellowface' performance in The Good Earth (1937), a role Wong had lobbied to play.

There was also a 1906 French comedy from Alice Guy-Blaché, Les Résultats du féminisme (Consequences of Feminism) that did a gender switch and had the men sewing and ironing while the women smoked, drank and made a mess. At the end of this seven minute satire, the men overthrow the matriarchy and gain their freedom.

Unusually for an exhibition, it left me wanting more. I could have easily spent another hour or two immersed in the world of screen goddesses. I would have loved to have seen African, Indigenous, Latinx, Eastern European, Asian cinema and actors represented in more depth and detail. But this was a good beginning.

Seeing this exhibition made me want to rewrite the histories and our narratives to include a much wider and broader range of woman. After seeing the Cressida Campbell exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra earlier in the year and talking to a friend about history books that are writing women back into the narrative, I am hopeful that we are on the crest of a wave, make that a tsunami, that will wash away the past and bring equality to our art, our screens, our books and our histories.

June 19, 2023
Know My Name

How many female artists can you name? How many of those are Australian?

Less than a quarter of the artists represented in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection in Canberra are female. Approximately a third of the artists in the NGA’s Indigenous collection are female. This is in spite of women significantly outnumbering men in art at the tertiary level. Worse, only two percent of the global art market is represented by women.

This thought provoking article says ‘…artists who are not white men come with qualifiers, whether it's "woman artist", "black artist", or "disabled artist".

Art historian Griselda Pollock says ‘In that qualifying, I have disqualified them from automatically being part of this neutral category: artist.’

The NGA’s initiative, Know My Name seeks to address this shortcoming with exhibitions featuring artists who are female.

Ironically the first two exhibitions in the series to expand the category of artist in the Australian imagination were held during the pandemic so hardly anyone got to see the works and learn a more complete picture of the story of art in this country. Unfortunately I don’t think there are any plans to tour these exhibitions which is a travesty. It should be required viewing for all high school students.

Cressida Campbell has been an artist for forty years and this year marks the 40th anniversary of the NGA. Campbell attended the opening of the gallery forty years ago and she is still painting. It’s the first time the gallery had featured a living, female Australian artist in its summer blockbuster exhibition.

Campbell sketches drawings on plywood which she then paints with watercolours. When the paint is dry, she uses an electrical tool to carve the wood. This woodblock is then misted with water from a spray bottle and a piece of paper is laid on top. A roller then presses the paint into the paper. This process is repeated until Campbell is happy with the result. Once the paper is removed she touches up both the block and it’s print. Only a single print is made from the block and both the print and the block are sold for around $500,000 each.

Even though she is a commercially successful artist championed by Margaret Olley who bought her paintings and donated them to galleries, most of the works in the exhibition came from private collections.

Seeing her woodblocks side by side with their reverse prints was wonderful. There was also a display case filled with paint brushes, rollers, empty paint tubes and the brace she wears to support her wrist.

Campbell’s work focuses on details of intimate interiors as well as landscapes and botanical illustrations. My favourites were the tondo painting – the round prints with thin white frames.

The exhibition featured a video of Campbell talking about her work as well as images of her meticulous process. She talks on the phone or listens to music when she’s painting but when it’s time to make the print she closes all the windows and turns off the phone and radio so she can have complete silence and focus on the process.

I didn’t think I was going to have a chance to see this exhibition but I managed to squeeze it in before my flight home. I’m so glad I managed to see it.

January 29, 2023
Eat Your Art Out

It's been a long time since I've done any drawing. I did a fair amount of art during the big lockdown last year but this winter I've been focussed on all things Pocketry – namely the brand new poetry podcast, Pocketry Presents which seems to have taken over my life (but in a good way!). You know I love a new creative project!

So it was wonderful to spend the afternoon yesterday, sitting under the banksia tree in the back yard doing art with my girls. We were attending an online art session with artist Claire Mosley and mentor Melissa Turnbull from the nature connection group, Firekeepers. You've probably heard me mention them before. We attend their nature camps in the school holidays and I have recently started mentoring at the camps as well as joining the board at the last AGM.

We started by doing some warm up drawings to get ourselves in the mood for making art. Except these were exercises with a difference – we had to draw a creature from a picture without looking at the page as we were drawing! This exercise is genius because after you see your results and have a good laugh at yourself, anything you make after that has to be better 🙂 It's a super good way to turn off the internal art critic that likes to tell all of us that we can't make art and who are we kidding?

While it feels strange to be doing art and nature connection online at least we were outdoors and drawing things from nature. I didn't have to go far too find what I wanted to draw. I just picked up some banksias pods, flowers and leaves from where I was sitting.

I'm hoping to spend a lot more time out here, making art and hanging out with my girls. What are you doing at the moment?

September 2, 2021
Art in the Bush

I just spent the most amazing five days camping in the bush around Riddells Creek at the wonderul Wild By Nature Village camp run by Firekeepers. The last camp was in January 2020 and it's been a long fifteeen months, waiting to get back out in nature with all the wonderful people who come to jpoin in all the adventures.

This camp we had two amazing artists in residence. Trace Balla is the author of many books including our family's favourites Rivertime and Rockhopping. Claire Moslely is a creator of nature prints, tea towels and journals featuring Australian flora and fauna. My walls are already decorated with Claire's art and my bookshelves hold many of Trace's books so it was wonderful to get to make art with both of them!

They even created an art exhibition featuring the art created by villagers of all ages. There was even an opening ceremony to which you could wear your fanciest bush clothes. At the ceremony there was a gigantic canvas, clay paints and an invitation to co-create an ephemeral art work which would then be washed away by the rain.

It was so much fun, I can't wait til the next camp in Spring!

April 12, 2021
Marevellous Museums

Yesterday I went on a family outing. The first in a very long time. We all piled into the car and headed into town to visit the Melbourne Museum. My main reason for going was to buy their Museum Victoria fields guide to marine life and I figured we may as well all go and check out the museum while we were there especially as we haven't visited for years and I knew there would be lots of cool things to see. When I have to go somewhere by car I like to fit in a few things so we're not wasting petrol by taking multiple trips so we also did some grocery shopping at Terra Madre, the organic food mecca. I like to fill the car with people for the same reason.

Our first stop was the outdoor rainforest space filled plants, trees, wildlife and birds. I really like how the museum mixes indoor and outdoor spaces for its exhibits – it's a beautifully designed building. We saw heaps of birds we've never seen before and now I have the fun job of finding out what they are. We also saw fish, frogs, eastern long necked turtles, lizards and ants.

Our second stop was the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre and the exhibition First Peoples. A lot of the interactive exhibits were closed due to COVID-19 but we still managed to see quite a few things. It was great hearing different languages for Australian animals. The girls had a giggle over the fire drill set up for people to have a go at starting a fire. They of course are already very good at using a fire drill to start fires, thanks to the Firekeepers' camps we have been going to for the past few years. I loved seeing all the hand made items – necklaces made from kangaroo teeth, seed pods and other organic materials; axe heads, message sticks and shields.

Within the exhibition there was the Two Strong Sisters Connected art exhibition featuring work by the indigenous artists, Aunty Rochelle Patten and Aunty Eileen Harrison. It was so good to see art again. I didn't realise how much I missed it until I saw the beautiful paintings and drawings from the two elders. I really don't know how to talk about art in a technical or fancy way but I know that the paintings spoke to something within me. Just being in that space, surrounded by all that art was amazing and uplifting.

From there we visited the Milarri garden trail before finally popping into the gift shop to buy the books. Happily they were having a 20% off sale so I snuck in a couple of field guides about Victorian moths as well as Welcome To Country by Marcia Langton.

After our museum visit we thought we'd make the most of being in the city so we walked into Carlton and grabbed drinks and ice cream on Lygon street. I had the richest, thickest, hot chocolate made with soy milk and felt a little queasy afterwards from all the sugar. If you only have one hot chocolate a year, make it a good one I say!

I'm hoping this is the first of many family day trips in and around Melbourne this summer. How are you planning on spending your summer?

December 30, 2020
En Plein Air

On Saturday I spent a few hours in the backyard doing some watercolour painting. It was a lovely day and it was so wonderful to spend it outside with my girls. We set up a table with all our watercolour paints, jars of water, paper, brushes and book.

You can see part of the tree I painted. What you can't see is the bit I messed up. I was having so much fun painting this scene using the instructions in the book, Charles Evans' Poet Book for Watercolour Artists: Over 100 Essential Tips to Improve Your Painting by Charles Evans.

I was starting to get tired but wanted to push on and finish it. My 14 year old daughter told me it was great as it was but I ignored her advice and kept going. Oh boy do I regret it now! Especially as she is a super talented artist, well versed in watercolours who definitely knows what she is talking about.

The painting is now propped up on the door of the sideboard in the kitchen so I can see every day and be reminded that sometimes it's better to stop and rest when you are tired and then come back later when you're feeling fresh.

November 2, 2020
A Cunning Plan

Well, we are still in lockdown. It's much harder the second time round. The first time I really got into the groove of creating and slowing down. It was wonderful to spend time at home, pottering around the kitchen making yummy food. Now, I'd much rather be at the beach, or in the bush. Someplace other than inside these four walls.

Part of the problem I think is that I had run out of things to do. I (mostly) cleared my desk of projects and then felt like I had nothing to do or look forward to. There's a sweet spot with creativity. Too many projects and I get overwhelmed and don't do anything. Not enough projects and I don't feel inspired and don't do anything either. Just enough projects and I happily bounce from one to the other as the mood strikes me.

Of course the much larger problem is I am missing all the connections with my friends and family and the collaborations that occur. There's not much I can do to fill that void of actually being able to see the people I love and give them a hug hug. The best I can do right now is get back into letter writing and connecting via phone.

I was feeling flat last week and so were my girls so we went and visited a book shop. I'm grateful they are considered an essential service and are still open. They are so good for the soul. We spent a happy couple of hours browsing and then I blew my book budget completely and bought all these beauties. How could I resist? Now we use these with our new art supplies!

How are you coping? What are you doing to stay sane?

July 27, 2020
Art Addicts Anonymous

This is what happens when you go to the mall to buy your daughters sneakers because even though it's lockdown and we have nowhere to go, their feet are still growing.

Right across from the sneaker shop there was an art shop. With a sale. Fifty percent of EVERYTHING! Sorry for shouting, I'm still very excited about it!

I think I was pretty restrained, all things considered. I only bought two of everything. Well, actually that's not true. Now I'm wishing I had bought two of everything!

I bought some great watercolours and watercolour paper. I also got a quick lesson in watercolour paper composition. For those of you who are interested, hot pressed watercolour paper is smooth, cold pressed watercolour paper has some texture and bumps, and the rough watercolour paper has been air dried. I can't wait to try out the Chinese rice paper. It looks very intriguing.

I also got a gorgeous half pan watercolour set, lots of stickers because, well stickers ('nuff said), scratch pads, sketching pencils and customisable wooden postcards. Can't wait to play with them all!

July 22, 2020