Detail

2005 site-specific intervention into Jim Thomson House

After 6 weeks on exhibition, this intervention was censored and not allowed to be seen or refered to again in any future press or documentation. It was like it never existed.

Europe the Game

2004 open mike session, Beaconsfield Gallery, England

2003 Priory Meadow Shopping Centre, Hastings, England

2003 Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, England

online version

2001 Arsenal Gallery, Poznan, Poland

2000 ArtSway, New Forest, England

Materiality of the Medium of Oil Paint

My art degree (BA [Fine Art] 1987 -1990 Victoria College Prahran, Melbourne, Australia) majored in painting with philosophy and art history (Melbourne University) on the side.

Painting was not yet the suspicious medium it was to become, at least not within the Australian artworld. My degree was within a context of a long and heroic tradtion of Australian painting: big gestural landscapes and the 1950s 'Angry Penguins' (Sidney Nolan, et al).

Meanwhile in the USA - or in other words, internationally, from the standpoint of Australia, feminist critical art was happening (Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Gorilla Girls), none of which used paint.

I wanted the best of both worlds: the criticality of this type of work, and the seductive beauty of paint for my own artwork. Until early 1999, I produced easel paintings that were satirical, critical and beautiful. The emaphsis was both on formal, well-crafted canvases and on the content - largely a critique of western attitudes to others and particularly attitudes and mythologies around Australian-ness. I found myself a (rich) collector and I realised that I may be compromising my voice, what I wanted to say about ideology, about mythology, about the accepted norms, because of how I was saying it - well crafted oil paintings that hung on walls and were sold.

I still believed in the medium of paint - that oil paint speaks to more people than say, performance art, becuase people are seduced by its beauty, its tactile qualities and the long tradition of oil painting. I wanted to use paint but in a less commodifiable manner. I also wanted to question the tradition of painting - not simply in terms of aesthetics as artists throughout the twentieth century had done - but the origins and language of oil paint: its materiality.

Oil paint is the sine qua non of European (high) cultural values. It was exported to the colonies as such. As part of the efforts to civilise Australian Aborginal people, oil painting was introduced and by way of example, artist Albert Namatjira became a paragon of assimilation. I wanted to talk about that side to the medium: the inherent value system within it and subvert it from within.

Since 1999-2000, I have been placing beautifully crafted representational oil paintings on the floor both within galleries and outside of them. Some have remained outside, decaying as the elements are brought to bear on the fibers and pigments of paint. I have used tham as interventions into landscapes, galleries and museums, attempting the question the ubiqitity of European values / aesthetics.

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