Review of GEELONG PRINT PRIZE 1999 Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria
Published in Imprint Vol 34 No 3 Spring 1999
The Geelong Print Prize, now in its third year, was awarded at Geelong Art Gallery in July. The exhibition as a whole was approachable and inviting, yet a touch over-familiar. Current practice in printmaking in Australia seems to fall into a typology of genres and moods. On the one hand, an emphasis on figuration; on the other, and in the minority, formalists with an interest in materiality and abstraction. In the range of moods du jour, we have the melancholic, the quirky, and the cool. Modesty of means and domestic scale were characteristic of most of the entrants; these works weren't founded on heroic technology, but boasted their tactility and down-home craftsmanship.
In a dinky vitrine there was a great selection of artist's books, hard to see due to a cramped display. Michael Shirrefs' (cover artist, Imprint, June '99) Unravelling Morandi stood out, with its wire-frame rendered Morandi hollow-ware on transparent drafting film. The analytical eye of technology almost brutally pulls apart the privacy and containment of Morandi's vessels; their poetic secrecy endures. This sense of alternating concealment and exposure is nurtured by the book format, for example in Sally Miller's Unpacking a woman's travel bag (treasures within a bag within a book), Allan Mann's syntax of Celtic alchemy Confined fires, or the pallid gaze of a veiled statue in Julia Silvester's Breathe.
Those works made using computer technologies — Milan Milojevic's Index of possibilities, Geoff Parr's Digital study, Marion Manifold's The dream of death begins. It is woman, and others— sat unproblematically beside their conventionally-made colleagues, both in terms of scale and in imagery. Only Parr used the capabilities of the new media to make an image that was intrinsically 'digital'; a large scale photographic interior overlaid with a transparent grid. Yet all the inkjet images looked a touch thin and detached next to the impressed surfaces and carbonaceous bulk of pressure-processed work.
An historicist turn on the romantic landscape tradition was evident in Raymond Carter's A narrative of a nineteenth century incident in which hope was denied, a large linocut which appeared to appropriate an historical wood engraving of a lifeboat in threatening seas; homunculi in a cockleshell overwhelmed by inflated printerly mark-making. The veil of distance and memory also informed the stylised icebergs that scrolled past in Marian Crawford's Forget me not.
In Guan Wei's Somersault, a rubber-ball man and his enigmatic emblems bounced across a flat field of litho colour. In the haunting sensuality of Helen Wright's Sphinx— woman speaks, kisses, sighs, as vessel captured within vessel — the texture of litho washes caressed both form-as-representation and form-as-surface. The monstrous infanta of Heather Shimmen's A tear in the fabric, Tanya Myshkin's Jonah as a neurotic captive graven into a mighty slab of lumber, the red wound in a black dress of Marine Ky's La robe de bal en satine noire were some of the more interesting explorations of figuration.
Acquisitions were Raymond Arnold's etching Shrapnel grid/gueule cassée; Raymond Carter's linocut, A narrative of a nineteenth century incident in which hope was denied; Allan Mann's artist book, Confined fires; Susan Pickering's aquatint Fluent 2; Julia Silvester's digital print Breathe; and Guan Wei's lithograph Somersault.