One year ago, nursing my then 9-month-old daughter, I was explaining to a friend that my tits felt like socks with change in them. She had just given birth and understood what I meant because prior to me speaking she had asked me, “when will my body stop feeling like a coin purse?” We whooped. But then, in some sort of private communion, we each rubbed parts of our body that felt funky from their newly renovated status’–our bodies and minds were now homes. Like the wholesome caricatures my algorithm had been feeding me at 3am, I felt ’grounded’ by the experience of it all. But for me, more of a goblin caricature, the word meant something rebelliously different; it wasn’t vegan, or ecclesiastically pure, it was runny, experimental and meaty. I had morphed into an ambivalent urn whose organs had graduated from secret, functioning to misplaced and loud: a goblin shaped womb-purse.
Paintings can feel like coins in purses to me sometimes–nothing but loose change–a currency that feels like too much effort to spend. But every now and then, I feel at home in a painting, I feel carried, contained. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag of Fiction”, she adduces that our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket, the net made of hair, the home, which challenges the preferred tale that the Hero’s sword or stick or blunt or killing tool was more useful, more necessary, “before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that forces the energy inwards.” It reminds me of a time I was commissioned to write about an artist. I went to their studio, and they showed me the tools they used to paint with. Swirling around wielding a long pole, they asked me if I was familiar with how Matisse used to paint using a nine-foot-long-stick. Thank you, I said, for the reminder. Unlike my coin-purse friend, I didn’t really share any regions with this stick-wielding-person–we spoke different languages. It was evident that our loyalty to civilisation was very different. Like Le Guin, the civilisation I speak of is that of the Hero– “if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently, I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”
“That's right," they said, "What you are is a woman.”
While visiting Sally’s studio, talking much about our shared muchness–motherhood, our beloved Rainbow Region, and our tri-monthly encounters with Hero-painters, she showed me some Louise Bourgeois paintings I’d never seen. Floored.
‘Femme Maison’ (1946-7) which can literally be translated as ‘wife house’, ‘woman house’, or ‘housewife’, is a collection of paintings that depict naked figures with houses for heads. 1.74 years deep in my new purse-bod-life, I was spinning. It's literal, yes, but it's in its literalness that it emancipates. “The female figure’s identity is obscured and confined by domestic architecture and, by extension, her role in society” , the internet tells me. I don’t disagree but I'm also provoked by this biographism; it's in
this type of narrative building that sidesteps Bourgeois’s humanity (and acts as an alibi for art history’s laziness.) Trying to find Bourgeois’s own words regarding these paintings I came across a clip of her drawing. With charcoal she draws a circle and right before she’s about to draw something inside the circle she looks up and says, “what I am going to put inside, what is inside this space, is under my control. And under my control, I want my fears.”
If the body is a container, that contains things to be contained, and the mind is the shelter, or sometimes prison, that contains the body, what is it that contains the mind? Words? Words hold everything. Paintings, like words, can be read–they are a way to describe what's going on, what people actually think, do, feel. Paintings, like words, when conceived Herolessly, act as vessels for civilisation–a place where everything in this sack of a world, “this womb of things to be a tomb of things that were” (Le Guin), is housed for us to see and make sense when there is none.
Sally paints vessels in the form of vases, portals in the form of windows, and emancipation from both of those things in the form of rooftops. Message received: her renovations are finished, she has capped her furbished vessel and is singing into the abyss from the lid/roof. But it's in the hues of blues that she guts me. In that Audre Lord sense–Sally's blues acts as links between our sense of self and our unexpressed feelings–whether mild, calm, or brooding, we are all surrounded by ourselves. Blue separates bodies from land, minds from sky–its peace, rest, meditation, but it's also the harbinger of sadness, depth, mystery. Blue contains us all.
As a woman, a mother, a klutz in a Hero-ardent world, Sally paints. She paints quilts for warmth and cut flowers as a keepsake of living. She is weaponless in her message while remaining full to the brim. Because of that, Sallys paintings appeal not only to your mind, but to your humanity.
Emma Finneran
A love of process and insatiable curiosity for life’s contradictions are the hallmarks of Sally Anderson’s painterly style. Abstracted and instinctual, her compositions are intangible landscapes of vaguely constructivist forms, reactionary mark-making and opaque references to past experiences. Comprised of layers, both physical and metaphorical, they catalogue a practice of meditation and technical application that gives the works a gritty depth at odds with their optimistic colour palettes and quirky titles.
Laden with autobiographical content, Anderson’s paintings both obscure and make blatant her emotional response to interpersonal relationships, private contemplations and observations on memory, association and context. Often paired to directly complement or contradict their twin, each work explores the way meaning is formed and how the use of language influences perspective. As the artist herself says, “we understand what ‘hot’ means because we know what ‘cold’ is”.
Crowning the works are Anderson’s unconventional titles, often seeming as meandering streams of consciousness. Lyrical and occasionally fractured, they are a poetic reminder of the friends, lovers and experiences that shape her idiosyncratic art practice.
Born in Lismore, Sally Anderson began her undergraduate studies in Visual Art at Southern Cross University before transferring to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. A past finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Anderson was invited to participate in the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2014. In 2017 Sally Anderson won the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and completed the three month residency at the Cite des Artes in Paris.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalists in the 2024 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her work ‘Self and still life (shared garden, future nurture)'.
The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.
Finalists exhibition will be held at the S.H Ervin Gallery, 25 October – 15 December 2024, Sydney
IMAGE: Sally Anderson Self and still life (shared garden, future nurture) 2024 acrylic on polycotton 183 x 198cm
Delighted to announce that Sally Anderson has been selected as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize with her work ‘Holding a hurricane, quilt curtain carrying the sea’.
How do you hold a hurricane? How do you hold close things that are spiralling out of your control? Can you contain the sea in a quilt? How do we measure domestic, creative and maternal labour? With time? How does one get more time in a day? How do we hold households, partners, children, paintings, parents and ourselves simultaneously? This painting speaks to the ways motherhood, domesticity and creative practice are, for me, reciprocal and ultimately entangled. Each informs and infects the other. This work deliberately dances between abstraction and representation and employs still-life and landscape motifs as symbols of containment and care.
Congratulations Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the 2024 Bayside Painting Prize for her 2024 work ‘Placenta banksia, Bridal Veil Falls view, the sea in me, PB nude quilt tablecloth’. Established in 2015, the Bayside Painting Prize is one of the most generous non-acquisitive painting prizes in Australia. The exhibition draws together a breadth of artists with varied approaches to painting. This allows the Bayside City Council to further develop its collection and promote artists to the Bayside community.
The finalist exhibition will be held at Bayside Gallery from 3 May to 23 June 2024.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson, who has been announced as a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award for her painting 'Nat Silk’s Seatown Still Life, PB Nude Quilt, Bromeliad Washdown'.
The biennial Grace Cossington Smith Art Award is a $20,000 National acquisitive award. The award theme is 'Making Connections' inspired by the work of Abbotsleigh graduate and artist Grace Cossington Smith - renowned for her Modern abstraction paintings of Australia. The finalist exhibition opens 27 January 2024 at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Wahroonga, Sydney.
Sally Anderson is featured in the July/August edition of Art Guide Australia.
Motherhood, domesticity, landscape, memory—these are just some of the experiences and memories Sally Anderson has captured in her two-decade painting practice, underpinned by a persistent blue.
The outer edges of Sally Anderson’s paintings reveal multiple layers of canvas, the evidence of past works painted over yet still present deep within. Integral to how Anderson works, this layering connects to ideas of containment and the action of being physically held. “This could refer to a mother carrying her baby, being restricted to the home, a vessel holding flowers, frames, windows or pools,” she says.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in this year's Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize with her work ‘Sea Town Lawn Roof Song with NO’s Vessel.’
Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in this year's Muswellbrook Art Prize with her work ‘Lismore Island Roof Song with a Screenshot of Nat Silk’s Seatown’.
Sally Anderson has received a glowing review in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Sally Anderson’s Guido 'Holding Folding Moulding' is another stand-out. Ostensibly a portrait of her artist husband holding their child, there’s a metaphysical dimension to the work, with a sculpture on a pedestal, a jug with flowers and a red, flag-like curtain taking up significant space in the composition. The play of curves and fractured planes adds to the mystery of the picture, as we feel we are looking through multiple doorways or windows, projecting a dream-like atmosphere.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the Portia Geach Award at SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.
The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.
The exhibition is open 16 September – 6 November 2022
Blue Island investigates the interplay of colour and memory in relation to individual experience. Paintings draw on hydrangea related respective experience to demonstrate the capacity for colour and object to hold and trigger memory and association. The exhibition seeks to question the reliability of memory and offers a way to authenticate experience through colour. In attempting to realise something perhaps visually impossible to verify within their paintings; mixing colour truthfully and straightforwardly from memory, the artists are challenged to settle on feeling and intuitive correctness rather than absolute truth and certainty.
Using a uniform size canvas, the 14 invited artists were instructed to translate, from their ‘mind’s eye’, the colour they most strongly associate with their experience of hydrangeas. The result is a collection of essentially monochrome surfaces steeped with hidden and concealed recollections of mothers and mother’s mothers, former neighbours and neighbourhoods, marriage, childbirth city front-yards, suburban backyards, households and broken family homes. More visually evident (than the personal histories imbued in the paintings) is the materiality and individually distinctive application of paint to surface. These largely monochrome works give a condensed, and detail like insight into each artist’s painterly signature, almost all of which are instantly recognisable.
Sally Anderson has been included in an exhibition and article by The Australian which highlight new Australian art on the market.
It’s this moment of evolution that has inspired The Australian’s Summer Exhibition — a showcase of sculptures, paintings, photographs and works on paper. Beautiful to look at, it’s a celebration of some of the best and brightest artists working today. All 50 pieces have been selected because they signify what’s happening in Australian art and culture right now.
So, what is happening right now? The primary art market in Australia is experiencing a small boom. For obvious reasons, flying to international art fairs is off the cards, and this has led Australian collectors to rediscover a local market packed full of prodigious works by tomorrow’s household names.
It means there’s a renewed focus on Australian stories and more opportunities for emerging artists to have their work seen, as gallerists and buyers look toward home. It’s this time of risk-taking and yes, even optimism that our summer exhibition represents.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson whose upcoming exhibition has been featured in Brisbane Art Guide.
To coincide with her exhibition at Tweed Regional Gallery, Edwina Corlette Gallery is delighted to present a series of new paintings by Sally Anderson. Sally is a past winner of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and a finalist in this year’s Portia Geach Award for female portraiture, with her painting of Claudia Karvan (below).
Born in Lismore, Anderson began her undergraduate studies in Visual Art at Southern Cross University before transferring to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. A past finalist in the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Anderson was invited to participate in the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists Residency in Reykjavik in 2014. Her work has been acquired by Artbank, the Australian Catholic University and corporate and private clients in Australia and Europe.
The concept of home has changed in 2020. For a lot of people, home has never been just one static place, and yet in the last few months that stasis has been forced upon us. In the midst of shelter-in-place orders, we’ve been directed to decide on a single location that represents our place in the world and stay there, hoping it keeps us safe.
Reframing the domestic space as a new landscape intrigues artist and new mother Sally Anderson. Her new body of work is entitled Bridal Veil Falls, the Window and the Piano Lesson, and was created almost entirely in lockdown. The pieces will be on display at Edwina Corlette gallery in Brisbane from tomorrow, in an exhibition that explores the fusion between Sally’s subjective experience of parenthood, and the collective endurance of pandemic paralysis.
To help my son sleep we put on white noise of a small river in Scotland and Llyn Gwynant waves in Wales. The toponomy of Lismore indicates it was named after Isle of Lismore which lies in Loch Linnhe, an arm of the sea, on the West Coast of Scotland. I was born in Lismore early 1990, an experience I hadn’t intimately considered until the birth of my son a couple of years ago. My son was conceived in the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio at Tweed Regional Gallery. There’s a pair of hoop pines (aka Richmond River Pines) that dominate the side view from the residency verandah. I often use these trees, along with banksias, within my work to represent the Northern Rivers region, my transition to motherhood and European exploration/invasion of Australia.
The works in 'Arm of the Sea and the Fertile Tree' use landscape metaphor rather than subject. Intimate personal experience and collective experience are translated into paintings, bedspreads, windows, still lifes and stages.
Sally Anderson's work 'Claude Swimming' has been selected as a finalist in the Portia Geach Prize for 2020. The painting of Claudia Karvan, actress, producer and writer will be exhibited at the National Trust's S.H. Ervin Gallery.
The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.
The exhibition will be open in Sydney from 14 August – 20 September 2020.
My paintings talk of relationship, context and metaphor. They are loaded with autobiographical content, draw on past and present experiences and often arrive in pairs. Recent paintings use abstraction, still life and borrowed landscapes to reference everyday intimate experience held in object and place. They explore the self and use abstraction, landscape and still life as devices to do so.
Sally Anderson's work 'Side of the Road River with Rousseau's Bluebells' has been selected as a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize
Mosman Art Prize was established in 1947, and is Australia's oldest and most prestigious local government art award. The winning artworks join a collection of modern and contemporary Australian art, reflecting developments in Australian art practice since 1947. Artists who have won the Mosman Art Prize include Margaret Olley, Guy Warren, Grace Cossington Smith, Weaver Hawkins, Nancy Borlase, Lloyd Rees, Elisabeth Cummings, Adam Cullen, Michael Zavros and Natasha Walsh.
The exhibition is open until 27 October 2019 at Mosman Art Gallery
We are delighted to see works by Sally Anderson, Belem Lett, Lucy O'Doherty, and Amber Wallis in the new exhibition 'The Whiteley at 20: Twenty Years of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship', as previous finalists of the award.
Established by Ms Beryl Whiteley in 1999 in memory of her son, the 'Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship' provides young painters with the opportunity to travel through Europe to develop their artistic practice. Since its inception, 20 young painters have followed in the titular artist's footsteps.
The exhibition features works by Sally Anderson, Alice Byrne, Mitch Cairns, James Drinkwater, Petrea Fellow, Becky Gibson, Nathan Hawkes, Alan Jones, Nicole Kelly, Belem Lett, Lucy O’Doherty, Wayde Owen, Timothy Phillips, Tom Polo, Ben Quilty, Karlee Rawkins, Samuel Wade, Amber Wallis, Natasha Walsh, and Marcus Wills, alongside the four paintings that won Brett Whiteley the Italian Government Travelling Scholarship.
The exhibition presents not only the works that won the scholarship, but features works from each artist's residency at the Cite Internationale des Art, Paris and recent work.
The exhibition is open from 22 March - 5 May 2019 at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney.
Sally Anderson's work ‘Guy’s Painting of Wollumbin on my Wollumbin’ has been acquired by Tweed Regional Gallery. In 2017 Sally was an artist in residence at the Nancy Fairfax Artist Residency through the Tweed Regional Gallery and throughout her life, has had strong connections to the region.
Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize 2018.
The Paddington Art Prize is a $30,000 National acquisitive prize, awarded annually. The prize is specific to paintings inspired by the Australian landscape, as the imagery is integral to the tradition of Australia painting and is an enduring motif within contemporary art, shaping national identity.
This work uses ‘borrowed landscapes’ to look at ways we experience the Australian landscape from the comfort of our homes. It uses landscape as a device to demonstrate a shift in the way we experience landscape.
Sally Anderson's recent exhibition 'Self Storage and the Really Real' is featured in the January edition of the Art Almanac.
'Self Storage and the Really Real’ looks at ways we authenticate experience and store memory in object and place’, says artist Sally Anderson whose abstract compositions brim with clear references to past experiences; from the hydrangeas at her childhood home to shells from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and Norfolk Pines from recent Instagram posts to landscapes from past and present relationships. These works are a visual archive giving permanence to intangible memories and making them, as the title implies, ‘really real’.
Sally Anderson has been awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship for 2017.
The prize is $40,000 and a three month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The annual Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship is open to Australian artists aged between 20 and 30. It was created from an endowment left by Beryl Whiteley, who witnessed the profound effect that international travel had on her son Brett Whiteley, as a result of him winning the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship at the age of 20.
The exhibition will open 13 October – 19 November 2017 at Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.
Sally Anderson has been selected as a finalist in Newcastle Art Gallery's Kilgour Prize.
In 1987 artist Jack Kilgour bequeathed funds for the creation of a figurative and portrait art competition to be run in perpetuity at Newcastle Art Gallery. Today the Kilgour Prize is one of Australia's major art prizes and awards $50,000 for the most outstanding work of art as determined by a panel of three judges, and $5,000 for the People's Choice Award, as determined by votes from the public.
The Kilgour Prize will be on display 5 August - 15 October 2017.
Iconic Australian blog The Design Files visited Sally Anderson in her studio recently, to see how things were progressing in the lead up to her first solo exhibition.
Working predominantly with a muted colour palette, the artist will often add an unexpected contrast, like a brush of bright magenta. ‘For me, working with colour is very intuitive; I might spend weeks working with dusky colours, only to come in one day needing to mix a cyan blue,
The paintings are an ongoing process of adding layers and marks. Sometimes Sally will paint over a work in her studio that she’d thought she was long done with. ‘My partner once said that my pieces are a bit like découpage… with individual snippets and cut-outs layered heavily onto a surface,’ she says. ‘My mum has always loved crafts and used to actually découpage the furniture in our house… maybe that’s unknowingly made an impression on me!’
