‘How To Swim’ Curated by Sally Anderson featuring Lydia Balbal, Kirsty Budge, Eleanor Louise Butt, Mark Maurangi Carrol, Jedda-Daisy Culley, James Drinkwater, Adrienne Gaha, Bridie Gillman, Simone Griffin, Rhys Lee, Eytan Messiah, Sally M Nangala Mulda, Pia Murphy, Miranda Skoczek, John Smith, Ken Whisson, Bugai Whyoulter, Sally Anderson

Congratulations to Pia Murphy who has been awarded a 2025 Visual Arts Fellowship to begin a residency in Montauk, New York. The fellowship was awarded through the Edward F. Albee Foundation and recognises the great talent of a range of artists bi-annually. The foundation aims to provide opportunities to a range of artists through a residency at ‘The Barn’, made possible through the abundant proceeds from the play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, memorialising Edward F Albee’s contribution to the arts.

IMAGE:

Pia Murphy in her studio, courtesy Rhys Lee

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Congratulations to Bridie Gillman who is a finalist in the 2024 Redland Art Awards with her work 'See from sky'.

The Redland Art Awards is a biennial contemporary painting competition open to all Australian artists, presented by Redland Art Gallery.

The finalists exhibition will be held at the Redland Art Gallery, opening Friday 6 December 2024.

IMAGE:

Bridie Gillman

See from sky 2024

oil on canvas

153 x 137 cm

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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

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We are thrilled to congratulate Bridie Gillman on being selected as a finalist in the 2024 John Leslie Art Prize with her painting ‘Hanging, holding.’

The $20,000 Acquisitive Prize is named after John Leslie OBE (1919—2016), Patron of the Gippsland Art Gallery and celebrates landscape painting by Australian artists.

Bridie’s work will be on exhibition amongst the other finalists from 7 September to 24 November at the Gippsland Art Gallery, in Sale, Victoria.

Image courtesy Louis Lim

IMAGE:

Bridie Gillman

Hanging, holding 2024

oil on canvas

137 x 198cm

READ MORE HERE

James Drinkwater has featured in ART-CLE Issue 02, 2024:

Known for his raucous yet meticulously composed paintings, James Drinkwater is one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists. Yet, the words ‘contemporary’ and ‘artist’ are not necessarily ones Drinkwater would use to describe himself. He prefers the term ‘painter’, and he is a gestural one at that, drawing on influences from the vast legacy of Australian, British, American and French modern art he became obsessed with as a child growing up in Newcastle, New South Wales. Drinkwater says he started drawing and painting incessantly from the age of five, after becoming taken with the small landscape paintings his aunt would work on at her kitchen table.

Drinkwater’s talent was recognised and nurtured early on, not just by his parents and those around him but also by the art world itself. During our conversation, he fields a call from his dad, who wants to come around and see his recent paintings. “It’s never ideal, the time he wants to come,” Drinkwater says after hanging up. “But I’m never going to say no to that, it’s fuel. You talk about fathers not approving of their kids doing art… artists like Clarice Beckett, you know. My dad was there in the garage with me, standing with a ciggy and a chardonnay just going, ‘Oh, bloody brilliant James. Brilliant. Michelle, come look!’

Between the ages of eight and eighteen, he attended Ron Hartree’s now-closed art school in Newcastle and visited exhibitions whenever his parents could take him. He later attended the National Art School in Sydney—only for one year, before getting restless—and then moved to Melbourne, where he met his now-wife, the painter and performance artist Lottie Consalvo. The pair soon moved to Berlin, where they lived for three years before relocating back to Newcastle in search of cheaper studio space and a quieter life.

In 2014, aged thirty, he won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, which took his family— then-newly expanded to three with the arrival of his first child, Vincenzo—to the Cité des Arts in Paris for three months and a further three travelling. Fast forward to June 2023, almost a decade on, and a survey exhibition at Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery—James Drinkwater: at mid-career, curated by Terence Maloon—announced without hesitation Drinkwater’s arrival at that often tenuous artistic milestone.

Drinkwater’s paintings are defined by their expressive use of colour. They are rich in matter, working texture and colour into abstract yet familiar figures, landscapes and interiors that speak of his experiences both real and imagined. In subject, his work draws heavily on the intimacy of his family life, the oceanic environment in which he lives, the broader Australian landscape and the people and places with which he interacts in his movements and travels. As was the case for the 20th century painters Drinkwater has so admired, his own exploration of this personal iconography at once allows insight into his subjective experience and offers something of our shared world to dive into.

- Emma Pegrum, ART-CLE

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater, courtesy Nic Gossage

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We are thrilled to announce that Sally M Nangala Mulda has been selected as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize with her work 'Amoonguna long time ago'.

We stay at Amoonguna long time ago. We went on the train to Maryvale.

Sally M Nangala Mulda, 2024

Sally M Nangala Mulda’s work is a form of documentary storytelling. In this painting, she references a time in the 1960s when her family moved to Amoonguna Aboriginal Reserve about 15 kilometres east-south-east of Mparntwe/Alice Springs, so the children could attend school. Sally was born in the camp of Aboriginal stock and station homestead workers on Maryvale cattle station. That camp was recognised as Aboriginal Land in 1978, and the residents have transformed it into the idyllic Titjikala community within easy walking distance of the old homestead.

Tangentyere Artists, 2024

READ MORE HERE

Artwork:

'Amoonguna long time ago' 2024

acrylic on linen

51 x 122 cm

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.

- Sally Anderson, 2024

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Holding a hurricane, quilt curtain carrying the sea 2024

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

182.5 x 198.2 cm

READ MORE HERE

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.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Placenta banksia, Bridal Veil Falls view, the sea in me, PB nude quilt tablecloth 2024

acrylic on polycotton

168 x 137 cm

Image courtesy the artist and Jessica Maurer

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At the time they both connected over their love for nature and now, roughly 10 years later Miranda has collaborated with Katie [Kolodinski] to curate The Protection Collection. Centred around symbolism and the rituals of self-protection including the iconic Aster flower, central to Katie’s upbringing, this was a harmonious alignment given Miranda’s style of art which is deeply influenced by historical references and ancient cultures.

For Miranda, her art allows people to explore other worlds and she hopes that placing her designs on clothing encourages people to have those conspectus conversations as well.

In line with this creative endeavour, she shared insights on her practices, creating the collection and her relationship with symbolism.

- Silk Laundry

IMAGE:

Courtesy Silk Laundry

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Congratulations to Bridie Gillman who is a finalist for the The Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize for her work 'Night Lines'.

Celebrating excellence and innovation in the watercolour medium, this non-acquisitive prize offers a winning of $20,000 generously donated by Elaine Bermingham.

Selected finalists will be exhibited at QCA Galleries, located within Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art and Design at South Bank, Brisbane from 30 November 2023 - 11 January 2024.

IMAGE

Bridie Gillman

Night Lines 2023

watercolour and ink on linen

102 x 115cm

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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.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Nat Silk's Seatown Still Life, PB Nude Quilt, Bromeliad Washdown 2023

acrylic on polycotton

153 x 137 cm

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Bridie Gillman is a finalist in the 2023 Girra: Fraser Coast National Art Prize for her work 'Quiet, after the storm' (2023).

The inaugural Girra: Fraser Coast National Art Prize is a major acquisitive prize of $25,000, that seeks to explore our reciprocal and inextricable relationship with the environment through contemporary art.

Selected artworks provide unique perspectives on industrialised landscapes, the forces of extreme weather events, our relationship to domestic gardens, ecological concerns and speculative solutions, ruminations on the beauty and power of nature, and much more.

The finalists’ exhibition, is held at the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery 23 September to 12 November 2023

IMAGE:

Bridie Gillman

Quiet, after the storm 2022

Oil on linen, glazed ceramics and soundscape

various dimensions

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Rhys Lee is featured in Issue 42 of Beautiful Bizarre.

Leesa Hickey, Director of Side Gallery in Australia, has selected 8 works in the market that she wishes to add to her personal collection. Amongst these 8 works is Rhys Lee's 2021 Polkadot Robe.

IMAGE:

Rhys Lee

Polkadot Robe 2021

oil on canvas

95 x 78 cm

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Bridie Gillman completed a residency at Córtex Frontal, for a 6 week placement in an 18^th century building located in Arraiolos, Alentejo, Southern Portugal, in April 2023.

Córtex Frontal is a multidisciplinary cultural project created in 2016 by the Cultural Association Córtexcult, in Arraiolos, Évora, Alentejo. The artists in residence program aims to provide the time and space to develop a project, fostering the sharing of experiences between artists and the community.

Bridie's new body of work directly inspired by her time spent at Córtex Frontal will be exhibited in her upcoming show, Watching Walls at Edwina Corlette Gallery 4 October - 24 October 2023.

Córtex Frontal is part of the Portuguese Contemporary Art Networks RPAC.

READ MORE HERE

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.

- Briony Downes, Art Guide, 2023

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson in her Studio, courtesy Jessica Mauer

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Early recognised as an exceptional talent, James Drinkwater has never toned-down the intensity and bravura of his approach to painting. His work has mined a vast legacy of modern art – Australian, British, American, French – as if all of it remains relevant, fresh and available to him. Now, on the brink of turning 40, this is the first survey of his prodigious past. While his paintings evoke figures, landscapes and interiors, they are also meticulously composed abstractions, distinctive for their complex and opulent fusion of texture, colour and spatial intrigue. This exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication. AT MID-CAREER: James Drinkwater is curated by Terence Maloon.

- Drill Hall Gallery

The exhibition is open 23 June, 2023.

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater

We are clumsy now on this southern beach 2016

mixed media on board

140 x 120 cm

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Arrernte and Southern Luritja artist Sally M Nangala Mulda alongside Arrernte and Western Arrarnta artist Marlene Rubuntja have developed their practice to be completely recognisable and representative of the place in which they live, Mparntwe/Alice Springs. Working from Tangentyere Artists and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists (art centres), these senior women have established themselves as two of Australia’s leading visual artists.

The third Artbank + ACMI Commission, Two Girls From Amoonguna, encompasses video, soft sculpture and paintings, with the centerpiece the animated work titled Arrkutja Tharra, Kungka Kutjara, Two Girls.

Arrkutja Tharra, Kungka Kutjara, Two Girls delves into the reality of First Peoples’ experiences in Central Australia by chronicling the artists’ successes and struggles. The work centres Sally and Marlene’s voices, as well as the voices of their younger family members, who can be heard in the animation. It was made in collaboration with Ludo Studio, the Emmy-award winning production company behind Bluey, Robbie Hood and The Strange Chores, along with script writer Courtney Collins, Left of Elephant Sound and Tangentyere Artists producer Ellanor Webb.

Figures from Marlene’s soft sculptures and Sally’s acrylic on linen paintings star in the animation, embedded on top of Marlene’s ink on paper works of the Central Australian landscape. Bringing together both artists’ practice, Sally’s iconic cursive painted lettering produce the subtitles.

Having grown up at the Amoonguna Settlement outside of Mparntwe/Alice Springs in the early 1960s, the two friends wouldn’t reconnect until much later in life, after both of them had seen their fair amount of hardships; now having achieved so much, they are immensely proud of one another.

Two Girls from Amoonguna is an exhibition about two of Australia’s leading artists and their journey to get there.

IMAGES:

1/ Sally M Nangala Mulda at Tarnanthi, 2019

2/ Marlene Rubuntja holding a soft echidna sculpture

WATCH HERE

READ MORE HERE

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.’

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Sea Town Lawn Roof Song with NO’s Vessel 2023

acrylic on canvas

115 x 97 cm

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Sally M Nangala Mulda is a finalist in the 2023 Sulman Prize.

Old man pay day

Daughter and father drinking beer. Down the creek one woman got two tail. Two man coming with the beer two rum with the bag

Two rum and two coca cola in the bag

Woman taking tail

Man taking rum and coca cola with the bag

Man taking beer at the creek

Sally M Nangala Mulda, 2023

Sally M Nangala Mulda’s work is a form of documentary storytelling. She started painting in 2008 and has frequently portrayed town camp life since the 2007 Northern Territory intervention: people camping in the riverbed in swags, council rangers moving people on, people cooking kangaroo tail down the creek. Her practice represents an important catalogue of lived experience of town camp life and colonisation.

Read more here.

Sally M Nangala Mulda

Old man pay day

acrylic on linen

59.5 x 91.5 cm

Miranda Skoczek is featured in ‘Artists at Home’ a new book about Australian female artists by Karina Dias Pires, published by Thames and Hudson, out now.

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek, courtesy Karina Dias Pires

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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’.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Lismore Island Roof Song with a Screenshot of Nat Silk’s Seatown 2022

acrylic on polycotton

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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.

- John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald, 2022.

READ MORE HERE

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

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Guido holding, folding, moulding 2022

acrylic on polycotton

198 x 153 cm

READ MORE HERE

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, 2022

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Congratulations to Sally M Nangala Mulda who is a finalist in the 2022 Sulman Art Prize.

The Sulman Prize is awarded for the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist.

Sally Mulda's painting 'Old Days at Amoonguna' depicts the art centre's toyota picking up all the woman for painting. That kungka Nadine driving. Long time ago I use to get picked up at Little Sisters. Now Abbott’s Camp. Every day. We listen to CAAMA radio. Good ways. Everybody talkin’ talkin’. This one [middle] – three woman, they on the hospital lawn, playing card for money. Pay day. Night time [right panel] four woman by the fire at town camp. They sitting round the fire at night time. Keeping warm, talking story. Maybe they by the fire because no power card? This is town camp life. Every day.

READ MORE HERE

Old Days at Amoonguna 2021
acrylic on linen
66 x 122.5 cm

Lottie Consalvo and James Drinkwater have created a big-hearted, art-filled home in their terrace house by the sea. James’ art practice incorporates painting, sculpture, drawings and wearable textiles. "Since I was a child, making art was the clearest way I could express myself,” he says. His creativity is nourished by “generosity of any kind, whether it be the human spirit or nature itself".

- Elizabeth Wilson, House & Garden Magazine

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater, courtesy Alana Landsberry

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There is more to Miranda Skoczek’s paintings than immediately meets the eye. They are built intuitively and in layers, from colours, patterns and objects that she absorbs in her immediate home environment – and all over the world. They are often abstract, sometimes with figurative elements; they focus on paint and colour, process and time, to create a space that takes us somewhere other, outside the material world. Inspiration comes from art and antiquities, folk art and contemporary design – and through obsessive consumption of images. Skoczek describes herself as “a sponge,” confessing to VAULT: “I have 95,000 photographs on my phone.”

The mystical is evident in Skoczek’s hope that her paintings work like amulets for those who acquire them. Protective elements aside, in their sensual textures and influences, so powerfully evoked, these paintings emerge as poignant and poetic visual essays written to the past and the present."\

- Louise Martin-Chew, Vault Magazine

IMAGE:

Front Cover of Vault Magazine, Issue 37, 2022, featuring Miranda Skoczek's Dreaming of Betty (Woodman), 2018

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This open competition is judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Finalists are displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery (although in the early years all entrants were hung). Although it is a non-acquisitive prize, several of the entries are now part of the Gallery’s collection.

Born in Titjikala in 1957, Mulda experienced a childhood accident that left her with impaired vision, but surgery has improved her sight. Exhibiting since 2008, she creates bright canvases with distinctive cursive text, depicting scenes of everyday life within Abbott’s Camp and drawing attention to social and political issues with emotional honesty.

In this portrait, the artist is wearing the stripey top and sits with her daughter, Louise Abbott. The other two people cooking roo tails on the fire represent all town camp women. As Mulda puts it: they are ‘maybe me and Louise, maybe any womans. This is town camp life. Every day.’

Mulda is also a finalist in this year’s Sulman Prize.

READ MORE HERE

Established in 2015, the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize is a celebration of contemporary Australian painting. The finalist exhibition brings together a broad range of artists, both established and lesser known, whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting in Australia today.

The annual prize is an important opportunity for Bayside City Council to add exceptional works of art to its collection and to promote art and artists as a valuable part of the Bayside community.

Sally Mulda's work 'Town Camp Stories' 2020 is a finalist in this year's prize.

READ MORE HERE

Adrienne Gaha is featured in Art Collector issue 94, October to December, 2020.

What drives Adrienne Gaha’s latest work is the myriad different interpretations waiting to be discovered in paint.

Gaha’s work reaches into art history with oblique references to narrative painters like Titian, Rupert Bunny, Bouguereau. The images are rubbed out, painted over, and heavily abstracted, conjoined with contemporary references. Their aesthetic contains touchstones, a sense of familiarity that is hard to pin down but speaks to our recognition of well-known historical paintings and their tropes, juxtaposed with pop culture references (cartoons, the Disney image) and animals. This method of working, where Gaha paints, wipes back with turpentine, glazes, builds, drips and pools paint is, as artist Brooke Fitzsimons suggests, a space where figuration coexists with abstraction in such a way as to address the maxims of modernism.

- Louise Martin-Chew

IMAGE:

Adrienne Gaha, courtesy Jacquie Manning

READ MORE HERE

Written by Louise Martin-Chew

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.

- Amy Campbell, The Australian, 2021

READ MORE HERE

Copywriter and content specialist Elle McClure was asked by the team at Medium Rare Content agency to help produce content for the autumn 2021 issue of the David Jones magazine, JONES HOME. As well as compiling trend pages and writing copy across the issue, Elle interviewed Otis Hope Carey, Louise Olsen and Miranda Skoczek as part of profiles on the artists.

READ MORE HERE

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.

- Brisbane Art Guide, 2020

READ MORE HERE

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.

- Sasha Gattermayr, The Design Files, 2020

READ MORE HERE

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, 2020

The exhibition is open from 3 July — 29 November 2020

READ MORE HERE

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.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Claude Swimming, 2020

acrylic on linen

168 x 137cm

READ MORE HERE

The Paddington Art Prize is a $30,000 National acquisitive prize, awarded annually for a painting inspired by the Australian landscape. Established in 2004 by Arts Patron, Marlene Antico OAM, this National prize takes its place among the country’s most lucrative and highly coveted painting prizes.

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater

Yellow Moon Over Tesoro 2020

oil in linen

122 x 180 cm

READ MORE HERE

Established in 1947, the Mosman Art Prize is Australia’s oldest and most prestigious local government art award. It was founded by the artist, architect and arts advocate, Alderman Allan Gamble, at a time when only a small handful of art prizes were in existence in Australia and the community had very little support and few opportunities to exhibit their work.

Entries for the 2020 Prize, for which there were over 580, demonstrated a remarkable spectrum of approaches in considering how we relate to the coordinates of the world at this time and the trajectory of contemporary painting.

IMAGE:

James Drinkwater

Bump in the night 2019

oil on linen

125 x 104.5 cm

Rhys Lee has been featured in an article by Juxtapoz on his experience as a practicing artist in Australia during the covid pandemic.

Continuing our mission to check with friends and favorite artists around the globe, we virtually traveled all the way to Victoria, Australia, to check on what's happening with Rhys Lee. Based in a small coastal town located southwest of Melbourne, the artist is a whirl of activity as he intensively works on new paintings.

- Juxtapoz

READ MORE HERE

'Artefacts', Alison Kubler, Vault Magazine, Issue 23, 104-105pp.

Bridie Gillman has been been selected as one of six finalists in the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The annual Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship is now in its 21st year and is open to Australian painters aged between 20 and 30 years. It was created from an endowment by Mrs Beryl Whiteley in 1999. The inspiration was the profound effect international travel and study had on her son, the artist Brett Whiteley, as a result of winning the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship in 1959 at the age of 20.

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, The Design Files, 2019.

READ MORE HERE

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

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Side of the Road River with Rousseau's Bluebells 2019

acrylic on linen

courtesy the artist

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Brisbane Art Design festival is a 17-day festival of exhibitions, performances, talks, art tours, workshops and open studios of artists and designers in Brisbane. BAD showcases more than 150 Brisbane artists across all career stages.

Bridie Gillman collaborated with Brisbane designer Alexander Loterztain to make the work Breath as part of the festival held at Museum of Brisbane.

IMAGE:

Jono Searle courtesy Museum of Brisbane.

The Moreton Bay Regional Art Award is an annual acquisitive exhibition proudly sponsored by the Moreton Bay Council. This year the Art Award offered an acquisitive prize of $8000, four category prizes of $2000 each, and two supplementary $1000 prizes for a Local Artist and a People's Choice Award.

Judged by Megan Williams, Manager of the University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, Bridie Gillman was awarded the overall winner with her work 'Some sort of growth' 2018.

Megan Williams commented: 'The artist's sense of the materiality of paint, the play of colour, darkness and light make it a very strong and visually arresting painting. The colours reference the natural environment and you get a sense of the artists awe and love of nature, however, its abstract quality resists clear and direct communication. It is a work to become immersed in, to sit with, and to contemplate.'

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Sally Nangala Mulda has been selected as a finalist in the 2019 Sulman Prize, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Sulman Prize is awarded for the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist.

Sally says of her working this years prize:

This is me outside my home at Abbott’s Town Camp in Alice Springs feeding my cats. Little cat, mother cat. One woman, my family, playing cards. Nobody bothering anybody. No papa bothering the cats! We are just sitting quietly. I like quiet. Nobody talking.

Sally M Nagala Mulda, 2019

Image: Sally feeding little cat, mother cat, acrylic on linen, 76 x 92 cm

Louise Martin-Chew writes about Sally Nangala Mulda's life and painting for Art/Edit magazine. She says:

'WHAT IS MOST DISTINCTIVE about the paintings of Sally M. Nangala Mulda is that they tell us just how it is to live in Abbott’s Town Camp, not far from the mostly dry Todd River bed in Alice Springs (Mparntwe). Many of the paintings produced by Indigenous artists working out of the region use colour and pattern to evoke the romance of their connections to Country. However, Sally’s approach delivers the gritty reality of the place in which she lives, the interactions between police and Aboriginal people, the supermarket as the source of “a feed”, the tension around alcohol consumption and people sleeping rough, all set amongst saltbush, waterholes, homes and shops.'

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On Sally Nangala Mulda's work for 'The National' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Snack Syndicate for Running Dog writes:

'Sally Mulda’s narrative style mimics the pedantic, forensic language of the state while at the same time showing that such language tends to obfuscate its subjects—people who live and die. Mulda’s frank descriptions of the Town Camp index the countless different ways that black life is both constrained by, and always in excess of, white law.

Together, the paintings in the exhibition are quietly unsettling, staging a series of encounters that produce both minor affects (annoyance, confusion, amusement, affection) and their major implications. Engaging with the paintings, we feel the enormity of living under occupation, as well as the conviction that such enormity can never be total.'

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https://www.the-national.com.a...

Curator Isobel Parker Philip talks about Sally Mulda's work for 'The National' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales:

'Sally Nangala Mulda is an artist who lives in Abbott's Town Camp in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

She paints scenes from her daily life. She paints people having breakfast. She paints going to the football. She paints people going to sleep. She also paints the routine and intrusive presence of the police amongst the indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.

All of these scenes are painted with the same frank and stark honesty. There is a normalisation of the police presence amongst the Indigenous community that is shocking to see at first and is amplified by the regularity with which Sally paints it and that we see it again and again across the installation.

This reminds us about what life looks like for a huge portion of our Indigenous people. In this work we see the lived effects of the 2007 Northern Territory intervention. It's a brutal reminder about what reality can really look like.

Sally paints her figurative scenes and then applies text on top of them to tether each work to a particular time and place. These are diaristic documents. They're paintings that do the job of photographs or snapshots. There's a kind of direct relationship between these scenes and the real world. We read them as snapshots. We read them as kind of episodes from life as it is lived.'

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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.

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In celebration of Gorman’s decade-long collaboration with visual artists, Heide is presenting a two-week pop-up exhibition in the iconic modernist building, Heide II.

The exhibition will feature garments from a new range by Gorman created in collaboration with ten artists who have worked with the Australian clothing label since 2009, including Miranda Skoczek. The garments will be displayed alongside the artworks which inspired them.

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Bridie Gillman's work as featured in Woven Kolektif's looking here, looking north exhibition at Casula Powerhouse has been reviewed in Art Asia Pacific Magazine.

At the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney, a video portrays the interior of a restaurant, its walls decorated with Australian-flag bunting, and kitsch Australiana tea towels and posters, positioning us inside an ostensibly Australian establishment. It is revealed in subsequent shots of the staff, clientele, and the beach outside, however, that this is in fact a tourist spot in Bali. Bridie Gillman’s video work Bali State of Mind (2017–18) ruminates on the unequal power dynamic between Australia and Indonesia, the latter being economically reliant on tourism and subject to the objectifying tourist gaze that comes with over one million Australians visiting annually.

Gillman is one of seven artists included in the exhibition 'looking here looking north' by members of Woven, a collective with “continuing personal connections to Indonesia.” While Gillman’s work is subtly political, the exhibition holistically was striking in its ability to reach beyond essentialist identity politics, reconfiguring what it means to be part of the Indonesian diaspora by speaking to universal themes of memory, place and belonging.

- Soo-Min Shim, Art Asia Pacific Magazine

looking here looking north is on view at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney, 12 January - March 17, 2019

IMAGE:

Bridie Gillman

Bali state of mind (still) 2017–18

two-channel video installation

17 min 40 sec

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looking here looking north is an exhibition by Woven, a collective of artists who each have continuing personal connections to Indonesia. Themes of identity, memory and cross-cultural experience are explored through performance, painting, installation, photography, video and sculpture.

Featuring work by: Kartika Suharto-Martin, Ida Lawrence, Mashara Wachjudy, Bridie Gillman, Sofiyah Ruqayah, Alfira O’Sullivan and Leyla Stevens.

looking here looking north is presented alongside an exhibition by artist Frances Larder and an exhibition of video works by Jumaadi as part of a suite of exhibitions showcasing perspectives on Indonesia.

The exhibition is on view at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney, 12 January - March 17, 2019

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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.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Guy's Painting of Wollumbin on my Wollumbin 2018

acrylic on linen

140 x 122 cm

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Miranda Skoczek, Julian Meagher and John Aslanidis are finalists in The Kings School Art Prize 2018.

The King’s Art Prize is a $20,000 acquisitive award presented to the best contemporary artwork created by an artist resident in Australia and represented by a commercial gallery, supporting both the artists and the fine arts industry. Entry is by invitation only and the finalists are selected by an appointed Art Prize panel.

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John Aslanidis, Belem Lett and Bridie Gillman are finalists in the 2018 Fisher's Ghost Award through Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The Fisher’s Ghost Art Award is part of Campbelltown’s annual Festival of Fisher’s Ghost. Held over 10 days, the Festival dates back to 1956 and celebrates Australia’s most famous ghost – Frederick Fisher.

The Open section of the Art Award is acquisitive to the Campbelltown Art Centre permanent collection and the artist is awarded prize-money of $20,000. Over the years, the prize has been won by some of Australia's most well respected contemporary artists.

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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


IMAGE:

Sally Anderson
Sharing Thirroul (Paul Ryan's Post Of Thirroul With Curtain) 2017
acrylic on linen
140 x 124 cm

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This is us, this is the way it is – that’s what Sally Mulda’s paintings of life seem to say.  Paddy wagons in the river, policemen pouring out grog, an assortment of bottles and cans lying on the ground; four disconsolate people, probably men, walking away.  Dogs, children sleeping and everything in between that makes up life in the Alice Springs Town Camps, are depicted in her paintings, raw and free.

Jo Hoban from the Design Files recently caught up with Bridie Gillman in her Brisbane studio.

Brisbane-based artist Bridie Gillman is inspired by cross-cultural experiences – from a childhood growing up in Indonesia, to residencies abroad and trips across Australia. Her bold, striking compositions convey moody landscapes, exploring both emotional and physical terrain.

- Jo Hoban, the Design Files

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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’.

- Art Almanac

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Tosha Falls as Curtains with Deegan Drive or LJs Mums Hydrangeas, 2018

acrylic on linen

122 x 122 cm

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Miranda Skoczek's exhibition 'Rag Rugs and Lion Heads' is featured on the Art Guide website. Miranda spoke with Louise Martin-Chew about her latest exhibition 'Rag Rugs and Lion Heads', her inspiration and the shift in her practice to looser, more expressive works:

Miranda Skoczek’s abstract paintings evoke old walls with layers of forms and shapes that emerge over time. In her studio, she might work simultaneously on nine canvases. Transferring from one to the other, she allows each oil layer to dry before repeatedly painting over it until jewel-like colours resonate and a spatial sensibility has been established within which the viewer may dwell. Skoczek told Art Guide Australia, “I don’t paint about social concerns. I create wholly immersive, beautiful pictures. They are places for escape and restoration: harmonious, calming pictures.”

- Louise Martin Chew

Miranda's exhibition is at the gallery from 14 November until 5 December 2017.

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Miranda Skoczek was a featured artist in the international group exhibition, The human experience, we are the ones doing works on canvas/Paintings XXXX at the Carlsberg Byens Galleri & Kunstsalon in Denmark. The exhibition was curated by Galina Munroe (Great Britain), Simon Ganshorn (Denmark) and Jordan Kerwick (Australia). The show featured 116 artists each working with abstraction through painting in their own distinct manner to promote diversity and highlight the possibility of medium and painting theory.

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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.

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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.

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Miranda Skoczek presents her first collection of jewellery works at Pieces of Eight Gallery in Melbourne as part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2017.

In DESHILADO, Miranda pays homage to the samplers created by stitchers in the early 16th Century. The collection is a three dimensional gathering of a myriad of interests and influences remixing materials and techniques, blurring the boundaries between objects, jewellery and art.

With a desire to connect ancient traditions with fashion, while acknowledging the archaeological importance of jewellery as artefact, Skoczek takes the opportunity to bring permanency to ornaments that have up to this point existed as abstract fragments in her paintings.

The exhibition is current until 25 March 2017.

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Miranda Skoczek is featured on The Design Files blog with a look at her move from an inner city two bedroom apartment, to a bucolic retreat set amongst the verdant landscape of the Dandenong Ranges. Miranda and her seven year old son Harper speak about the influence of nature on their lives and the impact a move to the country will have on her painting practice.

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek and her child, courtesy Caitlin Mills

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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!’

- Sally Tabart, The Design Files, 2021

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Miranda Skoczek is renowned for her engaging, energetic works and her spectacular use of colour. A fixture on the Australian art scene, her work is instantly recognisable for its layers of intuitive colour, pattern and motifs. Iconic Australian label Country Road thought her work was perfect for a collaboration with charity RedKite. Miranda has designed two tote bags and a t-shirt, with all proceeds from each sale going towards providing essential support to children and their families who are facing cancer.

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek in her home, courtesy Country Road

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Miranda Skoczek has collaborated with Gorman Clothing for their 2015 winter collection. In sync with the label’s aesthetic, Miranda’s artwork blends seamlessly into signature Gorman textures and styles. Her work is featured across all 53 pieces in the collection, with every print originating from five of her artworks.

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Dr Ashley Crawford - a freelance cultural critic based in Melbourne - has written a glowing essay on the progression of Rhys Lee's art practice.

Lee’s passport is stamped with a variety of exotic locales; he has been to Anger, he has stopped over in Love, he has traversed the landscape of Fear and, jet-lagged, he has experienced the Delirium of insomnia.

Like all adventurous travellers, Lee is a voyeur of the unknown. As this book opens we see him astride in alien locales, sheltering in a snow-capped tent in Scandinavia, peering over a swimming pool in a sweltering Havana. And there, early in his travels, are the first tentative sketches, faces – whether faces in the street or self-portraits is nary an issue; in many ways all of Lee’s work are self-portrayal. In 1999, the eyes stare out, Klimt-like, a mixture of defiance and trepidation. That same year, Lee discovers his trademark harshly-cropped skull in Haircut (1999). By 2000 the die is cast in a more assured self-portrait complete with sketchbook, a portrait of the artist as a young man.

IMAGE:

courtesy NBB Gallery, Berlin

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