Light Square Gallery Art Exhibition Opening Adelaide, South Australia - 22nd September 2010

Christie Anthoney (right), Creative Director, TAFESA, and family

Pro Vice Chancellor UniSA, Professor Pal Ahluwalia with project supporters(right)

Orapin Plummer, President of the Thai Culture Association South Australia

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Light Square Gallery Art Exhibition Opening Adelaide, South Australia - 22nd September 2010

Workshop artist Mike Sara and family

 

 

 

 

Chris Bull from Helpmann Academy and workshop artist Sheila Whittam

 

Workshop artist, Lauryn Arnott (right) with friends

More photographs from the exhibition opening to follow in subsequent posts.

Photos courtesy of the Helpmann Academy.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Light Square Gallery Art Exhibition Opening Adelaide, South Australia - 22nd September 2010

AC Arts - Light Square Gallery - Adelaide, South Australia

Edward James (Helpmann Academy) and Helen Stacey

Aboriginal Artist, Betty Sumner singing a lullaby to baby Azaria held by her mother curator/artist Wendy Grace Allen

Exhibition supporters

Betty Sumner (workshop participant and Aboriginal art consultant)

Exhibition supporters

More photographs from the exhibition opening to follow in subsequent posts.

Photos courtesy of the Helpmann Academy and Wendy Grace Allen.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Introducing Nina Rupena – Workshop Participant, Adelaide South Australia

'Vestige' ink, colour pencil and watercolour on old doily mounted on canvas-backed wallpaper, 

46 x 51 cm, 2010.

Nina Rupena

As a result of personal experiences linked with dislocation (as a refugee of war located in Bosnia and Herzegovina), I am attempting to analyse and mediate this experience.

My artwork ‘Vestige’ attempts to examine the perception of ageing. In a visual sense, hands are a symbolic vehicle, representing wisdom and endurance where folds, wrinkles and scars narrate a story and represent personal histories.

I have an evolving history as an industrial designer, photographer, video and installation artist, working both within a fine arts context and my own cultural community developing work which explores memory and the nature of history and place.

Nina Rupena

The Collaboration

I am collaborating with Patricia Wozniak and Lauryn Arnott. We come from diverse cultural backgrounds – Polish, Zimbabwean and Bosnian.

What we hoped to achieve with our collaboration is to enrich our art practises by openly exchanging ideas, techniques and materials. The opportunity to share personal histories and explore the complexities of exile was greatly rewarding. We enjoyed the synergy formed when creative minds are put together and exciting ideas for future projects came as a result of Borders Crossing project.

Text by Nina Rupena

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Comments from Our Guestbook in Bangkok, 5th Feb - 6th Mar 2010

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Introducing Lindi Harris - Workshop Participant, Adelaide, South Australia

No Borders 


Lindi Harris
This work describes my relationship to the Australian landscape and the British Isles, and evokes the power of sacred sites. It alludes to the nomadic nature of humanity, our desire to hold onto memories and objects of the past, and the effect of climate change and erosion on the built and natural landscape. Standing stone circles were constructed in the British Isles as early as 3400 BC and remained in use as astronomical observation devices until around 1500 BC, at which time northern Europe experienced a “global cooling”.1 Populations abandoned the Orkney and Shetland Islands to the north of Britain, and the Hebridean Islands to the west. Due to the subsequent lack of human activity and the peat moss that slowly covered all evidence of early civilisation, these regions today host some of the most well preserved Neolithic sites in the world. The earliest known examples of the Celtic cross, found in France and dated from 10 000 BC, are carved “ancestor stones” thought to contain the spirits of the dead. The Standing Stones of Callanish were originally laid out in the formation of a Celtic cross.2 The evolution of Uluru, central Australia, began over 900 million years ago.3 The warm reds and soft curves and contours of Uluru contrast with the angular cold grey of the Standing Stones of Callanish. As a small child emigrating in the 1960’s from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern, it was this dramatic change in light and colour that left a life-long sense impression. Both the Standing Stones and Uluru hold cultural significance to the people who live amongst them.

Processes and mediums used in this work include linocut, collograph, ink and pastel drawing and collage. Papers are Japanese Kozo, Hahnemuhle and silk paper.

Collaborating on The Border Crossing Art Project

At this stage I have selected another artists work and commenced initial studies with it. What I have learnt is how easy it is to choose similarity. I selected a piece that reflected my own values/ethics/style/medium and I feel very comfortable with it. I knew instantly how I would proceed-or at least had a couple of very clear directions to move in. How would it have been if the piece had been selected for me? If I had been required to respond to a work I didn't immediately understand? Crossing borders is uncomfortable and we avoid it where we can. This project has highlighted my discomfort with that I do not understand. And yet it is difference that attracts me. A paradox. 

About Lindi Harris

British migrant 1966 

Art student since 1966 (aged 5) when I questioned my mum about why the teacher said I was wrong because I had drawn the strokes the wrong way-my mum (an artist) told me the teacher was wrong. 

Early Childhood Education Diploma 1980 

SACAE Post Graduate Diploma in Counselling 1995 

University of South Australia Cert IV Art Practice 2001 

TAFE SA Currently student of Bachelor Degree of Visual Arts and Design 

Text written by Lindi Harris

  

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Shoutouts - Artgazine

Shoutouts on-line in Artgazine (Click on this link)This video was shown as part of our exhibition at The Art Centre, of our one day workshop with Thai artists and art students.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Visual Representation of our Collaborative Process

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Letting you know what we've been doing - Art4D

Click on the images to enlarge.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

Negotiating Boundaries - Australian Art

Negotiating Boundaries

Gates, salt lakes and hallowed ground

Boundaries are present in our lives in diverse ways. They may be natural or man-made, psychological or social. They may have a spiritual significance. Boundaries may be negotiated in diverse ways. This is the domain that Negotiating Boundaries explores.

The region where I, a descendent of first settlers, grew up and now live encompasses Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert, from Strathalbyn to Milang and Narrung and the northern reaches of the Coorong. Mount Barker is a constant feature of the horizon. For me the lakes region has a profound spiritual atmosphere.

In this region some boundaries are man-made constructions such as gates and fence lines, while other boundaries follow natural forms of waterways, shore lines, salt lakes and horizons. Such forms can become metaphors for boundaries marking colonisation and exclusion. They also become metaphors and suggest transformation.

Around Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert old farm gates and fences of corroding, battered metal and wire, stand or lean in discomforting elegance. The gate is familiar, yet ambivalent. On one hand the gate constrains and controls, denoting colonisation of land and people, yet it also conveys possibilities of openness and transition. For the Ngarrindjeri nation this country, with its salt lakes, freshwater lakes and the Coorong, is hallowed ground, a spiritual place. 1 In past history, colonisation and control of Ngarrindjeri lands and people was not negotiated. Cross-gates over Coorong country personifies the gate as a sign of authority on one hand while suggesting transcendence on the other.

Today, decomposing man-made boundaries can be a metaphor for new possibilities of negotiation, including cross-cultural exchange and reconciliation. In this collection, Negotiating histories was created in collaboration with artist and Ngarrindjeri elder, Ellen Trevorrow. Suggestions of country are overlaid with rush woven forms, aged found wire, a pair of mapping callipers and a constructed gate symbolising shifts in ownership and relationships. Further works shows Mt. Barker, Wommamukurta - Mountain in the Plain, a site of ancient burial customs of the Peramangk people, with floating veils, weeping or blissful, patterned with disintegrating gates, a token of our mourning and remembrance.

For many people this country with its dark alluvial soils, limestone outcrops and flattened horizons is apparently lifeless and at times dark and foreboding. Yet unexpected flashes of colour at salt lake’s edge, in vegetation and sky denote life. The austere, vast expanse of sky, land, water and sparkling crystalline salt flats emanate a spiritual ambience. While this atmosphere may be sensed in the optimism of dawn or the melancholia of nightfall, it is also evidenced in summer when light-drenched, bleached out surfaces of salt lake and grassland saturate the eye. It becomes a ‘thin-place’. 2 There can be a sense that material life is indeed finite, and the infinite and intimate Other is present. In this context, corroding gates and remnants of fences become metaphors for encountering and negotiating a material-spiritual nexus.

Decorative forms of disintegrating gates leading to Warrenji Station, a Ngarrindjeri place of significance, become reminiscent of universal signs for wholeness. In one series iconic gate fragments levitate over, or lie embedded in, land and roads - disembodied, seemingly benign.

Shimmering salt lakes, round or elliptical, suggest soul forms. In many spiritual traditions salt and light are symbols of a blest life. In works entitled Hallowed ground and Night flight, subtle shifts of light in darkness and floating, often incomplete, salt lake or soul forms, imply that negotiating and crossing material-spiritual boundaries is an uncertain and mysterious process.

The art of conveying such ambiguity can be described in the words of Korean artist, Lee Ufan, as ‘creating relationships between transparent and non-transparent things, making and non-making. Through this process the work comes to incorporate the known and the uncertain’. 3 In Negotiating Boundaries broken layers of colour lie over dark, textured surfaces built up with earth from the region, sometimes deeply scarred, or float on glass. Found wire and metal objects and cast stone are unexpectedly introduced. Some surfaces are salt encrusted and will be subject to change during the life of the work. Further uncertainty is generated in works such as the Borderlands series and Warrenji saltflats - rotating. Here the viewer negotiates boundaries visually. Landscape forms on multiple panels are layered, inverted, reversed, rotated and suggest that landscape, like life, is subject to fragmentation and change. Thus boundaries of gates and fence lines, salt lakes and horizons may be freshly negotiated and evoke new meanings.

This series contains the darkest works in the artist’s oeuvre to date, acknowledging the ominous times we grapple with, where hope is fragile. However, the work affirms that the spiritual may be present in darkness as well as light.

Helen J. Stacey MVA UniSA 1997, MVA (research) UniSA 2004, Associate Royal South Australian Society of Arts, July 2007

1. In Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-ruwe – Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea Country and Culture, the Ngarrindjeri Tendi (Council) states, ‘Ngurunderi (the Creator) taught us our Miwi, which is our inner spiritual connection to our lands, water and each other and all living things (this) is passed down through our mothers since Creation’. (p.8) (copies available from Camp Coorong, Meningie)

2. In God, where are you?, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1997, Gerard W. Hughes refers to an indigenous Celtic theological notion of ‘thin places’, where the borderland between the material and spiritual world has little substance, a notion with similarities to indigenous Aboriginal theology of land which affirms the spiritual interconnectedness between place and people. (see footnote #1)

3. Ufan, Lee, ‘The Subjects of Sculpture’, The Art of Encounter, trans. Anderson, Stanley N, Lisson Gallery Turner, London, 2004, p.30.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo

The Border Crossing Contemporary Art Project

BORDER CROSSING

Brief Description of Project

Border Crossing is as an exploration of collaborative art practice, where the artists involved in the project experiment with using multi-layered collaborative processes that traverse geographical and cultural boundaries. Within this framework, the artists reflect on current land occupation, colonisation or ownership issues, and the effects of rural - urban relocation on identity relating to their specific cultural context. The project culminates in a series of art exhibitions to be held in several countries within the Asia Pacific region.

Summary of issues explored in Border Crossing

Summary of issues explored in Border Crossing

• Collaboration between artists from different cultural backgrounds.
  
• Using techniques for art reproduction and communication enabled by contemporary technology.
  
• Issues of ownership, copyright and authenticity.
  
• How the artists resolve the themes for the work relevant to their cultural backgrounds.
  
• Resolving the conflict between individual artists freedom and respect for another artist's work.
  

Aims/Objectives

The aim of Border Crossing is to conduct an experiment between artists who originate from different cultural environments within the Asia Pacific region, utilising contemporary digital and communication technology to expand the possibilities of creative practice, culminating in a series of exhibitions in several countries. Fundamental to the process is the way the artists communicate across geographical and cultural divides. Border Crossing questions how issues of dissemination of information, image reproduction, ownership and copy write law are resolved and acted upon. The use of fine art reproductions (giclee canvas prints) challenges the authenticity and originality of the artwork. Who owns and therefore receives any monetary reward for a painting that the three painters have worked on? Is it the artist who creates the first painting, or the person who finishes the artwork? Unlike the master apprentice relationship, all three artists are acknowledged equally in contributing to the artwork, although the artist who finishes the painting has the main responsibility and freedom to resolve the finished artwork. Inherent in the process is an element of respect and acknowledgement of another's work. There is a need to adapt to another's painting style and respond accordingly. It is the prerogative of each artist to select which parts of an artwork to retain and which parts to erase or adapt – each artist has the option to completely paint over the other's work. In addition, the art exhibition, enabled by contemporary technology, creates a phylogeny of paintings where the evolution of the completed work can be traced, resembling a family tree.
The intended outcome of the exhibition is to present art work that engages viewers in a multi-country dialogue, stimulating discussion about the issues presented, and promoting collaborations between artists from different cultural backgrounds. There will be a forum available for viewers to respond directly to the works thereby continuing the conversation.
Border Crossing will impact the cultures that we are engaging with by raising awareness of issues concerning negotiating the differences between urban and rural life and critically engage people with issue concerning peoples connections to the land. Border Crossing aims to promote understanding between different cultures via the collaborative nature of the project and it's presentation to a diverse spectrum of people across several countries in the Asia Pacific region.

Connections between the artists

Border Crossing curator, Wendy Grace Allen (nee Dawson) grew up in Palmerston North, New Zealand, making regular visits to her cousins at their nearby family farm. Later,she owned a house in the country where she developed an interested in landscape design, ecological and sustainable gardening, growing fruit and vegetables and keeping bees. Her relationship to the land is informed by her Christian world view of God as creator and our responsibility as caretakers of His creation. In 1996, Wendy moved from Otago where she completed her Diploma of Fine Arts, to Adelaide to study for her Master of Visual Arts degree at the University of South Australia. This is where she met fellow students Helen Stacey and Apichart Pholprasert. She has lived in several places around New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Thailand. She is currently Artist in Residence in Ban Pao Rural Art Centre, Thailand.
A Bangkok based lecturer-artist, Apichart Pholprasert negotiates rural/urban cultural differences in his art practice. The contrasting experience between his childhood in a farming family in North East Thailand, and his relocation(s)to Bangkok, then Adelaide, Australia and Newcastle,U.K, to further his education led him to develop his art making philosophy. This philosophy builds around and responds to, the interconnection between the multiple binaries of rural/urban,low-tech/high-tech, and local/international.
Helen Stacey’s work revolves around the land, where some series include sign and metaphor related to issues of reconciliation and spirituality. In Border Crossing her work celebrates the long awaited post-apology era when reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians can be further advanced and signs of colonisation can become transformed.

Methodology/Implementation of the Project

Collaborative Process

1. Each artist creates a painting, then follows the pattern below:
   Artist A paints a canvas reflecting on the themes/ideas of the show.
   
2. Artist A then takes a digital photograph of their work and emails a copy to the other two artists.
   
3. With the digital copy of the image received, Artist B and Artist C each produce a giclee print onto canvas (of specified size).
   
4. Artist B then paints on top of a giclee print of the painting made by Artist A, responding to the work and reflecting on the theme of the show.
   
5. Artist C also paints on top of a giclee print of the painting made by Artist A.
   
6. Artist B takes a digital photograph of the combined artist's work (Artist A and Artist B). The photograph is emailed to Artist C.
   
7. Artist C takes a digital photograph of the combined artist's work (Artist A and Artist C ). The photograph is emailed to Artist B.
   
8. With the digital copy of the image received, Artist C produces a giclee print onto canvas.
   
9. With the digital copy of the image received, Artist B also produces a giclee print onto canvas.
   
10. Artist C then paints on top of the giclee canvas print in response to Artists A and B's work.
    
11. Artist B also then paints on top of the giclee canvas print in response to Artists A and C's work.
    
12. This process is performed three times: once for each of the contributing artist taking the place of Artist A.
    

The final exhibition will consist of fifteen paintings on canvas: three original fine art paintings on canvas and twelve subsequent collaborative paintings/canvas prints. The process is illustrated in Figure 1, where the artists are labelled A, B and C.

Figure 1: A diagrammatic representation of the collaborative process. Each letter represents an artist. The lines trace the history of a work. For example, the left branch of the left-most tree describes the process of Artist A creating a painting (a copy of) which is passed to Artist B to over paint, then a copy of this new work is passed to Artist C for a second over-painting.

The details of collaborative process can be confusing, so it is helpful to explain it in several different ways. Figure 2 also describes the process, labelling the paintings instead of the artists, and figure 3 shows how the actual artworks fit on to the tree.

Figure 2: An alternative diagrammatic representation of the collaborative process. The nodes of these graphs represent a (finished) painting using the following notation: each painting is labelled by the initials of the artists who have worked on it (see the key in the figure for a list of the initials), with the order of the initials corresponding to the order that the artists worked on the painting. For example, the node WAH represents a work that was originally painted by Wendy Grace Allen, reproduced and painted over by Apichart Pholprasert, reproduced again and finish by Helen Stacey.

Figure 3: Images of the artworks arranged as a “family tree”.

The project is to be exhibited in Bangkok, Thailand, Palmerston North, New Zealand, Adelaide, Australia and Singapore. The target audience includes professional artists, art collectors, art supporters, museum curators and art students.

The Earth's waters are both boundaries and pathways for peoples, objects and ideas.

Fumio Nanjo