Prints and Printmaking: Past, Present, and Future (1)
2 December 2022 at 11:00:00 pm
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Session Convenors
Dr Louise Voll Box, University of Melbourne
Kerrianne Stone, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Deirdre Cannon, National Gallery of Australia
John Landt, Australian National University
Alice Clanachan, Flinders University
Damon Kowarsky
The creation of images through a transfer process — woodcuts, etchings, engravings, screenprints, lithographs etc — has been central to art practice and scholarship over time. Study of the history of printmaking encompasses technical and aesthetic innovation, commercial imperatives, collaborative art making, patronage, and collecting. Prints exemplify the power of images to inspire, influence, and shape ideas.
The two sessions for this panel bring together scholars, curators, and a printmaker who explore the multi-faceted world of prints — historical and contemporary — and demonstrate prints’ important role in art making, exhibition development, and art historical scholarship in Australia and abroad. Prints and printmaking continue to challenge, illuminate, and delight.
This panel celebrates the demonstration of philanthropy by historian, curator, and collector, Dr Colin Holden (1951-2016), whose legacy supports scholarship, publishing, and exhibitions connected with prints and printmaking through the Colin Holden Charitable Trust. Dr Holden’s significant and wide-ranging print collection, now housed at Geelong Gallery, includes important French portrait prints (1640-1770); prints after Rubens and Van Dyck; depictions of cities and architecture; social realist prints (1940s-1960s); and prints by post-WWII émigrés and contemporary Australian printmakers that reinterpret European historical themes or consider social justice issues.
This panel is sponsored by Geelong Gallery in partnership with the Colin Holden Charitable Trust.
Holding form–the life and art of Barbara Brash
Deirdre Cannon, National Gallery of Australia
Throughout her 50-year career, Barbara Brash (1925-1998) consistently experimented with and tested the limits of the printed medium. A pivotal artist in Naarm/Melbourne’s post-WWII printmaking revival, Brash’s etchings, linocuts, lithographs and screenprints are recognised—both now and as they were at the time of their creation—for their dynamism, visual harmony and celebratory use of colour.
This paper will trace the biographical and curatorial research underpinning the recent exhibition Barbara Brash—holding form which brought together works by the artist in the Colin Holden Print Collection and Geelong Gallery’s permanent collection. Curated by Deirdre Cannon, this exhibition surveyed three decades of Brash’s prolific and exploratory output, mapping her artistic progression throughout the creative milieus of the George Bell School, Melbourne Technical College print room and her independent studio practice. As an under-researched and under-exhibited artist from this critical period in Australian printmaking history, this paper seeks to reassert Brash as an important innovator within her artistic cohort by illuminating avenues for further scholarship into the artist’s familial connections to the Australian Impressionist movement, her singular adaptation of printmaking techniques and media, and engagement with broader modernist artistic movements.
Janet Dawson’s Printmaking, 1957-60
John Landt, Australian National University
My presentation covers the content of my 2020 Master’s thesis on ‘Janet Dawson’s Printmaking, 1957-60’. This will be the first public airing of its main findings. Janet Dawson was a pioneering abstract painter and printmaker in Australia during the1960s and was one of the few female artists practising during a male-dominated era. Her iconic paintings of 1964 The Origin of the Milky Way and St George and the Dragon are frequently on display at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. She lives and works today at Ocean Grove, near Geelong.
Between 1957 and 1960, she lived in Europe and was primarily involved in lithography. There has, however, been little discussion of the art she made during this period. My thesis examined the prints and drawings she made in Europe, including some previously unknown works held in the art collection of the University College, London. It found that her printmaking at that time had formed a crucial stage in the development of her art practice. Through lithography, she discovered a sense of space and life in her works which then formed the central basis of her art practice. Previous interpretations of her art had failed to examine this key feature of her art.
After the Fall: artists’ response to FUMA’s European print collection
Alice Clanachan, Flinders University
After the Fall is an exhibition that was presented at Flinders University Museum of Art from 25 July to 16 September 2022. The project took its cue from the biblical Fall, represented in the FUMA collection by John Martin’s mezzotint Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise (1827), which illustrates a scene from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This exhibition reflected on themes of grief, faith, and end-times, and considered how artists respond to crises from the renaissance to contemporary times.
The European prints included in the show were purchased by the University’s inaugural Senior Lecturer of Fine Arts, Robert Smith, when Flinders University opened in 1966. Students accessed these prints while studying art in the 1960s and 1970s. From 2021-2022, three South Australian artists – Louise Haselton, Kate O’Boyle and Elyas Alavi –researched FUMA’s European print collection and responded by producing new work for After the Fall. Their works in sculpture, painting, video, and printmaking were displayed alongside 60 FUMA prints, including those by Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, William Blake, John Martin, Agostino Carracci, Albrecht Dürer and the 15th century Nuremberg Chronicle.
This unique research and exhibition project has sought to contextualise FUMA’s European print collection within contemporary art practice.
Coming to Landscape
Damon Kowarsky
This talk will look at the depiction of landscape in intaglio printmaking through my own work and the contemporary and historical printmakers who have influenced it. Landscape [along with portraiture and still life] is one of the three big themes in art. This talk will look at the ways landscape has expanded and contracted in response to new ideas about the world, and how it has come to be central to my current practice.
In a country as urbanised as Australia there is a paradox in our desire to visually depict landscape as separate from everyday experience – the Heidelberg School famously caught the train to paint their pastoral idylls. For me it is this discomfort with our place in this country that feeds the enduring power of landscape art. It is also, given the truly astonishing environments we live in and at the margins of, a huge joy and privilege to be able to depict them through the medium of print.
Biographies
Dr Louise Voll Box, University of Melbourne
Dr Louise Voll Box is a Teaching Associate (Art History and Curatorship) at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include eighteenth-century visual arts; print collecting and display; the English country house; and connections between business and the arts. In 2018, she was the Harold Wright and Sarah and William Holmes Scholar at the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, and has been awarded a Paul Mellon Research Support Grant and a Francis Haskell Memorial Fund Scholarship to study prints and archives overseas. She is a Trustee of the Colin Holden Charitable Trust which supports print-related scholarship, exhibitions, and publications.
Kerrianne Stone, University of Melbourne
Kerrianne Stone is the Curator, Prints at Archives and Special Collections for the University of Melbourne. She graduated from the University of Melbourne and has worked with several collections across museums and galleries in Melbourne. Her 2014 exhibition and associated publication, Radicals, slayers and villains, toured Regional Victoria. She was awarded the Harold Wright Scholarship and Sarah & William Holmes Scholarship in 2014 to study prints at the British Museum and in 2019 organised Horizon Lines, an exhibition and book marking the 50th anniversary of these awards.
Deirdre Cannon, National Gallery of Australia
Deirdre Cannon is a curator and writer based in Kamberri/Canberra, where she is currently Curatorial Assistant, Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia. Previously she was Curatorial Assistant at Geelong Gallery, where she curated the exhibitions Thirdspace and Going public—portrait prints from the Colin Holden Collection. Deirdre has contributed research to the catalogues raisonnés of Ron Mueck for the National Gallery of Victoria and Christopher Wool, for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has written widely on artists and curatorial models, and her research interests include the philosophies of humour and the restaging and documentation of exhibitions
John Landt, Australian National University
John Landt is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. I am a mature age student having previously worked in the fields of economic and social analysis within the Australian Public Service and at the University of Canberra. I live in Melbourne, caring for my elderly mother, and am an external student at the ANU. My PhD topic is ‘The Art of Janet Dawson’ and is being supervised by Sarah Scott and Chris McAuliffe.
Alice Clanachan, Flinders University Museum of Art
Alice Clanachan is Collections Curator, Flinders University Museum of Art. She’s a specialist in print curatorship, having managed public collections of works on paper for over a decade. She has held curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, and South Australian Museum. She was the 2019-2020 Harold Wright Scholar in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in London. Her broad-ranging interests include touring exhibitions, provenance research and interpreting print collections for contemporary audiences.
Damon Kowarsky
Damon Kowarsky studied printmaking at Victorian College of the Arts and Glasgow School of Art. Since graduating he has travelled extensively, and worked as a scientific, courtroom, and archaeological illustrator. Kowarsky has exhibited in Australia and abroad, with solo shows in Melbourne, Canberra, Wellington, Hong Kong, Karachi, New York, Philadelphia, Cairo, Damascus, and Lahore. He has received numerous grants, including from Creative Victoria and Australia Council. In 2018 Warrnambool Art Gallery undertook a substantial survey exhibition of his prints, paintings and drawings. He is currently working on etchings and drawings exploring interactions between the natural and man made worlds.