Here’s another energetic work by Kevin Meagher, from his recent show at Callan Park Gallery; a work dripping with death, time and transformation. From the Kali entry in Wikipedia:
The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a vehicle of salvation.
Kevin Meagher
Blood Kali Change
Meagher’s work is, for me, a Yantra, a refined instrument of analysis, a conception of how Blood becomes Kevin becomes Blood, how Jesus / Kali /Venus / Mars is the facilitator for a deep and necessary internal reorganisation that must take place: a matter of life and death for the artist. Or it’s something else! Something so mysterious that we’re returned finally to the work itself as carrier of archetypal content that has no other means of exposition.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Kevin Meagher,
Outsiders
In May, Callan Park Gallery hosted an energetic exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Kevin Meagher, an Outsider who’s been hospitalised for some time and who has developed his practice through the Pioneer Clubhouse in Balgowlah. He’s also taken an Artist in Residence role at Macquarie Hospital in North Ryde.
Kevin’s work is brimming with mythological and spiritual associations – and there is a real experience here of someone struggling to find where he fits into the vast staggering schemes of Norse, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Christian and Egyptian myth. And the inquiry is conducted with an urgency that conveys its importance to him, and sucks the viewer in to his worlds.
(Left, Neal Hawke, and right, Ben and Tim at War.)
For me, Kevin is involved in the classic “Who Am I?” question, with a fury and commitedness brought on by obviously distressing and bewildering personal states. I love his disregard for artistic style, and also for his daring iconoclasm – I’ll post some more of his intriguing works over the next few weeks.
(Works on paper in the top image are Shiva the Bee, Jewel Tree and Super Bella; ceramics are Ra Uranus, Iris Mary, Dianna Venus, Neptune Lir and Ganga Ocean. )
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Kevin Meagher,
Outsiders
Another work in the recent exhibition at Callan Park of a selection from Pearls of Arts Project Australia, a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. This one’s an energetic pastel by Leo Cussen.
Quoting from the recent Home Sweet Home exhibition blurb (National Gallery of Australia):
It is has been remarked that Cussen has a deep fascination with aspects of popular culture including the ‘Dr Who’ character from the television series of the same name and has produced a strong series of works based on this theme: ‘His work has an obsessive quality resulting from repeated use of words or phrases or in his intensive use of media. ’
I love the energetic text and the insistent working of the windows in this piece. I wanna know what’s in that tardis!
Leo Cussen
Untitled (Dr Who’s Tardis),2005
Pastel on paper, 56 x38cm
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Leo Cussen,
Outsiders
Bitten by snakes? Possibly. At the very least we can say they are slithering around… Here’s Anne Grgich’s Madam Dussa, from the Callan Park show of last November. (You can download a PDF about Anne’s Archaeologies of the Extraordinary Everyday exhibition here.)
Anne Grgich
Madam Dussa, 2009
Tagged as:
Anne Grgich,
Callan Park Gallery
While we’re back on the snake theme, here’s another from the Callan Park Gallery show (“Snakes”) of last November, a lovely work made from recycled materials that’s been biding its time in my blog photo folder, working it’s way in…
Janine Hilder
Snake from salty lake
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Janine Hilder
There was quite a text theme in the “APA People” selection for the Callan Park show I visited recently (see also the previous post). I found this both playful and energetic. Here’s a work by Julian Martin, born 1963 and started at the APA studio in 1990. He’s now represented in a number of private collections. He works with simple graphic shapes, like this superb letter N.
Julian Martin
Untitled (letter N)
pastel on paper
65 x 50 cm
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Julian Martin,
Outsiders
Callan Park Gallery is currently showing a selection of the Pearls of Arts Project Australia, which is a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. There are about 200 works in the collection, created by people with an intellectual disability who have been associated with APA. Stuart started collecting the works in 1998, recognising in them something very special.
I loved the text-oriented works in the show, and here are two examples by Scott Ferguson, who was born in 1963 and has been attending the APA studio in Melbourne since 1995. There’s a whimsical freedom about these pieces, a lack of self-consciousness that makes them, for me, very distinct from graffiti, with it’s usual insistence on identity.
Scott Ferguson
Untitled (white text on black)
14.5 x 24.5 cm
Scott Ferguson
Untitled (figures and text)
16 x 50.5 cm
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Scott Ferguson
The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
I am now the proud owner of number 892/2000 in the first edition of Susan King’s comic book, which I bought at her recent exhibition at the Callan Park Gallery. Here’s a snippet from the book, brimming with energy and much strangeness.
According to the comic:
Susan stopped talking around the age of 4. But she drew and drew and drew and drew and drew – expressive, rich, imaginative and complex drawings. In the mid 1980s, Susan stopped drawing. Then towards the end of 2008 as new people were starting to discover Susan’s work, she started to draw again. It’s late 2009. Susan has an exhibition happening imminently, a documentary is being made about her, wonderful people from the art world are studying her drawings… and Susan continues to draw.
There’s lots more of her work at Susan’s web site, and here are a couple of favourites of mine from the show (the one “happening imminently”):
Below is an image from her web site that I couldn’t help thinking fits closely with another of Susan as a child, drawing in the sand at Waihi, New Zealand. Maybe it’s my New Zealand connection, but I feel an emotional pull from these images; she’s managed to keep alive a fresh, child’s view and a child’s creative use of the natural resources around her. And I guess for me that’s the kick I get from Outsiders – their ability to remind me of things I’ve pushed out of my awareness, in my construction of a “normal” adult psyche.
Susan’s also on Facebook – I searched for “Susan Te Kahurangi King”.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Susan King
Ok, this one’s not obviously about Bali, yet in another way it is. This is a work by Paul Sedgwick (2006) that I saw at the recent exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery. I photographed it then, but wasn’t initially moved. Yet this strange canvas has been working on me over the ensuing weeks (and even while in Bali) and I now love its language and its delicacy.
That got me wondering about how good Outsider art works – how it operates, as though on a different plane from much mainstream art, breathing from deeper levels of the psyche. And the painting fits well for me with my recent Bali experience – Bali and this work hold something related; another, fresh way of inhabiting the world.
Before I went to Bali I spoke to Peter Fay about this work, and he gave me some of the background. Paul works out of an arts workshop in Hamilton New Zealand. He compiles lists of street names, of mountains, of local landmarks. (This one has entries from the Auckland phone book.)
I like Peter’s take on the work: to him it’s “the dying of a breath of wind” (the way the letters fade). There’s much delicacy here, in the text and in the underlying abstraction of colour (which the photo doesn’t quite do justice to). An art piece that’s prepared to die away, to breathe in quite a different way. I like that.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Paul Sedgwick
