BIENNALS:TarraWarra Biennial 2021

Inaugurated in 2006, the TarraWarra Biennial has presented the works of over 170 artists over the course of six exhibitions to date. Providing a significant platform for each of its six guest curators to identify and respond to new trends in contemporary Australian art, each iteration has had a distinctive and independent curatorial lens. TarraWarra Biennial 2021 had been planned for 2020 but, due to the pandemic and resultant lockdowns in Victoria, it could not be realised until 2021.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: TarraWarra Biennial Archive

The TarraWarra Biennial 2021 exhibition “Slow Moving Waters” takes its cue from the winding Birrarung (Yarra River) located nearby the Museum, the exhibition builds on the very special atmosphere of TarraWarra. A retreat for the imagination, “Slow Moving Waters” invites the audiences to slow down, consider alternative tempos, listen deeply, and immerse themselves in subtle, minimal and evocative works by 25 artists from around Australia. Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, his Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates the personal and family  histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country —, using technology to make visible the interconnecting  spiritual, cultural, physical, and historical relationships with the land, waters, sky, and all living things. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and  soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been  buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture. Jeremy Bakker is a Melbourne-based artist who works across drawing, installation, sculpture, photography and video. His practice takes its momentum from the apparent contrast between the common human desire for continuity and permanency, and the transient nature of material reality. Taking a range of forms—including durational drawings that embed time in the accumulation of marks on paper, familiar  objects that have been transfigured through different material states, and ephemeral site-specific installations—Bakker’s work engages with ideas of time and presence as understood through bodily engagement with the physical world. Lucy Bleach’s practice focuses on humanity’s enduring relationships to volatile environments by engaging with communities that directly experience such interactions and scientists who monitor the earth’s vibration. She generates artworks where processes are informed by geological force and which anticipate their own ensuing instability   and transformation. She uses her practice to investigate transitions of matter, to slow down the process of material collapse, to link global and local vibrations, and to invest in intricate acts of repair. Lauren Brincat’s most recent work takes the form of banners and sculptures made out of sailcloth, as well as malleable forms in textile that can be activated by participants. In 2019, Brincat created her large-scale work “Other Tempo”, co-commissioned by Carriageworks and Performance Space for Liveworks Festival. The artist also created “The Plant Library” (2019), a co-commission by the MCA’s C3West program and Landcom. In 2016, Brincat presented “Salt Lines: Play It As It Sounds, Performance Instruments” (2016), a site-specific installation at Carriageworks as part  of the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Louisa Bufardeci is a Melbourne-based artist, researcher and educator with over twenty years of professional experience. Her practice is  broadly focused on contemporary socio-political issues, particularly  how these issues involve representing experience through statistics  and other data. She has used statistical information, maps, plans, codes, sounds, speeches, digital images, GPS data, case studies, scientific ideas and more as the basis of works in a wide variety of media including digital prints, installation, video, neon, needlepoint, photomontage, animation, braiding, sound, drawing, kinetic sculptures, text, actions, fabric, embroidery, wall drawings and paintings. The relationship between abstraction and representation is a common element in her work.

Born and based in Perth, Western Australia, Jacobus Capone maintains a practice that incorporates performance, photography, video installation, painting and site-specific work. Characteristically poetic there is a holistic nature to his undertakings which increasingly attempt to integrate all action, however perceived by others, into the wholeness of one lived experience. In 2007, he traversed Australia by foot, in order to pour water from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific. Christian Capurro’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Academy in Rome, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, STUK Kunstencentrum, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Artspace and the Institute of Modern Art. His work is held in most major Australian collections and, amongst other notable accolades, he has been the recipient of the International Studio and Curatorial Program Australia Council Residency and the prestigious Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Sundari Carmody is an artist currently based in Adelaide whose practice is primarily focused on the language of sculpture. She concerns herself with the question of how to engage with universal systems and aspects of being which linger in the category of the unknown, in ‘the dark’.  She attempts to find useful frameworks to give form to things that are invisible or which lie just beyond the limits of our perception. Relevant precedents to her methodology include research in the areas of dark matter, sleep and the study of nocturnal creatures. The scope of her investigations take into account the scientific, cultural, physiological and psychological aspects of ‘the dark’.

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka (North Stradbroke Island in south east Queensland) artist. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment, and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality, and examines psychogeographies that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ and our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state. These explorations result in various material outcomes. Daniel Crooks works predominantly in video, photography and sculpture. He is best known for his digital video and photographic works that capture and alter time and motion. Crooks manipulates digital imagery and footage as though it were a physical material. He breaks time down, frame by frame. The resulting works expand our sense of temporality by manipulating digital ‘time slices’ that are normally imperceptible to the human eye. George Egerton-Warburton employs text, sculpture, painting and video in his practice which embraces stylistic dissonance, and the syntax of onceptual art. Elusive situations anchored by droll humour and irony, where sympathetic structures and topologies of stress are cobbled together in textured installations. Egerton-Warburton has presented rows of miniature beds that suggest that there is a symptom in the  room. Embracing the contradictions of conceptual art and critique, motors hum with pathos, mulling over multiple notions of power.

A contemporary artist, writer and curator from the Wiradjuri nation, central-west New South Wales, Nicole Foreshew works across a range  of mediums, from photomedia to sculpture, film and video. In 2015, Foreshew was Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney and Curator of Primavera 2015, MCA’s annual exhibition of young Australian artists aged 35 and under. In 2014, she was awarded the NSW Aboriginal Art Fellowship administered by Arts NSW  to undertake her work titled Grounded: Earth’s’ materials, processes  and structures and she was the winner of the prestigious Parliament  of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize 2014 for her photographic work Foreshew completed the Parramatta Artist Studios international residency program in Montreal, Canada at the Darling Fonderie studios in partnership with the Canadian Council for the Arts in 2012, and was awarded the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Professional Development Award also in 2012. Caitlin Franzmann is a Brisbane-based artist who creates installations, sonic experiences, performances, and social practice works that focus on place-based knowledge and embodied practices. In reaction to the fast pace and sensory overstimulation of contemporary urban life, she invites people to slow down, listen and contemplate interactions with their surroundings and with other living entities, including plants, insects, water, rocks and micro-organisms. She creates intimate situations within galleries and public spaces that allow for gathering, conversation and storytelling as a way to encourage reflection on histories, complex ecosystems and environmental concerns specific to a place. James Geurts’s conceptually driven practice works across sculpture, site-action, drawing, installation, photography, video, public artworks and earth-scale projects. Through abstraction, fieldwork, site interventions and studio research, Geurts typically focuses on the way that cultural and natural forces intersect to shape not only landscape but perception itself. His site-actions include modifying analogue and digital methods to emulate conditions of the site. Recent projects explore the diversion of river agency, consider the impact of industry on geology, study the seismic, draw a line from the primordial to the technological, and investigate concepts of time.

Michaela Gleave is a Sydney-based artist whose conceptual practice spans numerous mediums and platforms including digital and online works, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video.  Her projects question our innate relationship to time, matter and space, and focus particularly on the changing intersections between art, science and society. A member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of south-east Australia, Sydney-based Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones works across a range of mediums, from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and film. He creates site-specific installations and interventions into space that use light, subtle shadow and the repetition of shape to explore Indigenous practices, relationships and ideas. Jones often works with everyday materials, recycled and repurposed to explore relationships between community and the individual, the personal and public, historical and contemporary. Nogirrna Marawili is one of the most highly regarded artists currently working at Buku-Larr gay Mulka at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. Known for her highly sophisticated bark paintings and Larrakitj,  Marawili’s use of organic patterns in these remarkable artworks  reflect an ingrained, natural understanding of her culture, history  and environment. Like many Yol u working at Buku-Larr gay Mulka, Marawili draws inspiration for her artistic practice from her familial  ties. She paints the cross-hatched motifs from the Djapu clan of her  late husband, the artist and statesman Djutjadjutja Mununggurr,  the designs of her mother’s Galpu clan, as well as those belonging  to her own Madarrpa clan. What differentiates Marawili’s interpretation  of these designs is the free and natural spirit that resonates through the work—the gift of a skilled yet uninhibited artist.

Brian Martin is a descendant of Bundjalung, MurraWarri and Kamilaroi peoples and has been a practising artist for twenty-seven years  exhibiting in the media of painting and drawing. Martin has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from the University of  Sydney, a Graduate Diploma Vocation, Education and Training from Charles Sturt University, and a PhD by research from Deakin University. His research and practice focus on refiguring Australian art and  culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a  reciprocal relationship to Country. He has published numerous essays and articles and is an impassioned educator and communicator. Raquel Ormella has a diverse artistic practice that includes video, installation, textiles and creating zines. Her works investigates how art can encourage political consciousness and social action in relation to questions of national identity and the environment. Mandy Quadrio is a proud palawa woman whose ancestral countries  are the Coastal Plains Nation and the Oyster Bay Nation of north-east and eastern Tasmania. She is a Brisbane-based, socio-political artist working across sculpture, installation, photography and mixed media. Through her art practice, Quadrio maintains her commitment to bring attention to historical, cultural and political events that have been ignored and buried by Australian colonial histories.

Yasmin Smith travels widely, undertaking research for her archaeological ceramics installations that explore the chemistry of glaze techniques to furnish material evidence of histories, ecologies, geology and culture. She makes her glazes from organic and inorganic material found on site with elements of the clay body sometimes also locally excavated as part of her process. Smith pursues an alternative system of knowledge gathering by embracing ecological intelligence, collaboration and aspects of environmental science. Smith’s practice straddles art (ceramics) and more scientific investigations. Working predominantly with moving image, photography, and computer-generated imagery, Grant Stevens’s practice explores the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds and social realities. While his early works focused on the entanglements of popular culture, language, and the conventions of communication, his more recent works tap into therapeutic responses to today’s cult of speed and hyperactivity. Stock photography, mood music, guided meditations, and borrowed phrases remain important reference points, as Stevens uses the tools of visual culture to reflect on its complexities and paradoxes. Present throughout is a particular ambivalence that flickers between the existential and the mundane, where sincere quests for meaning and insight mix. Oliver Wagner wishes to acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, the custodians of the land and waters upon which he lives and works. His practice explores the potential, motive and approach of a post painterly language. This has led to a methodology where house paint is rendered into dust before being scattered into compositions on linen,  or ephemeral installations in exhibition spaces.

Participating Artists: Robert Andrew, Jeremy Bakker, Lucy Bleach, Lauren Brincat, Louisa Bufardeci, Sundari Carmody, Christian Capurro, Jacobus Capone, Daniel Crooks, Megan Cope, George Egerton-Warburton, Nicole Foreshew and P. Thomas Boorljoonngali, Caitlin Franzmann, James Geurts, Michaela Gleave, Jonathan Jones with Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Brian Martin, Raquel Ormella, Mandy Quadrio, Yasmin Smith, Grant Stevens, and Oliver Wagner.

Photo: Sundari Carmody, Somnograph (Spring and Autumn Equinox), 2020, neon light and electrical components, 15 X 110 cm , Courtesy of the artist

Info: Curator: Nina Miall, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 313 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Healesville, Duration: 27/3-11/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.twma.com.au