First recorded in the English-speaking world in the seventeenth century, hopscotch as a children’s game conjures images and sounds of laughter, joy, and play-themes that art photographer Michael Cook (1968-) comments on through their visual omission in his work Mother (Hopscotch). Speaking directly to the artist’s personal past as an Indigenous adoptee, and to the […]
Music, storytelling, ugliness, and love. These are the things Newcastle-based artist Sally Bourke (1973-) notes among her largest influences. In the portraits The Quiet Light and I am a ghost of you, you are the ghost of me, Bourke avoids her subjects’ external features or appearance. Painted ‘from the inside out’ as one curator puts it, ‘her […]
Knowing and direct, in this self-portrait Newcastle artist Norma Allen (1918-1998) peers intently into a round mirror. Her face is solid, posed against abstract shapes of green and blue. Struck by her gaze, we gaze back. Painted in 1959, Mirror: Self-Portrait was a finalist in the 1960 Archibald Prize, the premier award for portraiture in […]
Nephew of the first Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, Edmund Barton, William Sydney Robinson (1876-1963) was an industrialist, journalist and diplomat. Robinson was also a philanthropist at heart and made several donations of art from his personal collection as well as on behalf of the Zinc Corporation to the town’s art gallery. Among them were […]
Artist and activist Badger Bates is a Barkandji elder from Wilcannia near the Barka (Darling) River in far western New South Wales. His people are river people and, as a result, much of his art focuses on the Barka and the people and animals that are dependent on its flow. Badger was born in 1947 […]
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