On 31 July 1915, eighteen-year-old Winnie O’Sullivan stood on the roof of her family’s hotel the Lord Dudley. Here, she listened to the roaring crowd at the nearby Sydney Stadium, in Rushcutters Bay. Women were admitted to the stadium for free, but as a boxing venue it was considered no place for a lady. Inside the stadium […]
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 […]
Walsh Bay, on Gadigal land, is today a bustling, vibrant arts precinct. But on 26 June 1917, as the ship carrying the body of ‘The Maitland Wonder’, Les Darcy, docked in Sydney Harbour, the silence was loud enough to rival the busy wharves that groaned under the weight of wool for export. Several days later, […]
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 […]
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