181. Ro Murray | #Fuelled 1 & 2

After 30 years as an architect Ro Murray threw it in for art. She studied at The National Art School from 2007 to 2010. Now she is an artist.

In conversation Ro described these works as wall weavings, woven from the material of industrial doors. Ro doesn't see her self as becoming the master of any particular idiom. Instead she chooses methods and materials best suited to the realisation of a particular work.  Here the material and composition of her work are inseparable.

Ro’s idea of this work was born in a lecture on the art of Anni Albers who studied in Germany at the Bauhaus, where she was a student of Josef Albers and then his wife. Together they moved to the USA and became part of the mid 20th century New York School of painters who celebrated flatness. This is the idea that the surface of a painting is not a window to a painted 3 dimensional illusion of space, rather it is a flat 2 dimensional support for paint that occupies the actual space between the surface of the picture and us, the viewer. 

Ro’s woven plastic slats that are arranged on the wall respond directly to the idea of flatness. Her colour choice further obliterates any sense of illusion while observing the constructivist conventions of the Bauhaus, which effectively is the subject of her work.

People often enjoy seeing the street reflected in SLOT exhibits. With this exhibit I can’t help seeing SLOT reflected in the window of the Vietnamese restaurant opposite where Ro’s linear constructions sits comfortably with the calligraphic window decorations. It provokes the idea that painting is simultaneously intimate and universal, an allusion and a fact that can be both an accident and a revelation.

Guy Morgan’s painting fits the spectre of the universe into SLOT! This ghost of light is the Scorpion’s Claw Nebula, a large constellation near the centre of the Milky Way between Libra and Sagittarius. Reminding us that this incomprehensible large astronomic arrangement also fits into our mythology of the zodiac.

At the age of 7 Guy Morgan discovered art. By 18 he was enrolled in one of the worlds great art schools, London’s St Martins School of Art where he gave up painting for graphic art. At 25 he was on a plane heading for Australia where he went into advertising. After 35 years, with worn out eyes he started painting with an eyedropper!

Another version of his story is that at St Martins School of Art Guy became dissatisfied with the direct connection between his hand and the marks he made. After travelling to Australia he enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the Sydney College of the Arts where he began painting with devices that 

distanced him from mark making – and from there an image of space evolved. 

Like the nebula and Guy’s biography his painting invites various readings. One as a literal illustration of space - or at least what we understand space to look like. Another is asabstract art. Like Guy the well known abstract painter Jackson Pollock distanced his marks from his hand. He dribbled and flicked paint from his brush and sticks to produce a shadow of his painting process. As with Guys eyedropper he invited gravity to adjust the mark encouraging the paint to behave as paint rather than as a manipulation of the artist. His paint, like Guy’s, represents nothing more than its self. It sits on a surface that is flatly 2 dimensional and without reference to 3 dimensional space. 

To offer a pun, Guy’s painting is indeed nebulous. He switches, effortlessly between the opposed belief systems that govern both space as a subject and the practice of painting. 

Like many artists, Andrew Leslie’s sees his art as the function of his life experiences and as an engagement with contemporary art practise.

His life began in Geelong. Moved to New York State, Sydney and Melbourne, to Wellington, back to Melbourne. Around 1973 he moved into a share house in Carlton with some art students, his inspiration, completed a science degree then enrolled at Caulfield Teck to study printmaking. After a brief stint in Bendigo he landed a job teaching printmaking in Perth at Curtin University. Then he noticed as he said that his art was to do with “transfer and repetition”. And it’s easy to imagine each part of this work as a printing plate kissing its image on to the wall in softly reflected light. Given the title - Mirror, number 20 you might consider the work an elaboration of a printing process and even wonder if it’s the object, it’s refection or the process involved in its making that is the subject of the art work. 

In 2002 Andrew followed his partner to Sydney where he found work, teaching printmaking at the Sydney College of the Arts and began showing with Annandale Galleries. Then in 2003 he met Billy Gunner and within the space of a conversation decided to set up a gallery, the long-running SNO – Sydney Non-objective. “Non-objective” is jargon, defined by the Tate Gallery as – “a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity”, It perfectly describes Andrew Leslie's work Mirror number 20, which  ruthlessly avoids being anything other than the materials of its making.

Here Andrew identifies a dichotomy faced in art. His art which is his contribution to a wide discourse on Non-objective Art, articulates a deep a sense of other worldliness that transports us far from our material existence with something intangible, a reflection.

This work considers the proposition of playing a work of art as a musical instrument might be played.In this case, a work by Tony Twigg, called, The absent 5th. It is 3 sets of 5 wooden keys arranged as a scale with one missing - the absent 5th, which can be thought of as a destabilising element that initiates the reordering of the piece as a pack of cards would be shuffled as a preface to a card game.

The scale then can be played by first shuffling it and then by removing keys from the random arrangement to reveal various notes or visual arrangements of keys. Recorded as photographs the various notes can then be arranged as a composition. 

In this presentation of the piece, that could also be considered a performance. The instrument is hung as a scale of keys on one side of the window while on the other is a photographic rendering of a composition played on or derived from the instrument.

Tony Twigg 

SLOT is proud to present Suzy Evans’s show, Open as our first contribution to National Reconciliation Week. Secondly it marks the recommencement of SLOTs exhibition program following the Covid 19 lockdown.

Ruefully Suzy pointed out that the virus demonstrated one thing – how quickly our government can move, “with the stroke of a pen” as she put it, when the issue is survival. Aboriginal Australia hasn’t been so lucky. Now, while the past should never go with out acknowledgement the future offers possibilities that we should embrace and reconciliation between the first and subsequent peoples of Australia is undoubtably one.

Suzy Evans is a neighbour along Botany Road. The Aboriginal Art Directory, describes her “as an artist working predominantly in painting, sculpture and printmaking. In addition to her work as a painter she produces a range of designer homewares and stationary under the name Modernmurri.” She was born at North Sydney in 1964 and now lives between Moree and Sydney. Her heritage country is Bengerang, NSW, Boomi Garah, NSW, Mungindi, NSW and her language group is Kamilaroi. Recently her work, Night Skies was translated onto banners and light boxes throughout Sydney during NAIDOC week. Her inspiration came from a story told to her by Aunty Rose Fernando from Lightening Ridge. The story goes that the stars in the night sky, known as ‘twinkling stars’ to non-Aboriginal people are known as ‘Laughing Stars’ by Aboriginal people. Of course we all live under the same sky whatever the stars might be doing.

Suzy’s exquisitely collaged feathers seems to be as precisely Australian as our sky - why? Is it their colour? Perhaps it’s the isolation of the feathers that Suzy describes as a whirling dancers? Or a connection these works on paper seem to have with the bark paintings of northern Australia? Perhaps they hint at a shared heritage, something more easily understood as an emotion than as a narrative, something shared in a way that nationalism can’t be. That would offer reconciliation and become of our societies great achievements.