205. Tracy Luff | Passing through

The first thing that Tracy Luff said about her work, Passing Through that it had “ totally changed direction from what it was going to be ” Then, after spending another 5 days in my studio working on it as a flat object she spent another day turning it into the cylinder that is displayed in SLOT. 

Perhaps unintentionally she has illustrated one of the truisms of art – that art lies in the making of an object not in the preconceptions brought to its inception. Art is an inquiry - into the self, into the materials that the work is made of, into events that shape our thinking, perhaps most simply an inquiry into our thinking. And in this case the artist, Tracy Luff has been thinking about Covid 19.

It’s hard to escape the buzzwords of Covid neatly printed on shapes that are woven into the fabric of the piece. In Tracy’s eyes they introduce an idea of domestic life. They alert the work as our lives have been alerted to the need for vigilance against the threat of Covid. And they are in the shape of feet because in Tracy’s eyes Covid has come and will go. She continues – “ the piece is for fun, playing with the words and how they match up but they are serious words – the fun didn’t continue and it gets more serious – every action connects with what is happening ”

Watching Tracy’s daily work offered an insight into her art making. The fun of the Covid buzzwords was forgotten as thoughtfully connecting forms and voids, articulated in threaded cardboard discs replaced them as the subject of the work. Irrespective of any tangible meaning that may be attached to the work it is as Tracy commented of her art works reasoned beauty “ the process of making the work leads to the form it takes ” and further “ the form is dictated by what the material can and can’t do ” Or as the mid 20th century Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan put it – “ the medium is the message.” 

Kate Coyne is enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. Which is but a step in an education that began decades ago at the Sydney College of the Arts where she was as a graphic arts student. Along the way she mentioned a trip to New York where she came across an exhibition by Robert Morris that introduced her to the possibilities of art.

Robert Morris is one of the luminaries of the New York School of Modernism. A group of artists collectively described as “Minimalist”. A shared idea behind their often geometrically spare art lay in the power of their works to approached a kind of spiritualism devoid of religiosity.

In that context Kate Coyne presents an installation of apparently organic forms clustered across the wall leaving deep troughs between the elements of the work. Hooded and overlapping there is a sensuality in these forms and spaces that lead us past the rigours of a “minimalist” ideal. They offer associations with a natural world out side the art object that promotes a kind of revelry.

To my eye this work celebrates natural associations. I find it appealing to be enveloped in these forms and the sensuality they imply. In that sense the work is not conceived of as a whole - rather it is a sum of parts that we might experience as we pass by its elusive presence.

Unlike Robert Morris who lived at the ascendancy of the U.S.A. Kate Coyne is living through its fading hegemony as announced by Donald Trump’s feeble call to “make America great again”. In this context Kate Coyne’s white on white construction of sheeting stretched across wire frames seems, decedent. Because it hints at an art that is devoid of the rhetoric of power? 

SLOT is proud to present this work, by Annelies Jahn and Jane Burton Taylor as our contribution to Reconciliation Week, 27 May - 3 June 2022. The work celebrates Paul Keating’s; Redfern Speechdelivered on the 10th of December 1992 in Redfern Park, only a short walk from here. 

The speech was a courageous expression of reconciliation with Australia’s first nations people. It stands among others: The Yirrkala bark petition of 1963, the referendum of 1967 that repealed section 127 of our constitution, which stipulated “aboriginal natives shall not be counted (in the Australian census)”, the Gurindji strike of 1966 that lead to Gough Whitlam symbolically recognising land rights in 1975, The “Mabo decision” of the High Court that overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullis (“nobody’s land”). It paved the way for Native Title in 1993 and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation on behalf of the Australian Parliament in 2008. Courageous and humane as all these steps towards equality have been it cannot be denied that they were slow in coming, shamefully slow in coming.

In discussing the Aboriginal contribution to modern Australia through agriculture, exploration, commerce, sport, literature, music and art, Keating declared, “In all these things they (the first nations people) have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity.” It is a point observed by Jahn and Burton Taylor with a lament also drawn from Keating’s speech,  “how much we have lost by living so apart”. Here it is offered in the maternal voice of Mother Country as opposed to the nationalistic voice of 

Father Land. For here it is not a question of what we might harvest from our land but how we might nurture our land as a people lead by our lands first inhabitants.

It is both accidental and fortuitous that this exhibition also coincides with the 2022 Federal election where The Aboriginal Voice to Parliament is at issue. It is the next in the list of courageous steps that Australia must take towards nationhood. A step that Anthony Albanese has promised to take as a referendumheld in the first term of his government. The voice was born as an idea in the 2017, Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is a hand held out by Aboriginal Australia to the settlers as a map of reconciliation. It identifies a shared future where we might comment - how much we have gained by living together. 

George Alexander’s piece, Naked Lunch is an artefact of Covid 19. It is an exercise in idleness, in diversion and perhaps futility - a hiatus engendered by the obliquity two-week quarantine that temporally isolated Australia from the pandemic.

George and his son Blaze had returned from Europe, lucky to have found the flight that landed them in suite L2U6 of a Haymarket hotel where their day had 3 important highlights, the deliver of breakfast lunch and dinner. All presented in plain paper bags left anonymously outside their door. The artist in George began sketching images on them lifted from the films he was watching on his phone. He would freeze a frame, render it on a bag, and then, presumably recommence his wait for the next meal. I’m not sure if it was a pre-meditated work of art or one that casually evolved but now each bag is identified – “Quarantine series George Alexander paper bag 32 x 30 cm” - it’s become a sort of haphazard diary and a work that contemplates the process of waiting. 

Waiting, across the casual accumulation of time through the disconnected moments of forgotten considerations. We all know this, we have all waited for a buss in an outer suburb and known the interminable passage of idle thoughts, ever vigilant for a buss, less it be missed. It is realised here in George’s work. Stretched out across the floor. Opened up as segmented and disconnected units where the “meat” for living has been replaced with the thoughts of “existing”.

And we have all known the pleasure of idleness. The suspension of need and responsibility in a careless void where dancing images flash behind our eyelids. Our thoughts slide across the past and an imagined future with equal ease. Here is a record for that euphoria - drawn by George Alexander while he waited to take on again the burdensome mantle of self-responsibility. 

Suzy Evans is a descendant of the Gomeroi Nation through her maternal grandparents who lived at Bengerang a place near Moree to the north west of Sydney. She describes the dancing figures in her paintings as the representation of “the all of the Gomeroi people”. And her exhibition is SLOT’s belated offering in celebration of NADOC Week, 2022, which we are proud to support.

Suzy is also a neighbour. She lives a few streets away in Waterloo. Coincidently her terraced house is part of a row identified as a heritage item by the City of Sydney Council in their recent rezoning of our area. Inadvertently they point to the fact that an Australia heritage is a faceted condition. Irrespective of our ancestry, indigenous, settler or migrant, in Australia we are part of our countries heritage, described in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 as stretching “from the creation, according to common law from ”time immemorial”, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.” Concurrently as 

Australians we are responsible for and to our heritage that stretches from the beginning to the present and into the future.

In 1967, perhaps belatedly the people of the Commonwealth of Australia voted at a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Straits Inlanders in their settler society. Soon there will be a corresponding referendum prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart that is an invitation from the Indigenous people of Australia to join them in what will become our country. 

We must accept this profound invitation. It has proposed a referendum that will recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the constitution and give voice to their heritage in parliament. It behoves us to ask, what does this mean? And the point is that we don’t know what it means yet. The point is that we have to invent what it means and what it means as Suzy Evans might say - to become the all of the Australian people - to stand at the next beginning of our culture.