226. Michael Buzacott | No title

As requested by the artist, Michael Buzacott there is no text accompanying this exhibition.

The works are titled, on the left Circus figure, 2019 and on the right, Olympia 2024.

When Wendy Holz left high school, she thought of becoming a nurse. It didn’t eventuate. She thought of becoming a secretary but before she started training an aunt noticed a job going at the State Library. Forty years later Wendy can tell stories about her many jobs there. One of the more interesting was assisting the Field Librarian who travelled about examining proposed gifts to the library. Papers caught in a limbo between rubbish and material culture. The decision, to accept or reject each gift, brought into play the double role of a librarian, to care for books and to care for the narratives encoded in them. This is the material culture that Wendy has devoted her working life to.

In 2015 Wendy began a consideration of another kind of material culture, sculpture. She adopted a welder’s point of view. Studying first at the Tom Bass Sculpture School, then from 2017 on Saturdays at the National Art School where there is a focus on welded steel sculpture. She described her working process as “getting random pieces (of steel) out of the bins – then it’s push and pull until it seems right, but I can’t say what is right” It is a conversation in a language that has a vocabulary but no narrative, at least not the kind you might find in a library.

Like a pop song without words there is a mood here that has been crafted with a kind of reason that offers no explanation. It has a tangible presence that invites an intangible reading - of a wind, strong enough to blow something flat and something strong enough to stand against it. A contradiction perhaps, but there are no contradictions in this work. It is read in an instant but made in time with an understanding of poise and placement, crafted with such care that it appears precisely casual.To say that abstract art is enigmatic is to miss the salient point – that this work, like this art is not of our world. It is of someone’s imagination. Open to interpretation as metaphor but relentlessly evasive when it comes to meaning. Emphatically it is here holding in its presence something blowing past and through the pragmatic logistics of Botany Road. 

Vilma Bader’s work, One performance, one discourse, chronicles a performance work made on Sydney’s rocky coastline near Maroubra where Vilma lives. Part documentation and part distillation this wall work articulates a litany of 250 mental disorders across 50 meters of text.  Wound from one person to another in a performance that is replicated here as photographs, the work, prompts the question, why?

By way of explanation Vilma traces the work’s beginning to a period spent studying art at the Sydney College of Art that was then housed within the grounds of the old Callan Park Mental Hospital. A place where these disorders were once managed. And here, Vilma suggests that the act of naming these conditions is analogous to a colonisation of the psychic. Considering the unwinding process of her performance she comments “the patient appears to break free. But does she or more precisely, can she?”

Here in SLOT Vilma doesn’t answer any questions. Rather she re-visits her performance where the story of an  unwinding is 

played out, over and over again, so much so that it is rendered as a texture - a transcription rendered as a mood.There is nothing in Vilma’s life story to suggest that she has faced these troubling states of mind. But she is a traveller for whom art is a companion. From Mauritius with her parents, to Germany with her husband, to Sydney with her daughter to walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage she describes life as an intense meditation on a self, reflected in art, be it her own art or the art of others.  For

most artists, the self is a companion. If it’s encountered then the artist is obliged to enter a dialogue with it, and that could become a questioning. An unravelling, a reassembling, another unravelling, something to be repeated and repeated again, not unlike the process of Vilma’s performance. A truth that might remain an indeterminate abstraction or be named. And once named, identified within the context of others, becoming as Vilma describes a kind of colonisation applied to the psychic.  

Therese Kenyon is an arts administrator, academic, museum director, curator, printmaker and an artist. While her CV reads like the wish of a young professional she says “the key issue is how much blue can I get out of my printer.” That’s a SuperColour Epson P600 A3 desktop printer bought is 2016 that has become her pallet, her brush and her paint set.

The blue wall caught in her suite of images is a studio dividing wall in an old building that Therese shares with other artists in Marrickville. Photographed on an iPhone, digitally processed on a computer, then printed with maximum colour saturation the resulting work was first shown at Articulate Gallery in Stanmore. Here the prints are teamed with an easel that belonged to Therese’s sister Eleonor Rogers and one of her small paintings.

As sisters, Therese and Eleonor share an interest in art, as polar opposites. Therese lived in Darlinghurst, Eleonor at suburban North Rocks where she was the bubbly house wife attentive to her husband and her friends in a hobby landscape  

painting group. Therese, the high achieving arts

professional would visit Eleonor in her studio where they discussed whatever painting happened to be on Eleonor’s easel. But above all Therese is alive while Eleonor is not.  

Con’s long career as an artist has been tempered by his desire to provide for his wife and daughter. Recently another voice has been shaping his life. A rare and debilitating bone marrow disease that has left him suffering immense tiredness. It is now, slowly and successfully being treated but its presence coloured every aspect of our conversation about this, his third piece made for SLOT.

“The long strips of sandpaper are like X-rays” Con explained “and the bundle of fragmented garden furniture is like my bones”. And indeed, it’s the white furniture that scribbled over Con’s sandpaper as he scrubbed in a manner that might evoke a radiographer scanning a crumpled body. But he was quick to remind me that the randomised connection between sandpaper and the sanded object importantly serves to establishes the idea of cause and effect in his work. This meditation, perhaps prompted by Con’s illness has become an engagement with the methodologies of art making.

For Con the way of making art is to balance what there is as opposed to a bending of the available to his will. His materials are what comes to hand. Some old furniture and sandpaper that together propose an evocative kind of drawing. His process is a consideration of the available space in relation

to the materials at his disposal. His choice is to begin arbitrarily while proceeding with great alertness to a resolution, that for me has considerable poise and undeniable elegance.  

You might ask, what has this to do with a debilitating