235. Penny Coss
5 January – 8 February
Penny Coss answered the question, where did you begin, by saying that she had always been an artist. After leaving school at 14 to study at TAFE, she became a primary school teacher, studied art for a year at St Martins College of Art in London then settled into Sydney as a student at the UNSW School of Art and Design, that had been COFA and before that Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education where Syd Ball, a long-time teacher and hero of the painting school was the voice that spoke to Penny.
The paintings of Syd Ball, a major figure in Modernist Australian Art swung from rigidly formal abstraction to a haptic lyricism where paint was poured onto his canvas from cans and buckets. His two painting methods were apparently polar opposites. Penny encountered Syd’s poured pictures in the 1980's when, as she says, Post
Modernism was being taught at UNSW. This is the idea that the landscape an artist works from is our accumulated global culture. Or at least the portion of our culture that the artist is aware of.
Post Modernism was probably the last of the “ism’s” that chart a history of Modern Art from Impressionism to Expressionism to Minimalism to Conceptualism and so forth. It might also prompt the question – what’s after Post Modernism? And the answer is probably - art, which is where it seems that Penny Coss began. Her work in SLOT, that is a still life, a tableau, a sculpture, a kind of collage of objects that accommodates a considerable amount of air, might also be a
shopwindow display. Something that is not immediately apparent is the video. It is literally a veiled record of the work being made and its placement beside a traffic choked Botany Road. It is also an image of the artist's self-consciousness – a consideration of the process of making the work. Here the artist is making the work and the artist is also watching the artist make the work. As such this art work exists as it is set out before you and within a language of precedents drawn from our history, our interest and our education. This landscape of art, according to Penny Coss, is a re-visioning of what has already happened, where among other things we would find the lyricism of Syd Ball if not the polar opposites of his process.
