245. Vivien Haley | Vestige
21 December – 24 January
Arriving in Sydney as an 11-year-old with her emigrated parents Vivien Haley recalls the landscape as holding her attention. Five years later she was studying art. Painting first with Bill Brown, Robert Eddy and Peter Upward then sculpture with Ian Mackay and Ron Robertson-Swan, all luminaries of the Sydney art world in the 1970’s.
Art school ended, Vivien had a grant that gave her a studio in Darlinghurst, she had a job working for Rudy Komon, the gallery owner of the time, and working next for Charles Hewitt, the art framer of the time. Constantly moving, finding shows, making a life as she recalled, in a world that was making way for feminism.
Then came Wollongong, Stanwell Park, a guy flying a hang-glider and meeting Ian Gentle. Ian was a cult artist around Wollongong during the 1980’s when he made a unique contribution to Australian art by devising imagery that was imbued with our landscape. There was a child,
for Vivien, a job at Wollongong University and works purchased by the Wollongong City Gallery that documented her walks through the bush and along the beaches of Wollongong.
As life unfolded and Vivien’s art-making built a history, event by event it became clear that her subject was never the landscape, but rather observations made while moving through the landscape.
Now Vivien lives in an apartment around the corner from SLOT. These examples of her art are drawn from a larger collection exhibited at the Perc Tucker Gallery, Townsville
in 2023. The subject she says is “A new type of rock called plastiglomerate…emerging on our foreshores, as natural sediments and organic debris fuse with burnt and melted plastic.” The landscape, that once offered Vivian an innocent promise is now forebodingly tarnished. Perhaps it is simply the effluxion of life to progress from promise to regret but is it also our legacy to the planet?
