245. Vivien Haley | Vestige

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.

This show is about friendship

There are 2 voices here, the voice of the artist, Nguyen Nam Dong  Dong,  the voice of Ann Proctor, their friendship that is encapsulated in this collection of work. 

Ann is probably best described as an art academic. She travelled the world with her partner before arriving in Vietnam. A happenstance introduced her to Dong, variously described as a happy go lucky sort of guy, a second-hand dealer, connoisseur of Vietnamese beer, self-taught outsider artist, Shakespeare fan and finally motorbike chauffeur who accompanied Ann on her study of village temples around Hanoi as she worked on her PhD.

Another of Dong’s unusual qualities is a desire to give his art to friends. In Ann he found an enthusiastic recipient. Dong’s art travels with Ann. Respectfully packed and unpacked between stops on its journey to SLOT where it pauses, just long enough to become a consideration of the double voice in art, the artist and those who take responsibility for the artist’s work.

The miracle that preserves art after it leaves the artist's hands is a multi-faceted one. Monetary value ensures longevity, who would lose a Vincent van Gogh painting? There is faith, the sort of thing that preserved Vincent van Gogh paintings while they slowly acquired their startling value. And there is friendship, the thing that holds the heart in a connection with the artist through their pictures. This is the miracle that Ann and Dong are sharing with you.

Vivienne Dadour traces the story of the descendants of a Syrian migrant family who first settled in Redfern in the late nineteenth century. She notes that this history is commemorated by a public plaque; yet, when considering the suburb’s current demographics, this deeply embedded past is not immediately visible. The place becomes a site of movement, shaped by continual change in government legislation, social attitudes, and successive waves of “visitors.”

Vivienne’s family migrated in search of a better life, fleeing the socio-political pressures of the Ottoman governance. Her great-grandparents joined an established settlement to preserve cultural ties and cultivate a sense of belonging in unfamiliar territory. 

This dynamic reveals a tension between the relative permanence of physical place and the shifting cultural identities that inhabit and redefine it over time. The evolving and the enduring rarely move in tandem — a pattern that has accelerated since the Second World War and has profoundly shaped contemporary Australia. 

What a moment. 

The first remark of a newly elected Anthony Albanese was to declare the Uluṟu Statement would be fully implemented.

It came out of the blue, so much sweeter than a mere victory claim. This was visionary leadership, Whitlamesque.

This show charts the joy this moment brought. 

It charts the way that doubt changed its shape. 

It charts the way a song of joy became a subject of argument, of shrinking thinking. 

What’s in it for us, they asked? What will we lose? Why should the Indigenous people be preferred? Australia was about equality, they declared. 

Dutton, the doubt drover.

This show charts the way The Voice fell over, was put away. 

The show charts how, for all this, The Voice became more ingrained and sits in us more than it ever did before.

This show is an account of these moments.

From having been autonomous Voice and Yes sculptures, I began to make human figures to scale the work, to make the voices large or small, loud or soft.

The figures began to have their own spoken part which we are in the process of interpreting……………Michael Snape.

This statement was attached to Michael’s recent exhibition Then and now. A carved account of the history of the Referendum 2022-2026, at Australian Galleries Sydney, it is documented on his web site – www.michaelsnape.com – and it serves as an introduction to this, Witness.

Henry Lewis’ photograph is not so much a photograph of something as it is something constructed as a photograph. And while Henry is reluctant to discuss his process it’s easy to imagine his work being made on a computer in a program like photoshop where the limitations imposed by our physical reality don’t exist. In an interview about a previous body of work he said “I like the French word Bricolage which is the art of ‘do it yourself’, for me it is constructing an ephemeral piece from things that I find at hand and then, after photographic capture, its de-construction and demolition.” Here, as is the case with a great deal of art, the photograph doesn’t represent reality, it is a reality in its own right.

With this in mind the title of Henry’s work, Breathing over hair is surprisingly literal. There are photographs of hair here and over them, arranged in a sort of animated checkerboard, photographs of breath. More correctly they are photographs of the condensation within a breath, exhaled in a very cold place. Think of winter in France where Henry lived for many years or Bowral when he lives now. These are Henry’s breaths exhaled he said at about 14 times a minute, captured as a photograph before being given a “human” pink colouring and arranged in a manner that for me implies a pacing from one side of the picture to the next.

It’s hard not to think of there being a first breath that we understand to be accompanied by a cry and then a last breath that we hope is exhaled in silence. There might be the breath over hair in the passionate embrace of a lover or across the hair of another on our solitary rush hour train ride home. Here, as is the case with a great deal of art, literal meaning rests in an evocation of humanity, of breath and hair devoid of any instructive ideology or our pragmatic response to it.

Two similar works by Henry are included in an exhibition, Confluence at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, 26 April – 14 June. The catalogue essay observes, “There are 3 dimensions in Henry Lewis’ works. The first is the pictorial depth in which a single breath is represented…The second consists of the lines of surface composition in which each breath is set…the third is the rectangular shape also on the surface…One pictorial and two surface dimensions…an actual space and a map of breathing.” This is a constructed space as might be found in collage or bricolage or a contemporary digital version of it where the physical and conceptual constraints of reality do not apply. This reality is an invention.