69. Arryn Snowball | The nawing to be naught ...

The gnawing to be naught, never to be naught

Here a static camera observes a single motionless object in each video work. However the light shining on the object does move, with startling effect. The objects are abstracted and distorted in a way that challenges our perception of place and placement.

This work examines the experience of being a Filipino studying in Australia as a consideration of food. Filipino celebrations in Brisbane focus on the pleasure of sharing food that invite the inevitable stories of "back home that are interwoven with tales about experiences in a new country” as Abraham explains.

The video work and objects presented by Eric Rossi identify the traditional, Pacific Islander culture of Vanuatu butting against the new Pacific paradise culture that has caused the island to become a global tourist destination.

Part jewellery, part sculpture, part marquette, these forms derived from the shield/canoe of the Mbarbaram people of North Queensland have been fashioned from a selection of materials that belie their origin. They invite the question are we left with an essence or a residue.

This project was made during a residency at Geidai University in Tokyo. Among pen and ink drawings and other works that observe daily life Zoe Porter cataloged evidence of animal/human hybrids understood as the mythical Yoke, a subject of Japanese Monster stories.

In-Flight (Project – Another Country), is a fragment of a much larger version of the work that was exhibited in the Queensland Art Gallery as part of the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial in 2009 (APT6). Importantly the piece interacted with its audience in two different ways. As an art work in a gallery and by encouraging children and others to make model aeroplanes out of found objects. Aeroplanes that then became the substance of the work that rose from the floor high into the atrium of the gallery to create a vast flock of aeroplanes.

The work of the Aquilizans expands and contracts to accommodate available space. Here it has stepped from one of the largest gallery spaces into one of the smallest. Alfredo has placed each element here and I am told, made each element. The entire window is a single work that like most of their works documents their migration to Australia with their children from the Philippines. It is an art practise that envelops life and accommodates its idiosyncrasies in a headlong rush from Manila to Brisbane - again and again and again.

Ian Fairweather is an artist who defined Australia. A Scotsman who never adopted Australian citizenship he came to Australia via Asia. Working in Bali, the Philippines and China before settling Australia where he shunned our sprawling suburbia preferring to set up camp beside the deserted beaches, of Bribie Island on Morton Bay near Brisbane in 1952.

More than a citizen of a particular country Fairweather became a citizen of Asia and through his presence in Australian during the 1950's and 60’s, brought an Asian dimension to Australian art. The mastery of his paintings inspired successive generations of artists to make a pilgrimage in search of this most enigmatic of artist who lived by him self in the Australian landscape.

Among them was John Clegg who visited in 1965 as Fairweather was preparing for a trip to India. Concerned for the safety of his valued possessions Fairweather entrusted two pieces to John for safe keeping: an unearthed Mangrove tree root that had been placed at the entrance to his hut in the form of a lion gate and a celadon bowl in the Chinese style by Milton Moon. Moon one of Australia's most celebrated potters was teaching at the Brisbane Art School when he produced what became known as the ‘Fairweather bowls’. The bowl should be considered a portrait of Fairweather, but it is the post that is the greatest treasure entrusted to John Clegg by Ian Fairweather.

Together these objects offer a unique insight into the artist's sensibilities as they are among the few elements of domestic decoration that he bothered with. Unlike his paintings that were the activity he engaged with, these objects were among the few displayed and presumably valued for their beauty. They offer an oblique insight into Fairweather's sensibilities.

Ian Gentle, 1945 - 2009

The sculptor Ian Gentle died watching the cricket on television on 30 December 2009, aged 64. He had been excited about making a site specific sculpture for SLOT from trees he’d grown in his backyard in Nowra. Sadly, time denied him the opportunity. SLOT is pleased to complete his wish with this memorial exhibition, made possible with the support of Stella Downer Fine Art who has lent his work, Low life, 2008 to SLOT. It is typical of his wall based works made from timber he selected more than collected in the landscape.  

Ian was the image of an Australian bushman. An easy character to be with whose nicotine-stained beard was a nest for his dark twinkling eye. He grew up during the 1950s in the remote Queensland mining town, Mount Isa.

Ian moved to the New South Wales South Coast in 1980, and into a landscape that proposed his celebrated timber works. Living in his studio cluttered with timber hanging from the rafters, Ian’s life and work merged with the bush. He described it to curator Deborah Hart in 1992, 

“I enjoyed the clutter of it, the chaos of it, the smell of it.”

Ian was known as an inspiring teacher and he continued making art until his last days, finding original forms inspired by nature. Leaving in them a spirit of humour and humanity that he summed up -

“It’s about finding what you’re really happy with.

The stick found me; everything is circumstantial”.

Mike Ladd is well known as the presenter of Poetica, on the ABC's Radio National network. He is also a poet. His poem, “The Eye of the Day” is presented here as a short video that traces the passing of a day and its eye, the sun through the five pantums or traditional Muslim prayer times. 

It was filmed in 2009 while Mike and his partner Cathy Brooks were the guests of Rimbun Dahan, an artists residency on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Set in 14-acres of traditional gardens and fruit trees it is also the home of the architect Hijjas Kasturi and his Australian wife Angela. In a far corner of the property is an antique kampong or village house that was saved from the banks of the Perak River. Sun light washes though the house where time is caught in seemingly endless moments punctured by the Muslim call to prayer.  And other heavenly interventions such as the afternoon's thunder storm.

Mike Ladd describes this work, which won the 2010 Overland Award for new media poetry as "a kind of cross-cultural book of the hours”. It is exhibited here with a fragment of timber fretwork from the kampong house that Angela Hijjas gave to SLOT’s, Tony Twigg in 2005 when he was a resident at Rimbun Dahan and living in the same, kampong house.