Art Guide Australia Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

“And I definitely think that’s what landscape is for me, it is a questioning about living and life and what we do in places and what we leave behind,” says Polly Stanton in our latest podcast, talking about how her art practice looks at the entwined relationship between culture and nature.

Stanton is part of the exhibition that gives this podcast it’s title, Notions of Care. The exhibition brings together five artists and groups to consider care in art making, through materials, how we relate to one another, and as an approach to the world.

Stanton is an artist and filmmaker who primarily creates moving image works that look at how human action and use of the landscape effect not only the landscape itself, but how we perceive and interpret the landscape. Her practice focuses on sound and visuals, with an immersive process which sees Stanton spending much time in the sites she captures, from the Goldfields of Victoria to the landscape of Queenstown.

We start by talking about care in the arts, and how Stanton grew up with parents in the entertainment industry, where she early on witnessed the struggle to sustain a creative practice. We also talk through her early work in cinema and screenwriting, and the eventual shift into contemporary art.

Stanton takes us through her process of working in the landscape, and how it’s not about romanticising the environment but about understanding the world in non-didactic ways. And for someone whose work deals directly with human effects on the environment, and with ever-growing climate change threat, Stanton tells us how she feels about the future.

You can listen back to previous episodes in this series with Kate Tucker and Katie West.

Notions Of Care
Ararat Gallery TAMA
Until 26 February 2023

“I was thinking about meditation as being a way of creating calm and openness so that more constructive conversation can happen,” says Katie West in the second episode of Notions of Care.

In our latest podcast, West talks about dyeing textiles, creating spaces of meditation, and facing experiences of racism—all in a conversation centred on care and creating, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition, Notions of Care at Ararat Gallery TAMA.

The show features five artists and groups to consider care in art making, through materials, how we relate to one another, and as an approach to the world.

West is a Yindjibarndi Western Australian artist, based in Noongar Ballardong country in Western Australia. She exhibits incredibly moving installations, which often feature dyed textiles and native plants which are sewn and woven.

In 2016 as part of Next Wave Festival she exhibited the work Decolonist, which looks at how meditation can be a way to decolonise the self. And she later extended on this for a stunning installation at TarraWarra Museum of Art, giving audiences a space to meditate and contemplate.

Now, her work in Notions of Care could be described as a tea installation, and she talks through this work and how it came about. We also talk about what the concept of care means to her, how she came to meditating and bringing this into the gallery space, and the process of walking, gathering, and dyeing the materials for her textiles.

West also talks about the experiences of racism she has faced, and her words of encouragement to other people who have had similar experiences.

You can listen back to the first episode of Notions of Care with Kate Tucker.

Notions Of Care
Ararat Gallery TAMA
Until 26 February 2023

A kind thank you to our sponsors for this series. The show Notions of Care is a Bus Projects exhibition touring with NETS Victoria, which is curated by Kathryne Genevieve Honey and Nina Mulhall. This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and received assistance from NETS Victoria’s Exhibition Development Fund 2020, supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and don’t forget to rate the show as it helps people find us.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“Well, what I’d always noticed is the way men always had to be the drivers, right? And this was kind of a symbol of how they behaved in real life, in marriages and relationships, in business world, in politics, everywhere. They were always having to be the drivers.” So says Maragaret Dodd in the ninth episode of The Long Run, a podcast dedicated to talking with artists who have been practicing for 60 years.

Many people first discover Dodd’s practice through her brilliant ceramic holden cars from the early 1970s, where some are dressed up as brides, others as mothers and babies. Titled This Woman is Not a Car, the series also included a film of the same title. Based in feminist concerns, the iconic collection looks at themes central to Dodd’s work: femininity and masculinity, sexuality, capitalism and the links between car manufacturing and personal and national identity. They were recently collected in Dodd’s 2020 exhibition Margaret Dodd: New acquisitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Dodd talks about all of these things. She talks of her upbringing in Adelaide, her move to America with her husband (he was a physicist invited to work at Yale), and her time studying art in California. Dodd also reflects on how she became part of the funk ceramics movement in the 1960s, which bought much humour and less convention to ceramics.

From here Dodd tells us her thoughts on being a housewife, the isolation she felt when she moved back to Adelaide after being in the United States, how this influenced the profound feminism of her work, the links between sexism and cars, and the reactions to her film This Woman Is Not A Car.

Dodd’s work is also currently showing in two exhibitions:

GAGPROJECTS at Explore Sydney Contemporary
Online
11—21 November

Clay Dynasty
Powerhouse Museum
11 October—29 January 2023

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.
Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“If you can get through the conventional way of relating, then often you find that there are these meeting points of understanding,” says Vivienne Binns in our latest episode of The Long Run series featuring conversations with artists who have 60-year practices. 

A pioneer in feminist and community driven art, Binns has been at the forefront of critically engaged, feminist art from the 1960s onward. While painting is her central practice, she has also worked across printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing. It is no understatement to say that her art and activism has changed the Australian contemporary art landscape. 

Binns largely grew up in Sydney and in the 1950s attended the National Art School. She became known in the 1960s for her solo show at Watters Gallery where she exhibited paintings on female sexuality and genitals. As history writes it, these images caused a controversy. 

From here Binns co-founded the Sydney Chapter of the Women’s Art Movement in 1974, which was integral in supporting women artists, and has spent decades involved in many community art projects, as well as continuing her own painting practice. Alongside exhibiting at national and international institutions, as an educator Binns has been integral in mentoring generations of artists, and in 2021 was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts.

Binns talks about her childhood, and in particular her mother and the importance of women’s domestic work, as well as her time at art school. We also talk about Vivienne’s long-standing inquiry into what art really is, and how this links to her own thoughts about womanhood and sexuality.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

Although Stelarc is just shy of the 60 year mark—The Long Run podcast is centred on speaking with artists who have 60 year careers—his performances and installations, and the centrality of the body in his art, get to very meaningful ideas about life and technology.

Whether placing an artwork in his stomach, actualising a body with a third hand, giving his agency over to performance viewers, and rather famously growing an extra ear on his arm, Stelarc has gone to true extremes. The way he challenges himself through his art sets down a challenge to his viewers.

Through this practice, Stelarc has problematised the limits and capabilities of the human body. As he says, “Walking with six legs on a robot. Being algorithmically actuated by a full body exoskeleton. So, all of these experiences have been about exploring these alternate anatomies.”

Born in Cyprus, Stelarc’s family moved to Australia when he was four years old. He studied art in Melbourne, and soon after lived in Japan for almost two decades in the 70s and 80s. He first became well known for his early suspension performances where he’d hang naked, suspended by hooks into his skin, whether in the gallery or in a public setting.

In investigating the human body, his later performances are often entwined with technology—and have seen him perform nationally and internationally amongst myriad galleries and institutions.

Stelarc is incredibly interesting to speak with, and we talk about his suspension performances and some more recent technology-based performances. We also discuss what Stelarc means when he says the human body is obsolete, as well as questions of agency and death, and the ways in which Stelarc has used his body in his art for almost 60 years.

His work is showing for RMIT Gallery’s FutureU exhibition, which is currently closed due to lockdown restrictions.

Future U
RMIT Gallery
29 July – 23 October

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“Black and white photography has always been my…I suppose it’s just kind of my life,” says Mervyn Bishop on his 60-year photography practice. 

Bishop is a Murri man and is Australia’s first Aboriginal photojournalist and documentary photographer. In the early 1960s, when he was just 17, he began a four-year cadetship with The Sydney Morning Herald. Later in the 1970s Bishop took a government position as a photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. It was during this time he took one of his most iconic images of prime minister Gough Whitlam and Aboriginal rights activist Vincent Lingiari. 

The first solo exhibition of Bishop’s images came about in 1991 and was curated by artist Tracey Moffatt, and he currently has a major survey Mervyn Bishop: The Exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. 

Bishop began taking photos when he was young, and we talk about the influence of his mother in steering him toward photography, as well as the years at The Sydney Morning Herald. We also discuss the stories behind some of his most iconic images, and the emotional aspects of his work. And as a photographer who’s known for capturing incredibly empathic moments, we talk about how Bishop gets photography to such an intimate place. 

This episode of The Long Run is part of an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Suzanne Archer, Robert Owen, Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so you never miss an episode. And don’t forget to rate and follow the podcast. 

Mervyn Bishop: The Exhibition

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Until 1 August

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I guess that is the thread, that I am very open to influences that come into my life, you know, and I respond to them,” says Suzanne Archer in The Long Run, Art Guide’s latest podcast series featuring interviews with artists who have 60-year practices.

Based just outside of Sydney in the bushy suburb of Wedderburn, Archer has long-created layered and dense drawings and paintings, alongside sculpture and installations. With a practice always slightly edging on the mysterious, Archer’s work looks at nature, mortality, disgust and decay. Born in Surrey in the United Kingdom, Archer moved to Australia in 1965 and has since gone on to win numerous awards including the Wynne and Dobell Prizes.

In a very open conversation, Archer talks about how her immediate environment in Wedderburn pervades her art practice, from conscious to unconscious levels. She further discusses her first exhibition and what she feels about the idea of being called a ‘female painter’, as well as taking about having children and an art practice. Finally, Archer tells us how mortality plays out in her work, her decision to break from traditional portraiture, and what it was like for her to recently reflect on a career of 60 years.

This episode of The Long Run is an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Robert Owen, Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so you never miss an episode.

Suzanne Archer is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“Art is this amazing subject,” says Robert Owen. “It comes from different people and it contributes to cultural identity in a way that can question ourselves…"

In this fourth episode of The Long Run, our podcast series talking to artists who’ve had careers spanning 60 years, Owen talks about what it means to create over six decades, and what he feels is the truth of his art: a sense of oneness.

Now based in Melbourne, Owen has led an incredible life of creating, working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and public art. While his works are cemented in geometry and abstraction, they quite stunningly bring together a range of references from philosophy, poetry, music, literature, art history, mathematics and science.

In this podcast Owen’s talks through his early practice and his ideas on art. He discusses his love of a certain shade of blue, memories of his childhood in Wagga Wagga, and the uncertainty he felt as a young artist. Owen also mentions the four years he spent on the Greek island of Hydra from 1963, living and working alongside well-known creatives like Leonard Cohen, and his time in Britain in the late 1960s working under constructionist painters.

Finally, Owen tells us about the spiritual elements of abstraction, his reflections on a practice of 60 years, and his current survey show, Blue Over Time at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

The Long Run is an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley.

Blue Over Time: Robert Owen—A Survey
Robert Owen
Heide Museum of Modern Art Until 23 May

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

What does it mean to do feminism rather than be a feminist? In the third and final episode of our FEM-aFFINITY podcast, feminist critic and art historian Anne Marsh explains the idea of doing feminism in Australian contemporary art, from the 1970s to now. 

For over four decades Marsh has been researching and writing at the cross-sections of feminism and contemporary art. As a leading academic in this field, she’s currently undertaking an expansive research project titled Doing Feminism which, consisting of events, residencies and a soon-to-published book, looks at women, feminism and art in Australia since 1970.

In a very insightful conversation Marsh discusses feminism in the arts from the 1970s to now, and reflects on how female, marginalised and neurotypical artists can also be activists. Marsh further talks about why artists with a disability have been on the periphery on the art world, and how the Western art canon can be expanded to include the true diversity of 20th and 21st century art making. 

This podcast takes its name from an exhibition with the same title: FEM-aFFINITY is also a collaborative, female-led show that first began in 2019. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists.

FEM-aFFINITY is a nationally touring exhibition and will soon show at Riddoch Art Gallery at Mount Gambier in South Australia. Exhibiting artists include: Bronwyn Hack, Cathy Staughton, Dorothy Berry, Eden Menta, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Heather Shimmen, Helga Groves, Jane Trengove, Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Lisa Reid, Prudence Flint, Wendy Dawson and Yvette Coppersmith.

FEM-aFFINITY
Riddoch Art Gallery
22 May—4 July

Benalla Art Gallery
6 August—17 October

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring FEM-aFFINITY, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Patrick Telfer. Music by Mino Peric.

What does it mean to create art between two cultures? What relationships are formed when artists collaborate? What are the links between feminism, contemporary art and disability? These questions, and more, are explored in the second episode of our newest podcast series FEM-aFFINITY, featuring a very honest and intimate conversation with photographer Janelle Low. 

This podcast takes its name from an exhibition with the same title: FEM-aFFINITY is also a collaborative, female-led show that first began in 2019. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists.

Low is one of the exhibiting artists in FEM-aFFINITY who collaborated with Arts Project artist Eden Menta, producing a series of vivid and poignant photographs. Low talks about this collaboration—the friendship, humour and life experiences that gave it strength—while also discussing her upbringing and art world experiences, and being the youngest person (and second female) to win the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2013. 

Low is of Peranakan/Teochew heritage, and both of her parents migrated from Singapore. Low discusses how her work explores a sense of otherness between her cultural heritage and Western upbringing, and she further talks about navigating the art world as a person of colour, and why institutions need to curate diverse exhibitions with genuineness. 

FEM-aFFINITY is a nationally touring exhibition and is currently showing at Melbourne’s Bunjil Place Gallery. Exhibiting artists include; Bronwyn Hack, Cathy Staughton, Dorothy Berry, Eden Menta, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Heather Shimmen, Helga Groves, Jane Trengove, Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Lisa Reid, Prudence Flint, Wendy Dawson and Yvette Coppersmith.

FEM-aFFINITY
Bunjil Place Gallery
30 January—14 March

Riddoch Art Gallery
22 May—4 July

Benalla Art Gallery
6 August—17 October

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring FEM-aFFINITY, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Patrick Telfer. Music by Mino Peric.