A series of journeys and pilgrimages characterise Paul Hobans life, his account of which is spotted with significant exhibitions, readings, people, music and events. It wasnt until 1993, when he was 39, that Hoban first had a one man exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery. Radok here paints a clear picture of his work - A sense of surfaces and layers; words - intelligible, unintelligible, back-to-front, upside-down; wrinkles and transparency; colour and pattern; modernism and archaism, and so on. A myriad of conceptual and stylistic devises that exist largely within the margins of art conventions.
Melbourne artist Sue Fords 2003 photographic series Continuum is a suitable portal through which Stanhope looks at aspects of Fords work, a practice that has consistently evinced strength of vision and a humanistic philosophy, rich in connecting personal and local subjects to the field of national culture, social politics and the nature of individual existence. Continuum looks at the aftermath of bushfires and is aligned with her passionate reflection and documentation of the nature of our being in both time and place. If there is one medium that records time it is photographs - Sue Ford.
Many years ago the Chinese writer Lin Yutang expressed that, from an Oriental perspective, Western artists always seem to depict objects from the outside, whereas those from China and Japan express their experience of them from within. This Eastern approach is inherent in the culture, not a position able to be merely adopted, and springs in part from religious inheritance, but also from the pictorial nature of Asian written languages. This inherent approach can be found in the recent work of Catherine Woo, expressing some sort of biological affinity. If the paintings can be said to be about anything, it is a the fine balance between energy and rest rather than the apparent subject matter.
Narelle Autio and her partner in life and work, Trent Parke, completed a 16-month journey around Australias coastline in 2004. The two set out to document the culture of Australian coastal dwellers with an exhibition lined up at the Australian Centre for Photography the following year. Baxter speaks of her first encounter with the works of these remarkable photographers and goes on to offer some insight into the profundity encapsulated by these images.
Michael Jagamara Nelson is an artist who love - maybe even needs - a challenge. As Johnson examines, he has had his fair share. With his first painting, a piece he did for his uncle Jack Wayuta (a senior custodian for the Flying Ant Dreaming for Yuwinji) going unrecognised as one of his own for fifteen years, Michael Nelson made his mark in the indigenous art scene after his big break from Daphne Williams of Papunya Tula Arts.