RUNWAY SUCCESS
Artist Esther Stewart’s bold geometric paintings know no bounds, easily traversing art exhibitions and fashion catwalks
AT FIRST GLANCE you’d be forgiven for thinking that Esther Stewart’s paintings are merely decorative — you may even think they’re (gasp) art for art’s sake. But look closer, because each body of work by this young Australian artist has serious gumption behind its beautified façade. “I’m making work about the fantasy of domestic spaces,” says Stewart. “I’m interested in the utopian idea of domesticity, and making works with multiple functions — in when it becomes art and when it becomes design, and pushing that boundary.” ››
Boundaries, it seems, don’t appear to exist in Stewart’s oeuvre. She studied sculpture and spatial practice at the Victoria College of the Arts in the late 2000s but found herself captivated by architecture. She has gone on to design interior spaces with patterns that fully encompass the doors, floors, walls and ceilings — “developing or accentuating lines that already exist within the build”. And then last year, she was approached by Italian fashion house Valentino and asked to contribute her designs to its autumn/winter menswear collection for 2015–16. They opted to cut the garments according to the geometry of Stewart’s original artworks, so that cashmere coats, woollen sweaters and cigarette trousers all flowed as faithful replications of her paintings. “It was amazing to see them turned into wearable, consumable garments,” she says. Usually, Stewart is at home just outside of Daylesford in Victoria, working from a refashioned farm shed that she and her partner, fellow artist Oscar Perry, renovated together. They work side-by-side in the space, living in a tiny two-storey hay barn onsite and migrating to Melbourne on the weekends. Renovation strikes a chord with her, and inspires much of her work. “I’m so interested in ’60s and ’70s DIY magazines,” she says. “I’ve got hundreds of these wonderful ones called The Knack. Inside you’ll find a design for a toy box that becomes storage plus a daybed plus three modular chairs. It’s subscribing to a dream, when you subscribe to these magazines.” In her new exhibition at Sydney’s Sarah Cottier Gallery, Stewart takes her passions for architecture, design and fine art and resolves them together in two rooms. In one space, paintings will double as sculptures. “I want to be able to have an abstracted table or plinth coming out of the painting as a sculptural form,” she says. “I want to feel the pushing and pulling between three-dimensional and flat surfaces.” In the other space, some artworks will be hung on a central apparatus “like a three-pronged, rug display-style mechanism,” she says. “So rather than having the paintings all on one wall, I’m trying to think about how you can interact with them more closely, get snippets or different angles or views depending on how you move in the space.” The titles of her works reveal their true meanings. Sometimes it’s something physical like Description of a Mantel Piece, and there’s even a painting called The Knack. But her political, even feminist, motivations come out in other titles, such as A Man’s Home Is His Palace and The Glass Ceiling Your Husband Installed Is Beautiful. “I like to make works that can, on the surface, be non-representational,” she says, “and then layering them with a title that invites you into what I’m thinking about. It’s an ongoing investigation. I think I’m still determining what it is that I’m trying to say.” VL Behind Closed Doors runs 8 April–7 May at Sarah Cottier Gallery in Paddington; sarahcottiergallery.com.
“I like to make works of art that can, on the surface, be non-representational”