NAMING RIGHTS
The National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name exhibition celebrates women artists.
Vogue Australia partnered with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in commissioning this month’s cover artwork by Betty Muffler and have donated it to the gallery so that visitors can learn about its meaning. This contribution informs part of a wider NGA initiative called Know My Name, seeking to increase representation of women artists and acknowledge the influence they’ve made – and continue to make – to Australia’s cultural landscape. Here, the NGA’s Deborah Hart pays homage to others who, like Betty Muffler, should be celebrated, starting with those as part of a current exhibition.
AS THE MOVEMENT to actively recognise and remember the contributions of women continues apace worldwide, it is fitting to first look at Destiny Deacon’s Eva Johnson, writer (1994). In this work, Deacon, an accomplished KuKu and Erub/Mer artist, honours Johnson, a Malak Malak woman, acclaimed activist, poet, actor, director and playwright who has written about land rights, Stolen Generations and Aboriginal women’s rights and was named Aboriginal Artist of the Year in 1985. In Deacon’s portrait, Johnson, who was taken from her family and Country as a child of the Stolen Generations, adopts the pose of a young Aboriginal man in a painting by J.M. Crossland, Portrait of Nannultera, a Young Poonindie Cricketer (1854). Deacon felt sorry for this young man dressed like an English cricketer, trapped in a world not of his own making, taken from his people and culture to live on a mission.
In her transposition of the past in the present Deacon establishes parallel histories across time, investing Johnson with power, replacing the cricket bat with an axe, and creating a portrait that is both an act of reclamation and a tribute. Here, Deacon and Johnson combine to remind us of the impacts of colonisation on First Nations peoples and the potency of their activism in retelling their stories.
Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, which opens next month and runs until January 31, 2021, brings together a range of works by women that shed light on diverse ways of considering the stories of Australian art. While some of the artists are relatively well known, others less so, the initiative seeks to retell the dynamics of Australian art through the work of women to find new meanings and possibilities. Co‑curated with Elspeth Pitt, with the assistance of Yvette Dal Pozzo, the show aspires to make the art of women better known in the wider community, and to counter the dominance of historical displays of art emphasising men.
By turning the tables, we present an opportunity to reckon with the strength and breadth of women’s contributions to the art of this country from 1900 to 2020. Given the number of significant women artists of the past and present, this can only be partial; it is not an endpoint nor is it separate from other endeavours around the world, rather part of a continuum and an opening up of ideas.
The exhibition ranges from works exhibited for the first time to transformational or breakthrough moments in artists’ careers.
The timeframe is deliberately broad to reveal lineages between women. Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, there are circular movements in time within specific groupings, which include images of women by women, Country and environmental consciousness, dynamism and abstraction, collective and collaborative ways of working, and feminism and matrilineal connections across generations.
From the outset, portraits of women by women embody a plethora of stories. Among them are Badimia/Yamatji artist Julie Dowling’s affecting portraits of her Aboriginal great‑grandmother Mary Latham (née Oliver). In Mary (2001), she is portrayed with great dignity under an atmospheric sky in a vast desert landscape. Holding a goanna, with a dingo alongside her, she is connected with the Earth. Though Mary experienced racism, exploitation and servitude during her lifetime, she was held up as legend among her community.
Carol Dowling, Julie’s sister, explains: “As a Badimia woman, she was considered by both Aboriginal and non‑Aboriginal people in our Country as a truly remarkable woman. She could muster horses and cattle for long distances. She could track lost children and identify poisonous plants … For Badimia people, she was a healer, a midwife, a spiritual custodian or as our mother referred to her, a shaman. Granny could speak several First Nations languages as well as English. Yet, her children (our grandmother Mollie and great‑aunt Dorothy) were stolen from her.”
Violet Teague’s talent was recognised early. She painted Dian Dreams (Una Falkiner) (1909), receiving a bronze medal in the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Her model was Una le Souëf, a fellow student at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria Art School. Like numerous artists of this era, Teague was inspired by Diego Velázquez and John Singer Sargent, and this large‑scale work is easily the equal of any by her male peers. As Richard Neville has pointed out, through her model’s pose of quiet reverie, Teague conveys a self‑contained woman. “Her averted eyes are not deferring to a presumed male audience – as they so often do in images of women – but instead suggest a quiet independence and sense of self.”
Having studied in London and Brussels, Teague’s outlook was ‘cosmopolitan European’, a description that applies to numerous Australian women artists who went abroad, including Agnes Goodsir, who travelled overseas ‘to “find herself” at the mature age of 36. By the time she painted her striking portraits including Girl With Cigarette (circa 1925), she was living in Paris with an American, Rachel Dunn, nicknamed Cherry, who had left her husband to be with Goodsir. In Girl With Cigarette, Cherry is depicted as ‘the archetypal 1920s flapper’ enjoying her coffee and cigarette – stylish, yet at ease.
In the 1970s, work took place to retrieve the histories of women artists in documentation and exhibitions, including Janine Burke’s groundbreaking Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years
By turning the tables, we present an opportunity to reckon with the strength and breadth of women’s contributions to the art of this country, 1900 to 2020
1840-1940, which opened in the International Women’s Year, 1975, at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries at the University of Melbourne. Director of the gallery, Kiffy Rubbo, with assistant director, Meredith Rogers, initiated the project and also fostered contemporary experimental work. Artists and writers were the driving force behind attitudinal change in relation to feminist debates, with the medium of photography playing a key role in the democratisation of the arts.
A collective spirit of the times was epitomised in the landmark publication: A Book about Australian Women (Outback Press, 1974), which brought together photographs by Carol Jerrems and interviews by Virginia Fraser, of and with Indigenous and non‑Indigenous women of diverse ethnicities and sexual preferences from different walks of life.
At the core of Know My Name is a reimagining of Micky Allan’s first solo exhibition, Photography, Drawing, Poetry: A Live-in Show, first staged at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries in 1978. In this installation Allan brought art and domestic life into a space where people could relax, reflect and talk, eschewing what she saw as the ‘hush, hush, don’t speak’ formality of galleries. Allan’s practice, including her pioneering hand‑coloured photographs, is informed by deeply personal responses to people, places and the cosmos, along with a sense of inclusivity that speaks to the joys and vulnerabilities of experience across diverse age groups and genders.
In the 1970s, many artists’ works encompassed a strong social and political consciousness, including the injustices and inequities in Indigenous Australia. About 40 years earlier Violet Teague and Jessie Traill spent time in Central Australia, exhibiting their works and those of fellow artists to raise funds to provide the Hermannsburg community with running water. In the 1970s and 1980s, collectives of artists campaigned for recognition of Aboriginal land rights. Marie McMahon’s poster, You Are on Aboriginal land (1986), was conceived after she visited Tikilaru Country on Bathurst Island with Piparo (Winnie Munkara), one of its custodians. The work, in which Aboriginal woman Phillipa Pupangamirri firmly stands her ground, responds to white businessmen wanting to use the land for economic gain by building a resort.
Vivienne Binns believed in bringing dynamic life to the art scene through her work with communities and in her own art. Her courage as a young artist in her 20s engaging with gender and sexuality – evident in bold works such as Vag Dens (1967) and Phallic Monument (1966) – came at a time when feminism was growing in strength and censorship was rife. Pat Larter was unafraid to tackle and send up stereotypes and expectations of women in relation to depictions of the body in her performative work, photographs, collages and ‘femail art’, which was part of a worldwide mail art collective.
The joining of performance and photography is integral to Julie Rrap’s Persona and Shadow Series (1984), which reveals how stereotypic depictions of women throughout art history, such as those in the images of Edvard Munch (which she used as a starting point), have been made to adopt a series of roles. In a performative way, through her own body, she creates feelings of both dislocation and reclamation. Rrap finds humour in the provocation, and it is in the fearless and bold directness of her vision that she captivates our attention. Julie Ewington has remarked that Rrap’s investigation of the body “is thorough without being programmatic, a riotous, courageous play rather than pious prohibition”.
An overt expression of physicality and states of being is found in Nell’s self-nature is subtle and mysterious – nun.sex.monk.rock (2010), where a seated meditating figure cast from her own body is covered in text and imagery. The title suggests the game of rock/paper/ scissors. On a deeper level the work encompasses diverse aspects of the artist’s sense of being in the world – contemplative, sexual, passionate about music. In front of the body is a stick Nell found on a meditation retreat which she cast and then returned to nature, alluding to guidance, wisdom, following, support.
Ideas of darkness and light, of a body seeing and being seen, are integral to Heather B. Swann’s evocative Butterfly Kiss (2018) installation, in which she crafts 100 sets of eyelashes into a personal canopy. A sculptural object recast as what the artist calls a ‘performance tool’, this work can either be installed in a gallery space, slowly rotating and throwing shadows on the wall in a Dada play, or it can be worn and performed, as it was by Nell and others at the exhibition I Let My Body Fall Into a Rhythm in Tokyo in 2018. As is the case with many contemporary artists, Swann’s work is informed by travel, this surreal object coming into being after time spent in France, Italy and Japan; it is a distillation of her poetic notion that artists are being continuously, sensually ‘butterfly kissed’ as they move through the world.
An important aspect of the exhibition is the role of performance as a vital art form in its own right in women’s practice. Among the highlights is a new performance work by dancer and choreographer Jo Lloyd, generously supported by Phillip Keir and Sarah Benjamin, remembering the work of the brilliant but largely forgotten Philippa Cullen, who died at the age of 25 in 1975. Cullen’s highly experimental dance work included theremins, electronic musical instruments that are not touched but rather are responsive to movements of the body. Lloyd’s performative approach will bring her own dynamic vision and experience into close connection with the spirit of the earlier performance. It is about an act of collaboration, recognition and remembering. It suggests expanding the horizons of possibility. In this sense, the Lloyd‑Cullen project epitomises the idea of lineages in Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, reminding us, as so many women artists do, that while personal endeavour is crucial, so is our interconnectedness across place and time.
There is a sense in the Know My Name initiative, both within and outside the gallery walls, that it cannot be contained. This expansiveness overrides the common justification of many male‑dominated group exhibitions in the past that significant works by women were not evident. We are here to say that remarkable works across time have been and continue to be out there in spades. Indeed, the expressions of Australian women artists across time are so varied, layered and extensive that there will always be more to say, to experience, to acknowledge, to include. While there is still a way to go, it is heartening to know that in the 21st century women’s artistic contributions are increasingly better recognised across the country and the world, in a diverse range of ways.
It is the artists who are at front and centre of our endeavours and it is to them, to echo Australian novelist Jennifer Higgie, that we ‘bow down’.
Deborah Hart is head of Australian Art at the NGA. Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now is on from November 14 to January 31, 2021, although some sections of the show will still be on display from that date. For more information, go to www.nga.gov.au.
In the 1970s, many artists’ works encompassed a strong social and political consciousness, including the injustices in Indigenous Australia