Helen Lillecrapp-Fuller and Madonna Staunton
Helen Lillecrapp-Fuller's and Madonna Staunton's work, which is often based on found objects and interpreted as domestic, feminine, or private, has had little place in the official histories which have characterised Queensland art as a tradition of painterly expressionism. Here, Beth Jackson analyses these artists' practices, alongside those of Merv Muhling and Robert MacPherson, seeing them as offering an alternative history and a critique of totalising museum and historical structures.
The works of Helen Lillecrapp-Fuller and Madonna Staunton do not categorise easily into any style or “ism”. There is no hierarchy of media in their works, which include drawing, photography, painting, collage, assemblage and photocopy. There is a privileging of the found object and found materials. It is this very lack of hierarchy along with the dominating motif of the found in the oeuvres of these two artists, and their eclecticism, that engages in debate with the hierarchic history of modernism and the similarly hierarchic socio-political geography of core/periphery, centre/margin. From a contemporary postmodern view of history, modernism is recast as merely “one of the players”[1] and the core/periphery structure as a socio-cultural and political fiction.
It is not the aim of this article to compare and contrast the works of these women in the manner of modernist/formalist criticism, extracting the aesthetic and technical nuances of difference. The practices of these artists are mutually supportive—they are similar, to some extent co-operative, and they take a unified theoretical direction. It is the critical implications of their practices that I wish to explore in order to extract a political difference (the différance of Derrida).
Two immediate and lasting impressions of Helen Lillecrapp-Fuller's recent retrospective exhibition, A Visual Diary 1979-91, curated by... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline