In Praise

Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, Lindy Lee

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Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, Lindy Lee: during the last year these senior artists have been accorded major solo exhibitions, with substantial accompanying publications, that were worthy of note, indeed of praise. None of these exhibitions has attracted a great deal of critical attention, however: in this current era of focus on mass audiences and blockbuster projects, and with contracting discursive arenas, they seem, like so many other excellent exhibitions in this country, to have more or less slipped under the radar.¹ Yet these landmark exhibitions do deserve to be registered, and appraised, for each, in its own way, was exemplary.

As it happens, and not co-incidentally, these fine intelligent exhibitions were organised by university art museums. Anne Ferran’s ‘Shadow Land’, a career retrospective, was organised by the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia, and is touring to other venues until late 2016; Judith Wright’s project exhibition ‘Desire’, encapsulating related works dating from 2007-14, was presented by the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane, late in 2014; and Lindy Lee’s survey exhibition curated by Michele Helmrich for the University of Queensland Art Museum, also in Brisbane, was seen in late 2014/early 2015.² (I’ll return later to the significance and value of this university context.)

Ferran, Wright and Lee have something else in common: they all came to their practices as artists after other careers, other lives, though Lindy Lee did this in a very special way, as I’ll argue. More than that, all three emerged in the 1980s: while Lee and Ferran trained at Sydney College of the Arts, Wright was a self-starter, eventually completing a Master’s Degree at Brisbane’s Queensland University... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Lindy Lee, Fire and Water, 2006. Based on an original photograph by Rob Scott-Mitchell. Synthetic polymer paint and wax on board, archival inks on photorag paper mounted on board, 17 panels, one 81.0 x 60.0cm, 16 panels, each 40.6 x 30.2cm, overall 162.5 x 150.5cm. Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Lindy Lee through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2013. Reproduced courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Anne Ferran, Agitated thrush from Box of Birds, 2013. Pigment print, 72 x 48cm. Courtesy the artist.