Here&Now13
Here and Now is a moment all artists experience; a moment when time and space coalesce. In the here and now of making, all sense of a world outside the immediacy of the art activity disperses. In what Barbara Bolt describes as the heat of practice, of ‘working hot’ (Bolt, 2004) intense focus is given to bringing the marks and the materials to life. At such times the brush seems to have a life of its own, the colours on the canvas sing, the form magically shapes itself and there is a just rightness in the act of creation. In the here and now of artistic practice, the artist is able to perceive the world anew. In turn the resultant art work extends the potential of that insight to the viewer.
Curated by Katherine Wilkinson, the exhibition Here&Now13 surveyed the works of eleven contemporary Western Australian artists with disability. This particular iteration of the series, which is designed to provide ‘a snapshot of … the creative enterprise of Western Australian artists working at the cutting edge of contemporary visual arts practice’ (Snell, 2013, p.2), was the culmination of a key partnership between the Department of Culture and the Arts, the Disability Service Commission, DADAA and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Whilst this acknowledgement by mainstream cultural institutions is an important recognition for artists who are often located at the margins of conventional art history and its practices, for me the exhibition provided an opportunity to reflect upon the power of art to envisage the world.
Through the various approaches of these artists, in the here and now of this exhibition, I glimpsed the wonder of being in the world in