Al Munro and Julie Brooke
As part of the ANU (Australian National University) School of Art’s 2013 season of graduate exhibitions, Julie Brooke and Al Munro exhibited their final body of works from their doctoral degrees. In an exhibition that appeared to be exceptionally well curated, but in reality was a result of the artists fortuitously finishing their doctorates at the same time, their artworks exhibited strong correspondences in themes, approaches and aesthetics, with both artists exploring ideas around artistic and scientific systems. The exhibition was visually spectacular, with Brooke’s highly detailed paintings and Munro’s optical crochet circles. I was seduced, first by the spectacle, and then drawn further into the haptic space of crocheted surfaces, pigment markers and the soft washes of gouache.
Julie Brooke’s approach to her painting is strongly informed by her background in science: she views the processes of painting as analogous to an experimental process in science, the labour and time spent testing an hypothesis. For her doctoral research Brooke explored the conventions and ‘tricks’ of painting by paring back the layers of representation and isolating techniques that are used to create artifice: light and shadow, hard and soft, line and wash. Her spiral and tessellated paintings, while linear and stark, are also surprisingly soft when viewed up close: inside the segments of the spiral formations the gouache bleeds in soft washes, a human touch to the diagrammatic, which serves to highlight the very tensions of painting that Brooke calls upon to create her illusions.
By setting strict limits on the way that she undertook each painting, Brooke called into question the relationship of the artist to their materials and methods. Brooke imposed systems of working upon her paintings and