Responding to recent work of Judith Wright
Enter through a black mesh screen into the first space. Stand on the polished cement floor and gaze around at white walls hung with large framed drawings. After a while, walk to an adjacent room, darkened, sit on a low bench and look at the projection of two moving figures. One Dances: this is how this combined experience is introduced. The title is written on the entrance door of Grantpirrie gallery in Sydney.1 This is Judith Wright's 2004 exhibition with the gallery and her most personal and risky to date. It follows a number of other projects in which her film work has been combined with highly tactile abstract paintings on paper. For instance, in 2002 the Institute of Modem Art in Brisbane showed a suckling infant close up on video, around the comer from a large room hung with big skin-like sheets of paper carrying brown-toned shapes. Both were informal, intimate components of a larger installation by the artist titled Blind of Sight. The dialogue had commenced between the handmade object and the moving image, between seemingly irreconcilable media with completely different histories.
What could be more challenging than to achieve a meaningful synchronicity between a series of simple abstract forms on textured paper and the shifting images of a video made in real time? Yet Judith Wright has done it superbly in this work. We know that the artist has a background in professional ballet, that she was a relative late comer to the visual arts and that from the late 1980s her career has grown incrementally to the point that her name is recognised as belonging to one of Australia's most distinguished mid-career artists. She was... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline