The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Ashley Crawford talks with Heidi Yardley about the new Gothic in contemporary art and its relationship with her work.
There is always something of an irony when an artist who has been quietly fermenting a specific style suddenly finds themselves part of a broader ‘movement’. After years of painting essentially unfashionable imagery the world suddenly twists and the artist finds they are part of an international zeitgeist. The strange and compelling case of Heidi Yardley certainly fits this eerie pattern.
Melbourne artists have long held true to a distinctly dark aesthetic, from Albert Tucker to Peter Booth to Louise Hearman. But that aesthetic, which has been recently dubbed ‘neo goth’, has spread like a fecund virus around the globe. A recent book produced in London, Hell Bound: New Gothic Art by Francesca Gavin (2008), features artists from around the world who are delving into darkness (including Australia’s Ricky Swallow and David Noonan), and curator Alison Kubler captured the spirit in her massive exhibition ‘neo goth: back in black’ at The University of Queensland Art Museum in 2008.
Heidi Yardley was included in ‘neo goth’, thus placing her work firmly in a curatorial context. But, of course, the problem with such contexts is that they are inevitably simplifications of an individual artists’ project. To be sure Yardley’s work has all of the hallmarks of the ‘gothic’—the dark palette, the vampiric figures, the air of melancholy. But there is also a tenderness to these works, a heavy whiff of nostalgia and a heady nod to popular culture. Indeed, given the titles and subject matter of many of Yardley’s paintings, it is not hard to work out what she plays in her... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline