HISTORY REFIGURED: RUSSELL STORER IN CONVERSATION WITH SALLY BREEN IN CONVERSATION WITH SALLY BREEN
Ten[d]ancy’ was an exhibition held recently at Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay House (EBH), organised by local curators Sally Breen, Associate Director of Performance Space in Sydney, and Tania Doropoulos, Curatorial Coordinator at Sherman Galleries, Sydney. It featured commissioned installations by Sydney artists Gary Carsley, Hannah Furmage, Shaun Gladwell, Jonathan Jones, and the collaborative duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, who worked with Swiss artists Martin Blum and Simone Fuchs. Each installation worked with different sites and spaces in EBH, a grand mansion built in the 1830s for the Macleay family. An amateur naturalist and avid collector, Alexander Macleay amassed an impressive collection of scientific books and insect specimens, while his wife and daughters actively pursued painting, needlework and music. The house is replete with the evidence of these activities, presenting artists with rich source material for research and creative response. The house’s subsequent history has included a period as an artist’s squat, inhabited by a bohemian Kings Cross crowd in the late 1920s and early 1930s, providing a further layer for contemporary artists to unpeel.
The result was a dynamic and sensitively handled exhibition, with each work inhabiting EBH with visual and conceptual inventiveness. Gary Carsley drew on the botanical and bohemian legacy of the house, creating a parallel narrative of pathos and camp hilarity, while Jonathon Jones acknowledged the Indigenous history of the site through his trademark use of light, overlaying the floors with a web of fluorescent tubes. Shaun Gladwell responded to Macleay’s collections by inserting elements of his own impressive collection—elaborate glass bongs echoed the erstwhile owner’s botanical interests and suggested other ways of spending time in a colonial outpost. The team of Healy, Cordeiro, Fuchs and Blum... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline