Fay Poole, Josephine Starrs, Margaret Worth, Barbara Zerbini
If artists of the 1980s ever felt the need to frame strategies they rarely said as much. 'Strategy', implying a conscious application of stratagems to achieve desired ends may prove to be a word for the 1990s. It has a tough, no-nonsense ring to it which echoes realities facing most contemporary Australian artists in a period of fiscal recession.
When qualified as 'archetypal ', its sense is skewed towards a plumbing of depths in search of elemental bedrock on which to reconstruct realities.
While the exhibition's title was the outcome of negotiation and some compromise between the four artists, its capacity to encapsulate the common ground between a diversity of interests and methodologies is, in retrospect, consistently effective. Each artist presents a close -knit series of works incorporating, to varying degrees, symbolic, narrative structures.
There is a conscious returning to departure points, a clearing of the way for re-enactments or a retracing of individual or collective experience. Such are the stratagems associated with midcareer artists and it comes as no surprise to see these being employed by Barbara Zerbini and Margaret North . There is a twenty year gap between the art school experience of these two artists and that of Fay Poole and Josephine Starrs. Within this extended time-frame, perspectives on the urgency and nature of "archetypal strategies" vary considerably
Zerbini and Worth have travelled and worked extensively and in the process have come to know what it means to be an outsider, drawing on inner resources to maintain personal balance and momentum. Both talk at times of being on a constant journey, a perspective which contains its own imperative to mark and chart the trail. Zerbini 's artist-in-residence