Ugg Boot Press: It’s a long story
In 1998 Stephen Spurrier took up the position of lecturer in printmaking at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Toowoomba. Spurrier’s first exhibition was held in 1966 in his hometown of Melbourne. In late 2016, to mark the fifty year milestone of the artist’s practice and his contribution to USQ as well as to the wider community, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery (TRAG) mounted not one but two significant exhibitions: Journeys of a Curious Mind: The art & lives of Stephen Spurrier and Ugg Boot Press: It’s a long story. Curated by Tiffany Shafran, Coordinator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at TRAG, both shows signalled the Gallery’s approach to exhibition programming which engages directly with artists to produce gallery-based projects. The exhibitions were timed to coincide with the celebrations of fifty years of the Print Council of Australia.
Journeys of a Curious Mind: The art & lives of Stephen Spurrier takes traveling as its structural core. Although the exhibition of prints, paintings and drawings unfolds chronologically from early-career to current work, it is the notion of the artist making work in various places that leads the viewer through the exhibition. The exhibition consists of over one hundred works hung densely in the large gallery space, giving a strong sense of a prolific and enduring practice.
Spurrier is an inveterate traveller, setting up temporary or semi-permanent studios in locations such as Barcelona, New Delhi and Magnetic Island. Each journey brings something new to his practice, but these are decidedly not place-making works. Rather, Spurrier’s travelling delivers culturally-determined dimensions to his ongoing exploration of the inner psychological workings of the human mind within the context of a limitless cosmos.
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