Dora Ohlfsen and the facade commission

Karla Dickens
Australia, b1967
Wiradjuri, Southern Riverine region
Lives and works Lismore, NSW (Bundjalung country)

Karla Dickens has stated, ‘I’m not a politician; I’m an artist, a storyteller. With my art, I talk about my personal experiences. I don’t set out to make political statements.’ Yet she adds a crucial line: ‘I am political simply because I am who I am – a single mother, a lesbian, a First Australian.’

Dickens was drawn to the story of Dora Ohlfsen – a fellow queer female artist. But with this work, she continues to develop her own complex responses to the continuing legacy of colonial oppression. In her poem for 'To see or not to see’, she states:

'There are Masks and there are Hoods …

We choose to wear masks
Like high performance runners
Improved and enhanced
Stepping into subconscious wardrobes
Randomly trying on faces …

Hoods on the other hand, or head are not always chosen
Rather imposed covers,
Darker in knowing and practice
Roughly fitted by others uncomfortable with our being
Not wanting is see those who they are about to annihilate
… Under cover the hooded are still bearing witness’

Deborah Kelly
Australia, b1962
Lives and works Sydney, NSW

In 'Leaking Venus’, Deborah Kelly links Dora Ohlfsen with Mary Richardson, the militant suffragette who attacked Velásquez’s 'Rokeby Venus’ painting in London in 1914. Kelly notes that Richardson and Ohlfsen were contemporaries, ‘their lives connected by art and ideology at a time of great political upheaval’. She sees them as fascinating but flawed figures in the long, complex struggle for women’s political participation. Both had fascist leanings – Ohlfsen was patronised by Mussolini’s ruling party in Italy and Richardson was a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

Kelly uses pearls both to suggest wisdom and to recall their status as a favoured adornment of conservative women. Her pearls are also tears, ‘issuing from the wounds of Richardson’s attack’. Her doubled female Venus, goddess of love, ‘alludes to both Ohlfsen and Richardson’s homophilia, if not lived lesbianism’.

At the centre is the mysterious Sheela-na-gig with its unapologetic sexual display – a ‘grotesque’ motif found on ancient churches throughout Europe.

Sanné Mestrom
The Netherlands/Australia, b1979
Lives and works Sydney, NSW

Seeing the sphinxes opposite the Gallery entrance in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sanné Mestrom recalled the guardian sphinx, gatekeeper of Ancient Thebes in Egypt. She has described it as, ‘Belonging not to this world, nor necessarily to any other – and yet determining both the beginning and end of all things … waiting patiently at the gates.’

Her 'One voice’ asks the sphinx’s fabled riddle that ended in death if the answer was incorrect: ‘Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?’ According to myth, only Oedipus answered correctly: ‘Man, who as a baby crawls on four legs, then walks on two legs as an adult and in old age walks with a cane as his third leg …’

Made in the tradition of wrought iron window grilles, 'One voice’ continues Mestrom’s interest in the visual language of ‘threshold’ spaces – this time the Gallery’s. It is, she says, a cultural institution that is ‘gatekeeper to the life and death of an Australian artist’s career’.

England/Australia, b1967
Lives and works Sydney, NSW

In Caroline Rothwell’s notes for 'Dora’, the words of the Gallery’s former trustee Sir John Sulman appear: ‘Miss Ohlfsen is a woman, and … can cause mischief’. Also mentioned is Germaine Greer’s 'The obstacle race’, the landmark feminist study of the social, educational and psychological conditions constraining women artists.

Rothwell rigorously investigates how ideas and beliefs shape our contemporary world. She is well placed to explore Ohlfsen’s lived experience as a female artist – and her testing commission experience.

Here Rothwell takes motifs inspired by Ohlfsen’s Antipodean Venus, 'The awakening of Australian art’. She adds moments drawn from Ohlfsen’s plaster relief, re-presented in characteristically playful form. Though inspired by Ohlfsen, Rothwell’s symbols are consistent with those that recur in her wider practice. She interrogates the relationship between humanity and the natural environment, and often hides an ominous warning beneath soft contours and alluringly shiny surfaces.

Julie Rrap
Australia, b1950
Lives and works Sydney, NSW

Julie Rrap uses her own body to engage with issues of representation, gender and power. Hers is a slippery sense of self that refers to the relentless imaging of the body – especially the female body – within Western art history.

In 'Walk out’, Rrap appropriates the legs of five favourite sculptures in the Gallery’s collection: Ugo Rondinone’s 'if there were anywhere but desert. wednesday’ 2000; Patricia Piccinini’s 'The comforter’ 2010; Hans Bellmer’s 'La demie poupée’ 1971; Louise Bourgeois’ 'Arched figure’ 1993, and Michael Parekowhai’s 'The English Channel’ 2015. If developed further, Rrap would perform these figures, acting them out, before casting her own legs in bronze (with added colour to mimic the original works).

In 'Walk out’, we see how Rrap’s surreal humour destabilises: the legs walk out in protest from the bastion of culture – or join our own to re-enter the museum confidently, through the front door.

Shireen Taweel
Australia, b1990
Lives and works Sydney, NSW

Shireen Taweel’s mixed Lebanese-Australian heritage becomes a vital source of inspiration for her practice, in both form and content. Her research into Islamic arts proved particularly fruitful for her facade concept.

Taweel researched Walter Vernon’s designs for the Gallery and recognised the foundations of Islamic decorative arts in his structural compositions and decorative features. Such forms were held in high regard in the anglophone world in the mid to late 1800s. And in Ohlfsen’s medallist techniques, Taweel found connection with her own meticulous repoussé technique, where copper is hammered into relief from behind.

In 'opening inwards’ Taweel has created two facade options that build on the layers of history within a very contemporary practice. Seeing the NSW cultural landscape as more socially inclusive and progressive than in Vernon and Ohlfsen’s day, she seeks to create open, welcoming forms that contribute to the ‘formidable interior space’ of the Gallery, opening it to the ‘dynamism of fluid voices’.