Process and practice: ARTEXPRESS 2019 and artists from the archive

ARTEXPRESS 2019 (7 February – 28 April 2019) features excerpts from student Visual Arts Process Diaries (VAPDs). These diaries are a window into how each work in the exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW came into being. Looking at the material an artist experiments with in the process of making helps us to understand their work. It also gives us a deeper insight into the artist themselves.

To complement the VAPDs, a selection of materials from the personal archives of four Australian artists is displayed in the exhibition. These sketchbooks, notebooks, loose sketches, photographs and objects trace the development of works both realised and unrealised.

The National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of NSW has the most extensive art archive in Australia, with over 400 archives of artists, commercial galleries, art societies, curators and collectors. It is housed within the Gallery’s Research Library, which has an extensive collection of art-related books, periodicals and ephemera. Both the archive and library are open to the public.

Michelle Collocott (pictured above with ARTEXPRESS 2019 artist Emma Tye) has exhibited widely since her first exhibition, held at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1967. Born in Sydney in 1945, Collocott grew up at Warragamba where her father was employed as a diver during construction of the new dam. A deep respect for nature and an abiding relationship with her surrounding landscape has suffused the artist’s practice throughout the past 40 years. Working with various materials, Collocott gradually builds up layers of textured surfaces and skeins of colour with tissue paper, glue and diluted pigments, infusing her canvases with a delicate sense of space, light and climate. Many of the works incorporate objects from her archive, including pages from her diaries, photographs of the landscape, maps and other ephemera. Collocott gifted her extensive archive to the National Art Archive in 2016.

Born in Sydney in 1920, Robert Klippel is widely regarded as Australia’s leading sculptor. Early on in his career, Klippel moved away from the figure and firmly embraced the abstract, working in a distinct personal language of sculptural forms that he continued to develop over six decades. After spending time in London, Paris, Minneapolis and New York, Klippel set up a waterfront studio and workshop in Birchgrove, Sydney, where he worked and lived until his death in 2001. As well as sculpture, he produced a remarkable body of drawings, watercolours and collages throughout his career. Klippel’s archive was donated to the National Art Archive in 2017 by his son, Andrew.

Working across sculpture and installation, Stephen Birch created work that unsettles our sense of the familiar. Everyday objects appear out of place and scale, creating a sense of the uncanny. Born in Melbourne in 1961, Birch had his first solo exhibition in 1988. He went on to live and work in Sydney, where he became an active and influential member of Sydney’s contemporary art scene. In 2007 he was the subject of a solo survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia called Looking out my back door. Birch died a few months after this major milestone in his career. Birch’s archive was donated by his family to the National Art Archive in 2008.

Born in Italy and raised in Australia from the age of four, Katthy Cavaliere’s work encompasses performance, installation, video and photography. She was interested in exploring personal narratives and often used childhood possessions in her practice, reflecting her obsessive self-documentation. Cavaliere died of ovarian cancer at the age of 39; the same disease had claimed her mother only three years prior. At the time of her death she was critically successful though not widely known, despite the fact she had been the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Artspace, and was selected to show her work Loved 2008 in the Italian Institute of Culture at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Cavaliere’s archive is a rich collection of diaries, objects, video and audio, as well as studies for works and performances. It was gifted to the National Art Archive in 2016.