Introduction:
This art and wellness program includes 24 weeks of mindfulness art making activities along with Art Gallery NSW collections works to start a thought process and discussion. Included is a 5 mins recorded grounding meditation (mp4 file which can be emailed).

The weekly activity and questions focuses on grounding, gratitude and mindfulness during an unsettling time.

Access to one on one skype sessions can be arranged by emailing danielle.minett@ag.nsw.gov.au

Please feel free to share these conversions and art making activities with your loved ones, friends and family.

Thank you - Danielle Minett
Art Therapy Trainee / Intern to Access Programs AGNSW

Framing Questions:

Thinking about yourself today and where you find yourself currently.
Are you working from home?
Are there others working/schooling from home alongside you?
How does it feel to be here in a safe space with your family?
What fun character attributes are you noticing more about yourself and your loved ones?
What things do you notice which are distinct to your home and your family culture?
What have you noticed about yourself thinking about your change of environment and routine?
What gives you joy in your daily routine?
Try to keep in mind the positive attributes. If you feel your mind shifting to the things which you find stressful, take a couple of deep breathes and breathe out your anxiety.

Marlene Rubuntja is the sister of acclaimed watercolourist Mervyn Rubuntja and daughter of Wenten Rubuntja, an activist and artist who was a leader in the movement that assisted in the development of town camps for Aboriginal peoples in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Rubuntja is a gem of the desert, creating works that advocate for mental health awareness. She often speaks of how sewing changed her life - that she was very sad and troubled and by working at the art centre she has found a place of happiness and purpose where she can express herself. Rubuntja has worked hard for opportunities that have opened her world in ways previously not possible.

Rubuntja’s works are imbued with humour, while poignantly referencing her distinct cultural and social understandings of her hometown, Mparntwe. In this work Rubuntja colourfully adorns a female figure, joyously walking along with dilly bags in hand. Vibrant, excessive and somewhat comical, the figure highlights the importance of happiness and joy in our everyday lives.

Art Making Activity:
Create a Fun Character

Using what ever art materials are at hand, create a fun character which represents you and your unique attributes which form a part of your family culture. While working on this piece, try to focus on the aspects which bring you joy each day and find a way to represent this in your art piece.

Framing Questions:
Thinking today about your family and loved ones.
Who are you with today?
Is there someone you are missing while we are all in isolation?
How can you reach out to that person?
How can you connect in multiple ays to being people together?

Remembering that it is physical distancing and not social distancing - it is so important to stay connected to our support network in times such as these.

Collage is a fundamental and ongoing component of John Nixon’s practice that underpins his minimalist paintings. Collage reveals Nixon’s experimental working process in which he takes inspiration from the world around him and distils it into geometric cut and pasted compositions. “I can just walk around the block…and I’ll see something useful. I’m able to filter the mess of the world, and just see things that other people wouldn’t see…I’m importing information that I see. For my own use.” – John Nixon 2016

Nixon collages scavenged paper-based materials that operate through recognition and familiarity. Viewers will recognise fragments of everyday objects such as food packaging, paint colour swatches, sandpaper, newspaper clippings and stamps. These items become design elements within Nixon’s geometric compositions. The reverse of many of these collages reveals their former lives as packaging for pet food, cask wine and breakfast cereals.

Several collages were made while the artist was travelling, particularly in New York and Græsted in Denmark and bear the detritus of his travels. Elements sourced from whatever city he is in are incorporated, with clippings of his own photographs, local food packaging and newspaper clippings appearing. These materials are laden with specificity of time and place. One collage is made on the reverse of an invitation to his 2013 exhibition at Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich, Switzerland.

Art Making Activity:
Create a Post Card to send to a loved one

Using re purpose materials from around your house, construct a post card to send to a loved one.
Being close to Easter, a time when families come together, take the time to create a post card with a loving message.
This post card is one you will post to its intended.
While creating, put all the loving feelings into the artwork on one side, and the message on the other.
When looking for materials, you could keep in mind ones which might have meaning attached. Perhaps wrapping paper left over from a birthday present, part of a magazine page, paint simple cards, printed photographs, etc

Framing Questions:

What activities are happening in your home lately?
Are these new games, conversations, actives and exercises which previously didn't happen?
How have these activities changed your home space?
What unexpected joys have you found in these changes?

Wegner has made hundreds of drawings, paintings and prints of the subject of this series – his friend, artist and poet Graeme Doyle - since the late 1980s, when they met as fellow Fine Arts students at Melbourne's Phillip Institute of Technology. They form a special and distinct part of his oeuvre, which also includes nudes and still life.

Wegner's portraits of his friend have followed Doyle's ongoing struggles with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, although they were not originally intended to document an illness, but rather the subject himself. Anne Loxley describes Doyle as "a man of great intellectual and spiritual depth, not to mention charm and wit" (in 'For Matthew & others, journeys with Schizophrenia' Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, Sydney, 2006 p. 132). Graeme gave me the licence to paint him any way I chose. I believe his struggle with schizophrenia has given him insights into the human condition and because of this he was not deterred by a 'warts and all' approach. These works are a testimony to Graeme's lack of censorship, his lack of vanity and are a culmination of our friendship. (Peter Wegner, February 2002, quoted in 'For Matthew & others' op. cit. p. 132).

These recent drawings tell of Doyle's declining health with great poignancy and honesty. They were the first made at Doyle' s new home, an assisted care lodge, in 2012. The nine drawings were completed over two weeks of regular afternoon visits. The use of beeswax is a new development, which the artist sees as "like a cloud over his deteriorated physical self" (Wegner, artist's statement, 2012, AGNSW file).

Art Making Activity:
Drawing the every day

Using pencils and paper, make some quick sketches of the activities and people in your house.
Think of it in terms of a way of documenting the new and different ways your home and spaces are now being used. Try not to get caught up in 'being perfect' but to focus more on quickly capturing the moment before it changes.

Framing Questions:

Have you been outside today?
What did you do the last time you went outside?
When was the last time you gardened?
Or placed your bare feet on the grass?
What can you see outside right now?
What kind of day is it?
How does the weather make you feel?
What can you notice about the day?
What can you hear?
What can you smell?
What can you feel?

Untitled 2005/2006' continue Henson's motifs of landscapes, skies and the body but with a greater proximity to the subject. The body especially is depicted as almost protruding from the picture plane and having a weight which causes it to sink into the ground.

Sequences are an important part of Henson's work, creating a dialogue between the images and enhancing both the meaning and effect. An image that is hard to discern singularly becomes more readable as part of a sequence, while at the same time the whole sequence seems to become more ethereal and requiring of an emotional response.

Art Making Activity

Photograph Nature

Take some time to go outside and feel the day.
Go into the back yard, or for a walk around the block, or to your favourite bush walk spot.
Spend 5 minutes breathing and being still in this space with nature.
Pay attention to what you notice - what can you hear, smell, see and feel?

While outside, use your phone to document the details of your outing in nature. Pay close attention to the things which often go unnoticed.

Framing Questions:

What beings you joy right now?
How does it feel within your body?
How are you moving your body?
What do you notice about your physical self right now?

Art Making Activity:

using what ever art materials you have available, create a work which depicts the joy of an activity shared with someone you care about.
Try to keep it abstract and focus on the process - the movements to make with your materials, how it feels to make your marks, the activity you are thinking about while creating.
It is more about embodying the process and being with your feeling then depicting a realistic image of the activity.

Over five decades Suzanne Archer has established herself as a painter, sculptor and installation artist. Primarily known for her large textural paintings, her work is held in many private and public collections. Her work has been presented in institutions across Australia and abroad, including Campbelltown Arts Centre. Archer has maintained an impressive career that cements her position within abstraction and expressionism – a position defined by the objects and thematic she presents in her work.

Archers work often incorporates her inner state - reflecting on her travels, memories and thoughts about her current life and what might exist in the after life. Her painting are often huge and hold a real presence in any space the occupy while also embodying a sense of order, methodology and calm.

Framing Questions:

How are you staying connected with those outside your house hold?
What do your relationships mean to you?
Think about the threads which tie you and your loved ones together. How can you strengthen these threads even with physical distancing?

Mandala's are about balance, wholeness and integration.
How are you keeping balance in your life right now?
How are those special people in your life helping to keep balance and wholeness?

This installation is an extension of Javier’s works in print and painting that draw on the natural environment of provincial Batangas to create allegorical insights into the human condition and relationships.The artist says, ‘My appreciation for plants is always focused on the leaves and flowers, but never the roots. However, as an avid gardener, I know how vital roots are to a plant's growth. They are hidden from sight and often ignored. Maybe that is a bit like how we view people. We judge them too by outward appearance – or gender, religion, nationality, even by status in life. What is hidden, like the roots of the plants, is a deeper psyche, or collective unconscious that connects us all. A connectivity that can't be cut off by poor signals or power interruption. But how do roots move through the earth? Do they respond to situations, crisis, like we do? Do they invade and kill neighbouring roots? Do they reach out and tangle with each other for added strength and even, perhaps, create a sense of community? Like many of my works, this piece poses questions and there is no definite answer.'

Art Making Activity:
Create your own Symbolic Mandala

Start by drawing a circle and then fill your circle with patterns, shapes and symbols which have meaning to you and the relationships you have in your life.

How are these symbols and patterns connected? How do they come together to form a whole?

Framing Questions:

We all carry a mental load every day. Thinking about this - how many things are running through your mind constantly?
Are you giving your full attention to any one task at a time?
How do you feel you could you slow your thoughts down to focus on the task at hand?
When was the last time you were truly present with yourself?
How do you feel you could be truly in the moment?
What things could you do to help this mindful practice grow with your every day thought practice?

Photographs taken by John Lethbridge for Marina Abramovic and Ulay.

Abramovic and Ulay first came to Australia in 1979 for the 3rd Biennale of Sydney. Inspired by a brief trip to Central Australia, they returned in 1980 to spend five months in the Australian outback. Travelling between various Aboriginal communities, they spent long periods alone in the desert, much of the time sitting in the shade in silence, exhausted by the heat of the day. Unlike many of their joint performances that involved a form of mental communication and mutual trust to create unity in front of an audience, they were now alone.

It was during their time in the desert that they first conceived of the performance ‘Gold found by the artists’ that was to become the first of a series of 22 performances collectively titled ‘Nightsea crossing’ staged in various locations around the world between 1981 and 86. For the first performance, held at the AGNSW, the artists sat opposite each other at a table in silence, for the seven hours that the gallery was open to the public, every day for 16 days. Abramovic was dressed entirely in black and Ulay in red. Between them on the black painted table were 250 grams of gold nuggets, which they had found in the desert, an Aboriginal boomerang covered in 24-carat gold leaf and a live diamond-back python. After each day they returned directly to their lodgings and consumed nothing but water: endurance performances often involve fasting as a way of purifying the body and in some cases where a performance goes for days at a time, it is necessary for purely practical metabolic purposes.

Art Making Activity
Being Present with a loved one

This week, take the time to be truly present with a loved one - including yourself. Sit quietly facing one another and without words be really present with each other.
An alternative is to pick an activity you can be fully emerged in with someone. No interruptions, no phones, no clocks. Stay with that person in that moment and try to forget everything else going on for the duration.
You can also do this in front of the mirror and allow yourself to be truly present with yourself. Along with the medication and breathing, sit comfortably with yourself and practice being entirely present in your mind and body.

Framing Questions:

Home is where we are all spending most of our time right now - we are likely here more often then maybe we have ever been before.

How has your feelings of home shifted during this time?
How are you viewing this safe place and honouring it as a sanctuary?

Howard Arkley is renowned for his representation of the Australian suburbs; transmuting ordinary, everyday subjects into the extraordinary. Drawing upon the visual language of advertising and home decorating magazines, his work employs techniques and colour ranges of popular culture. It reveals his abiding fascination with pop art, underpinned by a sense of deadpan humour, irony and pathos.

With their fuzzy, dreamlike quality and tonal after-effects, the airbrushed lines stylised the final look of the painting. The results were always exuberant: 'I like the fact that the imagery looks like it's printed; it looks like a reproduction of a painting, rather than a painting' (Arkley quoted by Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997).

The artist captured the Australian suburbs on canvas as a new zone of aesthetic inspiration. He transformed the suburban home into a new icon, suggestive of the soullessness of the Australian suburban sprawl, which became a defining feature of the Australian way of life with the post war spread of suburbia.

Art Making Activity:

Using what art materials are available, select a favourite place in your home and create an artwork which represents your new ideas and feelings which have arisen around your safe place.

Framing Questions:

Thinking about your family and the close quarters you are all sharing at the moment -
How has the tie you have spent together changed?
What have you noticed about the quality and quantity in the activities you do together?
What activités have you or can you make special by doing them together now?

Born in England in 1954, Robert Billington moved to Australia from the U.K. at the age of 18 with a Nikon F2 Camera as a method of recording his new life. Inspired by Mirella Ricciardos’ book Vanishing Africa, Robert set about becoming a professional photographer.

Working for the Elton Ward Photographic Studio (1980), Robert studied portraiture and the art of wedding photography. In 1994, Robert won Australian Photographer of the Year by the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP). He then continued on to win over 100 medals in both Australia and England, winning the prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award twice (1988, 1992).

Whilst working professionally Robert continued to photograph personal fine art photographs, steering towards Black & White quirky street shots and the Australian landscape. Now some 25 years later the results of his photographic journals and art are now viewed on this website.

With his young family in tow, Robert moved to Arcadia, North of Sydney in 1988. Robert started shooting images for his first book, Rustic Paradise. These shots captured a unique part of Australia.
Arcadia was then a community largely untouched by the hustle and bustle of city life, and the images Robert created were humorous, emotional, quirky, and very Australian. Max Dupain hailed the book "a classic". His list of publications has now grown to include nine books, some of those titles being Balmoral, every man and his dog, The Bridge, This is Australia, Australianimal, Billington’s Sydney and his most recent Bondi – The sound of tumbling waves.

Art Making Activity:

Using your phone camera document the every day activities in your family life. Try to think about how these activities may have changed with the current circumstances and what that means to you.
Think of these portraits as a way to document life at home with a new way of seeing things.

Framing Questions:

Thinking beyond making a copy of ones self, what makes a portrait a self portrait?
What are the important aspects to include and think about when considering a self portrait?
When looking at yourself, what is it you see?
You could start by sitting in front of the mirror and spending time with yourself. Try to see yourself without being critical and look at all your aspects - what you can see reflected physically, what you feel, what you think and how all the elements come together to create a view of self.

Similar to Brett Whiteley's other major paintings of this period, 'Self-portrait in the studio' exudes a sense of sumptuous living and the liquid presence of the harbour through what he called 'the ecstasy-like effect of Ultramarine blue'. Whiteley's tiny mirror self-portrait also reflects the influence of Eastern art in his portrayal of man as merely part of a larger landscape. However, this painting also hints at a darker side, as Wendy Whiteley explained in 1995:

... he was warning himself and other people watching. It was the cage of his interior, his addiction, the window or a glimpse of possible escape into paradise: the escape from one's psyche.

His last studio and home - 2 Raper Street, Surry Hills in Sydney - is now a museum managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This painting won the Archibald Prize in 1976 and was acquired by the Gallery in 1977.

Art Making Activity:

Using what ever art materials you have available, spend some time in front of the mirror with yourself. Try to see beyond the critical thoughts we often have about ourselves. Think about not only what you can see physically, but also all the other aspects which make up who you are.
How would you represent these in your self portrait?

Framing Questions:
What role does music play in your life?
Are there differences in the way you experience music?
How can music change your state of being and feeling?
Thinking about re translation, can you recognise gaps, intervals and now rests in the music of your daily life?

"'Earth-Moon-Earth' (E.M.E ) is a form of radio transmission whereby messages are sent in Morse code from earth, reflected from the surface of the moon, and then received back on earth. The moon reflects only part of the information back – some is absorbed in its shadows, ‘lost’ in its craters.

For this work, Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' has been translated into Morse code and sent to the moon via E.M.E.

Returning to earth 'fragmented' by the moon's surface, it has been re-translated into a new score, the gaps and absences becoming intervals and rests. In the exhibition space the new 'moon–altered' score plays on a self-playing grand piano."

Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.

Art Making Activity:

Select your favourite piece of music. Play this through once in a quiet space simply listening to the piece in full. Feel it internally and take it in.
What do you notice about listening this way?
Now play the piece a second time, this time allowing yourself to bodily feel the music. Move, dance, sway - what ever it is you feel like doing in response.
What do you notice this time about yourself and the music?

Framing Questions:

What role do boxes play in your life?
How are they containers?
Have a think about what it means to be contained for you? Such as in the way Cavaliere places herself within the box for the duration of the performance, but also the way the paper bags contain her spent breath.
What are the roles of inner and outer spaces within the objects in your home and even your home itself?
What does it mean to you to have inner and outer spaces of self?
In what way can you think about elevating every day objects to hold special meaning?

Born in Italy and raised in Australia from the age of four, Katthy Cavaliere’s work encompasses performance, installation and photography, and explores personal narratives, often by using the artist’s personal possessions and through her obsessive self-documentation.

In 2000, Cavaliere won the Helen Lempriere travelling art scholarship and went to Italy. 'brown paper' was made there while Cavaliere was studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti de Brera. She was chosen among a small group of students to attend a workshop taught by Marina Abramović and 'brown paper' was performed and displayed in the group exhibition at Ex Chiesa di San Francesco in Udine.

Cavaliere lay naked in a large coffin-like cardboard box and repeatedly blew air into brown paper bags. She placed some of the bags onto her body and cast others outside of the box, surrounding herself with her captured breath. Describing the work as a ‘portrait of the soul’ 1, the bags represent lungs in the universal human function of breathing. Accumulated over approximately one hour of performance, the bags came to represent the ‘first and last breath of life and all the ones in between’2. Of the cardboard box Cavaliere wrote: ‘our bodies live in houses and die in coffins’3.

Cavaliere’s continued use of particular materials in her work, and particularly her use of found and low-cost materials, links back to an early interest in the Italian Arte povera (poor art) movement. Cavaliere’s ability to elevate everyday objects imbue works such as 'brown paper' and 'nest' with special meaning.

1 Cavaliere, artist statement 2001
2 Cavaliere, diary entry 2001
3 ibid

Art Making Activity:

Create your own 'self' box. Using an existing box or make one using simple materials, create a box and decorate with things you identify as part of yourself.
For the outside of the box, look to your outside self - what you show to the external world.
For the inside of your box, think about the parts of your inner self.
You can use what ever art materials you have available - including pens, pencils, collage, writing, paints, etc
You can include items to keep safe inside your box as well if you wish. You may like to include positive words about yourself, inspirational quotes or uplifting messages to yourself.

You can use this box to remind yourself of your positive inner qualities.

Framing Questions:

Take a walk outside - around the block, to the park, around the street. Make sure to leave your own yard.
Take with you some paper and pencils for a drawing activity while out.
How does it feel to be outside?
What can you notice about the change of seasons?
What do you notice about yourself as you walk through your neighbourhood?
What do you notice about the trees/plants growing around you?
What do you notice about the light?
How does your breath feel?

J. Muir Auld (as he signed his works) began to show oils at the annual Royal Art Society of New South Wales exhibitions, but he first became known in Sydney as a black and white artist, contributing regularly to the Sydney Mail and the Bulletin. In 1909 he visited England to study the work of English painters, particularly Constable and Wilson Steer, and precariously supported himself by pen-and-ink drawings for magazines such as London Opinion.

About 1911 Auld returned to Australia and in 1918 settled at Dee Why near fellow artists Roland Wakelin and Lawson Balfour in an environment suited to Post-Impressionist plein air painting. On 1 July 1914 Auld had married with Presbyterian rites a divorcee Maggie Kate Kane, née Bell. That year he completed his earliest securely-dated oil, a portrait of 'Thelma', his step-daughter. Besides landscapes, he painted some subject pictures and portraits: 'The Broken Vase' and a portrait of the poet Roderic Quinn were bought early by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Auld exhibited frequently with the Society of Artists, Sydney, of which he was a member. In the 1920s he joined the well-known commercial art firm, Smith & Julius, and illustrated several books. In 1931 he moved to Thirlmere, south-west of Sydney, where he spent the rest of his life alone—eschewing even a radio in his small cottage. Here, however, according to Wakelin, he painted the best of his landscapes, achieving 'a deeper penetration into the mysteries of light and shade'. He was awarded the 1935 Wynne Prize for 'Winter Morning', a study of trees and sky which had 'a stimulating sense of wind, and flying cloud' and showed the artist's partial adoption of the palette knife. Auld had three one-man exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, in 1928, 1936 and 1938, and had also exhibited in London and Paris. He was a foundation member of the Australian Academy of Art in 1938.

Art Making Activity:

Draw yourself as a Tree

While on your walk, pick a tree you most enjoy. Find a spot to sit near by where you can clearly see the tree.
Using the paper and pencils you bought with you, draw yourself as a tree.
While doing this think about what sort of tree are you?
Think about the roots of your tree as your personal roots and anchors in life.
Think about the trunk of your tree being your strengths, skills and knowledge.
Think about the branches as the important people in your life.
Think about the leaves of your tree as being your hopes and dreams.
Think about the flowers on your tree as your special attributes and gifts.

Sitting with your drawn tree, in the presence of the growing tree outside, what can you notice about yourself?

Framing Questions:

During this time of physical distancing and isolation, what ways have you noticed community still coming together?
How have these new ways changed your feelings of community?
How have you and your family been able to connect with community?
What have been some uplifting community experiences you have witnessed or heard about?

Another important shift has been away from completely autonomous art objects whose meaning is supposedly inherent in their form and therefore closed to continuing imaginative work, towards an art that finds its completion in the experiencing mind and body of the viewer. The work of Antony Gormley dramatically embodies these changes.

In 1989 Gormley came to Sydney to install 'Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' here at the AGNSW and to locate a reciprocal work in the desert, 'Room for the great Australian desert'. He had asked for a site with 360 degrees of uninterrupted flat horizon and red dust underfoot. I located a spot where I knew that the clay pans were extensive and the horizon was terrifyingly flat and low. Standing up there you are the highest object this side of the horizon. It is a vertiginous experience as if you could easily fall from the spinning globe. It was while camping out in this place that Gormley talked to me about Hiedegger and the phenomenological problem of consciousness that always rests so lightly upon the material world out of which it has arisen and yet is always constructed as it's other. There could be no more dramatic and appropriate place for such speculations and for an artwork that embodied them.
There is a collaborative aspect to many of Gormley's later works that extends the incorporation of site into an engagement with living culture. Since 1989 he has sought opportunities to work with communities and to make his art about the communal body rather than the unique and isolated body of the artist. In 'Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' the one thousand plus small figures were made by local students, multiple hands performing simple actions to form the likeness of a body but equally making a trace of their own hands.

Art Making Activity:

Using modelling material such as play dough, clay, placticine, textiles, found objects or other 3D materials, create a community of others.
These figures can be representations of real people in your life, of people you would life to meet, or imaginary people.
What are they doing? How is a sense of community being created through these embodied creations?

Simple Playdough Recipe:

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 cup salt
1 tbsp cooking oil Olive oil or vegetable oil
1 cup water
food colouring

Instructions:

1. In a large bowl, combine all of your dry ingredients (flour, salt, cream of tartar) and mix well.

2. Mix food coloring with your water first. Then add the vegetable oil and water with food coloring to a large pot. Mix together.

3. Add the dry ingredients to your pot and mix well.

4. Cook over low to medium heat until the dough starts to form and becomes dry.

5. Once it starts to form a ball together and looks fully cooked, take off the heat. Let the dough cool first before touching.

6. Once cool, knead the dough for 5 minutes to make the dough soft.

Note:
If your dough is not soft, continue kneading for another 5 minutes. If you find it is still too dry add a little bit more oil and knead in.

Framing Questions:

As things are 'settling' in to the 'new norm' and our old ways of operating have shifted, have a think about how you are managing adapting to these changes?
Are you finding yourself resistant or challenged in some ways more then others? Are you worried about more aspects of life?
Now with a few deep breathes, have a think about how you can go with the flow, and find your flow within these at times turbulent waters.
How do you feel you can let go of some of your writes of uncertainly? How can you sit with these and know that uncertainly can co exist with clarity? Where can you feel flow in your life?

Gunter Christmann was an artist's artist (b. 1936, Berlin, d. 2013, Sydney). He made abstract and figurative paintings since the early 1960s soon after he moved to Australia. For thirty-eight years, he worked energetically and experimentally in his modest Sydney studio on the top floor of an apartment block in Darlinghurst opposite the National Art School. He lived there with his soulmate, Jenny Christmann (b. 1929, Düsseldorf, d. 2005, Sydney). Gunter - the artist, the Berliner, the bohemian - was a fixture of the surrounding streets and cafes and well-known to NAS students and the broader local community. A 50-year retrospective of his work presented by Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne in 2014, curated by Lesley Harding, was testament to his greatness as an artist and indicative of the extent, diversity and excellence of his life’s work. Installation images of the Heide exhibition can be seen on The Commercial's website. An 80-page exhibition catalogue was published to accompany the retrospective with essays by Simon Barney, Lesley Harding and Noela Yuill.

Art Making Activity:

Using water colours (or other watered down paints or coloured waters) create an artwork that flows.

Thinking about how you yourself can be like water, and flow with the times. Letting go of things beyond your control and flowing with new and changed circumstances.
Let the colour flow across your surface without worry about how the go or where they blend.
Try to be in the moment and one with the flowing colours of the process.

Framing Questions:
Take some time to go out at night.
Can you see the stars?
What does the moon look like?
What do you notice about the night? About yourself?
How does it feel to you to be out looking at the night?
What how does it feel if you can't see the stars?
Thinking about stars and constellations, what do they represent to you?
What do you notice about all the points of light amongst the darer sky?
How are seemingly random points of light in your own life connected?

Paul Chan reconnects the stars in constellations, showing that even ancient patterns can be reimagined. Believing that “freedom of speech is more magical than Orion’s belt,” he dedicates these new celestial patterns as monuments to civil liberties. Despite being our society’s guiding lights, these rights are fragile, imperfectly protected, and perhaps just as mythical as Perseus, Aquarius, or Gemini. Placing America in the sky as a beacon, Chan nourishes hope for the survival of democracy, “not here, but up there,” among the stars.

Art Making Activity:

Using what art materials you have available - create a dark night sky.
Add into this dark night sky lighter points of light.
What / who do your stars represent?
Do your stars connect to form constellations?
What do these constellations show?
What else can you imagine in your night sky along with your stars?

Framing Questions:
Colour features strongly in the works by Awazu Kiyoshi. Colour adds to the graphic illustrative nature of his work. Colour also holds connections to feelings, memories and emotions for all of us.
Thinking about colour:
What colour/s heighten your emotions? make you feel excited? Anxious? Passionate?
Which colour/s give you a sense of calm? Quiet? Reflective? Relaxed?
How do these colours feature in your life?
Are you drawn to some colour over others?
Why do you think this this might be?

Japanese graphic designer Awazu Kiyoshi (1929–2009) developed a style that eschewed simplicity and clean line and instead drew viewers into psychedelic visual cornucopias. Born in Tokyo and self-taught, Awazu began his career creating film posters. He became known for working with a variety of themes and within different disciplines. He designed posters for film and theater, collaborated with architects and urban designers, and addressed social issues in his work. His style has elements that recall pop or psychedelic art, yet his use of color and iconography reveals a unique aesthetic.
The works evoke sculpture in the artist’s use of scale, as well as his pairing of unexpected elements and exploration of the boundaries between the inanimate and the animate. The result are artworks that provides an immersive viewing experience, rather than information alone.

Awazu’s works are complex, and for an audience not familiar with Japanese culture a full understanding may require some research into their motifs and symbols. What is immediately clear is the joy of peeling away visual layers and falling deeper and deeper into a fantastical world. Delight, engagement, and emotional response are the functions of his artworks.

Art Making Activity:
Using what ever art materials you have, an outline of anything you feel like. A scene, an animal, an object or person, or even just a collection of shapes.
Add colour to your line drawing. Block out certain areas and fill with the colours you feel most drawn too. Try not to think too much about it 'making sense' in a realistic way - focus more on your colour choices, how they feel and fit together.

Framing Questions:

Thinking about yourself and your own voice, how do you feel this may have changed with the shifts in the world around you?
Are there multiple versions of yourself?
What role do these versions play in your life?
How does your voice and being heard fit into each of these selves?
Thinking along the lines of all of us showing different elements of ourselves to different areas of our lives, do you find yourself showing different parts in your work life compared to your home life?
What elements of yourself are common between all versions?

In Linder Linder's work, the subject’s voice has been compromised. An image of the lower portion of a woman’s face has been crudely ripped from a magazine and is being held in front of another model’s own face as a speechless surrogate. Inert and in-expressive, these pictorial lips become a mask and a muzzle.

Even as it cites the stylistic codes of high fashion photography, rather than the makeshift and DIY character of punk’s visual coding, this photograph personifies the core principles of the punk ethos. More than any other cultural phenomenon, punk recognised and amplified the political possibilities of the voice. Unsettling the hierarchies that demarcate the vocal and visible from the voiceless, particularly in relation to class, punk rejected and reset the narrative of comfortable conformity. Alerting us to the mechanisms of an entrenched patriarchy – reliant as it is on the voicelessness of women – Linder performs the same feat.

Art Making Activity:

Create a cardboard mask

Using cardboard, create a mask for yourself. Cut out different shapes to layers over your base face shape to show some areas and cover others. You can make this as abstract or as realistic as you like.
When you have added all the shapes and layers you like, colour them using multiple colours, patterns and materials.
How does this created face represent the different versions of yourself and how they all fit together in a unified whole?

Framing Questions:

Thinking about animals, what role to they play in your life?
Do you share your life with special animals?
Are there animals which you have memories of?
Are you drawn to a favourite type of animal?
How does it feel when you think about animals? and any special ones you have a connection with?
What do animals represent in your own life?
And in the wider world for you?

Louise Weaver concentrates on ideas about metamorphosis, evolution and representation, animating animal and plant forms with a sense of wonder and whimsy. Among the modelmakers who have dominated the younger generation of sculptors in Australia over the past decade (Callum Morton, James Angus and Ricky Swallow, for example), Weaver has brought a distinctive feminine voice to this important strand of contemporary art.
The creatures and environments she creates are obsessively covered in crocheted, stitched, woven and sewn coverings. Apart from enhancing the original form, these epidermises suggest processes of self-transformation, fashionable personal display and a nature subject to the same glossy media fantasies that we are.

Weaver’s work can be situated within Melbourne post-pop art, an important trajectory in Australia since the early 1980s. Her animals relate to the humour and satire of artists such as Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Jenny Watson and Linda Marrinon. Her synthetic interpretation of the physical environment, as evident in her room installations, could even be connected to the high-coloured fantasy that is evident in many of Howard Arkley’s depictions of suburban houses and interiors. Her use of fabric and emphasis on surface also connects with artists such as Mikala Dwyer and Kathy Temin.

Art Making Activity:

Using what art materials you have, create an animal or collection of animals.
These animals can be drawings, made from found objects, painted, made from clay or play dough, or even lego.
While carting your animal, think about why you chose this animal and what they mean to you.
It might be a family pet, a childhood pet, it may be wild animals you love seeing, it may be an animal you have never met but are drawn to the way it moves, looks, feels.

Framing Questions:
If you have old family albums, take them out to look through. If you don't have printed photographs, scroll through your camera roll on your phone starting at the very beginning.

Slowly look through the images. Focus on ones which show people and activity.
Who are those in your photographs?
If you were there, can you remember what was happening in the photos?
If you weren't, what do you think they might have been doing?
What do you think they might have been saying to each other? What might they be feeling at that point?
Find an older image which features you doing an activity you most enjoyed.
How does it make you feel remembering that time and that activity?
Who were you with?
What did/does this mean to you?

Barbara Morgan was a dynamic and innovative interpreter of 20th-century American dance who remains the chief influence on contemporary photographers such as Lois Greenfield. She was born in Kansas but grew up in California, where she trained as a painter. From the outset her subject matter tended toward an exploration of rhythmic motion. She met Edward Weston later in the 1920s before moving to New York. It was not until 1935 that she turned completely to photography, the same year that she met Martha Graham with whom Morgan shared a lifelong friendship and working relationship. Over the following decade she photographed dancers such as Graham, Merce Cunningham and many others, which resulted in the portfolio ‘American modern dance’ 1935–45. Her published work includes a major monograph on Graham from 1941 and ‘Summer's children: a photographic cycle of experience with children's camp life’ 1951. Morgan's interests were broad and crossed into many disciplines including archaeology, anthropology and literature. She counted among her close friends Berenice Abbott, Wynn Bullock and Minor White, and she was a founding member of ‘Aperture’ magazine which dedicated a special issue to her work in 1964.

‘Children dancing by the lake’ is an example of Morgan's outdoor work and exhibits her hallmark vibrant interpretation of movement and form. The leaping children, their long shadows set against a pale sky and limpid water, are full of life and expression. As Morgan herself noted: ‘I'm not just a “Photographer” or a “Painter” but a visually aware human being searching out ways to communicate the intensities of life.’1

1. Patnaik D P 1999, ‘Barbara Morgan: modern masters of photography’, Aperture, New York p 10

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Art Making Activity:

Pick a favourite image from the album.
This can be one from your life, or one before your time with older generations.
spend some time with the image and feel want comes up.
Write down the story of this image. Include as much detail as you like and try to include how it feels, as well as looks. If there are people, what would they be saying to each other?
This can be a real memory or an imagined one based on the image you have chosen.

Framing Questions:

How has it felt during this time to be doing quite a lot of waiting?
What has this meant for you?
Have you felt there has been waiting time or not?
When you think about waiting - waiting for others, for events, for yourself - what do you notice in your body?
What physical responses do you notice?
Have there been other times where you have noticed waiting in your life?
What did that mean for you and how did you sit with this?
As time as continued, does waiting feel any different now then when this period first started?

Through subtle digital manipulation of the body and facial features of her subjects, Lux creates eerie doll-like creatures with glazed eyes, porcelain smooth skin and subtly ill-proportioned forms. The resulting portraits contain an uncanny blend of mute childish innocence and the self-contained stoicism of adulthood.

Lux’s images of children recall those of the old masters, such as Veláquez, Runge and Bronzino whom she cites as main inspirations alongside German photographer August Sander. Lux has stated in an interview with Louise Baring for the ‘Telegraph’ (UK) that she uses children ‘as a metaphor for a lost paradise’. Dressing her young models in past fashions (often of the era of her own childhood) suggests the child’s game of ‘dress ups’ in order to be an adult yet somehow played out in reverse. That is, Lux’s children do not seem like children at all, but rather like serious world-weary adults manifested in childish forms.

Art Making Activity:

Create a doll using any materials you have available. This doll might be an existing object you have already, a paper cut doll or one fashioned from textiles.
Use this doll to act out some activities you would like to do when you can move out of physical distancing.
What have you been most waiting to do?
Use role play to imagine how these activities might look, sound and feel again.

Framing Questions:

What does an abstract form mean to you?
How does this work feel?
Is there a quietness or activity you sense here?
What do you notice about colour and shape?
What can you notice about yourself when looking at this work?
How does abstract art make you feel? Is it work you are comfortable with or uncomfortable?
What do you like about this work? Why?

Klippel’s constant attempts to find more effective ways of constructing objects that articulated his desire to express the ‘static state’ in sculpture – that is, “those works which have a quiet, serene, timeless quality” – is also what drove his evermore thoughtful and analytical experimentation with ‘the language of forms’Indeed, throughout his artistic lifetime, Klippel developed a formidable conceptual vocabulary – a deep understanding of the elements of visual language. It is for this reason that Legge can claim Klippel to be “the Shakespeare of sculpture”. In an interesting historical aside, both were artists who died on their birthdays, something that Klippel’s partner, sculptor Rosemary Madigan, claims he would have seen as particularly appropriate – there was “a circular rightness about it”.

A lesser known but nevertheless important aspect of Klippel’s oeuvre are his drawings and collages. Unlike many sculptors, Klippel’s drawings, while connected to the concerns of his sculptural practice, stand alone. He also executed a vast number of striking collages, often constructed from coloured paper. Christopher Chapman, a former curator in the drawings department at the National Gallery of Australia, describes the process of cataloguing his works on paper: “Klippel’s drawings are entirely experimental in their content and form. It is little known that his sketchbooks included designs for furniture and studies of marine life forms – all of which feed into his work as a sculptor.”

Art Making Activity:

Create an ink blot painting.
Place blobs of paint onto half a page where ever you like. Fold the page in half and push flat to allow the paint to blend and colour both sides of the page.
Open up your pages and allow to dry.
Once dry, using college materials cut from coloured paper, magazines, house hold items,
add additional shapes and patterns to your ink blot painting.
Try and bee with the process - do what feels good to you without thinking too hard about forming any particular image.
What do you notice about yourself during the process?
What do you notice about the way the work evolves?

Henri Matisse’s illustrated book Jazz (1947) is one of the most famous graphic works and arguably one of the best loved artworks of the 20th century. In Matisse’s first major ‘cut-out’ project, realism and abstraction are finally reconciled at the end of a life-long tension. With the cut-out technique, Matisse felt he had finally solved the problems of form and space, outline and colour. ‘It is not a beginning, it is an endpoint’, the artist stated.

The book’s title evokes the idea of a musical structure of rhythm and repetition, expressed through the handwritten text, which is broken by the explosive improvisations of the colour plates. Matisse’s subjects are taken largely from the circus, mythology and memories of his travels. They represent either isolated figures or paired forms that suggest a dialogue between artist and model. Despite the vivid colours and folkloric themes, few of the plates are actually cheerful. Several are among Matisse’s most ominous images.

Matisse stated that his manuscript pages represent merely a visual accompaniment to the plates and ‘their role [was] thus purely spectacular’. Despite Matisse’s claim, the text and plates are actually subtly and consciously related. The underlying themes of art and artifice find many parallels in the text.

Jazz represents one of Matisse’s most interesting statements about his artistic development and the act of creation, which he believed results from the synthesis of instinct and intellect guided by discipline.

Framing Questions:

Thinking about personal layers, how do you feel your heart is layered?
Are there different layers to your life?
How do these layers work together?
Are there hidden layers?
What do these layers represent and how do they make you feel?

Art Making Activity:

Using some coloured pencils, draw a simple heart shape which takes up a large part of your page.
Picking different colours, divide your heart into sections for what you love in your life.
Allow space for all the grand things such as your important people, but also for the simple pleasures such as Nutella. Give space in your heart to each thing you love and know there is room for everything.
If you would like to layer your heart, create additional hearts/sections and fix them to your main heart. They can either be glued down to keep layers beneath hidden or added to be able to life up and reveal what is underneath.
While creating this work, think about what it is you might have hidden under other layers and what it feel like to lift those layers.

Framing Questions:

Thinking about your every day life, what is it you are grateful for?
There is no limit to this list and you can add everything you feel thankful for.
While adding to your list, think about why you have added it.
How do these things make you feel?
How do they impact your life?
What would it mean to be without them?
What difference do they make every day?

Jon Campbell’s art is built from snippets of suburban life. Songs half-heard on the radio, signs glimpsed from a car and voices echoing around a backyard are transferred into works that can seem more like posters, lists or banners than paintings. But Campbell is looking for something fundamental in these fragments. ‘She’ll be right’ is no throwaway phrase. In it Campbell identifies the national ethos expressed in Australia’s idiomatic fatalism: ‘No worries’, ‘Yeah’, ‘Maaate, it’s all good’.

With a focus on text-based works, Jon Campbell’s recent work carefully constructs imagery with abstracted and geometric elements. Meaning is created in the negative spaces, hiding words and phrases within the surface image. Campbell implements this methodology to explore the colloquial language and culture of contemporary society, he also engages with the viewer as a critical part of the work itself as they decipher the text.

Everyday life provides the script: street slang, commercial signage and pop songs. Ordinary materials support its production, including enamel house paint, coloured pencils and permanent markers. The artist’s sustained attention to suburban shopping strips, barbecue conversations and pub-rock gigs charts what Williams calls the “pattern of culture”, making for an art that is a “study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life”

Art Making Activity:

Create your own thank you cards.

Using what ever art materials you have available, create thank you cards using images and text to show your gratitude for all aspects in your life you are thankful for - big and small.

These cards can be given to people (including yourself) placed up where you can see them, or kept as reminders for other times.

Make as many as your like, as often as you like.