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“ROOM WITH A VIEW” THE PRINT CIRCLE CELEBRATES 40 YEARS.
2 July – 26 September 2010
The Print Circle’s exhibition for 2010 is an expanded “Room with a View” in the East and West Galleries of the New England Regional Art Museum.
Contact Details are as follows: New England Regional Art Museum, Kentucky Street, Armidale NSW 2350. Telephone: 02 6772 5255.
A beautifully illustrated catalogue is available to purchase there, as a souvenir of the exhibition and in it is a foreword written by a great and long-term supporter of the Arts and in particular of printmakers, Akky van Ogtrop. Akky is an Art Historian and Curator and Vice President of the Print Circle.
NERAM too is a fitting site for an anniversary printmaking exhibition, housing as it does a Museum of Printing History with a collection of 19th and 20th Century printing equipment, over a 1,000 printing blocks, and a comprehensive library on printing and technical manuals.
Individual artists from the Print Circle will be attending the exhibition to talk about their works. To find out more about these events, go to www.neram.com.au and follow the links, or ring the gallery on 02 6772 5255.
Below is reproduced the June 2010 issue of IMPRINT published by the Print Council of Australia.
studio news/exhibition preview
Room with a View
by Tanya Crothers
NSW-based printmaker
For their exhibition in Armidale, NSW, members of the Print Circle have chosen to interpret the title, Room with a View, very loosely. In most instances, the 'view' takes precedence over the 'room' and often the views themselves are far from representational. Myths, poems and fantasies find their way into many images, described by the printmakers as revealing their ‘mind’, ‘soul’ or ‘inner room’.
Christina Cordero is one artist whose images are informed by the real and surreal — involving evocations of stories and poems. Likewise, memory and meditation are the basis of landscapes by Jill Harris while Anne Bewah Wu's partially abstracted images are often based on reconstructions of the past.
Those who have responded more literally include Barbara Davidson, who gives equal importance to the room and the view in her group of etchings. Patti Somerset's The Golden Room contains several views from one room, and Helen Best's linocut triptych makes the most of a window box — blocking the view. Carol Shaw's Silhouette 1 suggests dappled shadows and reflections across a window rather than a view through it, and Debra Hannigan has defiantly turned the title inside out with her A View into a Room. However, it is landscapes of one kind or another that have emerged as the dominant response, whether figurative, as in Edith Cowlishaw's Evening, or abstract, as seen in works by Olwyn Cheung and MiEke Cohen — both using a limited range of forms and colours. Cohen's blobs and squiggles, with their references to red ochre rock walls, were produced after a journey ‘back in time’ while rocks depicted by Joanne Gwatkin-Williams ('rocks follow me everywhere') in her collagraph Rock of Ages are more recognisable as part of a coastal landscape.
So what was the intention of the printmakers in creating work for an exhibition entitled 'Room with a View'? The name itself cannot be regarded as a means of visually unifying the works since many of the artists have chosen to express their 'views', in a highly idiosyncratic manner. Deborah Wilkinson suggests that looking out is a means of seeing inside ourselves and, similarly, Jean Birrell believes that by looking into the natural world we acquire a sense of perspective.
The idea of seeing the world outside as something 'other' and separate from the security of the home environment may be appropriate to an all female group like the Print Circle. Established in 1970 and led by Sue Buckley (teacher at the Workshop Arts Centre, Willoughby), the Print Circle has since doubled its original membership of fifteen to become a well recognised and active organisation exhibiting and promoting printmaking in Australia and overseas. Forty years after the formation of the group, the work in this exhibition indicates that the Print Circle continues to ‘encourage experimental and innovative techniques within printmaking practice whilst supporting and exhibiting the work of women printmakers’, in accordance with its original aims.
Innovation takes many forms, including new(ish) media such as photopolymer used by Laura Stark in her striking work Venetian Window and less conventional media like collagraphs, with their potential for robust, textured images. Prue Crabbe combines text with etching in her meditative book of poetry entitled Pelagic Phenomenon, as does Robyn Waghorn in her bushfire triptych Between the Spaces, while Deborah Wilkinson uses text in conjunction with mixed media. Casting off traditional requirements that once involved a limited edition of essentially identical prints, Karin Oom has opted for the freedom of monoprinting. Other works in the exhibition include 'unique state prints' in which the raw printed image has been transformed with the addition of drawing, painting or some other intervention.
With their many variations on a theme, members of the Print Circle have created a stimulating and diverse group of works.
The Print Circle’s Room with a View is being shown at NERAM (New England Regional Art Museum), Kentucky St, Armidale (NSW), from 2 July – 26 September 2010. It will be accompanied by workshops and floor talks.
Keep a look-out for events on our website and we will do our best to keep our public informed.
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