stephen eastaugh
a good day tonight
17 september - 16 october 2010
artist talk:
3pm saturday 2 october
Stephen Eastaugh is Turner Galleries’ final artist in residence for 2010, and our visitors are in for a real treat.
Stephen is a very unusual artist, in that he has a nomadic, no fixed address, life style. He has travelled the world incessantly since 1981, living vicariously from one residency and exhibition to the next in over 80 countries, exploring and painting some extraordinary places in the process. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would be infected with wanderlust, as both his real father and foster father were sailors. Stephen also has another theory about his wanderings. "Biologically, there is a theory that, in each species, a few lucky or unlucky individuals get the job of reconnaissance. Meaning to wander away from the safe homeland to explore and possibly bring back information that may be vital to the family, community or species in the future.”
In 2009 he spent 11 months at the Mawson Station [the windiest place on Earth] in East Antarctica when he was the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow. He had to undergo a rigorous military adaptability psychological test to do this long stay. He noted whilst there, “the concept of home has become somewhat fuzzy in my head. That kind of makes Antarctica intriguing to me because Antarctica is no body’s home, and therefore it becomes strangely cosy for me. Work that out!” He also noted, "It is a fair amount of time to spend in a location that is extremely isolated and not your normal residency for an artist. Brutal lethal beauty, strange green lights in the sky and Sunday strolls on blue ice all eventually became normality. To absorb the brutality as well as the beauty around Mawson was somewhat tricky as was translating all my experiences down on the ice into art without being overly romantic, stupidly agog or just confused by the scale and light or lack of light. Antarctica really is the beauty and the beast of landscapes so I tried to get to know both these elements."
A selection of the artworks produced under these extreme climatic and isolated conditions are on display in this exhibition. A good day tonight, the name of the show and the name of a series of paintings, refers to the long, long dark winter at Mawson. Some paintings in the show are semi-abstract, but the landscape references abound. Several also have stitching, which in itself is an amazing feat in such cold conditions. As too is the attempt to shrink Antarctica into a manageable scale onto canvas or paper. Sometimes the scales are reversed, with small paintings of the striking empty landscapes contrasting sharply with large scale paintings of the ‘blizz-lines’ or knots in ropes.
Blizzard-lines are the rope and chain lines that are strung between all buildings at the station. In Mawson’s long winter nights, these became lifelines, connecting people and places. As such, they became an important focus for Stephen and his art. Another focus was the Nunataks, a nearby mountain range from which a panoramic vista of rock, sky, ice and void could be viewed. These small, and strikingly beautiful paintings, capture the vastness of the continent and the sharp contrast of dark mountains against white foreground and backdrop.
During his time at Mawson Stephen went on a demanding expedition to Colbeck to count the male Emperor Penguin colony at Tailor Glacier where the penguins battled the cold, starvation and blizzards whilst incubating their eggs. Here he really began to observe the mesmerising Aurora Australis phenomenon when the sun spits plasma and interacts with the earth’s chilly magnetic field high above the polar region. It became the focus for a new series of paintings for this exhibition, Outlandish [Aurora Australis], where he captures the truly outlandish lightshows that appeared regularly that winter.
He wrote at the end of 2009, “I will miss this unreal, icy lifestyle, cocooned in thermal underwear and surrounded by nothing but nothing. It is not easy to sum up this winter-over experience. This year has been more a charm than a hex; a long, stupefying intense spell that has been extremely demanding but extraordinarily worthwhile.”
[Art Monthly, #226, p66]
Stephen was born in Melbourne in 1960 and graduated from the Victorian College for the Arts in 1981. As a young artist he exhibited along side Dale Frank, Stieg Persson, Louise Hearman, Bill Henson, Mike Parr and Fiona Hall, but his wanderlust saw him obsessed with travel rather than staying in any one location to build a traditional art career. His CV is impressive, listing 68 national and international solo exhibitions since 1987. His travelogue is even more impressive. So too is the list of collections that house his work, including the National Gallery of Australia, The Phillip Morris Collection, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Margaret Stewart Endowment, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Museum of Modern Art at Heide, The Baillieu Myer Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, The Loti and Victor Smorgon Collection, Parliament House Canberra, Australian Antarctic Division Collection, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, City of Hamilton Art Gallery, Artbank, Faber Castell Collection, and the Kerry Stokes Collection.
Stephen’s residency is proudly sponsored by the Turner Galleries Art Angels and his accommodation and studio kindly supplied by Artsource.
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
- TURNER GALLERIES | showcasing contemporary art
at 470 WILLIAM STREET NORTHBRIDGE WESTERN AUSTRALIA 6003 - TURNER GALLERIES HAS NOW CLOSED.
This website is an archived record of the exhibitions and artwork shown at the gallery. - Turner Galleries acknowledges the Whadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Owners of the lands and waters where Turner Galleries is situated, and pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging.
- Website © 2000-2024 TURNER GALLERIES. All images are © the artists and are not to be used without permission.
- This is a millapede project.