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The art that made me: Debra Phillips

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By the Art Gallery of NSW
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Photo of Debra Phillips

In The art that made me, artists discuss works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection that inspire, influence or simply delight them. This selection by artist Debra Phillips first appeared in Look - the Gallery's members magazine.

Sydney-based artist Debra Phillips treats photographic forms and technologies as prompts to speculation, and question marks to totalising concepts.

A recent Gallery acquisition, A perfect thing moves in circles 2017 (pictured), features multiple photographs of an object that has been rotated and recorded by the camera. At different camera angles it reads as a positive – resembling an apple core – or as a negative – resembling the leftover from a machined process. The object is in fact a silicon offcut from the production of a perfect sphere, used in the calculation of a new and dematerialised international standard for the kilogram.

‘There are some things that appear to resist photography; forms that shy from the camera, surfaces and materials drifting between negative and positive, reality and data composition. For me, the photograph is both an occasion for aesthetic reflection and a visual object to think with.’

Joy Hester Frightened

Having as a child lived in Bulleen, across the road from what is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art, I’ve always been interested in both the life and work of Joy Hester, her close association with John and Sunday Reed and her experience as a woman artist amongst a dominantly male milieu.

Possibly made as a reaction to WWII footage Hester viewed of concentration camp victims, Frightened conveys raw emotional experience through the eyes of the subject, which – due to her use of black-and-white and red ink brush strokes – depict pain, terror and distress but also an element of defiance.

I am drawn to this inward, psychological moment rendered by the immediacy of its production. It is realised in a fluid manner, responsive to the subject matter at hand and produced at speed, colliding together private and public spheres of life.

Hester was one of the only artists of her generation who had the strength to choose not to work in oils like her male colleagues, particularly as this also further isolated her artistic activities from the mainstream ‘centre’.

Francis Alÿs Untitled (study for The modern procession–Frida Kahlo)

In this sketch, Francis Alÿs uses basic, low-key materials to visualise an idea towards his performance The Modern Procession 2002, which is one of my all-time favourite works. Alÿs conceived of the work to mark the closure of the Museum of Modern Art’s building for renovations, and its temporary relocation of exhibitions to Queens. In a procession drawing on the energy of both ritual ceremony and street parade, copies of key icons of modern art in the MoMA collection emerged from the museum onto the street and were carried across town to Queens by a crowd of participants (including animals) to the beat of a Latin brass band.

Like so much of Alÿs’ work, The modern procession brought together art and the everyday, or the sacred and the profane, and involved multiple collaborators in its realisation. At the heart of the work and leading the procession was the artist Kiki Smith, carried aloft. I love this acknowledgment of Smith as a contemporary woman artist, held up high and carried through the streets of New York with both joy and reverence as a living icon, while those mostly masculine icons of modern art are brought down to the everyday level of reproduction.

Mervyn Bishop Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory

Mervyn Bishop’s photograph documents the historic moment at Daguragu (Wattie Creek) in 1975 when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam handed back the deeds to traditional lands to the Gurindji. In an accompanying symbolic act Whitlam poured a handful of Daguragu soil into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner.

The work conveys solemnity and a dignified sensitivity. This photograph is a powerful reminder of the optimism of the land rights movement and photography’s capacity for political agency. It’s equally a painful reminder of an unrealised acknowledgment of Australia’s First Peoples as the sovereign owners of this land, and the torment this ongoing refusal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty continues to produce.

Here, Bishop produced one of the most important photographic images in Australian history. It also hangs on the wall in the front room of our house. At a moment when the Uluru Statement from the Heart has been rejected out of hand by our government, I take notice of this image every time I step out into the world or return home. It is both a sign of hope and a call to consciousness regarding sovereign ancestral ties between land and people.

Imants Tillers 52 displacements (no 2)

I first came across Imants Tillers’ work in the late 1970s, when he taught at Sydney College of the Arts where I was a student.

The relationship of system-based and conceptual art practices to photography were key topics of discussion and strong influences when thinking about how to make work. I became drawn to methods of utilising numerical, chronological or alphabetical systems throughout my own practice, as it provided a way in which to reconcile art with everyday life.

This work comprises 52 paintings of reproductions of framed seascapes by the 19th-century American painter and illustrator Frederick Waugh from a ‘how to paint’ guide by Walter T Foster. Tillers produced one painting from these reproductions each week for a year, with the final works accompanied by 52 separate framed texts.

Tillers’ 52 displacements reminds me of
the method of play in one of my favourite books, Georges Perec’s novel Life: a user’s manual (1982). The failed quest of the central character Percival Bartlebooth to impose order on his world and seek understanding through applying systems to all aspects of life is hugely life-affirming.