In The art that made me, artists discuss works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection that either inspire, influence or simply delight them. This selection by Sydney artist Alice Couttoupes first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine.
Recently returned from her Paris residency as the recipient of the 2018 Eva Breuer Travelling Art Scholarship, Sydney artist Alice Couttoupes’ exquisitely detailed, delicate porcelain sculptures capture botanical histories of display and control, while rendering the fragility of our current ecological balance in fine bisque.
Couttoupes’ time in Paris proved formative. Beyond ‘watching Notre Dame burn up in flames’ and ‘finding the best, true croissant left in Paris’ (according to her French teacher), Couttoupes notes that ‘during the residency the scope of my research ballooned and directed me to look more broadly at the concept of a garden. I became interested in investigating gardens as in-between spaces, both public and private, and how those boundaries unfortunately often define our responsibility to the environment.’ Our human relationships with the natural world also thread throughout the Art Gallery of NSW collection works that have shaped her.
In memory of art dealer Eva Breuer, each year the Eva Breuer Travelling Art Scholarship is awarded by the Breuer Foundation, in collaboration with the Gallery, to a young Australian female artist for the purpose of travel and study at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
Fiona Hall Cash Crop
Of any single artist in the Gallery’s collection, Fiona Hall must have had the most influence on me. I really do have her work to thank for making me an artist.
I can’t remember when I first discovered Hall’s work – probably sometime during high school – but virtually every aspect of her approach has been instructive for the direction of my practice. The overarching themes of her work – histories of botany, natural resources, global trade, collecting and classifying (as explored in this work Cash Crop) – are all ideas that form the basis of my work.
She is such a fastidious artist in every way. Her meticulous observations and commentary on environmentalism, and the troubling ways in which humanity relates to the natural world, make her works so conceptually dense; there’s always such a complex web of entangled, interrelated threads. This density is also translated visually through her works. Whatever the material or method, Hall seems to obsessively master the technique and make compulsively. As a three-dimensional maker, similarly working on an intricate scale, I can really relate to Hall’s approach and her desire to produce works in series.
Yoshihiro Suda Rose
In 2015 I went on a residency in Arita, Japan’s porcelain centre. I travelled around before settling down south, and spent a few days visiting Naoshima, the art island.
I saw the work of Yoshihiro Suda for the first time at Benesse House Museum as I climbed a staircase. These teeny-tiny green weeds were poking out of the interior concrete walls. I remember walking around trying to get a closer vantage point, but it wasn’t really possible. At the time it felt like he was playing a trick or creating some kind of treasure hunt, but on reflection, the imposed distance was precisely his intent, drawing on Ma, a Japanese concept of space. I’m certain I don’t fully understand what Ma means, but it loosely translates to the negative space that surrounds something; the physical or mental breathing space that allows for considered reflection.
Yoshihiro uses magnolia wood to carve his sculptures due to its softness, but he also notes that 140–150 million years ago, magnolias were one of the first plants to have blossoms. There is a lyrical beauty to his perfectly realist flowers within the monolithic mega-structure of a museum, and they’re a nice reminder of where we sit as humans within time and space. As a fellow flowermaker, I have a fundamental appreciation for his magnificent skill as a carver.
Esme Timbery Harbour Bridge
I love Esme Timbery’s sculptures. They’re at once playful and yet so potent.
I first encountered Timbery’s work during my time at COFA, in a class with Tess Allas on contemporary Indigenous art. So often Tess managed to wrangle artists to come and speak to us about their work; it was very special. I learnt about the now 89-year-old Bidjigal artist, who comes from a long line of shellworkers. Whilst the creation of shelled objects for sale to tourists was something encouraged by the missionaries, the use of shells for tools, jewellery and ornamentation was a practice that Bidjigal women and other coastal Aboriginal communities have held for countless generations. The continued act of harvesting shells from different locations is part of maintaining knowledge of her Country.
These works capture so much. What I find special about them (aside from their total fabulousness) is that they attest to the forceddisplacement of Aboriginal communities to government-sanctioned missions; they speak to a continuum of tradition, the dynamism and resilience of culture; and they challenge art gatekeepers’ understandings of craft, art and what Indigenous art looks like.
Rosemary Laing groundspeed (Red Piazza) #4
Rosemary Laing’s photos are always striking to see in person – in their scale and lush intensity. I find myself returning to this series time and time again. It always seems to have relevance to things I’m thinking about at different stages. That’s what I love about it: being able to revisit it, and each time interpret it in a new way. I remember looking at this series during my degree at COFA and drawing on it heavily for inspiration.
The picture shows a patch of thick Australian bush, the ground cover overlayed with an obnoxious domestic carpet displaying motifs of European ideals of nature. I always saw this as a postcolonial critique of Australia’s invasion and the displacement of what already existed (not that the term ‘postcolonial’ makes much sense in Australia).
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about gardens; how they are these strange in-between spaces straddling the inside/outside, public/private, as an intersection between nature and culture, and how they define a zone of ownership and responsibility to nature. Yet outside the garden walls, care and duty often fades. Revisiting groundspeed from this perspective, I’m having quite a different conversation with it.