Past Exhibitions

Songlines - Journeys Through Country

Travelling exhibition
ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery
Canberra ACT 2005
Gippsland Regional Gallery
Sale VIC 2004

My work, entitled Songlines, deals with historic and contemporary events and issues affecting Aboriginal people from the East Gippsland region. I explore ways in which people have survived and adapted to displacement from their traditional Country, and despite attempts at silencing their Aboriginality, have remained connected through kinship ties centred around new sites such as Lake Tyers. My focus is on women and their continuing role as keepers of the stories, traditionally passed on as they journeyed through Country - those storylines so critical to survival.

Until relatively recently the whitewashing of history erased, or made invisible black history. More was stolen than children; it was the silencing of culture for generations that has had the most enduring effect. The enforced removal of people to missions and reserves, or more accurately depots for collective assimilation, meant the silencing of language, of ceremony and of culture. For others, denial of their Aboriginality was a strategy for survival, a means of protecting their children from discrimination and from being stolen.

Temporal Fold

M16 Artspace and Gallery
Canberra ACT 2003

I use familiar patterns from a domestic past as a medium to interrogate, challenge and expose the many contradictions that lie below society's surfaces.

My concerns include the validation of the feminine experience and its transformation from 'low art to high art' through the use of personal metaphors based on my own sensitivities to life in the home, as a child, wife and mother. I have also drawn on my past practice in graphic illustration and production where I worked with textiles to dress the female body. More broadly I am also commenting on the corrosive effects of being seduced by the superficial values in our materialistic/acquisitive society and the allied loss of the spiritual.

Species - Introduced and Native

The Hive Gallery
Canberra ACT 2002

'Species' is an art exhibition inspired by Canberra 's Floriade. I use flowers to explore the human experience. The use of introduced and native species reveals much about the history of Indigenous and settler cultures. At another level the "flower "is associated with rituals and ceremonies - weddings, funerals and other celebrations. However, behind the seductive surfaces may lie less palatable realties.

Silent Generations

Alliance Francaise Gallery
Canberra ACT 2002

Silent Generations is an exhibition that draws on photographs from family albums - my own and those of friends and relatives - to reveal some of the intrigues and ironies surrounding black/white relations within families, and to make hidden histories visible. My work focuses on the celebration of survival, the discovery of family secrets and the peeling back of layers, rather than on the suffering and trauma that accompanied the process of assimilation. I used my mother as the key person for whom I witnessed the truth evolving the fragments of half truths falling into place; the uncles who were dark because they worked too long in the sun; and the separations. Shoeboxes of photographs revealed the costumes of assimilation; the fairy outfit; the fur trimmed coat; the ceremonial dress of the big day out; hat, gloves and handbag; the coiffed and tamed hair; and the sculptured body.

My journey, while celebratory and positive, is also about anxiety and displacement. This is seen in the awkward juxtaposition of black and white figures alienated from their highly coloured environments - the shallow space pressing the bodies like exotic butterflies in a specimen slide, and the sense of playing dress ups in someone else's clothes - sometimes playful, sometimes imposed. References to interior design, architectural features, women's crafts, and photography combined with allusions to the painterly surfaces of the great Flemish and Baroque artists give way to a personal and vernacular visual language that lies outside the more predictable political references associated with this topic.

Femmage

Graduating Exhibition
ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery
Canberra ACT 2001

I use familiar patterns from a domestic past as a medium to interrogate, challenge and expose the many contradictions that lie below society's surfaces

While both my drawings and paintings in this exhibition deal with the overall issue of feminine identity and the challenges mentioned below, the methods and processes differ:

My concerns include the validation of the feminine experience and its transformation from 'low art to high art' through the use of personal metaphors based on my own sensitivities to life. I have also drawn on my past practice in graphic illustration and production where I worked with textiles to dress the female body. More broadly I am also commenting on the corrosive effects of being seduced by superficial values in our materialistic/acquisitive society and the allied loss of the spiritual.

Another aim is to challenge the denigration of pattern and decoration and its extraordinary potential for art making. Within my own Aboriginal heritage surface makings and patterning of objects were demeaned as merely decorative until recent times. I identify with and take strength from artists such as Henri Matisse, Miriam Schapiro, Susan Norrie and Robert Zakanitch who dared to use and exploit pattern and decoration as mark making for diverse and serious ends. Matisse dared to use terms 'abstraction 'and 'decoration' interchangeably, Schapiro 'closes the gap between the arts and domestic crafts' and Norrie exploits contradictions through exploring seductive painterly surfaces from 'feminine spheres' of experience whilst Duchamp proved that 'context can make art'. Context including scale, colour and allusion, is a potent force in my work.

My drawings focus on the internal, interior spaces of the mind and body. This led to a series of drawings in charcoal rubbed and worked into coloured grounds exploring the eroticism of fabric, folds and the female body. It is suggestive of secret recesses and voluptuous forms with mystical overtones induced through veiling. Animated by the interplays of light and air heightening desire and passion, the female form is again referenced through drawings of vessels and corseted container forms, the illusory and various notions of beauty including making the ordinary extraordinary.

Where as my paintings focus on external shared spaces, the feminine experience remains and the use of lushly patterned and emotionally charged surfaces continues. Flowers continue as a powerful metaphor combined with wallpaper designs to evoke past associations with adorned domestic interiors, converting objective into subjective (eg houses into homes) and feminising spaces. The siting of these surfaces within architectural frameworks such as cornices, architraves, mantelpieces etc. both increase the tension between the feminine and the masculine, and contextualise the viewing space as a total experience not dissimilar to an installation work.

© Helen S Tiernan
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