Del Kathryn Barton • the Highway Is a Disco
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del KaTHRyn bARTON • THE HIGHWAY IS A DISCO • PUBLISHED TO ACCOMpaNY THE EXHIBITION at ARNDT SINGAPORE OCTober 31 – DECEMBER 6, 2015 ARNDt ART AGENCY ≥ 2015 ≥ CONTENTS 4 Introduction 9 Studio 19 Paintings 81 Sculpture 95 Collages 117 Film 127 Appendix 129 Biography 133 List of Works 133 Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION cutesy red shoes, spotty socks and a look of imperious detachment an expression which is found at the core of all Del’s paintings with their focus By Michael Young on womanhood and creation spiced with a hefty frisson of sexuality. “The sexuality … naturally evolves. There is a part of me that doesn’t always understand that but in terms of the vulnerable, exposed, empowered female (it) is something that I am very passionate about.” Del brought my attention firmly back to earth preempting a question asked by others so many times before. What does it all means? “I feel less Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton has a fertile imagination that capriciously need to explain the narratives … or be too analytic about them,” she said. She leads her down metaphorical Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes in pursuit of asserts her painting is not a cerebral process. “Everything just bubbles up”, the charms, amulets and mysticism that inform her paintings. When we met she said. at her studio earlier this year she announced that she wanted to be, “… a furry The wellspring from which everything bubbles up can be found in naked woman riding a blue bunny into the universe.” Tongue-in-cheek perhaps her childhood and the hallucinatory states she would go into, and the body but conjuring a beautiful image, which, like her art, is surreal, otherworldly boundary confusion she experienced as well as the synesthesia that kept her and somehow totally plausible and seems to exist in a parallel universe ruled “head a kilometer from the real world”. Her constant passion for drawing over by doe-eyed anthropomorphic creatures that are fierce, feminine and proved a salve for her anxieties. “I often felt I had too much energy in my decidedly self-referential. body and didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. However the excess of Del’s studio is in a quiet inner-city Sydney suburb and is a circa 1960s energy she experienced in her adolescent years has come to serve her well. rather anonymous brick building somewhat out of character with the locale. In the studio as part of this bubbling process Del was working flat out Internally the walls and ceiling are painted white with harsh fluorescent lights on several signature paintings and a suite of collages which she will show that emit an omnipresent glow; the floor is carpeted and splattered with paint for the first time at Matthias Arndt’s Singapore gallery. She works slowly that spreads in elongated arcs. The building is angular and boxy with a roller painting virtually every tiny ornate and succulent mark on every canvas with door at the front large enough for a small truck to drive in. Architecturally it is just the help of her one assistant, Liz Ellis. “I struggle to make enough work unprepossessing. Del has worked here for three years having moved from her for everyone,” she said. Several weeks out from the exhibition opening both previous studio – “which was bigger with higher ceilings” – to be close to the remain confident that everything will be finished on time. Even so there were schools that her children began attending. But for the usual studio clutter it is moments during the creative process which both described as “terrifying”. all very ordinary and domestic; toys, small dogs sniffing about and children’s The ARNDT Singapore exhibition will be Del’s first solo show outside drawings do seem at odds with a world inhabited by naked females riding Australia and marks an important milestone in a career that began in the early blue rabbits. But behind the roller doors Del inhabits a richly imaginative 1990s and which has seen her twice win Australia’s Archibald Portrait Prize world as she navigates mystical fantasies and folkloric adventures peopled the annual open portrait competition staged by the Art Gallery of New South by imperious women with their harems of familiars. Wales. In 2008 she won with a self portrait with her children and in 2013 with Inside the studio the blue bunny Del mentioned was painted on a a portrait of actor Hugo Weaving. 4 large canvas which leant casually against a wall. The woman sits astride the 5 In the studio reference material inhabits every surface; numerous creature her white thighs covered with fetishistic markings as ornate as photographs cut from magazines and scribbled notes are stuck to the walls. Polynesian tatau and her breasts pronounced and fecund. She wears only Detritus clusters on several tables; jars of dried flowers, piles of sketch-books and art books are ubiquitous, plastic cups filled with Art Deco colored liquids, and the Rose based on a dark tale of the same name by Irish Victorian permanent markers, tubes of paint, color daubes on pieces of paper, Polaroid playwright and poet Oscar Wilde. Various delays, false starts and production photographs. On one wall is a large hand drawn calendar with mauve Post-it problems dragged the process out to two years. notes marking deadlines – one day in October is filled by a drawing of a large Premiered this year at the Berlin International film Festival The bloated blood-red heart. I preferred not to ask why. In the furthest corner Nightingale and the Rose is a story of unrequited love that a young male are several shelves housing dozens of neatly arranged tubes of paint, Golden student has for a professor’s daughter. He hopes that presenting her with a mostly, an American made water-borne acrylic paint that “performs like red rose will win him favor. The flower proves to be elusive but the nightingale a wash, like oil dropped in water” allowing Del to apply the delicate color goes off in pursuit none-the-less with dire consequences and dies an washes directly onto the raw white canvas for which she had become known. erotically charged death impaled on a long penetrating thorn that pierces It is a delicious anarchic clutter. Overseeing this mélange of creativity and the bird’s heart. Crawling around the studio floor on all fours alongside her perched high on a window ledge is an Amethyst Cathedral Geode. Amethyst two dogs Del showed me the miniature house shaped boxes which she has I later learned stimulates and soothes the mind and the emotions and is had made to contain the editions of the animation. Last month (August 2015) considered to be a powerful psychic stone of protection against witchcraft the animation won the best Australian Short film award at the Melbourne and black magic. Quite so. International Film festival. Del was ecstatic. And among this maelstrom are the paintings. Some are finished having As I am about to leave the studio I notice on one wall something written been worked up into Del’s complexity of color, of dots and dashes, tiny marks, by Del. ‘I am not a woman but a world’, it reads. The statement says a lot wet paint trickles, watery pools of color, and multi-colored marks that flash about Del whose position in the world is defined by a symbolic language that like fish-scales. Other canvasses have only just begun their individual journeys articulates what it means to exist in the multiple guises of womanhood and to from raw white surface others are marked with sinuous lines from the maker tread a finely balanced path between fantasy and domesticity. pens with which Del starts every painting. The large diptych on show here During our studio conversation Del has made it clear that was little more than two empty conjoined canvases standing on empty plastic understanding on a cerebral level is not a pre-requisite for coming to grips paint buckets with color flushing out from the left-hand side. with her art and that perhaps an intuitive visceral response is enough. On all sides is a menagerie of polymorphous characters skirmishing for “I really like … not knowing and just being inside the process and this attention. And always the same female faces stare out, angular and precisely is what arouses me every morning … something interesting and powerful can but lightly sketched they confront but refuse to engage with the world at come out of working with things you don’t understand,” she said. With that large. Always the same face, I ask? “They arrive at a similar place in terms of the roller door dropped down behind me and I left the furry naked bunny the emotionality … I am always looking for a duality between presence and firmly ensconced in the 1960s building but ultimately, en route to Singapore. absence looking out but being within,” Del said. Pinned to the wall alongside the diptych is something unfamiliar. It is a grid of A4 images created on a computer. They are early sketches for the suite of collages that go under the somewhat risqué rubric, Flower Porn and which Del will show for the first time in Singapore. “The figures are pretty 6 much all naked,” she said. 7 Even though Del works slowly nothing quite prepared her for the time that it took to make her first animation, the 13 minute long The Nightingale 1 STUDIO 9 15 2 PAINTINGS 19 20 the highway is a disco, 2015 acrylic on French linen 240 × 180 cm 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 32 wild carrot dream, 2015 acrylic on French linen 160 × 140 cm 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 the cosmos is disco lust, 2015 acrylic on French linen, diptych 180 × 240 cm each <−− − Open 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 within my pleats, 2015 acrylic