Adrienne Doig: It’s All About Me! Adrienne Doig: It’s All About Me! Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 12 December 2020 – 7 February 2021 Contents Foreword 2 Sarah Gurich Director, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Introduction 5 Martin Browne Director, Martin Browne Contemporary Step Into My Shoes 6 (Fausto Santini Please) Steven Miller Head of the Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library and Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales Interview with Adrienne Doig 13 Emma Collerton Curator, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Artwork Highlights 23 Adrienne Doig: Curriculum Vitae 54 List of Works 56 Acknowledgements 60 6.36pm Black Dress 2017, acrylic, fabric, appliqué and embroidery on canvas, 34 x 87 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Martin Browne Contemporary. Foreword It is a great pleasure to present This exhibition has been some This catalogue is a rich archive curator; Vicky Roach, freelance BRAG acknowledges the funding Adrienne Doig: It’s All About Me! time in the making, gestating since of personal and professional writer and critic; Alex J. Taylor, support of the Gordon Darling as a highlight of Bathurst Regional I first met the artist in 2013 while perspectives on Adrienne Doig’s Assistant Professor in the Foundation for the It’s All About Art Gallery’s 2020 exhibition working at the Blue Mountains work, and I thank each of the Department of History of Art and Me! catalogue, and the ongoing program. In a year of great Cultural Centre. As with all good contributors: Joanna Braithwaite, Architecture at the University of financial support provided by disruption, this exhibition brings things, sometimes it is wise to artist; Martin Browne, Director, Pittsburgh; Joel Tonks, Curatorial Bathurst Regional Council, Create joy, humour, and colour to our wait, and I thank Adrienne for her Martin Browne Contemporary; Assistant, BRAG; and Julian NSW, and the Bathurst Regional gallery walls. patience, professionalism, and Lisa Catt, Assistant Curator, Woods; Audience Engagement Art Gallery Society Inc. (BRAGS). Officer, BRAG. generosity. I especially thank Emma International Art, AGNSW; Tracey will tour to It’s All About Me! spans three It’s All About Me! Collerton for so enthusiastically Clement, artist and arts writer; This exhibition would not venues in Wangaratta, Tamworth, decades of Adrienne Doig’s work; embracing this project when she Emma Collerton, Curator, BRAG; have been possible without Blue Mountains, and Cowra over from her first embroidery created joined the BRAG team in 2018, Peter Cooley, artist; Jane Gleeson- the generous loans from the the next few years, connecting a in 1989, to her performance and for working with the artist White, writer; Samantha Littley, following individuals and range of audiences with Adrienne video artwork produced in the to curate such a thorough and Curator Australian Art, QAGOMA; organisations: Fiona Beith, David Doig’s bold, whimsical, and mid 1990s, and recent work James Lynch, Curator, Art comprehensive survey. Collins, Adrienne Doig, Deakin singularly unique vision. chronicling life in isolation. Doig’s Collection and Galleries, Deakin University Art Collection, Bruce singular focus on self-portraiture I thank Martin Browne, Director University Art Gallery; Steven and Jo Hambrett, Lloyd Harris, Sarah Gurich forms a consistent thread through of Martin Browne Contemporary, Miller, Head of the Edmund and Martin Browne Contemporary, Director, BRAG her practice, utilising different for his support of the Adrienne Joanna Capon Research Library Ross McLean, Louise Mitchell, November 2020 mediums – video, embroidery, Doig: It’s All About Me! exhibition and Archive, AGNSW; Julianne Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of and sculpture – as stages for the and catalogue, and for the deep Pierce, independent writer, artist Modern Art; and private collectors exploration of complex social and and abiding respect he has for the and producer; Melinda Rackham, who wish to be anonymous. political issues. artists he represents. artist, author and independent Dolled Up 2020 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Martin Browne Contemporary. 3 Introduction A friend of 20 plus years, I’d followed had bought in a market while on devastating bushfires of the Summer Adrienne Doig’s work keenly before a residency in Paris. In so doing, of 2019/2020, proved prophetic. offering her a solo exhibition in my she recalled the European vision of Later, in 2018’s Extra, she interposes galley in 2012. I’d always been taken Australia so popularised in the early her daily life chores and pleasures with the sly and self-deprecating landscapes of Eugene von Guerard, into the maelstrom of war that is humour in her works and admired John Glover, and W.C. Piguenit while the Bayeux Tapestry, while most that she understood that to be most at the same time including scenes of recently, in the domestic interiors of effective, irony is best applied with a her own daily life channelled through 2020’s Picture Me, she has created light touch. Yet beneath the humour iconic images by and of everyone paeans to the pleasures of home and sideways grins, Adrienne has from Fragonard to Marilyn Monroe. in these ‘iso times’. In all of these always had a very distinctive vision Adrienne has remained true to the Adrienne’s portrayal of self has in which her figure is central to her central cause that has guided her since shifted ground, evolving work, but in such a way as she is work since she started: renewing, with her ideas and vision. She standing in for us all. refreshing and reinvigorating the has embraced landscapes, both classic genre of self-portraiture for In that 2012 show, her local environment and art AD in Arcadia the 21st century. Ego, several examples of which are historical antecedents. The works exhibited here, Adrienne playfully from 2015’s Look Out! Series Martin Browne engaged with Australian art history, confronted the ‘here and now’ of Director embroidering images of local Blue environmental devastation around Martin Browne Contemporary Mountains flora and fauna onto her Blue Mountains home and November 2020 commercially-made tapestries of the possibility of an apocalyptic European forest scenes that she future that, with hindsight of the AD Gloriam 2011, embroidery on tapestry, 45 x 46.5 cm. Collection of Lloyd Harris and David Collins. 5 Step Into My Shoes (Fausto Santini Please) Louise Bourgeois famously the 1960s and 1970s, a period of an enormous range of craft and summed up her artistic practice social change for Australians and ‘domestic work’. A formative in an interview: ‘All my work in the of increasing opportunities for influence was Mrs McCabe, the art past fifty years, all my subjects, women. Her family was loving and teacher at Wangaratta West. Her art have found their inspiration in home life stable with none of the room ‘was an exciting space with the my childhood. My childhood has trauma experienced by Bourgeois. work all around the room and loads never lost its magic, it has never But for those who have followed of materials, match boxes, aluminium lost its mystery, and it has never Doig’s artmaking over the last bottle tops, egg cartons, tin cans. lost its drama.’1 The details of that 30 years, from the performative The thing I remember especially childhood are well known: the family works of the 1990s through to the about Mrs McCabe’s art room was tapestry workshop where Bourgeois three-dimensional and then two- the sense of possibility.’3 first found pleasure in making things, dimensional self-portraits, often Possibility is particularly important the strained relationship between using marginalised craft practices for artists who grow up away from her parents, and her mother’s early normally associated with women, the big urban centres, with their death. Hers was an almost textbook the influence of her childhood and galleries and art events and range example of the Freudian traumatised her pleasure in making things are of creative horizons. It allowed Doig childhood that became a catalyst just as important as they were for to imagine a world beyond her for artistic creation. ‘I need to make Bourgeois. own and after her last year of high things,’ she explained, ‘the physical From the start, Doig was surrounded school she transferred to the Ryflkle interaction with the medium has a by people who ‘made stuff’, Folkehøgskule in Norway, where she curative effect. I need the physical including her grandmother, a completed a certificate in art and acting out.’2 knitter and dressmaker, and her drama. But before this, the world of Adrienne Doig’s formative years, father, who turned the garage into ‘high art’ briefly invaded the family thousands of miles away in rural a woodworking studio. Agricultural home in Wangaratta when, in 1973, Wangaratta, a town in the northeast shows and church fetes were the fledgling Australian National of Victoria, could not have been an important part of life in rural Gallery purchased Blue Poles by more different. She grew up in Australia and these showcased Jackson Pollock for the vast amount 1 ‘Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father’, Writings and Interviews 1923–1997, edited and with texts by Marie Laure-Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, MIT Press, 1998, p 277 2 Louise Bourgeois 2003, unpublished manuscript, quoted in Thomas Kellein, Louise Bourgeois: La Famille, Kunsthalle Bielefield, Bielefield, 2006, p 16 3 All quotes from the artist are taken from an interview with Steven Miller, 2020. MS2019.15/ARC449 Adrienne Doig Archive, National Art Archive| Art Gallery of New South Wales The Red Boots (Apple Core) 2013 patchwork, appliqué and embroidery on canvas, 78 x 105 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Martin Browne Contemporary. 7 of $1.3 million. All Australians, even began her art studies in Sydney, Street, the Sculpture Centre and those with little previous interest many of its assumed values and Watters Gallery playing host to in art, took note.