Every year the Higher School Certificate students – young people matriculating from secondary school – exhibit work at this gallery. It’s not a ticketed show, so the value is doubly good, but it’s not on that account that I decided to make this post. In fact, the quality of work on show was excellent though most of the works I’ve chosen to feature here are by girls.
The sole boy whose work I found was Jaeyoon Kim, who had studied at Epping Boy’s High School. This is an area that Asian residents of the city of Sydney favour, and it’s near to where my mother’s old nursing home is located. It’s a leafy, green suburb that has a major train station – serving two lines – straddling the M2 motorway that threads along through the north of the metropolis. The school is public.
Kim has chosen to show what he thinks are the dark lives of people with money, evidently something that factors large amid his peer group. He’s selected three views – I’ve only chosen one to show here – and has used sombre hues to demonstrate the loneliness of the elites, cut off, as he sees them, from the rest of humanity by their privilege.
I love the glossy, wet streets of Kim’s city (see above) in the series ‘Dark World of the Wealthy’. Kim’s chosen a country where they drive on the left but he’s put the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the car, too. I’m not sure why he’s chosen this configuration of elements through which to express his poetic vision. The auto maker’s badge is distinctly visible, the traffic light is green, and the roads are almost deserted. As in a comic book drawing, the buildings totter and threaten to fall over. But the feature in this oil painting is the satiny, glowing macadam of the roadway that stretches away, to the top of a hill – which forms a boundary – and captures the reflections of the car headlights, tail lights, and the traffic lights.
Next is the work of Sariah Cummings from Northern Beaches Secondary College, whose acrylic paintings feature fire. Inspired by the bushfires of the summer we had at the beginning of 2020, Cummings has created disturbing images that draw on the figurative tradition. Like a painting by Turner, Cummings’ pieces entice the viewer then throw their regard back in their faces as they come to grips with her poetic vision – a kind of dreamscape that resembles a Medieval conception of Hell.
Cummings' provenance in the Northern Beaches of Sydney – a pleasant part of the world that votes mostly conservative – also indicates a concern for the environment. Her work is strongly informed by narratives surrounding climate change.
The environment also features in Bronte Gooch’s drawings (see below). Here, in works titled ‘Detritus’, the meaning is clear but the method is anarchic and strange. I love the ephemeral, almost random series of marks Gooch uses to create signification in her work.
St Vincent’s College is a single-sex Catholic boarding school in Potts Point, an inner suburb of Sydney.
In Elizabeth Hayman’s ‘Scorched: Black Country’ the fires of last year feature again but here in delicate charcoal on paper (see below). These works are situated right at the end of the exhibition, near the exit.
Phoebe Turner of Ascham School – a single-sex girl’s school in tony Edgecliffe – has taken a different take on the environment, one that chimes with Gooch’s.
The label on the bottle of milk that the girl in the photo is drinking from features the design of one of Turner’s photomontages (see above), which are titled ‘States of Flux’.
Plastic in the ocean is a major problem around the world, and Turner is not alone in seeking to embody a tonic political concept in her expressive work. Paige Colgate of Caroline Chisholm College has also borrowed her theme from the natural world (see below).
Colgate’s ambitious etchings are titled ‘Suburban Wilderness’. They augur well for the future and if she can stick with the medium over the coming years it’ll be – I have no doubt – a surprise to see where her talent (which is significant) takes her. Caroline Chisholm College is a Catholic school located on the western outskirts of the city, near the Blue Mountains.
More ephemeral are the messages in Nissa Violet Jenkin Brennan’s ‘Ephemeral’, (see below). St Columba’s Catholic College – where Brennan went to school – is located in Springwood, right on the western border of the city, in amongst the mountains and the retreats of lyrebirds. These works of hers were made with graphite and watercolour.
A completely different tack is evident in ‘Feast of the First Morning of the First Day’ (see below) by Jennifer Nguyen. This is a series of metallic prints made on a computer with the Procreate graphics program. Nguyen went to Canterbury Girls' High School, a public school in the inner west of Sydney that has seen significant development in recent years as industrial sites have been turned into blocks of residential dwellings for the expanding middle class.
Using just three colours – red, white, and blue (the colours of the Australian flag) – Nguyen has rendered a range of scenes that you might see played out in Cabramatta during the moon festival.
It’s instructive to see what subjects these young people engage with in their search for meaning. The predominance of private schools is not a surprise, and where you’ve got public schools you’ve also got people whose heritage is Asian. For the Anglos – for example Turner, Hayman, Cummings, and Gooch – the environment is the main focus of the artist in the world trying to come to grips with modernity and the onward press of time. Each of them excels in her chosen form, and while the method of rendering the world in each case is different, you feel a common urge to change the status quo.
Sometimes this emerges in an overly dogmatic and determined fashion and this indicates that today young people’s identities are forged within the collective in a way that is different from how the dynamic functioned when I was young.
In Brennan’s work in addition to ideas of ecology you also find traces of a search for other types of meaning, but these are equally associated with identity. Here, and also in Turner’s work, feminism is clearly a construct to grapple with, adding another layer of complexity to the difficulty of being young in a post-postmodern world where the challenges are so evident but the way to their solution seems more fraught than ever. Artists of this generation therefore have not only to deal with the broader consensus of society, but also with a less liberating consensus – that of the coterie wherein they reside.
Breaking free of the embrace of the one is just as difficult as breaking free of the embrace of the other, and here is where style can play a role. The states these works render in visual form are not in flux however. What I feel walking through my memories of this exhibition is a desire to find something fluid and ephemeral, a state of flux rather than a prison of ideas.
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