It was early on a Saturday morning in autumn and I was on the bus planning to go to the state gallery but checked my phone because for a couple of weeks I’d seen notices of Fraser’s exhibition in emails. I’d actually received advance notification almost a month earlier, probably because I’d previously bought – critic’s disclosure here – one of the artist’s little ceramic sculptures. I took a shine to Fraser’s work as it was portrayed in a February 2014 email the gallery sent out to its list of patrons, whereupon I bought it and had it shipped to Queensland. I was living there at the time near my mother’s house and kept my eyes peeled for value.
Now, sitting on the moving bus, I lodged a booking to go to an artist’s talk in the early afternoon. I got off at Central and, instead of walking up by Surry Hills, I entered the train station to use the conveniences, then got on the light rail and took it to the QVB, from where I walked through Hyde Park to get to the AGNSW. Inside the front door a young woman stopped me to ask if I needed assistance and when I asked what was on rattled off a list. These included a talk on Indigenous art – she pointed to a young man waiting in the gallery foyer – which was to start in 10 minutes. I drifted off and poked my head in the bookshop door, picked up a book I thought I might like to read, then sat down on a settee to wait until 11am rolled around.
The talk was interesting and involved some works on the ground floor which the gallery had commissioned from Aboriginal people as well as Tiwi Islanders in the 1950s. I learned a great deal in a short space of time, then we headed downstairs to see some more contemporary works of Indigenous art, this time by a Torres Straight Islands producer.
A cup of coffee and a short visit to the food exhibition delivered meaning. The waitress had sat me down near a young woman seated at a standalone table wearing a long black shirt and a white woollen sweater. The idea came to me that I should strike up a conversation but I felt old and awkward, so just used my fingers to scroll through social media while I drank a tepid coffee. In the Asian gallery – where the food exhibition was held – I saw a few minutes later a painting (see below) that echoed my recent experience. Titled ‘Southern beauty’ the painting is by Chinese artist Li Jin.
It shows a young woman in a qipao looking awkward at a restaurant table. Done in ink and colour on xuan (rice) paper, it is a whimsical and entertaining portrait of femininity where the subject is not entirely confident in her appeal but where she nevertheless deploys it to best effect. Almost despite her true desires.
I left the gallery and walked through the park near men playing soccer, then went up William Street and over the hill to Rushcutters Bay. It started to rain for a moment, then relented – by the time the event ended it was only windy – but I was very early. It wasn’t 1pm and I mooched about as patrons gathered and at about 1.40pm Ali Yeldham knocked something against a bottle to get people’s attention and started the discussion.
At home I had placed Leah Fraser’s ceramic statue ‘Full moon rising’ on top of a bookcase, which was free – without charge – and that had been listed on Facebook Marketplace. Along with it went a wooden Japanese stamp and the Chinese box I’d had downstairs on the busy entertainment cabinet. There are also some rocks from my old place in Pyrmont and a flat, basalt roundel the original purpose of which I’m ignorant of; I selected it for inclusion because in its absence the rocks’d only number four.
Five being more auspicious. The bookcase has a chipboard construction but is sturdy in the old-fashioned 70s style of low-cost household furniture. Since it deprived me of no cash I’d no reason to quibble over such details as the stain in the top – which I covered with an orange dining placemat of mum’s that had been embroidered with a dove at some point in the far distant past. (I’ve got a set of these placemats in the kitchen cupboard ready to use – in Pyrmont they’d been stuffed away in the hall cupboard and were, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible.)
Before the talk started Fraser had been introduced to me by Will Mansfield. She is glamorous and quite stunning, resembling Keira Knightley – and in fact Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ is in the bookcase in the above photo – and, though not as tall as the British actress, she has poise. When Will mentioned some ideas I’d expressed about her art, Fraser seemed to want to run interference – she smiled and laughed and turned her head to the right as though something witty had been said but avoided commenting – though Yeldham later took up the same theme. I’d thought that Fraser’s paintings exploit conventional ideas about femininity while also challenging them. This was briefly discussed as the two of them stood in front of the small crowd in the gallery, everybody waiting to hear something new that might help them to understand questions raised by the confusing world in which they live and for which Fraser’s work seems to have answers.
Above: The night was heavy but the air was alive
While fey and attractive, Fraser is clearly knowledgeable about that world, and her artworks are titled as though with lines of poetry in a way that Craig Waddell also uses for his paintings. Waddell’s impasto statements are unlike Fraser’s delicate female figures – each of them enclosed (as Fraser mentioned during her talk) in a narrow space – in which the hands are especially prominent. Fraser said that her figures might be about to be hugged or stroked, but in some of the artworks (see image below) the subject is holding something in her long, icon-like fingers.
Above: She flew light night from land to land
The theme of darkness embodied in the name of the show is echoed faithfully in the titles of many of the paintings, which are done in acrylic on polyester canvas. In one of them (‘Let her go into the darkness’) a woman holds in her grip a long spray of stars, the tips of her fingers feather-light but competent for the task – as though holding onto the night itself were a power she resolutely but uniquely commanded.
Is it a power she wishes to possess? In another painting (see below) the woman holds a knife and uses it to prick her finger, whereupon a drop of blood is visible on the pale skin. In this painting Fraser uses a kind of border around the figure, the paint shimmering with suffused intensity and outlining the figure like a halo.
Above: I was charged with life
In her talk, Fraser mentioned her love of 16th century Italian paintings and named Botticelli as an influence. She said that in such artworks there is always a plethora of objects adding meaning and signification to the whole, and in her own works it is nature that serves this purpose, for example in the work shown below.
Above: Some strange music drew her in
Here, as in other paintings in the show, are birds and flowers. The latter reminding me by the shape of their petals of hydrangea but with the difference that here the blooms are on vines, whereas in real life hydrangea are clearly bushes. And the birds resemble a honeyeater, perhaps such as you might see feeding off and pollinating flowering gum trees around Sydney.
The feminine is not only expressed in Fraser’s work via the subject, but also through the rhythms used to create the composition, as in the painting above where vegetal vines strike up a chorus with the woman’s hair and with the unusual and almost Indigenous white veil in which she is cloaked. As in most of the works the eyes are oddly-coloured (in this case, black) and eerie, as though we were looking at an alien from another planet come to visit Earth and to describe all the ways in which we are abusing Her. The small teeth in the woman’s mouth seem to be about to serve to help form words. The mouth is slightly open, as though in casual speech. What is she wanting to say?
Once I was on my way home I pondered the juxtaposition of the AGNSW talk and Fraser’s show, and how they both contained messages about our society and the ways that we are using the Earth. In one of the bark paintings I’d had explained to me that morning, backburning was depicted by a traditional artist of Arnhem Land. The exercise doesn’t go as planned, however, and the fire spreads out of control. To escape censure, the man who’d been in charge changed himself into a bandicoot. Also visible in the painting was a crocodile with a burnt back, where the flames from trees overhanging the body of water in which the beast was lying had singed its skin.
Fraser’s art goes to similar places in different ways, though there’s also a strong storytelling component to the works on display on Saturday. It’s not clear who has agency in the paintings. Is it the women pictured? What about the darkness? Is there an implicit threat to their safety? Fraser’s early attraction to Wicca is expressed in some printed matter supplied by the gallery, but it’s not evident which form of the religious she cleaves to. If you go – as I did – to the main Wikipedia page, you can read about a wide variety of practices and denominations though they seem to hold in common the idea of a female god. Adherents’ connection to the Earth is also manifest in the account on the website. The movement grew as part of the same postwar counter-culture that spawned the ecology movement and looking at Fraser’s work you quickly pick up reverberations of this, too.
Above: I crushed the fragile white petals in my fingers. The scent was like oblivion, a trance
Yet this is clearly not the whole story (a species behaviour, we seek to make meaning out of what we perceive). Connected with an overtly environmental theme is another one that is also chained to the feminine, and it is here that, for me, the mystique of Fraser’s art most strongly resides. Like most contemporary art, Fraser’s is aware of itself in its context. I’ve already mentioned the method of titling the works, but I also felt ideas about how women live in the world, and one of the women at the show who wore what looked like a 1960s Indian cotton dress – mum used to sell such garments in her gift shop in Vaucluse – with an elaborate pattern printed on it made me think of the many women I’ve known over the years who have gravitated into my orbit like crazy stars.
Stars perhaps like the ones in the hands stroking the exposed figure in the painting above, the extended title of which is like part of the figure’s accoutrements. Whose hands are those that reach out from the margins to touch the raised knee or to dawdle in the flowers adorning her blue hair? Are they benign or malicious? Would they heal or can they, instead, hurt?
If the woman seems unhappy perhaps this is also an illusion. What was certain on that Saturday was the cold of the afternoon that closed in as I stood there among my coevals – people I’d never otherwise meet – and again I spoke to none of them, and when Fraser had finished regaling us with some mysteries of her practice I popped out the front door onto the street, scampered quickly up the hill, got on the train, and came home to make my weight-watcher’s dinner: a tomato with a half-fillet of perch baked in the oven and the juice of a lemon from the tree in my garden.
