Of pink marble and porphyry
2019 Geelong acquisitive print awards
Friday 20th September – Sunday 24th November, 2019
Geelong Gallery
Little Malop Street, Geelong
We are delighted that our print, A little palace of pink marble and porphyry, is on display as part of the 2019 Geelong acquisitive print awards until the 24th of November, 2019.
To celebrate, we have given a donation to Bush Heritage Australia to protect the habitat of the Western pygmy possum (Cercartetus concinnus) and the Powerful owl (Ninox strenua) who feature in this two-colour lithograph.
Though we’ve neither the prehensile tails nor impressive feathers, standing alongside our work at the opening last Thursday night, perhaps you will see why we feel these drawings always turn out to be self-portraits.
To jog the memory.
Artist statement:
“As soon the question “What is lost?” is posed, it invariably slips into the question “What remains?” …. loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained”[i].
As part of the Australian Print Workshop’s French Connections residency in Paris, we explored the collections within the Musée Fragonard, Jardin des Plantes and Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, we thought about how “the classification of animals, like that of any group of significant objects, is apt to tell as much about the classifiers as about the classified”[ii].
We then opened the cabinet door, and released a glass-eyed menagerie upon the page. Not rare, but there, save one, in a series of eleven etchings and lithographs, one of which you see before you now. First as an idea, then as a collage, before finally pausing as a drawing from which an impression could be made, an assemblage of Australian animals in an ill-suited environment.
Just as the collection reveals the collector, our prints reveal us, their very ‘stuffed’ and ‘stilted’ selection feels like a series of awkward self-portraits (of us all, perhaps).
These are specimens, removed from action, animated, possibly, by your vantage point in the gallery. An animated afterlife. “Animated precisely by what is not recoverable”[iii].
[i] David Eng and David Kazanijan, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David Eng and David Kazanijan (California: University of California Press, 2003), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp71r.5, accessed 3rd May, 2019, p. 2.
[ii] Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), xii.
[iii] Judith Butler, ‘Afterward: After Loss, What Then?’, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp71r.5, accessed 19th May, 2019, p. 468.
You can purchase an edition of A little palace of pink marble and porphyry, and other related tales, through the Australian Print Workshop’s online store.
See all of our available prints.
Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Contemplating marble, stucco, velvet, and gilding (detail), lithograph with hand-colouring. Image drawn directly on to the lithographic plates by the Artists and processed, proofed and printed in two colours from two plates, by APW Printer Martin King and hand-coloured by the Artists, at Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2019.
