Angela Cavalieri explores the art of writing in visual form. In her large-scale, hand-printed linocuts, literary, religious and historical narratives eventually manifest as image. Sources include poetry, music, religious epitaphs and inscriptions on public buildings.
 
Fragments of experience and narrative find their form in Cavalieri's enlarged, broken and repaired text. Seeing the text as an image, she re-writes that part of history by re-working and integrating the text into forms that reinforce its physical and material presence. The narrative is constantly changing and rediscovering itself and new narratives appear.
 
Whatever the source, Angela’s inspiration derives from her migrant family background, Italian being her first language. It is this intimate and personal connection that Angela uses to play with the ideas and architectures of language, storytelling and culture.
 
Recently she has been exploring ‘music as storytelling’, particularly in the use of ‘word painting’ from Monteverdi’s operas and the early poets who inspired his madrigals. CANZONE – Music as Storytelling, a combination of art and music, was exhibited at fortyfivedownstairs Gallery, Melbourne, in association with the 2015 Melbourne Festival, 29 September – 24 October 2015.
 
The exhibition was a culmination of Cavalieri’s five-year exploration of Monteverdi’s madrigals, developed during a recent residency at La Scuola Grafica Internationale in Venice, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria and a previous commission from the Arts Centre Melbourne.

Angela Cavalieri studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, from 1981-1983. She has since participated in numerous exhibitions. Most recently, in April/May 2015, Cavalieri was invited to La Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice for a residency and exhibition.

Angela Cavalieri's Parole Viaggianti: Travelling Words, curated by Maroondah Art Gallery and LUMA| La Trobe University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011 is her most recent touring survey exhibition. Angela has also participated in The Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion in the World Project, 2011.

Cavalieri has been awarded several prizes including the Manly Library Artist Book Award, New South Wales 2011; the Geelong Print Prize Acquisitive Award, Victoria, 2009 and the Silk Cut Print Award, Victoria, 2000. Her work is held in many public and private collections.

Launch: Friday 4 March 6-8pm

Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine interrogates the Australian postcolonial in her film-based work Cut Colony (2012). Consandine explores in this work the relationship between subjects and unforgiving landscapes as physical expressions of psychological states. Both the clay pans and desert lakes of outback New South Wales set the stage for awkward and assertive interactions between the subject and the environment; tense performances that invoke and consider binaries of wet/dry, masculine/feminine, stillness/movement, open/contained, composed and uneasy.

Consandine explains, “The relationship that I have as a white Australian in this country to something that’s unnerving, unsettling about these expansive interior landscapes which for someone who’s living in Melbourne and kind of existing on the fringes of this continent… still finds it hard to reconcile herself with, as I think many Australians find it hard to reconcile themselves with their relationship to the Australian landscape and these central desert areas.”

Cut Colony will show in the Screeroom at NCCA 27 February to 26 March.

Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums, including sculpture and spatial practice, video and performance. Her research interrogates the body in the Australian landscape, and its condition in relation to the physiological and psychoanalytic elaborations of space and its emotion. Consandine has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice in the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She received a PhD from Monash University in 2015, and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents gallery, Melbourne.

In June/July 2015 NCCA ran its second Artists' Camp in the Top End for Indonesian artists. 5 Balinese artists and a Bali-based Javanese artist spent time in a number of Top End and Central Desert locations. They visited iconic sites such as Uluru, and were welcomed by Tiwi people on Melville Island. They made work – en plein air, in makeshift studios, on the road – and met and collaborated with other artists along the way.

The Camp was not without a few stops and starts, from visas to volcanoes. In some cases a delay meant more studio and touring time. There was a lot of travel overall – by car, plane and boat – yet the artists produced a large and diverse body of work that clearly connects with the places and people they encountered. A small selection of this work (including opposite image) formed the exhibition desert trail at NCCA (Sept/Oct 2015) focusing on two Camp firsts: its visit to the Centre, and the inclusion of female artists, Ni Nyoman Sani and Suryani. A major exhibition of Artists’ Camp 2015-related work will show at NCCA 23 January to 13 February 2016. 

6 artists – Made Budhiana, Wayan Wirawan, Made Sudibia, Made Suarimbawa (Dalbo), Ni Nyoman Sani and Suryani – were led on the camp by Melbourne/NT-based artist Rupert Betheras. Other artists who joined in at various stages include Emma Stewart (Alice Springs), Lionel Possum (Alice Springs), Xiaogang (Xavier) Yu (Alice Springs/Tiwi), Tom E. Lewis (Wugularr/Katherine), and Tiwi artists from Munupi Arts & Crafts, Pirlangimpi. Indonesian journalist Henny Handayani (Bali Arts) also joined the Camp for the first two weeks.

The Artists’ Camp 2015 follows on from NCCA’s 2012 Artist Camp which saw 4 Balinese artists spend time in two Top End National Parks and Darwin, culminating with The Artists’ Camp exhibition at NCCA (Aug/Sept 2012). The Camp recognises a seminal Top End precedent with the artist-in-the-field camps initiated by the late Colin Jack-Hinton (first Director of the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT) in the late 1970s.

The Artists’ Camp 2015 is sponsored by the NT Government, Commonwealth Bank Indonesia, and the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (Australia Indonesia Institute). NCCA also acknowledges the support and involvement of Mike Stitfold, Munupi Arts & Crafts, Djilpin Arts (Wugularr/Beswick), Injalak Arts (Gunbalanya/Oenpelli), Colin McDonald, and the Made Budhiana Gallery, Ubud, Bali.

Images of Artists' Camp 2015-related work by (top-bottom) Dalbo, Suryani, Made Sudibia, and Rupert Betheras; photos by Fiona Morrison

Something is growing in the Boxset: feral, spiral, fungal … 'tis the season.

I Virii imagines growth as both voluptuous and viral, realised through the artist’s characteristic crochet of (often) tough, tensile materials.

Merran Sierakowski is a Darwin-based artist who has worked across a variety of media (mainly print, sculpture, installation) over the past two decades, and who generally deals with current issues of environmental and humanitarian concern. She exhibits regularly in solo and group shows in Darwin, nationally and overseas and, among other achievements, has been a serial finalist in the former annual Togart Contemporary Art Award exhibition (2006-13). Her most recent solo exhibition, Not Waving … Drowning (an eco-marine-themed soft sculptural installation), showed at Nomad Art, Darwin, in May 2015.

‘Entelechia’ is a Latin word originating from the Greek term ‘entelekheia’ which relates to Aristotle’s philosophy describing ‘the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realised’. ‘Actuality’ as distinct from ‘potentiality’. For artist Rita Macarounas, it’s a term which denotes her Greek heritage and is akin to the idea of ‘being the best that we can be’. In this regard, Macarounas turns to the sunflower as a symbol of this state of being fully realised and of the cycle of life. ‘There’s a lot of doom and gloom around so I wanted something really intense to tell a story’, Macarounas says of this work which incorporates a gold leaf background in accordance with the philosophy and sunflower motif as well as harking back to previous training in the Greek Orthodox icon tradition. This work, showing in NCCA's Boxset over the Christmas/New Year break, belongs to an ongoing series of ‘Entelechia’ works, and marks the artist’s debut showing at NCCA.

Born in Darwin, Rita Macarounas studied visual arts at Campus Arts & Sciences, Athens, with Effie Halivoupoulou, and printmaking at Charles Darwin University with Mats Undén. Her art background also involves pottery and Byzantine iconography. She has been working as an artist since 1986, first showing work in the 29^th Pan Hellenic Pottery Exhibition, Athens, 1987. Macarounas returned to Darwin four years ago after a long period living in Greece, and is actively involved in the local arts and Hellenic community. Primarily a painter, Macarounas is particularly drawn to the colour red and all its hues (‘symbolising life, passion, fear, danger, wealth, speed, and attraction’). Gold is also an important component in her work and identifies her Greek Orthodox spiritual heritage. She is currently working on a project based on the Hellenic Diaspora which will be exhibited at Darwin Visual Arts Association in May 2016. Macarounas’s work can be found in private collections in Greece, Holland, Belgium and Australia.

Seed to Seed (Gallery 1) is a collaboration by Cairns-based artists Tijn Meulendijks and Claudine Marzik which has involved them in a series of exhibitions over the past 4 years cultivating a shared interest in the natural environment and abstraction, expressed through their different mediums: primarily painting (Claudine), and ephemeral plant-based installations (Tijn). ‘Although growing up in Switzerland and the Netherlands’, the artists write, ‘we both have been living in Australia for many years and we have an extensive knowledge of plant and plant material from Australia. In Seed to Seed, we engage with the cycle of vegetation observing the rules; we aim to capture its movement and rhythm, and to give form and shape using a similar perception. Although we are using different mediums, our views have similar aesthetic values.’

Seed to Seed comprises 2- and 3-dimensional works which respond to, and reinterpret Australia’s tropical far north including a site-specific installation of Darwin plant life.

Image: 'Seed to Seed', installation view (detail), NCCA, 2015; image courtesy the artists

Claudine Marzik is a self-taught artist, primarily painter, who is influenced by mid-20^th century Abstraction and Minimalism. Born in Basel, Switzerland, she migrated to Australia in 1988 and is based in Cairns. She has held around 16 solo or duo exhibitions in various cities around Australia and internationally (Japan, Switzerland), and including venues such as Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, and Kick Arts Contemporary Arts, Cairns. Claudine won the Painting Prize in the 2013 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Award (SA Museum, Adelaide), and the Primary Award in the 2012 Redlands Art Awards, Queensland. www.claudinemarzik.com

Tijn Meulendijks works with nature, and with vegetation in particular. He holds a Master of Floral Design from Hertogenbosh, The Netherlands (2004) and his lifelong interest in botany and the human perception of nature has become the greatest influence in a practice largely involving site-specific installation and works on paper. Tijn has exhibited his work throughout Queensland, and in The Netherlands, and including for key ephemeral sculpture-based events such as Floating Land, Noosa Regional Gallery, and Strand ephemera, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville. He is a past winner (2009, with Claudine Marzik) of the Port Douglas Sculpture Award. www.tijnmeulendijks.com

‘… this is the contemporary challenge of seeing through moments of clarity while holding with frail hope the complex experience of being human …’

Of Beauty and Sadness brings together three strands of practice from NSW-based painter Michael Galovic. The first strand represents Galovic’s practice as an icon painter in the Christian tradition. This is the discipline that he is best known for and for which he has dedicated much of his practice since graduating from the Belgrade Academy of Arts, Yugoslavia, in 1974. As an icon painter Galovic is particularly interested in the Crucifixion and Stabat Mater (lit. ‘the Mother was standing’ [Latin], referring to the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Cross).

Galovic’s second strand of practice is what he calls his ‘contemporary religious’ works. These paintings are strongly informed by the icon tradition but without adhering to all of its strict visual codes, allowing the artist to explore themes such as the Crucifixion more freely and to draw on wider influences including Paul Gauguin’s ‘The Yellow Christ’.

Galovic’s third strand of practice is his ‘contemporary non-religious works’ which embrace a range of mythological subjects and which arguably include his depicitions of Uluru in Central Australia, a subject which he began exploring around 16 years ago. Galovic's Uluru-related works form a major component of this exhibition. They reveal the way in which his different strands may converge given Uluru's sacred significance and his response to this, in some of the works, through the icon tradition.

After extensive travels around the world, Galovic settled in Australia in 1990. His work as an icon painter appears in hundreds of churches and religious institutions throughout Australia and overseas. He has held solo exhibitions around the country and the world, and he is a four-time finalist in the annual Blake Prize for Religious Art. Of Beauty and Sadness is his first exhibition in Darwin.

Above quote from Dr Rod Pattenden, ‘Dark Light: The Art of Michael Galovic’, in The Son of Man: Traditional icons and contemporary religious artwork by Michael Galovic’, 2014, p. 4.

www.michaelgalovic.com