Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

by contemporary critics and was an ongoing feature of his work, and that of Kathleen's, for the following four decades.6 The relationship of Shillam's Reclining woman to Moore's recurrent figures of the 1930s and 1940s is observable not only in the design but also in Shillam's professed ideal, clearly adapted from Moore and Roger Fry, of'truth to material'.7The Helidon sandstone retains its patination and texture, and the figure seems to emerge naturally from the stone. Reclining woman's nonchalant, recumbent posture gives the impression that she is looking the other way — there is something of the bored fertility goddess about her, a sense of fecundity, of a relation to nature. All these qualities were irresistibly highlighted by her garden location. Forty years of being subjected to the elements bestowed a literal 'past' upon Reclining woman. Though not a narrative art work, the sculpture did have a story, a history etched into the form and inscribed onto the surface. However, in the cause of being accessioned into the Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, this process of synthesis has been disrupted. Reclining woman has been thoroughly cleaned and conserved, and the meaning of the work has inevitably altered. This was unavoidable, not only for the protection of other works in the Collection, but for the preservation of the sculpture itself. The moss that covered Reclining woman may have spread to other works, and the attached lichen's dendritic roots were burrowing into the stone, and would eventually have led to its disintegration.8 Museums are not neutral spaces in which each work displayed is able to enunciate its own tradition. In changing the context of display, a work's history may be concealed, or often forgotten: such works are, for most visitors, remarkably taciturn objects... they often say very little; and a sometimes quite considerable effort is required on the part of the historian, the art historian, the critic or the viewer to coax them into eloquence.9 Above Reclining woman prior to conservation work at the Queensland Art Gallery Left Henry Moore England 1898-1986 Reclining figure and mother and child studies 1978 Colour lithograph on thick wove paper 38 X 30.7cm Purchased 1979 Queensland Art Gallery Henry Moore Reclining figure: Prop 1975 Bronze maquette 12.7x28x15cm Purchased 1976 Queensland Art Gallery Museum obtained an eighteenth-century sculpture of the Saxon god Thuner, by J. M. Rysbrack. Originally commissioned for a garden, the sculpture spent time in the grounds of a preparatory school before being acquired by the museum, where it was initially displayed before conservation. Among the clean, polished busts of the rest of the collection it retained, according to Saumarez Smith, 'vestiges of its life in and passage through the outside world'.10 Like the Rysbrack statue, Shillam's Reclining woman has had much of her history erased. Except in the kind of documentary photographs reproduced here, there is no longer any visual reference to the sculpture's previous existence. This text therefore seeks to reinscribe that history. As Saumarez Smith also points out, the artist's original vision of an artwork may not everlastingly represent the most true and authentic appearance of that object. Artists and makers must be aware that absorption by the system launches an object into 'a long and complex journey in which it might be changed in both physical appearance and in meaning'.1 Leonard Shillam would not have been at all opposed to his Reclining woman retaining the marks and stains of her past, but he acknowledges that in these cases the antiseptic needs of the public institution will always prevail!2 Bronwyn Mahoney works as a research assistant at the Queensland Art Gallery and is currently undertaking her doctoral thesis at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Charles Saumarez Smith has described how in 1985 the Victoria and Albert IN FROM T H E C O LD 181