Contemporary Australia: Women

110 What’s in a name? (details) 2009–11 Watercolour with pencil on paper 325 sheets: installed dimensions variable Installation views, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2011 Photograph: Susannah Wimberley Images courtesy: The artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney control the focus. To compose narrative by choosing what is seen and not seen. But a drawing has its own vulnerable physicality. A drawing, like a story, is deeply intimate and human. There, even with the technical skill of a classically trained artist such as Jennifer Mills, the human hand of style is inescapable. The less we hide behind claiming to speak the truth, the more honest we are being about the interventions we make between reality and depiction, between reader and experience. But it is a careful balance, a magic trick. You can’t allow yourself to smother the world in style. Mills’s drawings are intimate, human — they look back at you. They are warmer than replications of their original digital images. Her hand is the conduit that has returned them to an authentic humanity. In this sense, I find the Jennifers restored by style. These images of women, auto-commodified and public, return to a marketless privacy as one-off, handmade objects. They are suddenly more intimate and more present than any profile picture. Instead of the reproduction of the digital network, this is the witnessing of craft. We are no longer anonymous, but we are not unsafe; our real selves are in some way protected by all the projections. These Jennifers cut straight through to that authentic, occasionally lost person. There are infinite fault lines in our fictional images, and perhaps it is along those fault lines, along those flaws, that we trace our human connections. What makes us artists instead of record-keepers is also our imperfections. Style is not only an honest admission of our own subjectivity, but our way of bearing witness to the flaws in the mesh of images we inhabit, which we call life. These Jennifers have travelled through the hyperreality of the network, and come back home. They have stories. I feel curious about them. And I think that is why artists and writers are important. Not because we are outside the world looking in, but because we work with the connections. We are inside the world looking in, and looking out, and looking through. Jennifer Mills The full version of this piece was originally published to accompany ‘What’s in a Name’, June–July 2011, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.