Contemporary Australia: Women

22 Gosia Wlodarczak Poland/Australia b.1959 FROST DRAWING FOR FEHILY (detail) 2011 Pigment markers on glass 11–day drawing performance on the Fehily Contemporary indoor patio windows, Melbourne, Australia Photograph: Longin Sarnecki Image courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Gosia Wlodarczak Poland/Australia b.1959 FROST DRAWING FOR THE LIBRARY (detail) 2011 Pigment markers on glass Four-day drawing performance on the library’s staircase glass wall, La Trobe University Bundoora Campus, Melbourne, Australia. Project commissioned by LUMA/La Trobe University Museum of Art. Photograph: Longin Sarnecki Courtesy: The artist, LUMA La Trobe University and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Even when their preference is for the speculative, poised and conceptually elegant that refers only obliquely, or perhaps not at all, to feminist discourses — I am thinking here of Sandra Selig and Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, or the post-conceptual playfulness of Agatha Gothe‑Snape’s enormous wall painting — women today have inherited what earlier campaigns have won. Their reward is not only in the expanded fields of artistic discourses but in the ambition of their visions. ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ recognises this presence, this force: women, whatever their work, articulate desires and aspirations on their own behalf and are necessarily agents for change in society at large. More generally, the exhibition allows us time to stop, to consider what Australian women artists and filmmakers are saying and doing, right now. Who can say what paths they will take in the future? Simultaneously a celebration of multiple voices and an assertion of possibilities for the future, ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ offers a wealth of energies, ideas and provocations. And all this from only a few of the multitudes of women who are making a different world out of their Australian lives. articulating forgiveness to assert control of her situation as an Aboriginal person of mixed heritage; and in the photographic suite, TheMiracles , Deborah Kelly raids the pious imagery of Italian Renaissance paintings to record loving non‑stereotypical families. Marie Hagerty, on the other hand, asserts the fundamental role of women in one of the great narratives, her deposition revisiting the European imagery of Christ taken down from the Cross to be laid in the arms of his mother and Mary Magdalene. It’s as if she is signalling, very gently, to all our sorrows. The immensely vexed question of how women relate to the natural world is suggested in three sharply divergent projects: Monika Tichacek seems to embed herself in nature in enveloping watercolour paintings, with their wealth of minute life, whereas in Fly away home , her large-scale interactive work for the Children’s Art Centre, Fiona Hall emphasises the specificities of cross-species dialogue and asks how these are embedded in particular social and political contexts. Deborah Kelly’s Beastliness 2011, on the other hand, introduces modernist collage artists to feminist theorists like Donna Haraway, suggesting that naughty comic savagery is the secret life of outwardly demure appearances. 15 Finally, what about feminism? From the start, ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ has striven for a certain openness, even impartiality, about how women are working today. This is declared in the title: the ‘F’ word was eschewed to signal that this exhibition, and the film program, were open to the broadest range of projects. 16 Yet contemporary artists — both women and men — work in a profoundly changed landscape precisely because feminists over many years, and in many ways, have broken open older social and artistic moulds to encourage other women to step forward.