The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Abeautiful and enduring myth 1990-93 Type Cphotograph 120x100cm Collection : The artist Marian Drew was born in Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia in 1960. She initially studied Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, then graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Canberra School of Art in 1984. She also holds a Diploma in Teaching (TAFE). Marian Drew has held solo exhibitions in Australia and Europe. She exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1990 and her most recent solo exhibition was at the Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney in 1992. She has shown drawings, photography and installations in group exhibitions since 1982, including 'Seven Queensland Women Artists of Distinction', Queensland College of Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1988; 'Empty Land', Camerawork, London, and UK tour; and 'Twentieth Century Fops', Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1992. In 1984, with scholarships from the West German Government, the Goethe lnstitut and the Dyason Bequest, Marian Drew studied experimental pho- tography and exhibited at the University of Kassel in Germany. She worked in New York in 1989 after being awarded a studio and travel grant from the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council. AUSTRALIA MARIAN DREW Marian Drew's work is represented in public and corporate collections in Brisbane including the Queensland Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Griffith University Art Collection and the Suncorp Collection. In 1993 Marian Drew was Artist- in-Residence at Somerville House School, Brisbane and the Brisbane Institute of Art. She lectures part-time in photography at the Queensland College of Art. Through her art, Marian Drew explores the mystery of the everyday, the currency of the past, and the universality of her own time and place. As her presence passes through varied planes, photographic surfaces and projected realities, her viewers enter aworld which is at once unsettling by its otherness and yet hauntingly familiar. Marian Drew's work is increasingly site- specific, her site being her own body, defined within her home studio environment, which is in turn located in a bay suburb of Brisbane. By focusing on herself, she in fact catches glimpses of intangible and unknowable elements which both connect people as human entities and distinguish them as individuals. 104 Large photographic prints map these wanderings. Each becomes a visual record of a private ritual which has been enacted before and for the open camera shutter. The final images are preplanned but not designed, often responding to notes, diary sketches and paintings. The interaction with various media is respiratory, regularly moving in and out of collage, photography, drawing and video. Drew's installation The cheerful girth ( 1993) represents a new development in her work. For the first time she has presented to the public one of her previously private instal- lations comprising large-scale drawings, collages and video projection. By means of this projection, Drew becomes a living subject as well as producer, bringing this fabricated environment to life with movement, ritual and laughter. Her nakedness evokes both nature and vulnerability, celebration and shame. This most recent work is informed by the artist's research into the history of the early settlement of Brisbane, records of the land- scape at that time and the culture of the local Aboriginal population. Drew laments the loss of so much of this culture and the lack of a spiritual base to contemporary Western culture. She states: I've always seen art-making as serving to satisfy that non-rational aspect of ourselves. Histori- cally, art-making and religion have gone hand in hand.They are connected in that they both tap into an intuitive way of thinking for their understanding and development. Explaining the world to ourselves in a rational way has meant that we no longer see the importance or the value of the spiritual, but we nevertheless feel an emptiness or hollowness in its absence. (Eyeline, Autumn 1992, p.27) Clare Williamson