Bonus Content: Pastel Hick on Film

 Styling / Creative Direction / Photography on 35mm film : Saskia Edwards

Creative Direction: Jonathan Rae

Model: Hamish Hill

Clothes: Aidan Renata / Sally Edwards

Rusted fields, 

Frayed wire.

Yeah, my own pastel hick.

View the original spread here.

Pastel Hick

 Styling / Creative Direction: Saskia Edwards

Images / Creative Direction: Jonathan Rae

Model: Hamish Hill

Clothes: Aidan Renata / Sally Edwards

Rusted fields, 

Frayed wire.

Yeah, my own pastel hick.

Julian Meagher 'Alone in the Sun' at Edwina Corlette Gallery

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

I think everyone has had a moment where they become conscious, and feel very acutely, that they are a product of their parents. Maybe it’s your same fear of cats as your mother, or that you like your toast slightly burnt like your father, or that you’ll always vote Labor because they told you that’s what’s right. 

But more than these obvious, more tangible things, your parents can deeply and permanently instil in you your values, opinions and beliefs. And it’s only when you're spraying your neighbour’s Tabby with your garden hose do you realise it.

But what about their parents? And your parents’ parents’ parents? How has that influenced you?

Well, that’s what painter Julian Meagher is looking at. 

“I think we can all see traits of ourselves in our mum and dad and, then I’m looking at further, well they’ve obviously got their parents in them as well,” he told me.

“We all must inherit something and as a nation, we have these shared traits as well - our love of drinking, our love of the beach, our identity, what makes us who we are?

“And I think as you get older, you start to look back and ask, ‘Why am I, who I am? Why do I have these values? And why do I react in these ways?’”

The hero piece of this series, ‘Alone In The Sun’, is a shadowy image of a group of turn-of-the-century women. They pose for a photo in an austere style with seemingly transparent faces. It has the same feeling as Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’. It’s eerie and also distant. These women are Julian’s ancestors. 

“I was at christmas dinner and I looked at the wall and there was the really powerful ghost-like image of these women from the early 1900s and I said, ‘who’s this?’, and she [Julian’s mother] said, ‘It’s your great-great grandma who lived out in the bush’.

“I’d never seen this image and they were so ghostly, it was such a powerful image.”

Julian also looks specifically at the relationship between drinking in Australia and our ancestry. 

“I started looking at broader things around masculinity and Australian identity years ago with drinking culture and things because I like painting bottles.”

In this series there are paintings of bottles, some fallen, others acting as vases for native Australian flowers. They are symbols for our uniquely Australian relationship with alcohol.

“In other countries, for example in Italy, if you get too drunk, you dishonour the family, in Australia the more drunk you get, the more honour you bring.

“Our Prime Minister holds the record for sculling a beer, our famous cricketer David Boon holds the record for drinking 52 tinnies on a flight to London. They’re our heroes.

“It’s very engrained in our culture because Australia’s very isolated, it’s all about how tough you are, how stoic you are.”

It’s worth noting here, that Julian hasn’t always been an artist. In fact, he’s still a registered doctor. 

“The switch is easy, having a career as an artist is the hard part.

“I think it’s way harder to be an artist than to be a doctor to be honest.

“To keep creating the works, it’s such an unstable career. Art is very difficult financially, particularly in early years and it’s a very, very tough road and it’s quite a solitary thing.”

His works are influenced by his medical career. His painting is very clinical. He’s “no wild, crazy artist”. And it is evident in his clean, precise works, that really do examine history, drinking and identity.

So, are we ‘Alone in the Sun’? Really, we’re not alone. We’re the combination of thousands of ancestors, people we’ll never know, but who have shaped us.

QUT Fashion Graduate Show 2015 Muse//Refracted - Womenswear

Words: Saskia Edwards 

Images: Jonathan Rae

How can I describe the QUT fashion graduate show? It’s a fairly unique event. Three years of working in such proximity has made an usually close university cohort. And all that work culminates in an event somewhere between a professional showcase and a school graduation. It’s exciting, but also tinged with sadness knowing that this is the end and now they’ll have to think about getting a job. 

The show began with Lou Vicenzino’s monochromatic looks. From there it gradually transitioned from muted designs to more vivid pieces. That included Kat Walsh’s androgynous-Woody-Allen’s-Manhattan collection and Courtney McVicar’s pastel looks dripping in soft leather. It concluded with a splash of hot colour from Alice Waterhouse. So - in an effort to embrace the cheese-ball within me - the end still looks pretty bright.

LouiseVicenzo - Endless Second - Although Changed I Arise the Same

Alice Waterhouse - Rise//Run

Kat Walsh -Grammar - Time

Courtney McVicar - C.L.M - The Protective Layer

Isabel Wengert - L.S.T

Ciele Marshall -CL - What Follows

/APT8/ The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Qld Gallery of Modern Art

Words: Saskia Edwards 

Images: Jonathan Rae

“One thing that was really apparent to me and also very beautiful were the amount of saffron robes.

“It was almost as if the landscape was orange, that you couldn’t go to any parts of South East Asia without seeing this colour orange in your periphery and in your vision.”

That’s according to Cambodian-born American artist Anida Yoeu Ali, who’s described as one of the ‘rockstars’ of the APT8.

Her work at the exhibition centres on Cambodia as she takes on the persona of the Buddhist Bug.

Anida Yoeu Ali dresses as the Buddhist Bug in a long spiraling tube with feet sprouting out at its tail end. It’s somewhat Alice in Woderlandian - like the blue caterpillar. Of course, the fabric is that same vivid saffron that’s so evocative of Asia, Cambodia and Buddhism.

While being distinctly Buddhist, the bug also wears a sort-of hijab. As Anida says, it references the “Islam that my parents carried back to the U.S. with them that they preserved for me and then my rediscovery of Cambodian Buddhism”.

Anida left Cambodia when she was five years old. She lived through the Khmer Rouge, a period of Communist rule in Cambodia remembered for genocide. And this has resulted in dysphoria for Anida, with her life riddled with “war and the displacement and the refugee identity”.

However, Anida is not dwelling on the past.

“I felt this very palpable energy among my colleagues among the artist community in which there felt like a critical mass in which the artist community was finally addressing the present moment and not just locked in the time, in referencing the past, the past trauma. 

“So to me it was a really exciting part and I knew we had something special that intersected with the reign of progress and modernisation and urbanisation that’s happening at a tremendous rate in Cambodia while the level of poverty increased.”

Beyond a performance piece dressed as the Buddhist Bug, Anida presented a film as part of the exhibition. It follows the bug for a night in Phnom Penh.

She begins at a carnival where the rides drench her in neon light. And then she rides around the busy streets of the city, her head poking through the roof of a took-took. She goes past a market and to a nightclub. There she finds young Cambodian women - some “empowered”, others not - dancing in mini skirts and tank tops with old white men.

All of this captures something very elemental and visceral about Cambodia. On one hand it seems to show the progression of Cambodia and how it has been thrust into the luminous modern world. But also it reveals how the nation is still growing. People are still largely on bikes and scooters. There’s an insidious invasion of Western culture. And, in a way, it still has that wild untamed beauty of Asia - where food is cooked on the side of the road, traffic is monstrous and anything could happen.

As a whole, APT8 has a great focus on the Pacific. There’s an abundance of oceanic art. Often, it’s in a contemporary style, with live tattooing, performance art and photography. But it’s all weaved together with traditional icons. Plus, on the opening weekend there were a few people in ethnic dress - often part of installations - wandering around the gallery.

Of course, there’s more at APT8 than a person can really absorb. But take time, it’s worth it.

Niqui Toldi’s Unbeing exhibition at Junky Comics: girls and anxiety

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

In Niqui Toldi’s illustrations there’re lots of girls - short hair, long hair, smoking, angry, pierced, bound.

But really, all these girls are Niqui. They’re like a self-portrait - a manifestation of how she feels and is. And they’re a way of grappling with her own life and self-identity. 

She says: “it’s just sort of a way for me to deal with how I’m feeling internally because I’m not always good at externalising how I feel to other people.

“It’s sort of a way for me to separate myself from being too vulnerable at the same time. It’s being vulnerable but without being completely vulnerable.

“Because it’s not always necessarily completely obvious that they are almost me.”

The girls seem sad at times, self-destructive, lost, with hands anxiously clasping at the ground or onto a cigarette or a match or a scalpel. And they do really display anxiety quite well - where nothing bad is happening immediately but you’re trapped sitting there half naked smoking and feeling helpless with a whirlwind in your brain.

This ‘Unbeing’ series looks at the last year of Niqui’s life. 

“A lot of things happened - a relationship I had of four years had just ended, my grandmother who lives alone and I’m her only blood relative... had a stroke so I’m her main contact.

“Then I was getting more responsibilities at work and it was the first year I’d been medicated and properly diagnosed for my anxiety.

“So it was a huge collection of all these things happening in the one year.

“I just started to deal with it - started drawing it.”

But it’s not that easy. Putting on a solo exhibition was a big deal for Niqui. 

“Because of my anxious nature and shyness I’ve always been really reluctant and I almost hold myself back.

“So this is the first time that I’ve really let myself put myself out there.

“Even last night at the launch, it was exciting and I was nervous and people had started coming in.

“And maybe five people had come in that I didn’t know and I just started crying up the back, which is really ridiculous because this is a really good thing, this is a fun time.”

Of course it went really well. People sardined themselves into Junky Comics, admiring what I guess they thought were imaginary sirens. 

If you really think about it, Niqui’s works remind you of the true purpose of art. They show that out of anxiety, self-doubt and heart ache you can make something. And it can be beautiful.