Artist Profile

Artist Profile is a fresh, imaginative magazine recording the personalities of leading artists and rising art stars that fill the visual arts and inspire a new generation of art lover. The magazine features intimate studio portraits, artists' working environments, leading opinion writers, previews of major public gallery exhibitions, feature articles on international artists and events, book reviews and more.

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR’S NOTE • Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.

“Let No-one Say the Past is Dead, the Past is all about us and within.” (Oodgeroo Noonuccal-The Past)

KIRTIKA KAIN UNTOUCHABLE • During my visit to Kirtika Kain’s home and studio in Parramatta, it was apparent that she and her artworks were in a state of co-habitation. Her artistic practice envelops her apartment; canvases lean against walls, and splashes of paint, ink and gold leaf temporarily stain the tiled floors. The process of creating this mess holds as much weight as the final amorphous works on canvas—all of which allude to her experiences of belonging to the Indian Dalit caste in the diaspora.

Telly Tu’u

Grounded Mystic Khaled Sabsabi • Khaled Sabsabi is an award-winning Lebanese Australian artist. In September he was awarded by his peers the inaugural Creative Australia Award for Visual Arts. His latest works Knowing Beyond and Buraq unfurl the spiritual dynamics steeped in Sufi cosmology which inform his aesthetic creations.

OLD MEDIA MEETS “THE SENSUAL PHILOSOPHERS” • According to Rogue Gallery, where Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings are currently showing separate bodies of art in an exhibition called In Heaven as it is on Earth, Biggs studied Fine Art at the University of Leeds in the early days of punk. She worked with Vivienne Westwood, while her partner at the time worked for Malcolm McLaren. The clients for her mosaics include Prime Ministers, boxers, pop stars, cathedrals and mosques! Collings studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in the 1970s, and later at Goldsmiths. His TV series This is Modern Art won a Bafta Award, and his book Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, 1997, was published by David Bowie. His 2004 book Matt’s Old Masters contains some of the most erudite, yet page-turning, essays on Velazquez, Titian, Rubens, and Hogarth ever written. Collings has made two great art documentaries, on Donald Judd and the last days of Willem de Kooning. Collings collaboration with Biggs has been ongoing for twenty-five years, yet they maintain their separate practices.

MARIE HAGERTY UNDER COVER • Marie Hagerty left home at sixteen to study art at Meadowbank College of TAFE in Western Sydney. At nineteen she enrolled at the Canberra School of Art, drawn by the distinctive white Art Deco building. “It made me feel I could be anywhere. It fed my fantasies of international travel and escape.” That was in the late 1980s. She’s stayed in Canberra ever since, building a career as a painter known for works that hover between figuration and abstraction.

In the studio with John R Walker • Bushwalking, geology, environmental history, and fugue have fed painter John R Walker’s love of country, resulting in his layered evocations of walking, and looking.

JACKY REDGATE MIRRORS, SYSTEMS AND SELF • In many ways, the pursuit of art is a quest for self-knowledge. Artists scrutinise life and themselves–their reflections, for self-portraiture, or more deeply, their psychological dispositions and the cultural, social and historical events that have shaped and inspired them. Such scrutiny, and the effort to understand and rationalise one’s self, is at the core of Jacky Redgate’s remarkable creative practice.

SUBURBAN STORIES • Dagmar Cyrulla’s painting continues to evolve, with...