Hand Over explores the idea of re-remembering and re-honoring the art teachers who taught art mainly between the 1920s to the 1930s at the South Australian School of Art, privately, or in peer exchange and supportive, collegiate friendships. It brings to light a small number of art works by South Australian art teachers and artists, re-airing their contributions to the artistic and cultural fabric of South Australia, in the early to mid-twentieth century. This exhibition subtly places historical and contemporary artworks together to create a shared contribution of the premise that the learning of art skills and practices are handed onto the next generation of artists in a repeating, forever continuous pattern, yet in a cyclical, nuanced way.
Jenn Brazier, Maude Gum, Simone Kennedy, Mary Packer Harris and Edwin Newsham, John MacAskill, Jessie MacDonald, Lee Salomone, Avis Smith, Beverley Southcott, PH Williams.
Curated by Beverly Southcott
Photography by Sam Roberts
The curatorial rationale for Handover; a circular notion based on the premise that we learn from others, is a complex theme entrusted to memory. With no hard or fast rules as to how we learn or what we take preference from in our individual life experience; I look to my emotional memory to interpret the theme, ‘Handover’, where, I locate poignant and uncanny moments that continue to command my full attention, over and above all other memories.
For the exhibition Handover, I utilize two paintings (Diptych) from a series of ‘twenty six’, entitled, Failure to Thrive. The first, reflects on the emotional fragmentation of memory and the second, a smaller painting, interrelates with the first in re-imagining a specific ‘Handover’ moment, observed by a ‘minutiae’ figure, (a witness).
An addition to the Diptych is the original painting H is for Hunger (The Hungry Years). This small vignette formed part of Learning to Speak (2007), a project which entailed ‘fixing’ 26 specific words (words that originated from a stream of consciousness writing), and extended with an interweaving of storytelling, culminating in the absence of any punctuation. This particular project focused on giving ‘voice’ to trauma not only through the symbolic use of the number 26 (the alphabet offering the boundless potential of language). Whilst writing, connecting the ambiguities and abstractions of ‘lived experience’ through the text, the fixed words created a surprisingly faithful account of intense emotional memory.
Simone Kennedy
