The first artwork encountered when entering the Maitland gallery's current exhibitions, is a billowing patchwork of transparent leopard-print fabrics. Two long-sleeved women's blouses, have been stitched into the installation work, puffing and deflating intermittently. The work is held to the floor by silver high-heels.
It serves as introduction Hannah Gartside's exhibition, Harbingers: Loie, Artemisia, Pixie, Sarah and Lilith. The work in Gartside's show is primarily frock-like sculptures made from glamorous textiles, such silk moire and georgette, twirling on mechanical forms.
It is a continued development of an installation commissioned in 2018 by the Museum of Brisbane, with another iteration shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney last year. In the MCA space the sculptures were installed in dance-floor proximity. In Maitland, the work has more space, with walls installed to place the sculptures within their own world of shifting shadows.
The swirling sculptures are based on women from history, such as 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi who was internationally successful in her lifetime despite powerful artist guilds excluding women.
Gentileschi painted violent scenes in response to the repressive treatment of women, partly based on her own experience as a teenager being physically tortured as punishment by judicial order after appearing before a judge as a survivor of rape.
Deborah Kelly
Upstairs at the MRAG, in an exhibition of video artworks by Deborah Kelly, reclining female nudes cut from images in art history books are "released from long servitude" in a stop motion animated titled Lying Women.
Using mind-bending puppetry and kaleidescopic imagery, featuring a lot of long, bare, dismembered legs atop high heels, the works in Many Hands Make Life Work - Deborah Kelly and The Moving Image 2011-2021 are thought-provoking visual essays (with spoken components) about women and this world.
Valerie Marshall Strong Olsen
In the front gallery downstairs, the life of Valerie Marshall Strong Olsen (1933-2011), is celebrated. Strong seldom exhibited. As such, this exhibition is as much a revelation as is the experience of seeing the early career work of Ileigh Hellier being held in the "avenue" gallery space upstairs.
The 63 pieces of Strong's works in the exhibition, titled A Rare Sensibility, are largely from the collection of son Tim Olsen and daughter Louise Olsen, both prominent in the art scene.
The pair curated the show to "share memories of their mother and her many unrecognised talents". The most recent work is a 2004 portrait in pencil, titled James, Love Grandma.
The exhibition of Strong's work, titled A Rare Sensibility, was first shown at the National Art School's gallery in Sydney last year alongside an exhibition of work by John Olsen, to whom she had been married. A portrait of Strong by Olsen is included in the show.
Two of Strong's student works, life drawings, are on loan from the National Art School collection where, in her late 20s, she studied under John Passmore (at the time it was East Sydney Technical College). She then became a teacher at NAS.
One of her larger-scale early works, Afternoon Yarramalong (1963), comes from the Newcastle Art Gallery collection. It was bequeathed to NAG by Strong's latter-life companion Gil Docking, who had served as the inaugural director of the Newcastle gallery.
With a spare touch, Strong created compositionally complex canvases alive with mark-making. A few strokes, and a flower is formed, a wicker chair conjured, a Persian rug described, as seen in her ethereal portrait of Margaret Olley.
Ileigh Hellier
Similarly, Ileigh Hellier generates form with gesture, from her flicky pencil works to conceptualised tree crowns.
Hellier was a finalist in MRAG's Brenda Clouten Memorial Travelling Scholarship and the winner of the painting section of the Newcastle Emerging Art Prize in her graduate year, 2017. In 2020 she was a finalist, and commended, in the John Glover Art Prize.
Her Yellow Sun, Blue Gum series, including painted globe ceramic forms, is drawn from observations of the Glenrock nature reserve.
Hellier's work may be categorised as naive genre, which is explicit in her joyously, overtly, simpflied clouds. Yet, it is her bold, space-shifting construction that makes her work a stand out.
Harbingers: Loie, Artemisia, Pixie, Sarah and Lilith - Hannah Gartside and Many Hands Make Life Work - Deborah Kelly and The Moving Image 2011-2021 run until 19 February. Yellow Sun, Blue Gum - Ileigh Hellier runs until 26 February. A Rare Sensibility - Valerie Marshall Strong Olsen runs until 5 March.
