In Praise:Concerning Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, LindyLee During 2014, Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and LindyLee, three senior Australian visual artists, wereeach accorded major solo exhibitions, withsubstantial accompanying publications. I believedall these exhibitions were worthy of note, indeed ofpraise. At the time, however, none of the exhibitionsattracted much critical attention: in this current eraof focus on mass audiences and blockbusterprojects, and with contracting critical arenas in thiscountry, as in others, these exhibitions seemed, likeso many other excellent projects, to have more orless slipped under the discursive radar.1 Yet theydid deserve to be registered, and appraised, foreach, in its own way, was exemplary. As it happens, and not co-incidentally, theseintelligent exhibitions were organised by universityart museums: Anne Ferran’s Shadow Land, acareer retrospective, was organized by theLawrence Wilson Gallery at the University ofWestern Australia, in Perth, and toured to othervenues across the country until late 2016; JudithWright’s project exhibition Desire, encapsulatingrelated works from 2007-14, was presented by theQueensland University of Technology Art Museum,Brisbane, in late 2014; and Lindy Lee’s surveyexhibition, at the University of Queensland ArtMuseum, also in Brisbane, was seen in late2015/early 2015.2 (I’ll return later to the significanceand value of this university context.) Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and Lindy Lee have

something else in common: they all came topractice as artists after other careers, other lives,though Lindy Lee did this in a very special way, asI’ll argue later. More than that, all three emerged inthe 1980s, so they share a background in thatdecade of ferment and development in Australianvisual art: while Lee and Ferran trained at SydneyCollege of the Arts, a college opened in 1977 and inthe vanguard of pedagogical commitment to agenerously post-medium approach to art, Wrightwas a self-starter who did not undertake anundergraduate degree in visual arts, eventuallycompleting a Master’s Degree at Brisbane’s atQueensland University of Technology after almost adecade of exhibiting. My point is that making artwas a deliberate choice for these artists, made asmature women; and now each has, over threedecades of constant work, refined a distinctivevision through producing exceptional bodies ofwork. So while this essay is not exactly ‘in praise ofolder women’, following the title of StephenVizinczey’s infamous 1965 novel, it does recognizethe inestimable value of life experiences in themaking of an artist. And the great value of maturity. Moreover, in thinking about these exhibitions, andthe work of the three artists, it is worth noting theoften-idiosyncratic ways and eccentric timetablesthat many artists, especially women, follow infinding ways of working and pursuing their owncreative agendas. Proving my point nicely, thesethree artists found divergent paths to reach theirmature practices: they all, effectively, changed fieldsto become visual artists. And this is a crucial matter:ever since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, we haveunderstood that it is the incomers to intellectual andcreative fields who very often make substantialinnovations.3 This is precisely what I am claiming

for Ferran, Wright and Lee. Anne Ferran came to critical attention with hergraduating exhibition in late 1984 at Sydney’sPerformance Space. At the time, it was like seeingAthena springing fully formed from the head ofZeus, or, more accurately, a kind of feminine auto-genesis: as the series Carnal knowledge 1984, thesubstance of that first exhibition included in ShadowLand shows, this was work of startling maturity for arecent student. But mature age students are alwaysfar from average, as those of us who have workedin art colleges and universities can testify. There isa special joy in recognising students who havefound their moment, and their métier, and in leavingher work as a schoolteacher, and with two childrenalready in school, Ferran had entered into her ownterritory. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, her first series ofworks, both Carnal knowledge and the subsequentScenes on the death of nature 1986, took the entryof young girls into womanhood, throughrepresentation, as her subject, and her daughterand friends as models. But if this personalinvestment was an immediate starting point,Ferran’s stance as a photographer was alwaystheoretically considered, reflexive: the ambitiousintellectual climate at Sydney College of the Arts,and in Sydney's feminist theoretical contextgenerally during her student years in the early1980s, suited her interests perfectly. Havingpreviously gained a degree in psychology andeducation, along with studies in anthropology andlanguages, Ferran found, in photography’s newlyinterrogative bent, a rich historically inflected toolthat had a fresh relevance, not only in Australia butinternationally, for considering pictorialrepresentations of women. (All this is sketched with

economy and decision in Susan Best’s excellentcatalogue essay.) 4 In the next decade, Ferran’s interests widened toconsider colonial sites in Australia where womenhad been present, but where that painful and oftenlongstanding occupation was barely registered,whether in scant historical records or, more rarely,with physical historical remains, let alonephotographs. Beginning with a 1995 joint projectwith Canberra artist Anne Brennan at Sydney’sHyde Park Barracks, Ferran began to address thepresence (and absence) of women in historicalsites, investigating over many years how theirpresence might possibly be conjured. This almostquixotic project is rendered more poignant becauseof its impossibility: how to make a photograph ofwhat is no longer there? Ferran welcomes thissingular obstruction – indeed, it might be seen asher creative motivation – and in a 2014 interview forABC Radio National’s Book and Arts, is quoted assaying ‘photography's insufficiencies are one of thethings I value about it’.5 Amongst these works, I particularly enjoy thephotograms exploring collections of historicalclothes, from Sydney’s Rouse Hill House to thePioneer Women’s Hut in Tumbarumba in rural NewSouth Wales, to treasured items from families,made between 1998 and 2003: they are exquisite,detailed and entirely unsparing, the exact phantomof their wearers. However, and going against thegrain of the direct contact that photograms require,and undoubtedly the major achievement in thislong-standing project, is the series Lost to worlds2008. These photographs, printed on shimmeringghostly aluminum sheets, are of the now barrenground at Ross, in central Tasmania, where convictwomen and their children were incarcerated, and

often died. The implacable silence of the ground inthese magisterial images is eloquent, and final: asThierry De Duve remarks, in his probing interviewwith Ferran published in the catalogue, ’The photosthemselves… are poignant in a way that thenarrative, with its inevitable humanism, cannot be.’6 I said earlier that this exhibition was a careerretrospective, but given its necessary abbreviationfor touring, it might better be described as a survey;the mix of works across decades I saw installed inSydney at the Australian Centre for Photographywas not a standard chronological account, but co-mingled older and more recent works. This strategywas telling: it emphasised Ferran’s consistentinterrogation of the limits of photography as aguarantee of veracity, and pointed to the mnemoniccharacter of many images. I liked the dialogues.Thinking about this, I keep coming back to thehands shown in Insula: books 3 & 4 2003, croppedfrom photographic records made in 1948 of womeninmates at Gladesville Mental Hospital in Sydney,which are now housed in the State Library of NewSouth Wales. Those hands that had nothing tooccupy them, except waiting, often clutched at thickfelt jackets; the thick woollen material of thewomen’s clothes, with its signal mute expressivity,has recently been recapitulated in the series Box ofbirds 2013, where dancers perform to articulatelengths of cloth in subdued colours that recall thickwool institutional-style blankets, and conceal theidentities of the performers. (I’ll return to thesehaunting works.) The same complex interweaving of an artist’sproject, across time, subtended Judith Wright’sexhibition Desire. Unlike Ferran’s exhibition, whichencompassed three decades, Wright’s focused onjust seven years, from 2007-14, with barely a dozen

works exhibited. Of the three exhibitions, this wasthe most concentrated visually, installed in anenfiladed series of rooms that permitted oneinstallation to bleed into the next, using dramaticlight and shadows to unify the whole. Shadows are,in fact, the key to the entire ensemble: both in theseven videos, where the performers might beshadows flickering across the screens, and inbizarre shadows thrown onto the gallery walls bycarefully deployed spotlighting. These spookydoubles, often far larger than the actual sculpturalobjects, dramatized them effectively, and drew boththe performers in the seven videos, and we visitors,into this imaginative world. It was a tour-de-force. To backtrack: famously, Judith Wright came to artpractice only after a successful career as a classicaldancer in the Australian Ballet, and after bearingfour children. Initially self taught, and only sometime after commencing exhibiting in the mid-1980s,she completed a Masters degree at Brisbane’sQueensland University of Technology, and went onto teach sculpture there for many years. Equallyfamously, though this was not widely known untilsome years later, amongst Wright’s key creativemotivations had been the loss of her baby daughterin 1973, shortly after birth, and her efforts to cometo terms with what had been, at that time, a griefconventionally unspoken, and generallyunwelcome, in Australian social life. Over threedecades, Wright’s work has traversed manyostensible subjects, generally at least ellipticallyfigurative, and media as various as sculpture, large-format books, video and painting. Yet, in somesenses, all her work has been at the service ofunderstanding the circumstances of her own life,and of those closest to her. Once again, Wrightsought practice as an artist as a mature individual,and it has always been driven by searching for

answers that she needed to find. The powerful motivating force that Wright found inthe death of her child has arguably found its mostexplicit and most narrative expression in the sevenvideos shown in Desire, collectively titled ‘Sevenstages of desire’, and in three extraordinarysculptural suites made between 2011-13. Beginningwith the mesmeric video One dances 2003, whichshows Wright’s actor son dancing with an archaic,almost life-size, mannequin, these works directlyaddress the missing girl in Wright’s life and family.All seven videos, often set in dim studios or even, inthe case of The stager 2008, in an abandonedtheatre, evoke loss, grief or displacement through,and in the midst of, bodily contact, whether betweenliving people or proxy mannequins. Even moredirectly, the three suites A wake 2011 (CollectionQAG | GOMA, not exhibited in Desire), A journey2011 and Destination 2013 evoke, in turn, a solemnwake for the departed, the journey she makes tothe underworld, and, finally, the fiesta-likeatmosphere accompanying her arrival into paradise. This is astonishing work, completely idiosyncratic.There is nothing else like it in this country, though itrecalls for me the theatrical allegiances ofinstallations by the celebrated Pole Tadeusz Kantor(1915 –1990), with his similar respect for theevocative potential of objects – in Wright’s caseranging from masks to costumes to antiquatedconveyances for A journey – and for the exactcharacter of bodily gesture. As Catherine de Zeghernotes in the suggestively titled text ‘Judith Wright:‘Life? or theatre: An elegiac choreography’, gestureis central in Wright’s work: ‘Imbued with themovement of dance, touch, empathic relation,Wright’s art practice of reinventing sensation andrelation becomes an instrument, a tender tool, an

exquisite mouthpiece for hopeful and affectingresistance against the devastating experience ofseparation, not only personal parting but also newforms of migration and disunion...’ 7 As De Zegherpoints out, Wright’s work tackles personal loss in itsbroadest implications, offering her own experienceto, and for, others. In this way, her work recuperatessorrow. In this trinity, Lindy Lee is, in an important sense,the exception that proves my rule. She has alreadyhad two careers as an artist, so the mature decisionto take a particular path was taken after she hadalready trained. In the mid-1980s, Lee was knownas an early adopter of postmodernist appropriation,with the singular peculiarity that she specialised inmoody photocopied works on paper of famousEuropean Old Master works, and later magnificent(mostly monochrome) paintings of similar subjects.(In an interview with Suhanya Raffel, Lee notes shemade her first photocopy work as a student atSydney College.) 8 These are beguiling works, inwhich Lee characteristically, and for the time almostperversely, took striking faces from EuropeanRenaissance art as her distinguishing motif. A fineselection of these earlier works was shown in LindyLee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom, where thedarkness of the title might be taken, almost literally,as the velvety depth of the layers of photocopy inkconstituting such mysterious works as Philosophyof the Parvenu 1990. Yet in what I see as the second phase of Lee’scareer, she turned away from canonical WesternEuropean imagery towards images from her ownChinese family’s history, and sourced from herembrace of Buddhism. Continuing her longfascination with portraiture, early in the 2000s Leebegan to incorporate images from family albums

into multi-panelled works, culminating in the majorinstallation Birth and Death 2003; she evendeployed a beautiful portrait of her grandmother onstreet banners in 2004. This decisive turn towardsLee’s Chinese heritage, repressed in her Australianchildhood in the era of official assimilation, isassociated with the great significance of hereventual decision to become a Buddhist. Around1995, the year when Lee spent time on an Asialinkresidency in Beijing intending to study calligraphy,the notion of ‘darkness’ in her work began to takeon an another meaning altogether: here the darkmight begin to signify, in consonance with Buddhistphilosophy, ‘the void that holds everything andnothing’.9 In recent years a number of Australian-born artistshave explored the significance of Buddhism for theirlives and work, in part because of Buddhism’sstatus as Australia’s fastest growing spiritualaffiliation: in 2001, for instance, Lee’s work wasshown with that of Tim Johnson and Peter Tyndallin the exhibition Three Views of Emptiness atMonash University Museum of Art, curated by LindaMichael. Today Lee is perhaps the most seniorAustralian artist whose work is significantlyinformed by Buddhist practice, and this was madewonderfully clear in Lindy Lee: The Dark ofAbsolute Freedom. In her choice of subjects, suchas Bubhi and Me or True Ch’ien, both works onpaper from 2009 that were altered by theapplication of fire, and in her methods, particularlythe thrown bronze works such as Cosmos – A Lifeof Fire 2014 or The Life of Form: One Billion Worlds2012, Lee is clearly making her commitment topracticing as a Buddhist an integral part of her lifeas an artist. This is one of the most thoroughgoing renovations

of an artist’s practice that I can recall. In remakingherself as an artist in this way, and for deeply-feltreasons, Lindy Lee is articulating a vision of life thatis relevant to increasing numbers of Australians. Aswith Ferran and Wright, I am struck by theimportance of the artist’s commitment to taking onher own personal circumstances, views and desiresas a source for making work. Not for a minute do Ibelieve art historian’s Rex Butler’s elegant accountof Lee’s career as a transit from abstraction back toabstraction. Too neat by half. Lindy Lee’s work is farricher than this, in my view. 10 Coincidentally, Ibelieve that Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and LindyLee share a larger territory that I will not attempt todefine precisely, as that would betray theindividuality of their projects. This terrain certainly,however, encompasses a firm basis in the artist’spersonal life, and a commitment to exploring whatthat might suggest in their practices: in all threecases the singularity of the work of each artist is theguarantee of the intimate character of her work.And it is correspondingly valuable for this. What of the work of these three artists since 2014?How does this short period relate to the largerthemes that were explored in their comprehensiveexhibitions? Were these exhibitions termini, or way-stations, of a sort, in far longer trajectories? Since2014, and the career milestones marked with theseexhibitions, each artist has continued to develop herpractice. (None of the exhibitions was the end of thestory.) Thinking about the intervening years, I amstruck again by personal threads that continue torun through the works made by each woman. It isno small matter to continue to find inspiration andsubstance in the issues life throws up to one, yetAnne Ferran, Judith Wright and Lindy Lee, indifferent ways, continue to draw on the immediateenvironments of their lives, families and

communities. These three Australians are not alone in theintimate personal cast of their oeuvres: this hasbeen marked in art in the post-modern era,arguably as a reaction to the high formality of muchmodernist art, at least in its most formalmanifestations. Certainly, the value of the personaland the intimate, and the power of the immediatelybiographical, has been fundamental to the feministcontribution to contemporary art, and it is not co-incidental that all three artist I am considering herecame to artistic maturity in the 1980s, and in thecase of Ferran and Lee, in an art school wherefeminism’s relationship to art was part of thecurriculum. 11 Since 2014, Anne Ferran has continued to workwith the interactions of women’s bodies with cloth,as she has throughout her career. (As we will see,she commenced a new series of works in 2013 thathas continued to the present.) On occasion thisworking with the expressive possibility of fabric hasled Ferran to work with actual clothing, such asphotograms made with archived clothes fromhistorical collections, or Rydalmere Vertical 1997,where historical styles of caps, commissioned b ythe artist, were photographed unworn: in both casesthe absence of wearing bodies is precisely thepoint. But an equally allusive recurring motif inFerran’’s work has been the ways women relate to,even express, potentialities inherent in fabricassociated with women: in Scenes on the death ofnature 1984, for example, young women woresheets approximating classical drapery. In Box of birds 2013, made at the time her surveywas being prepared, Ferran began to workcollaboratively with dancers who either posed

motionless, behind spare falls of thick fabric, assolid and impenetrable as modernist monochromes,or improvised to animate them, as if to suggest thelightning movements of birds. There is a nice wordplay in ‘Box of birds’ — a selection of women whoare also, as the vernacular expression has it,sprightly and joyful; this has another resonance inFerran’s life — she is an ardent bird-watcher. But aswriter Kyla McFarlane suggested, there is a darkersuggestion in this title: ‘Ferran’s engagement isdrawn more from Plato, who likened the mind to acage of birds; in confusion our thoughts flutter fromour grasp.’ 12 I have wondered whether Ferran sees birds, asmany cultures do, as symbolic of the impulse tofreedom, or as messages from afar? Her use of feltbegan with Insula: books 3 & 4 2003, and the 1948photographs of women effectively incarcerated in apsychiatric hospital, often in bleak and harshconditions and perhaps unnecessarily, givenmodern views about female forms of resistance tofamilial and state authority. These photographedinmates wore thick felt-like garments, and inSydney, from 2013, and in Paris and Helsinki in2014, Ferran has been collaborating with dancersto articulate lengths of felt cloths, photographingsessions that resulted from their conversations.Ferran notes:

… the lengths of felt were one starting point,and the 1948 photos of the Gladesville womenwere another…I don’t remember the details ofthe conversation but it would have included myidea of releasing energy from those archivalimages…we were all aware that the lengths offelt ‘represented’ the felted clothes of thepatients, and that covering their faces waspartly about the patients’ anonymity.13

The work from Box of birds onwards alerted me to think retrospectively aboutthe ways Ferran’s work, from time to time, has touched on her own lifeexperiences: in Carnal knowledge 1984, for instance, the coming to maturityof her daughter is foregrounded, and two years later this was refigured inScenes on the death of nature 1986. Other works, such as the series I Am theRehearsal Master 1989, started from considerations of the ways women areacculturated, especially how the social institutions of medicine and psychiatryhave borne on their lives, or, later, on that ways colonial history does, or doesnote, record the lives of women. Here Ferran’s engagement seemed to me tobe both personally felt, and also broadly general in its implications: its valuewas to implicate all Australians in the social experience and historical lives ofwomen. Working with adult dancers as she has recently, on the other hand,seems to me to bring Ferran’s work into a closer alignment with her own stageof life: each photograph seems to be a photographic mediation on theconundrum of how to see individual experiences, over many decades ofhistorical time, as something that might be shared: I see the recentperformative collaborative photographs as essay in how to seize what is,inevitably, always going to be lost.

With Judith Wright, connections between her artisticwork and events in her life are always close and toa degree direct, if not always immediate orimmediately interpretable, even by the artistherself.14 As seen earlier, the death of her onlydaughter just after birth, and the experience ofsocial and official repression of that grief at the time,had been a powerful force in her work. But sinceexhibiting the works in Desire, which spanned theyears 2007-14, the sudden tragic death of anotherinfant occurred in Wright’s family. A granddaughtersuccumbed in December 2014 to Sudden InfantDeath Syndrome at the age of four months, leavingthe family inconsolable, and causing Wright torevisit, once again, the persistent sorrow that hadprompted so much of her artistic work. Wright’s work as an artist may not be reduced to atranscription of the facts of her biography, or that ofher family members, but her work is fundamentallycompelled by her emotional life; it may even play acathartic role in it. When Wright lost her daughterNicole many decades ago, infant deaths weregenerally unremarked and unacknowledged inAustralian social life; they were seen as a trial to be

born stoically — it was usual for stillborn and veryyoung infants to be buried in unmarked graves, asNicole Wright was, until her mother found the child’sgrave in 2000 and erected a stone for her. (As acontemporary comparison, when a memorial waserected to still-born and young babies buried from1920s-1980s in unmarked graves in West TerraceCemetery in Adelaide, another major Australian city,it was revealed over 30,000 infants had beeninterred, more or less unceremoniously, with thecollaboration of hospital staff.15) Today attitudes tosuch losses are different: they are acknowledgedand grieved, with active support from hospitals,churches and other services. Members of Wright’sfamily, including the artist herself but especially thechild’s grieving mother, have been able to accesssupport networks, and are actively involved inraising awareness of SIDS and fundraising forresearch. 16 Because of the longstanding impetus for Wright’swork in the memory of her daughter’s death,coupled with this more recent bereavement, Irecently noticed the appearance in her work ofoversize infant’s heads presented in simplifiedoutline, hugely scaled up: the works measure twometres square. In Significant others 2016 (now inthe collection of the Art Gallery of New SouthWales), the blocky forms of the children’s heads aresimple, magisterial, benign, but in the recent Linesof confluence 2017, the colours are strikingly acidic,heightening the emotional tension of the assertiveintersecting forms that characterize this series andnamed it. Wright has suggested that these are‘more confrontational’ than her previous works, andshe attributes the bolder colour, and the departurefrom her characteristic emotional reticence, to agathering sense of mortality: as she gets older,Wright believes she is prepared to expose more of

herself, and her vulnerabilities; she commented thatshe no longer has’ time to pull back.’17 Takentogether with other recent works, especially theinstallation The Garden of Good and Evil (firstexhibited 2015, on-going) and the associated suiteof paintings entitled Fragments from The Garden ofGood and Evil 2017, which sit directly in line withthe three preceding large installations, JudithWright’s recent work continues, but importantlyexpands, her work on memory. This is activeremembering, a process rather than a project. Since her 2014 survey exhibition, alongside herregular commercial gallery work, Lindy Lee hascontinued to explore her social location as anAustralian-born Chinese through major sculpturalprojects, both in Australia and China. She has beencommissioned to create major civic sculptures suchas The Life of Stars (2015) for Ting Hsin Plaza inShanghai, China, and Life of Stars —TheTenderness of Rain (2017, for Zhengzhou CulturalCenter in Henan Province. For the Australianprojects, Lee’s focus is the current lived experienceof her Chinese Australian heritage. Two significant projects have allowed Lee to workclosely with different communities of Chinese inAustralia: the first was a civic garden at the smalltown of Avoca, in the southern state of Victoria nearthe city of Ballarat, nearly 200 kilometres from themetropolis of Melbourne, the second a sculpturalinstallation in the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown. TheGarden of Earth and Fire at Avoca was madeduring 2014, with a substantial Small TownTransformations project grant, sought by the towncommunity from the Victorian Government.Launched in December 2014, it is a civic amenitythat is a tribute to the long-standing Chinesecommunity in the town and district, which dates

back to the 1850s and the Victorian gold rush. Leeworked closely with a multi-disciplinary team,comprising community representatives, a designerand a soil expert, convened by artist Lyndal Jones,a local resident.18 Winding paths lead through agarden filled with both Australian natives andChinese plants, to a central pavilion surmountedalong the roof-line by Lindy Lee’s scorched metalflame forms, that continue her long-termengagement with the element of fire. The structureis part Chinese pavilion, part Australian shed. AsLee noted, ‘I think what we’re creating in thisgarden is a really beautiful and particular kind ofChinese-Australian vernacular.’19 Nestled amongthe plants is another of Lee’s contributions — apolished-metal scholar stone. Underlining itsChinese references, the entire garden owes itsinspiration to hexagram 64 of the I Ching (theancient Chinese book of divination also known asThe Book of Changes); this is, the final hexagram,‘Nearing Completion’, which suggests that life (likea garden) is never finally completed.

Lindy Lee's next major project was much closer toher then home in Sydney. She has led thedevelopment of the renewal of the Thomas StreetPlaza, creating a new public art space in the heartof Chinatown, which commenced in 2016 as part ofa major revamp of this central historical Chinesecultural precinct; it is scheduled to be finished latein 2017, with shading metal discs overhead.Entitled The New Century Garden, the work payshomage to traditional Chinese gardens, whilereflecting an Australian identity. It is well-used:sitting at the intersection of three major streets, it ispopulated by men smoking, women shopping, andchildren climbing and swinging from the sturdymetal forms, which are reminiscent of the wind-hewn rocks beloved of traditional Chinese gardens,

here rendered in a virtually indestructible material.This project Chinatown project has brought LindyLee back to working with the community from whichshe sprang. As Lee says:

I feel like I have now come full circle. I spent alarge part of my life finding my place, myidentity. Now I am creating an important placethat represents and celebrates ChineseAustralian culture. It is an exciting moment inmy life. 20

With Lindy Lee’s recent public projects in Australiawe see a senior artist, from one of the country’slongest-established cultural communities, assertingthe specificity of that community’s cultural heritage,which is historically located in the centre of thecountry’s largest city, in a project sponsored by thecity of Sydney. Importantly, the Thomas StreetPlaza project was, for the first time in the city’sdistinguished public art program, led by an artist.(Lee worked in collaboration with Sydney architectPhilip Thalis.) This is a tribute both to Lindy Lee’sachievement as a visual artist, but also to her abilityto broker connections between her visual arts worldand the leaders of the city’s Chinese community.Lindy Lee, artist, is now a community identity, bothAustralian and Chinese, and authentically both.

Finally, I want to return to the crucial institutionalcontexts of the three major exhibitions featuringworks by Anne Ferran, Judith Wright and Lee withwhich I began this essay. It is no coincidence, in myview, that these exhibitions were mounted byuniversity art museums. Today, the Australiannetwork of university art museums and galleries hasemerged, as I believe it has in other countries, asproviding significant sites, resources and expertisefor in-depth considered research into the practicesof contemporary artists. These university

foundations have become considerably moresophisticated and better resourced in recent years,and this is significant for contemporary artists, sincefollowing the country-wide reforms of the tertiaryeducation sector in the late 1980s, almost allAustralian art schools have become incorporatedinto the university sector. Thus this network ofAustralian university art museums now has themandate, and the responsibility, to explore theachievements of the artists that it has trained, andcontinues to employ to educate successivegenerations of artists and cultural workers. More generally, these university museumsparticipate vigorously, as part of their educationalrole within their respective institutions, in broaderdiscourses in contemporary art, with access to, andsupport from, experts across many fields includingart historians and art theorists, but also from theuniversity communities of scholars, that allows themto initiate and sustain thoughtful projects, such asthese substantial exhibitions. Consequently, theyhave in recent years grown into extremely importantnests for manifesting and developing practice-based research. All three exhibitions came outparticular research focuses at the respectiveuniversity museums: Ferran’s exhibition wasinitiated by the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at theUniversity of Western Australia, which houses theimportant Cruthers Collection of Australian WomenArtists, and thus places special emphasis on workby contemporary Australian women; Judith Wright’sexhibition follows QUT Art Museum’s policy ofstaging substantial exhibitions for Queensland-based mid-career artists; and Lindy Lee’s exhibitionwas curated for the University of Queensland ArtMuseum by Michele Helmrich, a longstandingBrisbane-based curator, in part following thatmuseum’s established interest in the Australia-wide

(and international) diaspora of artists of Queenslandorigin. Moreover, the feminist orientation of thewomen curators in the initiating museums hasplayed a role in sustaining these projects: thecurators, and their museums, are aware of theimpact of considered exhibitions dedicated to thework of senior women artists, all of whom have hadsubstantial careers teaching in university artcolleges. This commitment to intelligent focused exhibitionsfor leading living artists is, in Australia, moreimportant than ever, given the audience-drivenfocus of the national and state art museums, theprincipal institutions able to stage contemporary artexhibitions. At one time, one would have expectedto see solo exhibitions by contemporary artists ofthe achievement and sophistication of Ferran,Wright and Lee undertaken by the larger public artmuseums, but this is increasingly less likely today,with increasing pressure on budgets and staff, andthe corresponding pressures to secure expandingaudience numbers. This being so, it is a tribute tothe growing complexity and maturity of theAustralian cultural landscape that projects of thishigh calibre are being undertaken by university artmuseums, now more frequently than before, andthat they are being supported by both universitybudgets and philanthropic foundations.21 Thedownside, of course, is that these university artmuseums do not attract the same large numbersand very broad demographic that the larger publicmuseums are able to command, a point I made atthe outset when I commented on the lack ofpublished critical responses to these exhibitions. Asone manifestation of the research-directed energyin Australian university art museums, however,these three exhibitions were accompanied by finepublications, with a wealth of material by leading

authorities, and supplemented by many generousillustrations. It is fortunate that these published records exist: myonly regret in thinking about these three splendidexhibitions is that wider audiences may not havehad the opportunity to encounter them, given therelative lack of publicity accorded university-basedmuseums in Australia, which are often ideas-richbut resources-poor. For Anne Ferran, Judith Wrightand Lindy Lee, like so many of their fellow artists inAustralia at the moment of their maturity, are artistswith rich complex bodies of work, at the height oftheir powers. For this, they do deserve ourattention, and merit our praise. NotesA version of this text, entitled In Praise: Exhibitionsby Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, Lindy Lee, was firstpublished in eyeline, 2014. My thanks to SarahFollent, editor, for her kind permission to expandthat essay for this volume. 1. See a brief mention of the exhibition by JohnMcDonald in a Sydney Morning Herald review ofthe Festival of Perth dated 22 February 2014, athttp://johnmcdonald.net.au/2014/perth-festival-2014/accessed 3 August 2015; the detailed reviewmooted here by McDonald did not appear. See alsoPhil Brown, ‘Wings of desire, Courier Mail,Brisbane, 27 September 2014, p.11 on Wright’sexhibition and Lucy Rees’s web-based review ofLee’s exhibition,http://www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/TheDarkOfAbsoluteFreedom, accessed 5August 2015.2. Anne Ferran: Shadow Land was at LawrenceWilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia,8 February-19 April 2014; at the Australian Centre

for Photography, Sydney from 29 November 2014-15 February 2014, will be at Newcastle Art Galleryfrom 12 September-15 November 2015 and atWestern Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, from 23April-26 June 2016. Judith Wright: Desire was atQUT Art Museum, Queensland University ofTechnology, Brisbane, 12 September-23 November2014. Lindy Lee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom,was at the UQ Art Museum, University ofQueensland, Brisbane, 20 September 2014-22February 2015.3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of ScientificRevolutions, 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 1996, originally published 1962.4. Susan Best, in Anne Ferran: Shadow Land,Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of WesternAustralia, and Power Publications, 2014, pp. tbc.5. Anne Ferran quoted on 14 March 2014, speakingon ABC Radio. Seehttp://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/anne-ferran3a-shadow-land/5258648,accessed 3 August 2015.6. Thierry De Duve, ‘Interview with Anne Ferran’, inAnne Ferran: Shadow Land, Lawrence Wilson ArtGallery, University of Western Australia, and PowerPublications, 2014, pp. 65-73, p.73.7. Catherine de Zegher, in Judith Wright: Desire,QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 2014, pp. 68-74, p.73.8. Michele Helmrich, ‘From Darkness to Light:Pathos and Reverie in the Work of Lindy Lee’, inLindy Lee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom, TheUniversity of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane,2014, pp. 15-31, p.29.9. See Suhanya Raffel, ‘Between the Oceans ofBirth and Death: An Interview with Lindy Lee’, inLindy Lee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom, pp.73-83, see pp.74-5.10. Rex Butler, ‘When One Becomes Two’, in LindyLee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom, pp.45-59.

11. Susan Best, in Anne Ferran: Shadow Land,p.tbc, and also, more generally on emotion inmodernist art, her Visualizing Feeling: Affect andthe Feminine Avant-Garde, London: I.B. Tauris,2011.12. See Kyla McFarlane, Anne Ferran: Box of birds,athttps://anneferran.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/anne_ferran_catalogue.pdf.13. Anne Ferran, email communication with author,June 2017.14. Judith Wright, telephone communication withauthor, June 2017.15. The Baby Memorial was commissioned fromJulie Blyfield, Sue Lorraine and Catherine Trumanof Adelaide’s Gray Street Workshop.16. Judith Wright, telephone communication withauthor, June 2017.17. Judith Wright, telephone communication withauthor, June 2017.18. For Lyndal Jones’s Avoca Project, seehttp://avocaproject.org19. See interview with Lindy Lee,http://vimeo.com/106165131.20. Seehttp://sydney.edu.au/sca/news/2016/lindy_lee.shtml21. The University of Sydney’s Power Institutesupported the Anne Ferran catalogue, thoroughPower Publications, and the Gordon DarlingFoundation supported the Lindy Lee catalogue;Australia Council support was also crucial for theFerran catalogue and the Lindy Lee exhibition. See(eds.) Felicity Johnston and Anne Ferran, AnneFerran: Shadow Land, Sydney: Power Publicationsand Perth: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2014;Judith Wright (et al), Judith Wright: Desire,Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology,2014; Michele Helmrich (curator, et al.), Lindy Lee:The Dark of Absolute Freedom, Brisbane:

University of Queensland Art Museum, 2014.