Art Guide Australia Podcast Art Guide Australia

Even Agatha Gothe-Snape struggles to define her art. While performancemay be the easiest description, there are many avenues winding through her practice including dance, collaboration, text, public works, PowerPoint slide presentations, augmented reality and documentary. If the form of Snape’s work can be slippery, so too can the content. Broadly speaking, much of her work looks at artistic processes, the canon of art history, and the social and aesthetic contexts that artworks sit within. 
In a career barely brushing one decade, Gothe-Snape has exhibited widely. She’s the only artist to have shown in all iterations of the Sydney exhibition series The National, and was also included in the 20th Biennale of Sydney — not to mention she’s also the subject of an Archibald-winning painting, created by her partner Mitch Cairns. 
Most recently, Gothe-Snape was commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for the exhibition Making art public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. For the show, Agatha created Lion’s honey, an ongoing performance in which a single person reads to themselves each day in the gallery. It’s this work that becomes the focus of the podcast, with Gothe-Snape recounting how the performances came to fruition — just when she was at the edge of refusing a commission — it was hearing a fable that brought her back into creating. It’s Gothe-Snape’s telling of the story that gives such an insight into her practice, and how she thinks about art. 
Gothe-Snape also talks about the experience of being part of an artistic family, why she eventually went to art school, the role of language in her work, her thoughts on John Hughes and the art canon, and her struggles with the label of “art”. 
See more at Art Guide online: www.artguide.com.au/podcast

For David Hurlston curating is both a conceptual and physical process: he’s concerned with how viewers move through gallery spaces and how they read artworks. “It’s just about making a really tangible and interesting and educative experience, and I think that happens in the real world, in the real space,” he says.

Having been a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria for over 25 years, David Hurlston’s name is synonymous with the curatorial field of Australian art. While his current role is Senior Curator, Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts to 1980, David has worked in a number of curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Victoria including Curator, Australian art exhibitions (2002-2007), Program Coordinator (1999-2002) and Access Gallery Curator (1993-1999).

As Hurlston explains in the podcast, curating is centred on collaboration, listening and negotiation: elements which have come into play when curating survey shows on well-known artists including Ron Mueck, David Hockney, Deborah Halpern, Ian Strange and more.

Hurlston also discusses the push and pull between entertaining and informing gallery visitors, his childhood experience of regularly visiting NGV, his background as an artist, what curating has meant to him over the years, and what the label of ‘curator of Australian art’ signifies today.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

“Not only is it exhibition making,” says independent curator Andy Butler when talking of his curatorial practice, “I think it’s advocacy in a lot of ways for particular artists’ practices, for the arts more broadly, for particular ideas that you want to see circulate within the contemporary art world and contemporary art discourse.”

Along with being an independent curator, Butler is a Filipino-Australian writer and artist who continuously looks at the dynamics of power, systemic racism and racial hierarchies within a contemporary art context. As Butler explains in the third episode of our Conversations with Curators series, independent curating provides a malleable space for exploring power and racism, allowing him to work closely with artists and to take greater curatorial risks.

Although Butler is still in the earlier stages of his curatorial career, he’s recently curated a number of exhibitions that have garnered considerable attention including Those Monuments Don’t Know us at Bundoora Homestead and Always there and all a part at Melbourne artist-run gallery BLINDSIDE.

In the podcast conversation Butler talks about these shows, explaining his impetus to illustrate the complexity of artists and their work, and to focus on having meaningful engagements and discussions on racism and colonialism in both art and life. “At least in the exhibitions I’ve curated, I’ve tried to move away from this sense that exhibitions like this are just celebrating diversity — they’re actually more about whiteness,” explains Butler. “They’re more about structures of power that people from all of these [different] backgrounds are all navigating in these different ways.”

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

“Each curator is unique like every artist is unique, I believe,” says Nici Cumpston, who holds the dual positions of Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and artistic director of TARNATHI. Not to mention that Cumpston, a Barkindji woman of Afghan and European descent, is also an artist, educator and writer.

In this podcast, the second of four episodes which focus on contemporary curating, Cumpston discusses how for her curating is a mixture of aesthetic, cultural, political and educative roles, at the centre of which lie community, relationships and conversation. “For me I need to have a good understanding of the artists work,” she says. “I need to build a relationship with the artist that I’m working with and I like togive them the opportunity to excel themselves.”

Cumpston further talks through her pre-art life, how she eventually found herself at AGSA, the larger aspirations behind curating, and the changes she’s noticed in the arts as an Indigenous curator during the last decade.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

When Anna Davis discusses being a curator, she talks about collaboration, conversation and experimentation: “It’s about working with artists and working with ideas.” It’s also about the relationships: “The exhibition really starts to take shape in a real sense once the artists are really talking. I think when you get the chance to work with someone like Jenny Watson or Louise Hearman and it’s over a number of years, which is fantastic, you get to develop this relationship with them and hopefully a level of trust comes through that.”

Having held the position of Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) for the past decade, Davis has curated a vast array of contemporary exhibitions, which she discusses in the first episode of Art Guide’s four-part series ‘Conversations with Curators’.

Anna discusses how she came to curating, what her past life as a “lapsed artist” offers her curatorial practice, the experience of curating major solo shows and the ethical implications of her work.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au
Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

Colour is simultaneously the most apparent and most complex part of Gemma Smith’s practice. The artist, who has a penchant for abstraction, creates paintings that capture dialogues and interactions between colours. Smith doesn’t paint with colour; she persuades colour.

In this podcast she discusses her explorations into colour and form, her process in the studio, her penchant towards abstraction, and what she has learnt about painting from almost two decades of explorations into colour, space and form.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-gemma-smith-on-the-persuasion-of-colour

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.