curator's gallery

Louise Martin-Chew is a senior arts writer who has worked in the visual arts industry for over twenty years. She worked with the national touring agency Art Exhibitions Australia 1986 to 1990, becoming Editorial Manager of Art and Australia journal 1990 to 1992. Since then she has worked as a freelance writer from a Brisbane base. She has contributed regularly to The Australian newspaper since 1996, and writes for national art magazines, catalogues and books. In the Australian indigenous area she has recently written on the work of Dorothy Napangardi and Alick Tipoti and on urban Aboriginal artists including Judy Watson, Fiona Foley, Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. She contributed two essays to The Heart of Everything: the art and artists of Mornington & Bentinck Islands. This book, published by McCulloch & McCulloch Australian Art Books, will be launched at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane on 17 May, 2008.

In these paintings from 2005, Paula Bannan’s twenty year career as an artist and traveller yields diverse inspiration – drawn from the Iraqi war, time spent working with indigenous artists in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, research on war propaganda, and her early training as a printmaker. These influences coalesce into particular images of experience and observation, and tie wit to overarching pattern and shape. They combine strong colour and tight composition, and an appreciation of the machinery they portray – flattened patterns from land or city, infilled by planes, tanks, caravans, cars, and the recurring star symbol. With surfaces as densely textured as their multitudinous sources, these paintings build a lively aesthetic around concepts both personal and political. (Louise Martin-Chew, 11 March 2008) Photo by Patrick McKenna.