ESSAYS

For more than 35 years Judith Wright has explored the otherworldliness of everyday happenings. Paralleling the dissonance of recent times with memories of the childhood fear of the unknown, her recent works exemplify this career-long quest.

The works of Judith Wright perhaps shape-shift the viewer into a different mindset. A rational view gives way to a landscape of shadows and fledgling dreams, populated by fragments of creatures, human and otherwise. Above and about us, a cast of animals from farm and zoo, nature, home and spirit oscillate in a mobile of many parts, their flipsides revealing human faces. Painted on oddly shaped scraps of wood, faces and body parts are sometimes suspended one under the other in twos or threes, further animating this strangely happy flock. Have they found release from story books and toys? Their graphic quality suggests such a link with childhood. An elephant, a merry goat, a cat with pointy ears and wicked eyes, perky birds with upturned beaks, some linked to placid fish, human faces whose nose and mouth have become separate entities, and are they birds with wings, a bat, and …

Judith Wright’s practice is deeply grounded in the corporeal. As a former professional ballet dancer, the artist works from the perspective of embodied knowledge – a means of understanding the world through the physical reality of the body. Her large-scale painted books, for instance, demand the viewer’s physical effort. To experience these works one must turn their oversized pages with exaggerated, sweeping motions. Similarly, her works on Japanese paper are directly scaled in relation to the proportions of the body: their abstracted forms hint at the curves and undulations of the human form, while their waxed surfaces mimic the uneven texture of skin and emit a faint, sweet aroma. Wright’s video works, too, revel in the movement of living, breathing bodies against the inert stiffness of mannequins, which feature heavily in her practice. This focus on the dimensions and conditions of the body is linked to her exploration of mortality …



Here We Are interview with Judith Wright (PDF download) Judith Wright in conversation with Hannah Hutchison, Art Gallery of NSW. Movement and the body play an important role in your practice, particularly the movement of bodies in relation to each other. Is this informed by your background as a dancer? Yes, definitely. My dance experience has been very influential in the formation of my art practice. Movement and space – the intimate spatial connections between two bodies – are crucial, as well as the wider spatial relationships of dancers on a stage. These spaces are negotiated through movement. You were a dancer with the Australian Ballet Company in the late 1960s. After you left the company, you started to attend life-drawing classes. What was it that attracted you to drawing? I have been interested in drawing since childhood, making portraits of my school mates and, later, my fellow dancers. I …