ESSAYS



MCA Collection Artist Studios: Judith Wright From her studio on Turrbal Country, artist Judith Wright talks about her practice and the process in creating her work, ‘Relative Conversations’ (2006), on display as part of ‘MCA Collection: Eight Artists’. Reproduced with permission of the MCA. Visit the MCA website for more information MCA group exhibition Eight Artists.

  Judith Wright is well-known for works spanning painting, drawing, video and installation, often sustaining dialogues between different media. She came to her art practice from a background in classical dance, having performed with the Australian Ballet for four years, a history revealed in the performative aspects of her work. Often dealing with the impermanence and the vulnerability of life, recently, Wright has drawn on her enduring themes in new ways, making videos and figurative sculptural installations. For ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, Wright has made A wake 2011. Her first major figurative installation, it marks a new development in her long meditation on the loss of her daughter, who died shortly after birth many years ago. Wright says ‘the power of the shadow to conjure absence’ directed her to make A wake. The ancient Greeks associated shadows with the soul, and this is true of Wright’s musicians: their shadows are the …

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 …