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 soul of their music.
The title of the work also suggests that to be awake to the memory of the departed is the only way left to give them life — they persist in our memories as fleeting shadows: we glimpse them only out of the corner of our eye. Thus, these fantastical musicians are assembled to accompany, with pomp and ceremony, the passage to the afterlife: every shadow is a ghostly refrain of that original loss. Wright had previously collected antique masks for her works — in this work, she has gathered obsolete antique instruments that embody the memory of the music they once made.
‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ includes more than 70 works in painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles, video, and performance. The exhibition will explore key themes such as ‘performing’ femininity; the place of personal and intimate spheres such as sexuality, the body, motherhood and ageing; the return to everyday materials; and the ways some artists are ‘redressing the canon’ of painting.
Contemporary Australia: Women | 21 April — 22 July 2012 | Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)