COME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN
Restraint (detail), 2000
Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 40+ years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.
Cover BRYAN SPIER Acrylic on linen, 50 x 40cm Photo by Brenton McGeachieCOME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN
JUSTIN ANDREWS
STUART BAILEY
LEAH BULLEN
TREVELYAN CLAY
HELEN SHELLEY
NOËL SKRYZPCZAK
BRYAN SPIER
CURATED BY ALEXANDER BOYNES
For young artists who were emerging in Kamberri/Canberra during the late 1990s and early 2000s, their allegiance to the capital was a dirty little secret to hide from the cool crowds when visiting Naarm/Melbourne or Warrane/Sydney. As graduates packed their cars and hit the Hume Highway, they would whisper, “Don’t tell anyone I’m from Canberra!” eager to leave what they perceived as an artistic backwater for more culturally sophisticated cities.
In the last two decades Canberra has gone from not only being an excellent place to study and cut your teeth in the visual arts, but has also grown and matured into somewhere to put down roots and develop a career. These days you’re more likely to hear artists hissing “Don’t tell anyone about Canberra!”
Come Back, All is Forgiven brings back a selection of strong and talented artists who graduated from the Australian National University School of Art & Design (ANU SoA&D, then called the Canberra School of Art) in the late 90s and early 00s. These artists first exhibited at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) as fresh-faced graduates, before leaving the capital to “make it”. The exhibition features original works from their formative years in Canberra, alongside new and recent works produced after two decades of working as practising artists. By using the gallery as a space to reflect on the career progression of each artist and the evolution of their craft, presenting their early and current work side by side allows audiences to engage with different moments that occur within a creative practice. This hopefully gives emerging artists an insight into potential career progressions, encouraging them to persist.
The common thread among this group of artists, aside from their recognition as valued and commercially successful artists, was their shared interest in Abstraction, which began to emerge in the mid-1990s at ANU SoA&D. This contemporary exploration of one of the most significant art movements of the 20th Century was so widespread that my father Robert Boynes, the then Head of the Painting Workshop, noted two distinct camps: the Sharpies and the Blobs, positioned at opposing ends of the Abstraction spectrum. While all artists shared a common value for non-representational image making, some artists, such as Justin Andrews, were situated at the far end of the Sharpies, while others, such as Noël Skrzypczak, were in the Blob camp. All of the artists featured in Come Back, All is Forgiven have, at some point, occupied a position on this artistic spectrum, with the importance of contemporary Abstraction continuing to resonate through the ANU SoA&D to this day.
Image JUSTIN ANDREWS Spatial Array, 2000, Graphite, oil stick and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Justin Andrews, a graduate from the ANU SoA&D Painting Workshop is an artist whose mode of Geometric Abstraction aims to capture the complexity of contemporary life. Currently living and working in Castlemaine, Victoria, which has become a rural haven for artistic Melbournites, he draws inspiration from the unique surroundings and rich cultural landscape of the region. Andrews works in various mediums such as drawing, printmaking, sculpture, site-specific installation and more recently, sound, maintaining a curatorial and independent publishing practice alongside his art practice.
His works are characterised by the use of angular elements, dynamic colours and organic surfaces, and are mostly created through acrylic paintings on canvas, stretched on frames and panels made by the artist himself. Andrews’ visual and conceptual language draws inspiration from early 20th Century avant-garde art movements like Constructivism and Suprematism, extending their currency into the 21st Century with his contemporary interpretations.
Come Back, All is Forgiven features an early work by Andrews called Spatial Array (2000), comprising a tessellating arrangement of black and white rectangles and squares, which animate the surface of a silvery-grey patchwork. The interesting aspect of this work is how it is gridded on an X and Y axis, but displayed at a 45 degree angle, perhaps foreshadowing his later works. Alongside Spatial Array, the exhibition showcases a series of recent works that maintain an X and Y axis, but the grid is distorted to form V and A shapes. Visually striking with bold colours and patterns, the real beauty of these works lies in their subtle surface treatments. Andrews achieves this by sanding back or thinly applying masked stripes of paint, creating a translucency and sense of depth that belies the typical front loaded picture plane often associated with Geometric Abstraction.
Having studied Printmaking at the ANU SoA&D and the Kyoto Seika University in Japan, Dr Stuart Bailey works as an artist, educator and curator. He completed his Doctorate in 2014 at the Sydney College of the Arts and currently lectures in contemporary art at the same institution.
Bailey’s visual arts practice aims to draw connections between individuals who lack awareness of social and political issues and the often-repressed images of death, destruction, and humiliation associated with far-right politics. He is also influenced by heavy metal and hardcore punk music scenes, specifically the fusion of the two known as Grindcore. Similar to the primary lyrical themes in this genre - social and political issues mixed with satire - Bailey’s artwork explores the gap between political consciousness and action. He expresses his ideas through a variety of mediums, including printmaking, sculpture, and installation.
Image JUSTIN ANDREWS
Endless Infinite Diffusion Network, 2020, Acrylic on canvas over plywood panel, 121.5 x 85cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Come Back, All is Forgiven features a collection of early works created at Megalo Print Studio, including The Real Target (2002). This particular artwork portrays Martin Bryant, the convicted mass-shooter who took the lives of 35 people in the Port Arthur massacre. The image shows Bryant’s likeness depicted in a naive style, alongside a pair of crossed rifles adorned with the Australian flag, centred on a gunsight with both elements directed at Port Arthur on the map of Tasmania. While the work was originally intended to critique Australia’s worst gun massacre and mock far-right extremism, it now bears an unsettling resemblance to the propaganda language used by Incels (Involuntarily Celibate), time has made it scarily believable.
As Bailey’s art practice has developed, his politically charged output has become more subtle in its delivery. One of his recent works included in the show, Detachment 4 (2019), draws inspiration from political posters that have been obscured, redacted, and stripped of their meaning to create something more closely resembling contemporary Abstraction. These works convey mixed emotions about the effectiveness of resistance politics through the seemingly outdated medium of political posters. They create a sense of tension between historical moments of political optimism, such as the Russian Revolution and late 1960s French and U.S. political posters, and current political images that appear tired and drained.
By exploring the complex relationship between politics and the individual, Bailey’s work critiques the notion that political change can only be achieved through direct action. Instead, he uses his art to encourage people to reflect on their own political engagement and to recognise the impact of their actions, or inactions, on the wider community.
Dr Leah Bullen is a contemporary visual artist based in Armidale, New South Wales. Her artistic practice spans across various mediums, including painting, printmaking, drawing, and mixed media, completing her Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) and a Doctor of Philosophy Creative Arts at the ANU SoA&D.
Bullen’s work explores the intersection between photography, painting, drawing and collage, with photographic source material serving as a reference point. Her artistic practice is centred around the representation and mediation of the natural world, with a recent focus on representing locations that reconstruct nature, such as gardens, aquariums, and museum displays. These locations serve as a model through which she explores how we experience and consume the spectacle of nature in contemporary culture.
Detachment 4, 2019
Image STUART BAILEY Acrylic on aluminium, 120 x 90cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image STUART BAILEY
Come Back, All is Forgiven installation, 2022
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Included in Come Back, All is Forgiven are an early suite of small paintings on board depicting images of natural disasters sourced from newspapers and the internet. In retrospect, images of State Emergency Service drills, rescued divers and cars submerged in flood waters places the series under the banner of Climate Change art. As with Stuart Bailey’s early work, time has positioned Bullen’s work in a deeper and more profound context.
As her practice has developed, Bullen has extended beyond paint on canvas and board, and has carved out a niche for herself producing painted monotypes, a process that possesses the freedom of painting and the formality of printmaking. In Something Like Forgetting (2016-19) her ability to merge these two mediums results in a unique language that is visually captivating, and speaks of disassociation with the landscape, the work depicting visitors inside an aquarium exhibit. The melding of these two languages also gently references her subject matter, focussing on a man-made recreation of natural worlds, a synthetic version of the organic.
Bullen’s artistic practice reflects on her deep passion for the natural world and her interest in exploring how it is perceived in contemporary culture. Through her work, she challenges viewers to consider their relationship with nature and how it is represented in the world around us.
Born in Cornwall, United Kingdom in the early 1980s, Trevelyan Clay moved to Australia at a young age and grew up on the mid-north Coast of New South Wales. He completed a Bachelor of Arts Visual (Painting) with First Class Honours at the ANU SoA&D.
On the surface, Clay’s artistic approach often appears casual or offhand, residing somewhere between authenticity and satire. It could be viewed as a contemporary reinterpretation of 20th Century European expressionism, filtered through the laid-back aesthetic commonly linked with his commercial gallery, Neon Parc, Melbourne.
Come Back, All is Forgiven features two outstanding examples of Clay’s early visual language: Bleeding Painted Grave (2006), with its prominent representational elements, and Cop Car (2006), which incorporates absurd text. As his practice has evolved, direct references to the Australian landscape, popular culture and droll wit have given way to a more restrained visual language. These paintings from almost two decades ago are exhibited alongside recent abstract works, Pushy (2021) and Harp Tree Plays Itself (2020), which at first appear dissimilar to the younger artist’s work.
Above LEAH BULLEN
Afterness (Frogman), 2011, Oil on board, 15 x 30cm
Below LEAH BULLEN School, 2010, Oil on board, 20 x 40cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachieSomething like forgetting, 2016,
Above LEAH BULLEN
Watercolour, gouache and monotype on paper, 57 x 152cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Next page, right TREVELYAN CLAY Pushy, 2021, Oil on linen, 183 x 153cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Next page, left TREVELYAN CLAY Bleeding Painted Grave, 2006, Acrylic on MDF, 142 x 112cm
Photos by Brenton McGeachie
Moving away from humorous text and naive representation, Clay’s current artistic approach embraces flattened fields of pattern, impasto textures and organic forms. However, Clay still employs an interchangeable palette of motifs and icons that appear throughout his work, and in doing so creates a connection across his output, encouraging the viewer to consider the artwork as part of a larger body of work rather than as separate individual pieces. While this style may seem casual or hobbyist at first glance, the use of high-quality materials and large scale suggests a highly aware and purposeful approach. He’s serious about what he’s doing, but he’s still pulling your leg.
Helen Shelley is an artist based in Sydney who graduated from the ANU SoA&D with first-class honors and received her Masters of Fine Arts (Painting) from Sydney College of the Arts. Shelley’s work is inspired by moments in life that evoke wonder and awe, as well as her personal experiences with grief. Her artwork serves as a form of ritual that symbolically immortalises late loved ones and pays homage to the natural world. Her practice explores the role of creativity in the grieving process and how it can channel personal grief into something beautiful and transformative.
Shelley’s recent works have been inspired by moments of transcendence experienced through the birth of her children, and moments in nature, including abstract representations of geological forms and tree growth rings, both of which represent the essence of time. Through her art, Shelley aims to represent life as a continuum and explore notions of immortality through shared matter.
Shelley’s use of iridescent paints and glitter on Perspex has been an ongoing investigation, often featuring repetitive marks made with glitter and acrylic paint on the ‘back’ of the work, allowing the image to be revealed behind a polished skin as though just below the surface of water. The final result produces images that pulse with vibrant energy, organic shapes and symmetry that reference the body or plant life, capturing facets of transcendence and reminding us of the precarious state of the human and natural world.
While she once took cues from Geometric Abstraction, as seen in Greif (2015), her recent work suggests geological matter or celestial imagery. Their ambiguous organic nature means they often read as both micro and macro at the same time, like the detail of a tiny stone under a microscope or an entire galaxy, as seen in The Earth’s Crust, The Baby’s Breath (2018) or Our Late Loved Ones (2016).
Image HELEN SHELLEY The Earth’s Crust, The Baby’s Breath, 2018, Mixed media on Perspex, 160 x 110cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image JUSTIN ANDREWS and HELEN SHELLEY
Come Back, All is Forgiven installation, 2022
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
The essential ingredient missing from any documentation of these works, and only truly experienced by viewing them in person, is the scale of the work in relation to the body. One’s own reflection in the sparkling abyss weaves together the lineage between macro and micro, and reaffirms Shelley’s comfort in the idea that all matter is shared and, in turn, renders her late loved ones immortal.
Shelley’s art references loss and grief, but it also offers an opportunity for transformation and hope. Through her use of materials and techniques, she creates works that are visually striking and emotionally resonant, offering viewers a chance to connect with their own experiences of grief and transcendence. Ultimately, Shelley’s art invites us to contemplate the fleeting nature of life while celebrating the beauty that can be found within it.
Noël Skrzypczak was born in Toronto, Canada, and moved to Canberra as a child. She completed her Visual Arts degree at the ANU SoA&D, including a semester at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, and currently resides and works in Melbourne.
Skrzypczak’s practice draws upon her knowledge of art history as a lens to visually represent the intangible – ranging from psychological experiences to our relationship with the spaces around us. Her earlier work involved representation, but now her art primarily focuses on Abstraction, characterised by vibrant colours and manipulation of paint’s physical qualities. By elevating paint from the surface, Skrzypczak creates an innovative medium and ground, resulting in large-scale abstract works featuring fluid shapes and vivid pigments that extend beyond the boundaries of traditional paintings. These paintings interact with architectural space and are created through a unique process that involves the use of paint, glass, soap, and other materials, resulting in textured organic shapes that allude to the natural world, the human body, and the everchanging psyche’s landscape. Skrzypczak’s art demonstrates her passion and commitment, as she seamlessly combines personal experiences with broader themes of the psyche to create a unique and inspiring artistic perspective.
Next page, left NOËL SKRZYPCZAK
Moonflower #4, 2018, Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 188 x 146cm
Next page, right NOËL SKRZYPCZAK
Moonflower #1, 2018, Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 188 x 146cm
Photos by Brenton McGeachie
Left NOËL SKRZYPCZAK Flyer, 2000, Oil, acrylic, enamel on canvas, two panels: (1) 193 x 93cm, (2) 184 x 91cm
The works in Come Back, All is Forgiven bookend a critical period in Skrzypczak’s practice. Flyer (2000) anticipated her departure from the confines of a canvas, with two irregularly shaped panels challenging the formal conventions of four 90-degree corners. Following this period, Skrzypczak began crafting works by pouring marbled acrylic paint onto Perspex sheets, allowing it to dry and then peeling it off like a soft plastic. These pieces were then arranged in completely organic formations in the gallery, unconstrained by traditional boundaries.
Moonflower #1 and #4 (both 2018) demonstrate Skrzypczak’s artistic development and painterly skills as she reclaims the formality of the canvas, incorporating lessons learned from working beyond its boundaries. In earlier pieces, Skrzypczak’s work seemed to flow limitlessly over a surface, embracing their organic nature. However, she has now achieved control over these elements, cutting into unbounded forms, making them appear as shreds of marbled paper on a surface, jostling for position over a dusty pink ground.
Bryan Spier is a Melbourne based visual artist and teacher at RMIT University. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the ANU SoA&D for his thesis on the formal aspects of visual storytelling and their application to non-representational artwork. Spier has taught painting at both ANU and RMIT and has contributed to journals and exhibition catalogues on abstract art. Despite working with various mediums, including installation, printing, sculpture, and video, he primarily focuses on challenging the concept of painting in a technology-driven world.
Come Back, All is Forgiven showcases two suites of Spier’s works. The earliest includes Loss, Restraint, and Black Poles (all from 2000), a series of small acrylic-on-linen works. These works have loose interpretations of hard-edged Abstraction and show paint dribbling beyond masked lines, with hints of colour creeping out around the edge of overlaid forms. These works have a casual spontaneity and freshness, and their muted tones do not easily reveal their age.
Spier’s recent work is often self-referential and formalist, with a meticulous focus on the compositional elements of colour, line, shape, and texture. Surrealist Spreadsheet and Start Up Chime (both 2022) take obvious cues from digital interfaces but are filtered through traditional principles of colour mixing to add, divide, and multiply structural shapes, resulting in complex compositions.
Image BRYAN SPIER Black Poles, 2000, Acrylic on linen, 50 x 40cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
While Spier’s use of vivid colours captures the viewer’s attention, his intention is not to educate them on colour theory, rather he aims to explore the limits of abstract painting with his highly constructed and complex works. He employs various tactics to generate his imagery, including locating found objects and incidental shapes within other paintings to create tension within each work and between each new suite of works. Spier’s artwork encourages the viewer’s eyes to follow the contours of the painting, which change, merge, and bounce into different forms before ultimately leading the viewer back to the vantage point of observing the work as a whole. Spier’s highly complex and constructed works challenge viewers to explore the limits of contemporary abstract art and appreciate the interplay of colour, line, shape, and texture in his compositions.
Canberra’s reputation as an artistic backwater has changed dramatically over the past two decades, as young artists have emerged and developed their skills in the city’s vibrant arts community. Come Back, All is Forgiven is a testament to the strength and talent of only a small portion of these artists, who began their careers in the ANU SoA&D and went on to make their mark in the wider world. The exhibition highlights the evolution of their work, from their formative years in Canberra to their more recent and mature works. It is a celebration of the capital’s growing cultural sophistication and its ability to nurture and support young artists, providing them with a platform to launch their careers and succeed in the wider world. The exhibition is a reminder that Canberra’s artists have come a long way, and their work deserves recognition and appreciation on the national and international stage.
Alexander Boynes CuratorJustin Andrews is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne
Trevelyan Clay is represented by Neon Parc, Naarm/Melbourne
Noël Skrzypczak is represented by Neon Parc, Naarm/Melbourne
Bryan Spier is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Naarm/Melbourne
Image BRIAN SPIER
Untitled, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 45 x 35cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image TREVELYAN CLAY
Come Back, All is Forgiven installation, 2022
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
