HEATHER SHIMMEN History Rhymes 11 – 30 May 2021
AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE
Artist in her studio
AU S T R A L I A N GA L L E R I E S MELBOURNE
Invites you to the opening
HEATHER SHIMMEN History Rhymes Tuesday 11 May 2021 6pm - 8pm 28 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066 Current until Sunday 30 May 2021 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm T 03 9417 2422 melbourne@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au
Front cover: Cockatoo #2 2019-20 linocut on felt 70 x 38 cm unique
Heather Shimmen — History Rhymes Our histories are in a constant process of reinvention.1
Empowering the animal world through myths, literature, poetry,
kangaroo, cockatoos, marsupials, bush rats, swans, echidnas and
nursery rhymes and cartoons might seem a common form of
emus, she reinstates their entitled position but also reminds us of
transmogrifying humanity’s morals and politics, but it is an effective
their vulnerability to invasive Western ways.
way to pull out darker stories about personal memories and historical events. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and James Gilray gave animals distinctive personalities and names, characters who were capable of interventions or facilitating fateful and hilarious outcomes. Artists such as Goya animated his etchings with owls, bats and donkeys to great effect. In Heather Shimmen’s recent body of prints and sculptural assemblages we find Indigenous Australian creatures enticing us into fabulous, metaphysical realms that weave around politics, environmentalism, racism and feminising tales of women adrift, adorned, lost or outcast. Excavating forgotten stories and sequencing images is one of Shimmen’s main conceptual and aesthetic tropes and her repertoire of animals and visual narratives engage us at various levels. In her words, ‘A bee in the hair is worth a hive in the hand’, sometimes with a sting. In Shimmen’s installation wall work, A rogue son and a royal visit 2019–20, which includes Cooemu 2019–20 and The faraway tree 2019–20, antipodean animals embroider the imperial trunk of colonialism. It is a work inspired by a satiric account of the first royal visitor to Australia, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, whose ‘Welcome to Country’ in 1868 was lampooned by a cartoonist with a chorus of native animals holding a long scroll of formalities.
Sighted 2021, a six-panelled linocut with a double-vision narrative, situates the iconic kangaroo — as depicted in the well-known engraving made after the 1772 painting by George Stubbs — as a colonial victim. The ‘Kongouroo from New Holland’ became a kind of mascot symbol after the British discovery of Australia, but it is not just a quixotic antipodean animal for Europeans, rather a target for hunting parties, a recreational replacement for hounds and foxes – note the Rorschach revolvers in the upper section of the print. The warped concentric circles imply an historic bending of truth as much as referring to the shooting target, but these circles perhaps also extend to the attrition and dispossession of Australia’s first nation people.2 Shimmen’s intriguing imagery generally involves female figures, whether mythological, colonial or contemporary, and are statements about womanhood embellished with menageries and microcosms of insects and flora. Her lino prints have a marvellous sense of alchemic freedom, something she attributes to the experimentation encouraged by her RMIT teachers Len Crawford, George Baldessin and Andrew Sibley during her student years in the late 1980s. Many of her images ‘step calmly out of her head’, yet they are informed by the historical obscurity and misrepresentation of women – saints, martyrs and goddesses such as Minerva, the seven daughters of
Shimmen transforms this scenario into a totemic work of embossed
Eve, or the many types of Matilda, a generic identity for Australian
aluminium, hand stencilled lines and faux fur — as she puts it,
women, or the misogynistic treatment of women as witches,
she likes to ‘get the print off the page’ — and the message, while
naturalists and herbalists. By rehabilitating them into the picture
animistic, is also political. Celebrating our indigenous animals, the
Shimmen speaks of the immeasurable contributions they have
made across time and place. Heather Shimmen’s linocuts and semi-
work Shimmen has produced to date, a multitude of assembled
sculptural works also draw upon personalised experiences of her
stories about mythology, astrology and women create a galaxy in
childhood and her present semi-reclusive coastal life in the bushland
itself. Based around the star cluster the Pleiades, which has informed
of South Gippsland. Anthropology, ethnographic and colourful tribal
ancient and contemporary cultures across the globe, the star may
lore are pervasive threads, for as a child she moved between two
symbolises divine three guidance, but its microbial features radiate
very different cultures, the Anglocentric mores of Melbourne and
beyond prescribed time, and Shimmen’s small, decorative star-
the remote jungle plateaus of the New Guinea highlands where her
flowers also refer to the visual and viral nature of transmission.
parents co-owned a farm. Initiated into the tropical, not as tourist
Heather Shimmen’s art and sense of reality tantalisingly plays with
but as an innocent, she absorbed the fetishistic exoticism as simply another way of living; jungle tales were accompanied by a chorus of melodious native songs and chants, and rather than Western capitalism’s Barbie doll craze, Shimmen played with carved wooden figurines and collected brilliantly coloured beetles and butterflies, often travelling with a throng of highland children who sang to ward off evil spirits. Heather’s sense of songlines of protection permeates much of her work, hence the music scores that float across the paper, for instance the colonial Waltzing Matilda song. Indeed, the
Western patterns of male control, the force of the feminine and natural and mystical forces that merge into a highly individualised iconography. Her vocabulary of representation commands our attention with magnificent, mesmerising and at times confronting images that sweep across cultural zones and centuries, reminding us of the importance to imagine, revise and reinvent. Sheridan Palmer, March 2021
exotic acts as a mystifying force that saves us from banality and transports us elsewhere.2 In the linocuts, The invisible hand 2020 and The wisdom of grasshoppers 2019, Shimmen returns to the subject of body decoration, linking tribal scarification with the cosmetic excess of European women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the latter painted large beauty spots to conceal smallpox scars. Both prints refer to the transmission of viruses that have plagued humans, something that Shimmen has long been interested in, yet these works were made pre-Covid and now seem prescient of the devastating pandemic wave of 2020. In her eight-metre frieze The Ladies of the Pleiades 2019, the largest
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2
Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish, Picdor, Pan Macmillan, 2001, p. 2. Harry Harootunian, in Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetic on diversity, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, vii.
The invisible hand 2020 linocut on paper and organza 76 x 120 cm edition 25
The wisdom of grasshoppers 2019 linocut and ink on paper 152 x 112 cm edition 25
The Ladies of the Pleiades 2019 linocut and ink on paper 180 x 810 cm unique Installation image at Gippsland Art Gallery
E-muse 2021 linocut and embossing on paper 152 x 112 cm edition 25
Sighted 2021 linocut and ink on paper 112 x 76 cm edition 25
Through thick and thin 2019 linocut and ink on paper 180 x 210 cm edition 5
& a roo 2021 linocut and ink on paper 152 x 112 cm edition 25
Cooemu 2019-20 linocut on aluminium, faux fur and pressed tin elements 82 x 67 cm unique
Reach 2019-20 linocut on aluminium and faux fur 82 x 60 cm unique
Clockwise from top left: Small pox #1 2019 aluminium and linocut 13 x 13 cm unique Big pox #6 2019 aluminium, embossing linocut and faux fur 20 x 20 cm unique Big pox #5 2019 aluminium, embossing, linocut and faux fur 19 x 19 cm unique Small pox #11 2019 aluminium and linocut 12 x 12 cm unique Big pox #2 2019 aluminium, linocut and faux fur 21 x 21 cm unique Small pox #10 2019 aluminium, embossing and faux fur 13 x 13 cm unique Big pox #7 2019 aluminium, embossing, linocut and faux fur 25 x 25 cm unique
Tree creeper #2 2019-20 aluminium, embossing and linocut on felt 76 x 39 cm unique
Tree creeper #1 2019-20 aluminium, embossing and linocut on felt 89 x 39 cm unique
The faraway tree 2019-20 linocut, aluminium, pressed tin and embossing 188 x 169 cm unique
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