Exhibition Floorsheet | Presence of Evidence

Image: Maria Madeira, Victor de Sousa, Narelle Jubelin, Fiona Macdonald, Elastic / Borracha / Elastico (detail) (2012 Timor-Leste Mobile Residency Archive), 2014, offset lithograph, 135 x 275cm. Printed by Big Fag Press. Winner FAC Print Award 2015

Curated by André Lipscombe In the absence of the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award (FAC Print Award) in the year of Covid19, Presence of Evidence serves to attest to the ascendency of women’s print making spanning 25 years of the Award (1990 – 2015). In this embodiment of fine prints and print series, ideas about identity, selfknowledge and representation of culture, place and societal constructs that impact upon women’s bodies and experience are given voice.

FAC has a strong track record in representing women artists in the exhibition program. There have been numerous significant projects dedicated to exhibiting the work of Aboriginal women working in remote WA communities and facilitating artist interpretation of the histories of women imprisoned at the Women’s Division of the former Fremantle Lunatic Asylum and Women’s Home (now FAC)1. Similarly, women’s print practice has been represented in exhibitions derived from the Collection, generating both solo and survey exhibitions which broaden and enrich the level of engagement and interpretation of the print artists’ work to local and national audiences2.

The City of Fremantle Aboriginal and Indigenous Art Collection comprises over 40 works on paper and prints are its mainstay, with a larger representation of WA artists and important works linked to Walyalup/ Fremantle area. Nyoongar artists are important to the Collection as they offer a worldview connected to personal experience and an Indigenous history and cultural knowledge of Walyalup and the South-West region of WA. WA Aboriginal painter, printmaker and writer Sally Morgan was granted an Indigenous Award for her screenprint Birthsong in 1993. The image represents Country as a creative force which underpins the Aboriginal concept of the ‘land as our mother’. Part of the Stolen Generation, Morgan published My Place in 1987, an autobiography which traced her family history to identify her own hidden origins as belonging to the Palku and Nyamal people of the Pilbara. Peggy Griffiths’ print Majajgoo is also about her home Country and Miriwoong culture of her mother and father associated with the permanent water at Jasper Gorge, close to the border of WA and Northern Territory. Peggy began working with Waringarri Aboriginal Arts (Kununurra, East Kimberley) in 1985, carving and painting on canvas and working with limited edition prints with her then partner, senior artist Alan Griffiths. Peggy Griffiths won the non-acquisitive FAC Print Award in 1995.

Two prints in this exhibition connect with the resistance, resilience and artistic vernacular of the culture and heritage of Timor-Leste people.

NT artist Therese Ritchie, in collaboration with poster maker Chips Mackinolty, produced Rebuild East Timor in 1999, a political statement in support of Timorese independence following a referendum to repeal the annexation of Timor-Leste to Indonesia in 1999.

Utilising a similar colourful palette, the Timor-Leste Mobile Residency Archive, a partnership between artists and communities from Timor-Leste and Australia, produced a folio of 10 prints Elastic/ Borracha/Elastico in 2012. Substantially more sophisticated than photographic documentation, this print series celebrates the textile heritage of Tais, a woven adornment and unit of ceremonial exchange produced solely by women. The Tais traditional fibre and weaving culture is handed down through a verbal matriarchal tradition which provides a vehicle for communal identity, social expression and symbol of economic independence. Each or the 13 regions of Timor-Leste produces greatly different Tais designs, which play an integral role in Timorese life and shape the identity and attitudes towards women’s roles in cultural life.

Both Pat Brassington and Michelle Hyland have produced confronting re-constructed images of young women.

Pat Brassington produces ambiguous, often bleak and erotic images based upon the feminine body.

Here, an unidentified young girl appears to dance in a white gown which is marked with a vertical wound representing the idea of the ‘violated body’. Many of Brassington’s images produce anxiety in the viewer, being both seductive and repelling, as they engage on a formal and psychological level, drawing upon art historical and Freudian references. Akimbo is part of a larger body of work titled Default Blue and was awarded the FAC Print Prize in 1997.

Michelle Hyland produced this psychological selfportrait following her studies at art school. It reveals a haunted figure, racked by competing influences and transfixed by an outward and inward gaze. For Hyland the expectations placed upon young women to find their own physical and intellectual voice in the world was a source of consternation and subject for this powerful emotive work.

In a of series of digital prints Marion Manifold explores the nature of feminine beauty and the sensuous ‘mythological mother’ with an underlying sinister tone.

My Mother’s, Mother’s Mother – Rrose, depicts her great grandmother’s dressmaking model falling through space in a rose-coloured sky. The mannequin’s hour-glass form, in Freudian and Surrealist terms, represents a female double, the symbolic woman who must fall in the male’s initiation rite. The iconography in the printed series repeats Freud’s theories of doubling, repetition and patterning which provide an assurance of life, but also evoke a reminder of death.

1. For example: Bush Women 1993 & 2018, Absence of Evidence 1994, We don’t need a map 2017 2. For example: Freo Women 2005, Olga Cironis, Fajr 2011, Big Winners 2012, Helen Taylor, Sunrise bluebird 2014 and Gosia Wlodarczak, Happy landings 2016

Fremantle’s print holding has over 640 printed works, a quarter of which were acquired from the annual FAC Print Award.

In 43 consecutive years (1976 - 2019) the Collection acquired 56 award winning prints and purchased another 79 from the award exhibition which included numerous non-acquisitive awardwinning prints by women artists.

Collectively these works define the strength of the print holding, in representing examples of print by many leading national practitioners and demonstrating the considerable success by which the partnership with sponsors and benefactors has fulfilled its original objectives and contributed to creating an Australian print holding of national significance.

The Print Award was inaugurated in 1976 offering prize money and an acquisitive award, where the winning print would be entered in the Collection.

The Award was fundamental to the creation of a national focus for print in Western Australia and a mechanism by which to access Australian prints for potential acquisition by the Collection.

Although printmaking is an important media for many women artists, they remained underrepresented in the early Award exhibitions before 1990. Remarkably, the major prize was not awarded to a woman artist until the ninth year, when Monica Schmid won with her Untitled collagraph in 19843.

This situation improved over the next 30 years, primarily through various FAC progressive initiatives, including establishing an Aboriginal Print Award and advocating for equal representation in the judging panels. With the 1980s trend of judges consistently splitting the prize between 2 artists, it wasn’t until 1992 when Heather Hesterman won the major Award outright with her feminist critique of idealised femininity titled 1. Cut on dashed line.

In recent years, particularly after 1995, women artists began to regularly win the Award through the agency of Artist Books and generating multisheet digital print series to explore complex subjects and establishing innovative and collaborative print partnerships involving both men and women artists and printers4.

3. Only 36% of the total number of Award winners to 2019 are women 4. This cohort includes 14 prints of 24 Award winners after 1995

All artworks are from the City of Fremantle Art Collection and listed by artists surname and installed dimensions are in centimetres H x W Pat Brassington (1942-) Akimbo, 1996 digital inkjet print edition 1/5 185.5 x 129cm winner FAC Print Award 1997 no.923

Maria Madeira & Victor de Sousa, Narelle Jubelin & Fiona MacDonald Elastic/Borracha/Elastico (Timor Leste mobile residency archive), 2012 offset lithograph 10 x prints edition 4/30 124 x 230cm winner FAC Print Award 2015 no.1398.1-10

Michelle Hyland (1968-) Statement of Identity, 1989 carborundum ground collagraph edition 1/10 270 x 207cm winner FAC Print Award 1990 no.75

Marion Manifold (1954-) My mother’s, mother’s mother – Rrose, 2000 digital prints x 9 edition 51 x 342cm joint winner FAC Print Award 2000 no.1030.1-9

Peggy Griffiths (1941-) Majajgoo - Jasper Gorge, 1995 lithograph edition 6/20 67 x 105cm winner non acquisitive FAC Print Award 1995 no.937

Sally Morgan (1951-) Birthsong, 1993 artist proof 64 x 47.5cm winner Aboriginal Printmakers Award 1993 no.889

Helen Ling (1940-) Meanwhile, Nalda searches for a way out……, 1989 etching edition 1/6 83 x 117.5cm joint winner FAC Print Award 1989 no.539

Therese Ritchie (1961-) & Chips Mackinolty (1954-) Rebuild East Timor, 1999 edition 10/10 89 x 63.5cm joint winner FAC Print Award 2000 no.1027

FAC would like to acknowledge it operates on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk people and that we respect their spiritual relationship with their country. We also acknowledge the Whadjuk people as the Traditional Owners of the greater Walyalup area and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still important to the living Whadjuk people today.

This program is available on FAC’s website and can be requested in alternative formats such as large print, electronic, hard copy, audio or braille via artscentre@fremantle.wa.gov.au

1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle, Western Australia | fac.org.au