TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form

“In art … it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.”*

From throwing liquid bronze to whistling for three days straight, the TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form considers how the wild, intangible forces that animate behaviour might find form within an artwork.

For the sixth TarraWarra Biennial at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, guest curator Emily Cormack has selected 23 artists and one artist group from across Australia whose work captures the anarchic exuberance of human will through a range of sculpture, painting, performance and film.

For some artists, will is drawn from a relationship to country and earth, while for others it is channeled through the psyche. Other artists highlight the role of the body as either a conduit for, or a concealer of, wilful forces.

The Biennial includes 19 new commissions, performance events and works that refigure the spaces of the Museum itself, including Bidjara, Ghangalu and Garingbal artist Dale Harding’s site-specific, 30m-long wall painting Wall Compositions from Memory, 2018. Red earth from his grandmother’s Garingbal country in the Carnarvon Gorge is mixed with saliva and blown and rubbed into the Museum’s wall, becoming a vast field of colour which both folds into and transcends the aspirational language of American colour field paintings. 

Other works to be premiered include renowned Australian artist Mike Parr’s Whistle White, 2018, which sees young artists work together to whistle continuously for three days in an endless, cycling rhythm of breath; Claire Lambe’s Witnessing Bacon, 2018, which employs a process of psychic overflow to trigger subjective narratives around a collection of objects —images of women peering behind doors, a bronze hair washing basin, a two way mirror—hovering before a large tapestry depicting Francis Bacon’s London studio; and Lindy Lee’s Neither Choice, Nor Chance, 2018, which draws upon the ancient Zen Buddhist calligraphic practice of flung-ink through a series of bronze forms thrown by the artist following periods of meditation.

Starlie Geikie will premiere Abri, 2018, a hand-dyed and stitched wearable sculpture that acts as a personal architecture, serving to both contain and restrict the body; while Kusum Normoyle channels the raw energies of the Norwegian fjords in her new video work Magnesite Norway, 2016-18. In collaboration with Norwegian free jazz saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, the duo translate this sublime environment through the vehicles of voice and saxophone, improvising and resonating with nature’s forces.

Artists from Erub Arts in the Torres Strait will exhibit their earthen structures for the first time in a national exhibition of this kind, presenting contemporary sculptures which draw on the ancient stone fishing traps that surround their island and continue to hold a deep social significance, reflecting the interdependence between Erubam Le culture and practices and the ocean.

Victoria Lynn, Director, TarraWarra Museum of Art, said, “From Will to Form includes works that are wilfully overflowing with humanity, resonating with forces that are bodily, aberrant, abject and creative.”

From Will to Form is accompanied by a range of performances, artist talks and a comprehensive catalogue, providing audiences with a variety of contemporary art experiences.

The TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form includes the following artists:
Belle Bassin; Vicki Couzens; Naomi Eller; Artists from Erub Arts; Starlie Geikie; Agatha Gothe-Snape; Julie Gough; Dale Harding; Claire Lambe; Lindy Lee; Bridie Lunney; Rob McLeish; John Meade; Sanné Mestrom; Alison Murray; Michelle Nikou; Kusum Normoyle; Mike Parr; Michael Snape; Hiromi Tango; Fairy Turner; Michelle Ussher; Justine Varga; Isadora Vaughan.

Established in 2006 as a platform for identifying new contemporary and cutting-edge work, the TarraWarra Biennial has become a major forum for artistic expression in Australia. The TarraWarra Biennial invites artists to present new work at the unique TarraWarra Museum of Art, located in the spectacular Yarra Valley one hour from Melbourne.

*Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, (trans. Daniel W. Smith), New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 56.