A Celebration of Female Voices:
Representations of the Female Voice in the Rockhampton Museum of Art
Kellie Williams
Female artists are significantly under-represented in the Rockhampton Museum of Art (RMOA) collection, with approximately one quarter of artworks created by women. Even further under-represented are artworks by Queensland-based and Indigenous Australian women. Despite this, many of the works that are held are significant, in terms of the significance of the artists’ contribution to the development of Australian art, the representation of female voices in everyday life, and the Australian experience and history more broadly. It is worth celebrating and showcasing the significant works by female artists in the collection as a contribution towards representation of women in Australian public art spaces. In the 21st century, the gallery has actively sought to re-dress the gender imbalance in this important regional collection.
This study has focused particularly on artworks by female artists that are significant from a feminist point of view. Varying greatly in terms of subject matter and form, these artworks are a celebration of the personal and collective achievements of these talented artists, honouring the authentic reflection of women’s experiences seen through the eyes of women rather than ‘focusing on events concerning men, told by men’.1 The subject matter may not be overtly feminist, and the artist need not identify their practice as being feminist, however a woman sharing her voice on either personal or global matters through the public act of exhibiting art, is arguably a feminist act in itself.2 Seen through this lens, artworks of significance include works by a range of nationally significant female artists, including some Queensland artists. An analysis of artworks broken down by time period, reveals the following artists and artworks of considerable significance…
Grace Cossington Smith’s Drapery in the Studio (1940) and Constance Stokes’s The Virgin (1944). Both artists can be considered feminist in the sense that they pursued professional art careers during decades where most women did not work at all, and when the art establishment was far more likely to celebrate male creative achievements. Cossington Smith is one of the most influential Australian modernist artists who developed her own response to European post-impressionism. In contrast, Stokes is not generally considered a household name alongside her contemporaries such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and others. This is in some ways surprising considering that her artworks were exhibited alongside those men in London and elsewhere, and with international critics at that time lauding Stokes’ works as the finest of them all.3 Stokes created the work The Virgin two years after the birth of her last child, which was the beginning of a prolific period of art making for her, despite having an infant and two toddlers to care for. During this time she exploded onto the art world and produced what are widely agreed to be her masterpieces. She practiced what became known as modern classicalism.4 Judy Cassab was in many ways a trailblazer for women in the Australian art world. She was the first woman to twice win the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture (1960 and 1967), and only the second woman to ever win this prize. She accomplished this in an era where women artists were not often recognized for their achievements, winning both 1960 and 1967. Cassab’s artwork Oscar Edwards (1963) was painted during this era and is a wonderful example of her rich, painterly style.
The 1970s was a boom decade for the collection, after Rockhampton Art Gallery acquired a large number of artworks; sadly few female artists were included in this purchase, especially during an era where Australian female artists were actively interrogating notions of feminism. While the collection does not generally feature examples of the more overtly feminist works of the decade, significant works are held by female artists that were pioneers within their respective styles. Rosemary Madigan’s sculpture Little Eve (1976) and Bridgid McLean’s painting Reverse Pop (1977) are exemplars of this. Madigan was one of Australia’s most distinguished sculptors. Her style was reflective of the minimalist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The 1980s was a dynamic era of change, with female artists asserting their position in the Australian art world. Indigenous women came to the fore, seen through the acquisition of Judy Watson’s Self Portrait in Black II (1988) and Pansy Napangardi’s Traditional Dreamtime Legend (1988). Watson and Napangardi were pioneers in their respective styles. Watson is a celebrated Queensland artist and Waanyi woman. Her Self Portrait in Black II includes herself as the subject, which was a technique widely used by female artists in the 1970s and 1980s to redirect conversations around the visual depictions of women in art.5 Napangardi was a pioneer in that she became the first professional female desert painter for Papunya Tula in the Northern Territory. Moving away from traditional styles of painting demonstrated by her male peers, Napangardi created her own style of dot painting that was a more personal expression of her cultural beliefs in a truly original manner.
Women continued to challenge hierarchies in the Australian art world into the 1990s. Annette Bezor’s Entanglement Inversion (1990) is a stellar example of these challenges. Emblematic of her style, the painting Entanglement Inversion depicts female faces distorted, boldly coloured and obscured by veils, turbans and shapes. Greenaway Art Gallery director Paul Greenaway, who represented Bezor from 1992 through her international exhibiting years said that:
Already an accomplished painter and strong feminist, she exploited the idea of appropriation, taking images of women from classical painting and popular culture, and reproducing them as highly stylised representations that subverted the impact of the originals. No longer the male gaze, but an empowered new view that questioned identity and sexuality.6
The turn of the 21st century saw the gallery acquire works of art with near equal gender parity. Significant works include Lindy Lee’s Nell-Dharma (2001) and Tracey Moffatt’s First Jobs, Pineapple Cannery 1978 (2008). Lindy Lee is a Queensland-born contemporary artist whose practice is considered feminist by scholars such as Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore, by virtue of her commitment to taking on her own personal circumstances, views and desires as a source for making work.7 During the period of time that the artwork Nell-Dharma was created, Lee began to incorporate images from family albums into multi-paneled works, continuing her long fascination with portraiture. Tracey Moffatt is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video. She often deals with issues of racism and colonialism in her work by ironically using storytelling to disrupt common cultural narratives.8 Her photographs reference the history of art and photography, as well as her own childhood memories and fantasies, exploring issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity.9 Moffatt’s practice is feminist in the sense that she interweaves the personal with the political.
The 2010s is well represented by female artists. Significant works include Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s painting Dibirdibi Country, 2011 and Kate Shaw’s video artwork Continuum, 2018. Gabori was a senior Kaiadilt artist born on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland. Gabori began practicing with acrylic in 2005, at 81 years of age, after materials were made available to her at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre, where she worked.10 Without being bound to artistic tradition, Gabori expressed her love and longing for her original homeland of Bentnick Island through expressive brushstrokes, and an abstracted representation of landscape mixed with feeling. Shaw is a collage and video artist who reinterprets the notion of landscape and its relationship to Australian identity in a contemporary context. Shaw has a tendency to work with saturated colours, and motifs of abstraction and psychedelia.
Overall, while widely varied in stylistic approaches, mediums and themes in terms of feminist art practice, all of these artists have made a significant contribution to the development of Australian art and have pioneered the way for contemporary female artists to be recognised for their achievements.
February 2022
1 https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/so-fine-the-bone-collector-pulling-apart-australian-history-20180628-p4zoc7.html
2 Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. 1996. “Chapter Eight: Performance Art”. In Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artist’ writings, edited by Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, 682. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3 http://legacy.annesummers.com.au/speeches/an-artist-lost-rediscovering-constance-stokes/
4 Constance Stokes 1906-1991. Curated by Jane Clark. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1993. Exhibition pamphlet
5 Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz. 1996. “Chapter Eight: Performance Art”. In Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artist’ writings, edited by Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, 679-694. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6 https://www.smh.com.au/national/painter-probed-the-dark-side-of-beauty-and-celebrity-20200202-p53wy0.html
7 Millner, Jacqueline and Moore, Catriona. 2018. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. London: Routledge.
8 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/moffatt-tracey/
9 https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/tracey-moffatt/
10 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/gabori-sally/