For as long as I can remember my mum would draw. She called them doodles, this description made them sound less serious, kind of fun. I recall a teacher asking about my mum at school and I proudly announced “She’s an artist, she does lots of doodles” they gave me a strange look. It took mum a while to consider herself an artist. She often drew to give herself a sense of place in the world, to be in a room and not have to speak, to do something other than read while waiting, a way of talking if she felt like her voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard. There was a therapeutic nature to her creative process too, much like some people use sensory tools, she drew.
Her drawings are playful, whimsical and quite spontaneous. Often starting out as black and white line work. Her entire life she was armed with a small sketch pad and black pen. Felt tip fine liners or metal liquid ink were her favourites. They both flow nicely onto thick textured paper. In recent years she would clear out the Daylesford bargain shop of A5 sketch pads, such was her veracious appetite for drawing and the prolific nature of her process. Any visitor to her art gallery Radius in Hepburn over recent years will recall her sitting at the front counter “doodling” and drinking coffee.
As with most creatives by the mid 90’s she had amassed a large volume of work. My father was mum’s biggest champion at the time and arranged her first exhibition at Kazbar on Chapel Street, South Yarra. She was thrilled to experience the excitement of selling some artwork. There was also a sense of validation, purpose and renewed vigour to her creativity. She became more experimental, adding colour and creating whole scenes and make-believe worlds. Her second exhibition was about 5 years later at Hogan Gallery in Collingwood, when it was still on Smith Street. It turned into quite a party with local buskers invited to play music and local ‘Fitzroyalty’ Grant McCracken taking over proceedings with his unique poet / spruiker style to help sell mums creations.
After the success of these shows Steph introduced miniature knitting to her work. She liked the idea of making her creations more dimensional. She used incense sticks to knit with and off guarded threads which she then later applied as assemblages to her drawings. She referred to them as ‘Mindscapes’. She also started placing her work in her letter box and encouraged snails to nibble on them, delighting at their alterations to her drawings. These would be reworked collage style. She adored the randomness of collaborating with nature and was quite disappointed when she moved to Hepburn and there were no snails in her new letterbox!
She also explored other methods of creation over the years, from rubbings known in the artworld as ‘frottage’ to pour painting and reworking her own digitally altered images. About half of her work is figurative, often faces that feel like exaggerated caricatures or creatures, sometimes inhabiting imaginary worlds or interacting and floating with a surrealist type aesthetic. She rarely wrote much about her art, recently I found these words she penned for an exhibition catalogue which really captures the essence of her thought processes:
“These paintings aim to depict the ironies of our existence such as pathos and joy, friendship and alienation, a sense of belonging and displacement, love and loneliness, and just the plain bizarreness and peculiarities of what it means to be human through the filter of my inner child’s perception.”
I came across the term outsider art a few years ago and I think that describes mum quite well: “A self-taught, untrained artist who operates outside the conventional art world. Often not influenced by mainstream artistic movements or commercial art markets.”
She had two more exhibitions, one at her gallery B1 in Ballarat when it opened in 2009 and then again for the launch of Mingus Gallery (later Radius Art) in Hepburn. Before she passed this September Steph created some gauze inspired works in honour of the people of Gaza. The very word gauze is believed to derive from the name of Gaza, an ancient Mediterranean textile hub. These images were delicate fabric like black & white line drawings, the last of which she did before passing on the 30th September this year.
We gave away a lot of her work at a Life Celebration at Radius last month as was her wish. There’s a memorial page on our website featuring artworks and memories if you would like to explore further.
Lastly, we have a new exhibition opening this week: Wide Open Road. It is a spectacular show featuring 4 local artists and their artworks derived from an expedition to Lake Mungo and White Cliffs for 10 days in August. This is an annual exhibition now in its fourth year, please join us for art and bubbles this Saturday 14th November at 1pm. The exhibition is our last for the year and will be open on Sat and Sun 10am – 4pm until xmas.
