Artist’s statement
When the wind and the weather blow your dreams sky high
Sail away, sail away, sail away
— Noel Coward
The genesis of this exhibition lies in a small painting, Sail Away, which I made in 2001 for a fundraiser exhibition. The image floated, forgive me, into my mind, shortly after September 11. A second version of that picture appears in this exhibition. A number of related images came to me at around the same time. Other projects precluded my painting them until several years later.
I stood at New York’s Ground Zero early in 2002. My spontaneous reaction: ‘this is bad, but no excuse to go apeshit around the world’. A forlorn thought, because since the 1950s even pretexts have been virtually redundant. Countering fascism with fascism is disastrous, yet sweet, sick dreams of empire blend with childish fantasies of conquest and adventure for many of us, I guess. For evidence, look around you, and not, of course, just at the exhibition.
But these are not edged political pictures. I used to enjoy drawing pirate galleons and smoky sea battles when I was seven or eight. The big wave could be from my bathtub of those years, when I liked to create, relative to the size of toy boats, such maritime monsters. Terror, the Afghan war and the European Space Agency’s MaxWave project all reaffirm a connection between dreams and reality. A need to venture something of the real thing led me to traverse the Pacific in a container vessel in 2006. I am not the first nor surely the last—however cool we are with nature— to see the void as a promise of freedom.
To each and every one: fair winds and a following sea.
The Mission, 85 x 153cm (left), Sail Away II, 25 x 20cm (right)
Gallery installation view
IAN NORTH
Biographical note
Born NZ, in Australia since 1971. Art museum director/curator to academic to independent artist/writer. Writing a violon d’Ingres, art the more fundamental vocation. Did not exhibit when a curator to avoid conflict of interest. Works with photography, painting or combinations thereof.
Selected Solo Exhibitions since 1986
2009 Sail Away. Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
2006 Symptoms. Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
2005 Canberra Suite & Canberra Coda (1980-81). Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
2004 Sail Away. Apartment, Melbourne
1998 Vault (with Helen Fuller). Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide
1997 Correlations. Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
1992 Home & Away. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1990 Manifest Destiny. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1988 Pseudo Panoramas. Cazneaux series. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1997 Seasons. Pseudo Panoramas. Australia. Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney
1986 Seasons. Pseudo Panoramas. Contemporary Art Centre, Adelaide
Selected Commissions
2008 Graham Priest, philosopher. University of Melbourne
2005 The World is All that is Not the Case. Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne
2000 The Intelligence of Blood. Department of Surgery, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide
1996 The Olive Plantation. Art Gallery of South Australia
Selected Group Exhibitions since 1988
2008 Redlands Prize Exhibition. Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney
2007 True Portraits. Adelaide Central Gallery
2006 Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale. Finalists’ exhibition
The Ability to Lie. Horsham Regional Art Gallery
2005 Archibald Prize. Finalists’ exhibition, Art Gallery of NSW
2004 Good Looking. National Gallery of Victoria
2002 Arid Arcadia. Art Gallery of South Australia
2001 Seeing Through Landscape. Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney
2000 Chemistry. Art Gallery of South Australia
1998 The Painted Coast. Art Gallery of South Australia
1997 Painted Realities: hand-coloured photographs from 1839 to the present. University of Wyoming and US tour
1996 Colonial/Postcolonial. Museum of Modern Art, Heide, Melbourne
1992 Location. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and Asia tour
1992 Southern Crossings/Empty Land. Camerawork Gallery, London and tour
1988 Stories of Australian Art. Commonwealth Institute, London
1988 South Australia Rephotographed. College Gallery, Adelaide Festival
Public collections
Artbank, Sydney; Art Gallery of Ballarat; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of SA; Flinders University of South Australia Art Museum; Griffith University, Brisbane; Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria; Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; Riddoch Gallery, Mount Gambier
The Wave, 73 x 170cm
