Official Opening of "Timeless: The Art of Cressida Campbell"
5 March 2009
Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology, Major General Peter Arnison, AC, CVO,
QUT Precincts Director, Professor Peter Lavery
QUT Art Museum Gallery Director, Stephen Rainbird
Exhibition curator, Louise Tegart,
Ms Cressida Campbell,
Distinguished Guests, Art Lovers, Ladies and Gentlemen.
As has become customary at significant events in our State, I, too, in a spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered, the Jagera and Turrbal peoples, and recognise their special and ongoing connections to this location, this place.
It is a connection that I believe the artist who we honour this evening through the presentation of this exhibition would, as someone whose own sense of place and attachment to place is so acute and so finely expressed in her work, also recognise and respect.
This is my first official visit, as Governor, to the QUT Art Museum, which is such a jewel in the heart of the QUT precinct, overlooking our beautiful Brisbane botanic gardens. I know that Ms Campbell finds much of her inspiration in her own location of Sydney and of her home there, but admiring the exquisite print of rock lilies chosen for the invitation to tonight's function, or the cycad colour woodblock created the same year, I couldn't help wishing that we could entice her back to Queensland for another period as artist-in-residence, to enable a mutual magic to be worked between her artistry and the lush gardens and flowers of sub-tropical Queensland. After all, it is now 23 years since she was artist-in-residence at another of our fine universities - and although she is with us this evening for this exhibition opening, we would love her to stay longer.
Sadly, I think we will have to ‘join the queue' in wanting to claim her for ourselves or more of her time and artistic energy. This stunning exhibition - which, with its 80 paintings and prints, is a comprehensive survey of Cressida Campbell's output over more than two decades - and which fits absolutely the QUT Art Museum's wish to acquire and show only the finest examples of contemporary art - created great excitement in Sydney, where it opened at Sydney's National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery in January. According to last Thursday's Financial Review, as a result, Cressida Campbell has "become an overnight sensation - 25 years after she began creating her woodblock prints of domestic interiors, flowers and Sydney panoramas". And I understand the exhibition broke all attendance records at the Gallery, which even extended its opening hours to cope with the demand.
Dr Philip Bacon - who has presented Ms Campbell's work here in Brisbane on a number of occasions since the early 1990's and Rex Irwin, who has had at least six exhibitions of her work in his Sydney Gallery since 1989 (and both of whom, happily, are with us this evening) would, I imagine, view this surge of enthusiasm and praise with a mixture of pride and satisfaction, but also wry amusement. I may be wrong, but I wondered if perhaps they were thinking quietly that it's high time that some others caught up, not only in their appreciation of the quality and integrity of this artist's distinctive work, but with the depth and breadth of her achievements to date and the way she has quietly, painstakingly staked her claim - with the same quietness and exactitude that is the hallmark of her art - to a place among the great contemporary Australian artists.
Not yet 50, Ms Campbell has won a string of awards, is featured in the prestigious locations of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and Parliament House and a range of regional galleries, as well as in the British Museum and National Museum of Krakow.
I am surprised, given the influence on her work - both her artistic sensibility and technical ability - of her study in Japan at the renowned Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo, not to see more Japanese galleries feature on the list, but that is bound to happen - assisted no doubt by the flurry of media attention being given to this exhibition (including the item which is being screened on tonight's 7.30 Report). To an untrained, inexpert observer like myself - just an ordinary lover of the arts - there really seems to have been an unusual amount of commentary about this exhibition in both the arts press and in the mainstream press, and the way it appears to have captured the imagination of the wider community - well beyond those fans and ‘aficionados' who have been following Cressida's career for some years - is also quite striking.
Waiting lines for the big, well-publicised and promoted blockbuster exhibitions from overseas, or like the current Queensland one of ‘Optimism' presenting the strong works and bold messages of many different artists - yes - it's easy to understand the popular interest ... but, for a single Australian contemporary artist whose style is subtle and whose subjects have been described by some as the "ordinary and commonplace" and others as "the most familiar and prosaic of subjects"... it is less easy to fathom.
For some, of course there is a relatively simple explanation - they find the work beautiful, a pleasure look at: for the Director of the Art Gallery of NSW - Edmund Capon: "... her work is a joy to behold" - for art critic John McDonald: "... her prints (and paintings) almost radiate with the pleasure of their own making." For Christopher Allen, writing in the Australian in January: "The exhibition is filled with things that deserve to be looked at, that reward the time you spend exploring them. There is a pervasive sense of delight in the visual world, which communicates itself to the viewer ... something even rarer than delight; perhaps the best word is joy."
Other admirers will point to her expert craftsmanship, praising the subtleties of her designs and patterns, the richness of colour and texture in her works, the careful drawing and skilful composition, the meticulous detail of her forms, her exceptional gift for harmonies, hues and contrasts ... these are all things you can see and judge for yourselves.
However, as you view and enjoy this exhibition, you may be interested to reflect also - as I have been doing over recent days - on the intensity of interest it has created and to ask yourself why it is that the works created by Cressida Campbell have struck such a chord with the Australian public at this time and in this place in our history? Although obviously, like most artists, she has developed and refined her techniques over the years, using methods that she herself has described as "idiosyncratic" (and in this process has become perhaps this country's finest exponent of the interconnected mediums of painted woodblock and woodblock print), there has also been, from the beginning, a remarkable consistency about her work, about her subject matter and her portrayal of beauty in the familiar. The qualities of intimacy, of simplicity and yet of subtle richness have been there from the beginning - so, too, the still life arrangements , domestic interiors, the Australian flora and bush compositions ... so what has changed? Why this surge of superlatives, this new mantle of "overnight sensation"? Cressida will have her own thoughts, I am sure, but let me offer one suggestion to think about as you absorb the works.
Art, of course, is as subject to fashion and trends as any other aspect of human existence, and while some commentators have simply speculated that the fashion is changing, it is possible that something deeper may be at play here.
The American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, when talking about her work, once said "It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it". That phrase - "when nobody had time to reflect" - has even greater resonance today, in a world become ever more frantic, where people constantly bemoan the accelerating pace and stresses of life, and its corollary, the increasing scarcity of time - time to think, time to reflect and time to appreciate the beauty around us.
Despite the current global financial crisis and worries about recession, taking the longer view, there is no question that the economic, social and cultural changes and advances made in our world and society in the lifetimes of those present have been overwhelmingly positive - but these advances, including some of the very technologies designed to save us time and to make life easier - have paradoxically made our lives more complex, creating demands and overloads that make Georgia O'Keeffe's observation that "nobody had time to reflect" in the 1920's seem a quaint, almost absurd, overstatement compared with the rushing realities of this 21st century. And might not that be one reason why this exhibition has proved so alluring at this particular time, to the public and critics alike? The very name of the exhibition - "Timeless" - is seductive - evoking an image of time stopped, time captured, time mastered, time controlled instead of being our relentless master. A fanciful thought, you may say - yet the works themselves - and the reactions so many people have to them - prolong the fancy, with commentators repeatedly remarking on they way they "reassure", are "calming"; finding pleasure in their "quiet compositions", in the "stillness and lucidity" of those compositions, in their "serenity", in their "intimacy", their "poise" and "refinement", their focus on the everyday and the familiar, the way they "bring us back to simple things". Is this not a yearning of sorts - a search for solace in the world of art? A reaction to turbulence and disorder? Those who know their art, of course, make it clear that the apparent simplicity and effortlessness of Cressida's imagery is the result of painstaking effort and are full of praise for her technical expertise and skilful mastery of her chosen medium, and for the way she has achieved an "almost perfect harmony" between her vision and her craft.
Somewhere between these two ways of reacting to the works - between what I might term the emotional and the technical, the philosophical and the aesthetic - the lines of analysis and appreciation cross, to produce a remarkably consistent view - that this is a beautiful and important body of work that places the creator, Cressida Campbell, among the very best of contemporary Australian artists.
I congratulate the QUT Art Museum and its Director for bringing this exhibition to Brisbane. I know that it was originally planned as a one-off and that when the idea of bringing it to Queensland arose, this would not have been easy to achieve - with exhibition schedules needing to be changed, loans from private collections to be extended and no doubt a host of other practical challenges to be negotiated and resolved. But resolved they were - so that Queenslanders can now see for themselves this significant exhibition and discover (for some, re-discover) the pleasures of Cressida Campbell's distinctive art - the art described so memorably by two separate observers in terms that explain far better, I am sure, than my own modest speculation, the choice of the exhibition's title 'Timeless". The first was the art critic whose words I cited briefly earlier, John McDonald: "In bringing us back to simple things, Campbell is exploring a decorative art for our times, an art that avoids the overheated demand for meanings and messages. The vital difference is that her prints (and paintings) almost radiate with the pleasure of their own making. It is a quality that alerts the viewer to the contemporary pleasures of looking, those necessary, timeless pleasures that our television sets have been helping us to forget."
And the second, QUT's own Stephen Rainbird and long-time admirer of her work - to whom I give the last word: "Ultimately, it is the subtle richness of Cressida Campbell's palette, the meticulous detail of her forms and the clarity of her design that are of importance. As one, they compress the joy and pleasure of a moment and make it into a timeless work of art".
Thank you Stephen. Thank you Louise; and thank you and congratulations, Cressida.
It is now my pleasure to declare open the exhibition "Timeless: The Art of Cressida Campbell".