Fire & Life: Jon Cattapan & Surendran Nair

About the exhibition
Fire and Life was an ambitious international visual arts project that brought together ten artists from Australia and India across ten cities through a series of residencies and joint exhibitions.

Each iteration of Fire and Life paired an Australian and an Indian artist, who lived and worked together in each other’s cities. Rather than requiring direct collaboration, the project encouraged a diversity of working methods, allowing artists to respond independently—or in dialogue—to the experience of cultural exchange.

At Monash, the exhibition featured the work of Melbourne-based painter Jon Cattapan and Baroda-based artist Surendran Nair. Cattapan’s vision of urban life is shaped by European artistic traditions and interest in the urban psyche. Nair, originally from Kerala, draws on local lore and mythology to create expressive, often ironic commentaries on memory and the absurd.

Their collaborative drawings—each initiated by one artist and completed by the other—combine human figures with diaristic marks, mapping their shared experience of cross-cultural immersion. As their exchange developed, the drawings evolved from simple overlays into integrated compositions of symbols and signs. These works were presented alongside individual paintings and drawings by Cattapan and Nair.

Acknowledgements
This exhibition was produced in partnership with Asialink.

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^{Image: Jon Cattapan and Surendran Nair, Untitled (Matter Drawing) 1996, watercolour on paper, 38 x 28 cm. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Purchased with a Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant, 1997}