Jennifer Higgie: Weaving Their Way

Simone Slee:

Hello and welcome. My name is Simone Slee and I'm the Head of VCA Art, and following that wonderful Acknowledgement to Country, by our much loved colleague Tiriki Onus, my role here tonight is extraordinarily brief. And that is to welcome all of you here to the VCA, and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, where we are in the most beautiful Hanson Dyer Hall at the Conservatorium of Music. Tonight is a very special event, where the VCA has the great privilege to partner with Monash University Museum of Art, known as MUMA, the Sheila Foundation, to bring Jennifer Higgie's lecture, Weaving their Way, as the second lecture in the Annual Kate Daw Memorial Lecture series, which also coincides with the exhibition that Jennifer has curated at MUMA, called Thin Skin, an extremely beautiful exhibition for those that have already seen it and for those that are going to see it.

When Kate Barber from MUMA approached me about Jennifer's lecture at VCA, it was the perfect alliance. We could not have thought of a better person than Jennifer to give the Kate Daw Lecture, who, like Kate, advocates for all the things Kate loved, painting, and those who identify as female. To also let you know at the end of this lecture we'll be announcing this year's recipient of the annual $10,000 Kate Daw Traveling Scholarship, generously funded by the Humanity Foundation. So a very warm welcome to all of you in the crowd, and to our valued colleagues at MUMA, and at the Sheila Foundation, supporting this endeavor. May we have many more of these associations. We're also very honored to have in our midst our Dean, Professor Marie Sierra. Thank you for coming. And of course, most importantly, it is an honor to have with us Kate Daw's family, Robert, Theo and Camille Hassan. Welcome. And as you know, this is the hottest ticketed event in town tonight. I'm now going to hand over to the Chair of the Sheila Foundation, Kelly Gellatly to introduce our speaker, Jennifer Higgie. Thank you.

Kelly Gellatly:

Thanks so much, Simone. It's a pleasure to be here this evening, to present the Kate Daw Memorial Lecture, with Monash University Art Museum and the VCA, and to see so many dear friends and colleagues in this very beautiful space. Before I hand over to our special guest this evening, I'd be remissing my duties if I didn't take the opportunity to briefly introduce you to the Sheila Foundation and what we do. The Sheila Foundation is a national philanthropic foundation which is driven to overturn decades of gender bias by writing Australian women artists back into our art history, and ensuring equality for contemporary women artists. Sheila is named in honor of Lady Sheila Cruthers, a tireless advocate for women artists who built the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art into Australia's largest standalone collection of women's work. Sheila Cruthers began collecting the work of women artists in depth in the early 1970s and gifted the collection to the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the University of Western Australia in 2007, where it continues to grow. It now numbers over 750 works.

Like Sheila Cruthers, the foundation is passionate about building the presence and recognition of the work of Australian women artists, past and present. We need to see many more women artists in the collection displays of our regional, state and national art galleries, in our art history texts, and significantly, in our school curricula, so that women's art, women's stories and women's lives are no longer so secret, and that the next generation grows up with a more balanced picture of our country's art history, and as a result, the history of our nation. For our contemporary women artists, and I know there's many of you among us here tonight, things are certainly improving, and I need to acknowledge the fantastic work of Countess here, of whom Sheila's a long-term supporter. However, I think we can all recognise that there's still a way to go.

Sheila's focus is on providing practical support to contemporary women artists, as well as being a strong advocate for change. We've got three main strategic focuses, and don't worry, I'm not going to go into them here. But they are, Contemporary Women, Into the Light, which focuses of course on historic women artists, and Going Global, which encapsulates our ongoing support of and work with the Cruthers Collection. So please do jump on our website to find out more about them. I think Sheila will have succeeded when a visit to any of our major galleries shows, equally, the lives, stories and ideas of women and men, when students learn about our great women artists in equal measure with our great male artists, and when the women graduates of our art schools are equally represented, published, and importantly renumerated in our art community. We've got an ambitious but mighty and hardworking volunteer board, and I'd like to acknowledge my fellow board member Angela Goddard, who's here this evening, and we'd encourage you and welcome your involvement and support. And there's my plug.

And now it's my very great pleasure to introduce you to tonight's guest speaker, Jennifer Higgie. Jennifer is, of course, a celebrated Australian London-based writer, curator and former editor of Frieze Magazine. She was the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, the author of The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits, the novel, Bedlam, and the author and illustrator of the children's book, There's Not One, as well as the editor of The Artist's Joke. And if that's not enough, she's also a script writer. Her new book, The Other Side: Women, Art and the Spirit World, which I can't recommend highly enough, was published in February this year, and her BBC Radio 3 five-part essay, on the subject, was broadcast in January, 2022.

In 2015, Jennifer curated the Hayward Gallery Touring and Arts Council Collection Exhibition, One Day, Something Happens: Pictures of People, and you'll certainly see that emphasis and interest on the face reverberating in her show at MUMA. And this tour of the UK, from 2015 to 2017, she's been a judge of the John Moores Painting Prize, Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize, and the 2021 Freeland Painting Prize, and has been a member of advisory boards for the Arts Council of England, the British Council, Venice Biennale Commission and the Contemporary Art Society. She's currently on the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee and is the inaugural editor of the National Gallery of Australia's new publication, The Annual. And of course her current exhibition, Thin Skin at MUMA, runs until the 23rd of September. Importantly here, Jennifer is also a VCA alum, having completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting at the Canberra School of Art, followed by a Master of Fine Art in painting here at VCA. Would you please join me in welcoming Jennifer Higgie, who'll present her lecture, Weaving Their Way. Thank you.

Jennifer Higgie:

Oh, hi, goodness gracious. Thank you very much, Kelly, for your lovely words, and also Simone. It's really great to be back here at the old art school, although it didn't look like this when I was here, I tell you. Very fancy. I'm going to start here.

I'm really so very honored to deliver the second Kate Daw Memorial Lecture. And I remember Kate's very beautiful spirit, and her generosity, and great talent, and she's terribly missed. I'd also like to thank the wonderful Charlotte Day, who can't be here now because she's getting about Tuscany, for inviting me to propose the show that became Thin Skin, the incredible curatorial, publishing and installation team at MUMA, my sister Suzie Higgie and Tim Oxley, who created a very beautiful soundscape for the exhibition out at MUMA, which I hope you'll all go and see and listen to, Kelly Gellatly of course, and the Sheila Foundation, Simone Slee and everyone at VCA in the University of Melbourne, everyone who worked very hard to make this talk happen, and of course the 36 artists whose work comprises Thin Skin, and whose paintings have inspired, challenged, moved and educated me over the past year.

So straight in with the old stuff. I opened my new book, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, with a quote from Madeline Miller's retelling of the Greek Myth, Circe. I thought, "I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another." It's a line that has stayed with me over the past few years. There's something very inspirational in it, the idea of new beginnings. Today I'm going to be talking or rather telling a story about time and conversations and journeys, about things I've looked at that have moved or held me for reasons I can't always articulate. It's about questions I have no idea how to answer and about the fact that art is never one thing. It's about weaving meaning from various threads, about how looking can inspire thinking and feelings, from the revelatory to the mundane, and vice versa.

I read that in Sanskrit, tantra means loom, weave and treatise, and that textile and text are derived from the Latin, texere, or to weave. I read about the women weaving their stories, watched over by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war and the inventor of the loom. Charlotte Higgins introduces her recent book on the Greek myths, told from a feminist perspective, with a declaration. "My women are not telling the stories, they have rather woven their tails onto elaborate textiles. The book, in large part, consists of my descriptions of these imagined tapestries," she writes. In Madeline Miller's novel, the witch, Circe, weaves on a loom designed by Daedalus, the master designer and symbol of wisdom. Penelope weaves to put off her suitors, hoping for Odysseus's return from Troy. Minerva, or a Athena, the goddess of a thousand crafts, teaches mortals, woolworking and weaving. And the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses is devoted to stories spun by three sister goddesses, confined to their looms. Known as the Three Fates, the women personify destiny... Sorry. The women who are variously depicted in white robes as maidens or crones, personify destiny. Clotho weaves the threads of fate at the beginning of life. Lachesis measures them, determining how long a life will be, and when Atropos cuts them, life is over.

In Central Australia, Tjanpi, which translates from desert grass, in the Pitjantjatjara language, refers to the woven grass sculptures and baskets made by women, which are embellished with wool, raffia, emu feathers and seeds. But it's also related to Tjukurpa or ancestral law. To weave is to learn about your land, your ancestors, your community. Across the world, from culture to culture, century to century, weaving was and is both a practical and a spiritual, as well as a creative, activity. From the United States to Mexico, Australia, and elsewhere, in the 20th century, women in particular, employed weaving to create works of strange and transcendent beauty. Many of the objects woven by women, while enthralled to centuries old traditions, frequently employed the kinds of languages we associate more with modernist painting. They expanded the possibilities of the medium via color, form and texture, mood and atmosphere and feeling a conveyed via warp and weft.

This is a potent way to understand and look at art. Look, listen, touch, make, let the artists guide you. Trust your instincts, respect history, but don't let it restrict you. It's not a straight jacket. Art, like weaving, is a form of alchemy. The transformation of one thing, an idea, a material, into another. It's in its nature to be elusive rather than literal, to deal in association, symbol and encryption, to honor intuition and imagination over reason. All of this chimes with much magical practice. Meaning weaves in and out of images, spun from paint and pigment. Their meaning is complex and often open-ended. I think about W. H. Auden's poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, which he wrote on the eve of World War II. About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I titled the painting show I curated for MUMA, Thin Skin, because it's what paint is, a thin skin on a surface. And it's also what every good artist has, hypersensitivity is necessary to the creative act. How else to make nuanced images or objects in response to an often abrasive world. To be an artist is to be vulnerable. It means reflecting upon yourself, your community, your culture, to see creative possibilities in unbearable circumstances, to embrace humor amid darkness, to be constantly on guard and self-critical, to resist complacency in thought or deeded, to be on your toes, to celebrate, to mourn, to dig in, to weave in and out of meaning of understanding of expression. The artists in Thin Skin approach painting from myriad angles. There is something in each of the paintings in this show that chimes deeply within me. Some of them hum, others shout. Some are full of pain, others replete with joy or curiosity or bafflement, or a mix thereof. But whatever their approach, each of them is open to mining the worlds that hover between physical and immaterial realms. They see bodies as conduits for feelings and thoughts that can only, ultimately be expressed in paint. To varying degrees, they're attuned to different energies, moods, nuances, dreams. Many of them source the past in order to move into the future. They are also receptive to the power of non-humans. They understand that animals and plants have much to teach us.

Kieren Seymour writes, "I want the creatures [in my painting] to be both things— a dog of war and us—something outside of logic that still feels familiar, truthful." Paul Becker writes, "When one of my paintings works, it has a life, a suggestion of its own existence, something that eludes me. The paint breathes." Tala Madani writes, "The paintings become entities. They become personas. They become objects with souls. They become something outside of anybody who made them."

Mitch Cairns writes, "I produced Self-portrait as a Lemon Tree after completing a small suite of still lives, which featured lemons [. . .]. Working backwards in my walled garden studio, and as the painter of the still lives, I was sure that I was the lemon tree." When I met with Mitch, he told me about Tom Kreisler, so I looked him up. The late Tom Kreisler wrote that, "This painting is where I feel I want to be as a painter. In the words of the title, Lightness of Hand, Fleetness of Foot, I mean, I paint lightly and then I like getting out of it quickly." He said, "I like art that constantly questions itself, that appears to be aloof but is passionate, that looks at ordinariness and ordinary things without wishing to colonise them."

Mia Boe writes, "I've learned to appreciate my thin skin and see it as a way to comprehend my sensitivities. The death of my brother in 2018 had a profound and unknown impact on me. I often include images of spirits in my works, that in some way always reference him. And so when I paint spirits or imagine homelands, I am both acknowledging the disconnection of culture, communities, and Country, as well as imagining futures and present realities, if things had been different." Mia writes, "The work I'm making for Thin Skin will be a revisiting of a work I made in 2021, called Tranquility Incarnation. [. . . It's] a self-portrait of sorts, with the pose of the figure taken from still from Tracey Moffatt's film, Night Cries—a rural tragedy in 1990. In the painting, next to the figure, is a ghost or spirit wongari, dingo.

I write, "Skin is not much of an armor, but it's all we have. It can be as translucent as a cobweb, as opaque and as tough as an old boot. It's a vessel for bones and organs, a meat sack, a temple, an architectural folly. It protects and betrays us. As we age, it drags us gradually back to the earth. Paint is a thin skin, a layer that protects and transmits ideas. It can be lumpy with impasto, scumbled, smooth, made from acrylic or oils or pigments dug from the ground or boiled plants. It can crumble into dust in months or last for millennia. It can embody truths, ambiguities, histories, spirits, propaganda. It can be conservative, radical, censored, sold, idiosyncratic, religious, spiritual."

Karen Black writes, "I think about the thin skin crusted over the wet blobs of paint in the work, or the thin layer between the reading of the work and the actual meaning. It can be punctured or held taught, wrinkled or smooth like our thoughts." Brent Harris writes, "This small standing figure with outstretched arms first appeared as a smudge of arching pink paint, and now has become something of a witness within the picture. I describe my paintings," he writes, "as figurative, but they are barely realist. They attempt to play with a symbolic meaning of things. I guess this, in turn, leads to some sort of allegory, where meaning remains contingent. There's a fine line between what is conventionally described as figurative or abstract painting. Bodies dissolve light into shadows in meaning in life and in art. The skin of both paint and humans hovers in a liminal space. Neither form is permanent."

Gareth Sansom was head of painting when I was at VCA. I remember how he talked about painting as if it were a storm, a feeling, a battle. I liked his energy and it was important to me that one of his remarkable paintings was included in the show. Influence, learning, memory, what we absorb from our teachers, even if we don't agree with them, they weave out, in and out, of our development. Gareth writes, "Big punch was painted quickly, in about three hours. It wasn't planned at all—pushing abstract shapes around until I got a figurative lead—spontaneously finding the shapes that led to the glove and the punch."

In Jennifer Packer's untitled painting, from 2017, a person is pictured in the midst of movement. Their face obscured, one leg and both hands disappearing into a charged atmosphere. The chest of the person is vermilion and the color is echoed in one raised foot. I saw Jennifer's paintings at the Serpentine Gallery in London and I left reeling. Her paint seemed to breathe and throb. In an interview in 2021, Jennifer said, "I feel a resistance to the use of the word 'bodies' to describe the figures in my work. There's an important difference between having a body and being a body. Bodies can be almost anything and are often subject to mindless objectification or a loss of humanity. I'm usually thinking about the significance of that distinction as I work." Jennifer Packer became a painter after seeing Caravaggio's St. Matthew series, from 1599 to 1602, in the Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. "Caravaggio," she says, "made me understand what a painting can do."

I recently re-watched Derek Jarman's wondrous film, Caravaggio, from 1986. It's a profound reflection on art, sexuality, how someone sees themselves and how different that often is to how they're seen. Jarman's memoir, Modern Nature, which he wrote in 1991, which is about art, life and gardening... Actually, it was published in 1991, which is about art, life and gardening, made a big impact on me when I read it during lockdown. His garden in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, on Dungeness beach in Kent, was as much a metaphor for memory and hope, as it was earth and plants. Even as he was fading, a victim of another terrible pandemic, AIDS, he cultivated plants that could withstand the shingle and the savage salty winds, alexanders, foxgloves, periwinkle, poppies, purple iris, sea kale and vipers, bugloss, bloomed brightly. "My garden's boundaries," he wrote, "are the horizon." Jarman died shortly after his 52nd birthday, in 1994. His parting words in his final memoir, At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, read, "May you of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. As the shadows closed in, the stars came out. I am in love."

The history of art is a history of the representation of skin. Its significance and the ways in which it has been visualised, shift wildly from culture to culture. In Michael Armitage's painting, Sleight of Hand, I never know how to say that, 2016, he pictures the Chinese Monkey King, also known as Sun Wukong, who was born from a stone and acquires supernatural powers, receiving wisdom from a malnourished owl who perches on his left arm. Armitage had been fascinated by the compositional qualities of Frans Hals' painting, Malle Babbe, from 1633, of a smiling woman with an owl on her shoulder. He reinterpreted the subject in oil paint on stretched Lubugo, a Ugandan fabric made from fig tree bark, which he first encountered in an Nairobi tourist market in 2010. The Monkey King is, like most of Armitage's work, cloaked in an accumulation of history and knowledge.

Skin is both a border and an insulator. Across the world, in countless origin myths, it's a container for a soul. Bodies are temporary, mutable, discardable. Humans, it would seem, are only a breath away from shedding their skin and becoming something or someone else.

Selecting work for Thin Skin was very much an ongoing conversation. One painting would lead to another. When I was visiting Pete Graham's studio last year, he told me about a wonderful exhibition at the NGV, Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala. I went and was so moved by the extraordinary works made by Yolŋu women. I was honored that a painting by one of the artists, the late elder Ms D. Yunupiŋu, is included in Thin Skin.

In 2019, in earth pigments and reclaimed toner ink, she began painting the story of her conception as a mermaid, and her family's journey in canoes from Marchinbar Island to Yirrkala in Eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. She explained, "One day my dad sees the tail of the mermaid and thinks he has seen a fish, so he walks closer and closer and closer, and silently puts the woomera into the spear, ready to throw. He throws the spear at the mermaid, but she jumps into the water. Later, when he gets home and lies down and falls into a deep sleep, in his dream he sees the mermaid and realises it was no ordinary fish. It was me. I was telling him in the dream, 'That was me, dad, don't spear me papa. It is I, it was not a fish.'" When her father woke from his dream, his wife confirmed that she was pregnant and they understood that the mermaid had been the spirit of their unborn daughter, Ms. D. Yunupiŋu.

A depiction of a body is often a depiction of a state of mind, a representation of cultural, as well as individual, knowledge. Tracey Emin, who has recently battled cancer, writes, "To me, thin skin means blood seeping through my paws." I write, "It gets under my skin, is an indication that someone is annoyed or bothered or preoccupied. They clearly have something to deal with. In many ways it's a description of the painting process." Tracy Emin said, "Any painter will tell you the failures within painting kill you. They kill you. You go to bed mournful, you go to bed feeling it's the end of the world. It's suffering, if you don't get it right. That's quite a big deal to put yourself through. It's this battle, but it's just you and it, and you kind of... It sounds so pretentious," she writes, "but it's like a vortex. It pulls you in."

Skin is political, its color, its function, its gender. Everyone knows this, but not everyone acknowledges it. A picture of skin is, even unintentionally, a reflection of a particular moment, filtered through the artist's body and mind. Jem Perucchini writes, "I consider myself a painter. I consider myself first a painter, before a black artist. The fact of being of Ethiopian origin certainly marked my growth and consequently influenced my relationship with the society that surrounds me. Despite this, my origins are not the main subject of my work, but an aspect among many. To have skin in the game means to be directly involved or affected by something."

Jelena Telecki writes, "Mirroring is a work from the Mirror Practice series of paintings from 2019. I was interested in French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss's notion of Personne and Moi, where Moi can be understood as one's true self, and Personne as who we are in society, and how we perform our role. Mirroring," she writes, "represents a moment before the act of performance, the rehearsal of one's artist person in front of the mirror. This is a thin skin moment when Personne and Moi coexist, and are aware of one another. Understanding thin skin, as a threshold between the two, is a theme in many of my works," she says, "where I explore embarrassment resulting from the exposure, of Moi and an inadequate Personne."

There is something meta about painting skin. The artist's hand holds the brush, skin paints skin. I read a poem, The Skin of Sleep by Myra Sklarew. Its opening lines: The skin of sleep is thin. It will not hold. Its contents stumble out. A nub of bone lodged in earth at the bottom of a pit. There is an echo here of John Spiteri's painting, Dis-solution 2006. Three bodies as naked as skeletons, bleached beneath a kind of hairy ectoplasm. It's a graveyard, a bad dream, a revelation of bony connection. Johns Spiteri writes, "The figures [in my paintings] are like faded memories of the original, forced together out of context. I like using paint at times like camouflage."

The skin is the largest organ of the body and makes up about 15% of our body weight. It has an area of roughly two square meters in adults and weighs about five kilograms. It is thinnest on our eyelids and thickest on the palm of our hands and the soles of our feet. This surprises me. Surely our vision needs greater protection. Our skin contains more than 20 kilometers of blood vessels, renews itself every 28 days, and sheds about four kilograms of dead skin cells each year. There is a parallel somewhere in here with the artist's restless renewal of their creative language, the weaving of bodies and minds. In A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes writes, "Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other." Ellen Gronemeyer writes, "'Thin skin' opens up associations of a space, a border between the inside and the outside—like a door, a keyhole, a mouth. It's thin, which means vulnerability, but it also opens up the possibility of being a membrane to let things pass through. It defines two different spaces, but it also functions like a bridge between them."

Jenny Watson writes that her painting "captures me, a stride, a beloved horse in a favorite nighty, and the idea of looking back over one's life, imagining a future. What is not shown but implied are the endless suburbs. I remember when I was young riding my white horse across Canberra paddocks, telling him everything. His ears would flick back and forward listening. Skin transmits information. It's a mediator." In Gordon Bennett's painting, Wound, from 1990, colonialism is a bloody scar on Australia's skin. In 1996, Bennett wrote, "If I were to choose a single word to describe my art practice, it would be the word, question. If I were to choose a single word to describe my underlying drive, it would be freedom. . . To be free, we must be able to question the ways our own history defines us."

Nick Modrzewski tells me, "There's a thin boundary between our bodies and the world we're enmeshed in. The figures are loose in space and the space itself is loose. The ghosts of the law are moving in and out of bodies. The skin of a face, I think, is often referred to as a complexion. The term originates in humoral theory, the ancient idea that the combination of the four bodily humors, blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm, which were erroneously thought to control the temperament and constitution of the body, are evident on the skin." I read medical texts dating from the second half of the 18th century characterise skin as, a nervous canvas, a notion of skin associated with Fragonard's Fantasy Figures, from 1769 to '71. The four paintings that comprise the series portray the artists friends and patrons, enhanced with creative flourishes. A richly patterned dress swells like the sea. The peachy skin of a woman's face is as vivid as her crisp, rough... A billboard advertisement seen while I'm waiting for a train, achieve your skin goals.

Lisa Bryce writes of her painting, Parting at Dusk, "The cobalt blue skin refers to the fire blue devil character of Trinidad, who is transformed and emboldened by a thin skin of cobalt blue pigment—as she is." A few years ago I penned an essay for Lisa, for a catalog of a show she had in Holland. I wrote, "She drifts through the centuries, her glance as packed as a suitcase, her hair, a study in time travel. She's black, she's white, she's blue. She refuses to be pinned down to race or age or provenance. Her origins are ambiguous. She's an image, a symbol, a portrait, a type, a marvel, an enigma. She's a conversation and a complication. She's a model. She's an artist."

Donna Huddleston is a close friend of mine and I have learned much from her. In fact, it was she who introduced me to Hilma af Klint, which set off an exploration that resulted in my writing my book, The Other Side. And that's why I'm so happy that Donna's drawing is on the cover of my book. Little plug for my book there. Donna once told me that she thinks of influence as a necessary guide that chaperones and magnetises you. She writes, "'Thin skin' communicates a value of sensitivity or transparency, of materials, of color, of the figure in space. It's like a veil between worlds."

Rose Wylie is now 89 and she understands about influence as she's been thinking about it, filtering it, examining it, for more than 60 years. She's uninterested in hierarchies of value. She's as open to being influenced by a candy wrapper, or a scene in a movie, or the color of a girl's shoe or lipstick, as she's about art. She wrote to me that the spreading, putty-colored paint around the yellow marzipan girl in this painting, grew from correction and repainting. "I call it," she said, "a stain. But a friend, clearly an expert in descriptive language said, 'It was like a bit of wet concrete,' a thought I like very much." She wrote, "The painting is a cautionary tale, this time against smoking, again, something I have worked on before. Thin-skinned is where you find it, floating around, do you think? What about the thin and spontaneous skin of the almost-transparent-pink-paint surface on three of the girls?"

David Noonan is making paintings for the first time in years. I first saw his amazing creations when we became friends at VCA in the early 90s. In fact, we became friends because of a prophetic dream I had, but that's another story. Early this year, he invited me to his studio to select a painting for Thin Skin. The walls were hung with myriad faces, masks, details, blurring, staining, smoothing, portraits as much of a state of mind as they were of something or someone in particular. He sent me a quote from Soren Kierkegaard's 1843 text, Either/Or, "Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?" The faces David paints dissolve, perhaps in the process of becoming something or someone else. The face is a mask. The mask is a face.

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by Sidney Nolan. The strange discomfort between humans and landscapes in his paintings, that evoke something of the intrusions of unwelcome settlers onto this ancient land. Kelly at the Mine 1946–47, is one of the 26 paintings that comprise the Ned Kelly series. Nolan blocks the bush ranger's skin with the metal of his helmet, which forms a black hole against the landscape. His eyes, as bright as headlights, stare out from the prison of his own making. Nolan said of his approach, "One's trying to show, I suppose, the skin and flesh and then this extremely frail inner thing, one's personality and psychic setup." Although this series is a profound exploration of an historical moment, Nolan admitted that the Kelly paintings are secretly about myself. "You would be surprised," he wrote, "if I told you. From 1945 to 1947, there were emotional and complicated events in my own life. It's an inner history of my own emotions, but I am not going to tell you about them." In his poem, Coopers Creek, Nolan writes, "As heat discards through a heart so the heart discards and skin discards in this extraordinary continent." Nolan reminds me of Virginia Woolf writing in her novel, Orlando: A Biography, the story of a poet who lives for centuries and changes gender, "When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."

Many of the artists in Thin Skin are time travelers, moving across the membrane of history. Many of them are as passionate about music as they are about art. The Granada born British artist, Denzil Forrester, started making drawings in London in the reggae and dub nightclub scene, during the early 1980s, and his paintings are full of rhythm. I asked him what he remembered of this painting 26 years ago. He replied, "My favorite position for drawing at the beginning of a long night. I am located slightly behind the action, with a good overview of the dancehall. The DJ's record playing booth is on the left. The night is still young and I am just about to put pastel and charcoal to paper. I focus on a few figures, spaced out across the dance floor, and a rapper toasting to the B side."

Paintings often operate at or respond to borders. Tom Polo writes, "For me, a thin skin is a pit stop, a threshold between two zones—of curiosity and desire on one side, to a decision and action on the other. I'm often thinking about our eyes, mouths and hands as pit stops and that's why they feature so frequently in my works. They are the space between something witnessed or unseen, said out loud or swallowed back down, touched and gestured towards, or just simply imagined." Oops, sorry. I just lost my place. What are we up to? My thin skin knocked everything out. There we go. Actually, sorry. I'm just going to reread Tom's. For me, a thin skin is a pit stop, a threshold between two zones—of curiosity and desire on one side, to a decision and action on the other. I'm often thinking about our eyes, mouths and hands as pit stops and that's why they feature so frequently in my works. They are the space between something witnessed or unseen, said out loud or swallowed back down, touched and gestured towards or just simply imagined.

Borders, in painting, are often simultaneously visible and invisible, remembered and present, lost and found. Vivienne Shark Lewitt writes, "My understanding of 'thin skin' is that it means being considered 'too sensitive' and easily hurt—something of an affliction, but quite blamelessly, just a natural characteristic. I also think it means being porous and open to take things in—and so having more to process as a result, which fits with my painting and probably why the face looks worried." Vivienne sent me an email about her painting, A Penny for Her Thoughts, and included an image of a work from the 14th century. I think it might be subconsciously influenced by this Simone Martini painting of St Clare of Assisi. It was made in 1320. The saint glances to her right, beyond the picture. Her skin, 700 or so years old is soft, illuminated. It's a study of deep thought, of a delicacy that endures across time, the collision of the deep past with the present.

Helen Maudsley is now 96 years old. I asked her about the evolution of this wonderful painting. She replied, "I only had two teachers in art. One was Jan van Eyck and the other was Johannes Vermeer." I think of grief, its relationship to painting. When the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, from 1434, first went on display in the National Gallery in 1843, it sparked intrigue and wonder. Who were these people? Why was a bed in the living room? There's a glowing orange on the window sill, which indicates wealth. The painting includes a tiny portrait of the artist, reflected in the mirror coming into the room. An inscription on the wall, Jan van Eyck has been here. A painting is always a question, a mystery, an evocation. Perhaps paintings are always self-portraits of sorts.

Mamma Anderson painted Star-gazer, 2012, when she was mourning the death of her mother. She writes, "The man, the artist, was probably me, a self-portrait, the feeling of being completely shut out from the rest of the world when you sit there in nature and just paint, and don't think about anything else [. . .] A painting is a certain way right now with my eyes, and becomes a completely different image in another place with someone else's eyes and experiences."

That skin is thin does not mean it's not robust. It's a malleable metaphor, a state of mind, a reality that shifts minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year. It's paint, like life, it's a work in progress. David Egan writes, "The flowers in the cards whisper secrets to each other, behind cupped hands, beautiful green cupped hands [. . .] the way to the spiritual world is by borrowing deeply through the physical, not floating up away from it. I'm interested in the phenomenon of holy tears, crying as a bridge between physical and spiritual realms. A bridge between physical and spiritual realms."

Pete Graham writes about his painting, A Cave in the Mind of a Shadow: My Memory of Looking upon Mantegna's Rescue of Lost Souls from Limbo 2023, "The image displays like a cross section of my head, which may be difficult to read at first. I imagine this imaginative occurrence being revealed within, as if it were a fossil, indelibly fixed in the core of my mind. My pictures," he writes, "sometimes operate like peculiar portals, unlocking secret spaces in the back of your mind. I think of the two-dimensionality of an image as a partition upon which we inscribe our charms, in order to access metaphysical realms, through which our separated souls might finally meet."

When, in early 2022, I saw Pete's paintings of the last few years, they astonished me and helped me clarify the ideas that I had percolating for Thin Skin. Pete wrote, "The event that I remembered was being in a museum and imagining painting this very picture, while randomly gazing upon an image by Mantegna of Christ retrieving lost souls from limbo, from 1492. He wrote, "I often feel the surface of my head, and translate that into a visual form, which gives me the impression of physically inhabiting a space beyond time." Oh, sorry, "A space behind the face and beyond time."

For the surrealists, skin was a flimsy garment, one that could be refashioned, along with the psyche, at will. Rosslynd Piggott tells me about reading Andre Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism, almost 40 years ago, which she found fascinating and magical by turns, and a precious gift. It was around this time she painted Ten Rimbauds Holding One Rimbaud. Rimbaud was of course a 19th century poet, who rejected naturalism. He believed that the purpose of art was to access truth via the systematic derangement of the senses. I remember seeing this painting somewhere in Melbourne a long time ago, and it stopped me in my tracks and it stayed with me. The poet carries multiple visions of himself. It's a brilliantly funny and somehow brilliantly true observation.

The body can be represented as something recognisable or something coded. Michelle Ussher writes, "I was researching quantum theory, string theory and multiverses, which led to thinking about the eyeball in relation to the black hole [. . .] The membrane of a black hole exists only because of dispersed information of matter and ideas. I imagine this membrane like the surface skin of a painting, that forms a frontier between an interior unknown and an exterior we think we know." But sometimes what we know cannot be easily explained. Dorota Jurczak writes, "The title of my painting translates from the Polish as Three Saints." I asked her about it and she wrote, "I would prefer not to talk about my work. Somehow it makes things worse when I tried to explain it."

Tamara Henderson's painting emerged from an intense period of meditation. She writes, "The teacher's words feel like incantations or spells on the brain and body—in the nicest of ways—they dance themselves with my energy onto the stage of the canvas." It's an accurate description, I think, of many of the paintings in Thin Skin. Nothing is finished here, it's all a work in progress. Meaning weaves its way. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Oh, great. Thanks, Pip.

Thank you very much. That's better. It is bright, yeah.

Pip:

Hello. What a joy that was. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Higgie:

Thanks, Pip.

Pip:

My name is Pip. I'm Senior Curator at MUMA, and we're going to have a little conversation, and I'm going to throw a few questions at you about the lecture-

Jennifer Higgie:

[inaudible].

Pip:

... but also the exhibition. Yeah, we're on a funny angle, aren't we?

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah, yeah, let's-

Pip:

[inaudible] do that too.

Jennifer Higgie:

Let's get cosy.

Pip:

Yeah.

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah.

Pip:

Great. Where to start? I wanted to pick up on something that you said in the lecture about language. You quoted Barthes and you said, "Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other." And it had me thinking about how you've began as a painter and you've continued as a writer, and I wonder how and why you have found language to be your medium to write about painting. What it is that the alchemy of painting, as you described it at the beginning of the lecture, how language is rendered through that lens?

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah. Wow, that's a great question. I painted for a long time and then when I went to London... I think I'd always been a secret painter, but I was never... Oh, sorry, a secret writer, but I was never academic at school and I changed schools a lot, and I didn't do particularly well at school. So I felt very comfortable making pictures, but there was also something about when you... I loved disappearing into paint and I'm obsessed with painters, you can probably tell. But when I went to London on a scholarship for painting, and then I was feeling the inadequacy of my own visual language. And I think it was the feeling too, being in London and not really knowing anyone, except for a couple of friends. You can make a fool of yourself, and so I could play with words in a way that I never felt confident doing in Australia, because I didn't have that particularly academic background.

So being anonymous in a big city, and also I remember being very... I had so much to process about what I was looking at. I was waitressing, and then I'd go to the National Gallery in my lunchtime and that was my solace, and I really dove deeply into art history, in way that I hadn't before. And I couldn't process that in painting. I had to process it in words, and I was just writing for myself. I never ever thought I would be a writer. I was a writer, but I didn't think of myself as a capital 'W' writer. So that's a bad answer, probably.

Pip:

No, not at all.

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah.

Pip:

The relationship in Thin Skin, between the physical and the metaphysical, to me is the thread that runs through all the works. And in your recent book, The Other Side, you also look at painting as this medium, in both senses of the word. Can you talk about why it is that painting, for you, is able to move through those boundaries, in a way that perhaps, I don't know, perhaps other mediums aren't for you?

Jennifer Higgie:

Who knows why you fall in love. It's very difficult to describe, but there is something about... It's so simple, painting, it's just pigment on a surface. That's all it is, but there are infinite... It's like an octave in music, what you can do with that octave. And I like the fact that you can never really experience a painting except in the flesh. You can look at them in reproduction. Even these, they're all the wrong scale, seeing them like this. And paintings have such a... They have a vibe to them that can't be reproduced. So there's something very physical, and especially in this hypermediated world, they're one of the few things that... Oh, well, I mean there are many things, but that you need to experience in the flesh. And I was I doing an interview once with the great Bridget Riley, who's in her 90s and still going strong, and she said to me, "You know, Jennifer, what I love about painting is it's still in its early days." And I thought that was great, the optimism of the 92 year old. Brilliant.

Pip:

That is amazing. The book, The Other Side.

Jennifer Higgie:

Yes.

Pip:

I want to dig into some of the things you explore, but maybe you could just introduce the book and what drove you to write this book.

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah. Well, yeah, it's the most personal thing I've ever written, really. And it was about, again, The Other Side, was a very ambiguous title in a way, because it was about... I've always been interested in the exclusions of art history. As we know, traditional Art History was written by white men about other white men, and I'm very interested in the gender exclusions of art history, but also the exclusions of class and race and geography, and also different approaches to painting, I think.

Basically, the history of modernism, as told by Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, was one about formalism and modernism was about a stripping back. It was about getting rid of all the things that had hampered painting, like religion or intuition or imagination or spiritualism, and to create something formal and pure and clean. And I think that's a fundamental misreading of modernism, myself. So The Other Side was about women who explored spirituality in the 19th century, often within women's groups, and then how this bled into surrealism, but wasn't really acknowledged and then to modernity, but again was excised from the story. So it was about the other side, another side of art history, but it was also about the other side of me coming out of a job that I'd been doing for a long time, and running away basically. Yeah.

Pip:

In the book, you, at one point, talk about the relationship between the rise in spiritualism in the early 20th century and the First World War. And the quote is amazing, but I've tangled up all my notes about, oh, the psychic space that was desperately needed. And I wonder, as we note now, in the last five, 10 years, a rise in interest in some of the artists that you write about like Hilma af Klint, why is it that we are returning to these practices and these interests now?

Jennifer Higgie:

Well, I don't think we're returning to them. I think they've always been there, but now there's an acknowledgement that making art is something that can be done in myriad ways, and for myriad reasons, and by all humans. And I think that's a great thing about painting now. I think that it's not particularly prescriptive, in a way that it maybe was 20 or 30 years ago. And I think painting's very good at responding to grief, and that was something too, that hums through Thin Skin. It's laughter in the dark, really. There's a lot of humor, but there's a lot about grief, and about how we process that, and how we visualise it. And often grief, as we know, is inarticulate, but it can be represented by certain images. And I think that now there's a certain... It's not dissimilar, maybe to the time around the First World War, when there's terrible things happening in the war, where people are dying needlessly, where there's a questioning of power structures, and belief in governments are wobbling. So there are many artists who are examining different ways of responding to the world, that aren't necessarily filtered through more formal languages.

Pip:

One of the theories in the book that struck me, was written about by... I've also lost my notes, but it was the concept that was... Oh, yeah, written about by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, theosophical leaders who described a concept of thought form, where thoughts give rise to correlated vibrations of matter and color. And that seemed, to me, a good way to understand Thin Skin, but I wondered if you could talk a bit more about what drew you to their concept of thought form.

Jennifer Higgie:

Well, it's not so much that I'm drawn to their concept, but it was fascinating and it's great that we've got Tamara's picture up here, which was an image that emerged from meditation. So in a way you could call this a thought form. But theosophy is an immensely dodgy and fascinating belief system, and Madame Blavatsky, she was basically a brilliant trickster who used theatrics to tell the truth. There's an amazing paradox in there.

Theosophy is absolutely fascinating. You read five biographies of Madame Blavatsky and they're five entirely different stories. But what was interesting about thought forms, was that they were recognising something that was to really impact on abstraction, really. The idea that you could represent thinking in forms that weren't necessarily related to the visual world, which was an incredibly radical thought in 1905. And it really influenced, obviously Hilma af Klint was hugely influenced by theosophy and thought forms. But then you've got Mondrian, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, all of them at some point were obsessed with theosophy. And so it wasn't widely acknowledged, for a long time, the impact of, say, thought forms and Besant and Leadbeater's book on modernity, because it was considered too woo-woo. But it happened, it's a fact.

Pip:

You quote Roberta Smith in the book, when she writes about Agnes Pelton, and she said, "Let's put it this way, Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton did not act alone," which sounds kind of suspect. But in your research, and also, I feel, in your practice of curating Thin Skin, the kind of network of conversation, in the history of those movements that you talk about, of associations, of societies, of groups, of often women coming together, seems to run through those movements, those practices, and your own practice. I wonder if you can reflect a little bit on collectivity in painting, or between artists.

Jennifer Higgie:

Art has always been... It evolves organically. The way that traditional art history was told, that one movement segued cleanly into another, and that history is this neat series of pigeonholes, is wrong. History is messy, people are messy, art is messy, and often it evolves from organic and social situations, through conversations, through influence, through seeing something out of the corner of your eye or overhearing something at the pub. Conversations are the lifeblood of the art world, and the development of art.

Pip:

Thinking about what you're doing now, and recent work and future work, one of the places your writing has taken you, is in screenwriting and script writing. How is it to turn to that, very different, medium as opposed to the stilled frame of the painting, and see your language and your writing flow through that medium?

Jennifer Higgie:

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, screenwritings driving me out the wall. And often I leave it and run back to the art world, because the art world gives you permission to do anything but screenwriting, especially if you're writing for a very particular audience, or to try and sell an idea... Yeah, it's wearing me out actually. But what I do like about script writing is that it's a combination of, you have to be constantly thinking visually, which, having trained as an artist, that's essential to it. Whereas writing a book, you're spinning images from your words, but writing a script, you're having to constantly think about what will this look like? What will it sound like when it's spoken? What will it be juxtaposed with? What is the scenery? So it's a very painterly medium.

Pip:

Thank you, Jennifer. Would you all join me in thanking Jennifer.

Jennifer Higgie:

Thank you very much, Pip. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Pip:

There's only one more part of the evening, a very important part, but before we move on to that bit, I just wanted to say that it's been wonderful to collaborate with the University of Melbourne and VCA on this event. And I wanted to thank VCA in particular, Simone Slee, Susan Bird, Teagan Nowicki and Milly Mullina, for their work in hosting us, and to also thank the Sheila Foundation for partnering on this event, and special thanks to Kelly Gellatly, chair of the foundation. So with that, I'm going to hand over now to Jenepher Duncan, honorary fellow, to announce the Kate Daw Prize.

Jennifer Higgie:

Thanks very much.

Jenepher Duncan:

Thank you Jennifer and Pip, and good evening. I'm Jenepher Duncan and it's my pleasure and honor to announce the 2023 Kate Daw Traveling Scholarship of $10,000. But before I do, I'm sure many of us here tonight may recall Juliana Engberg's Memorial Lecture last year, it's wonderful evocation of Kate Daw. Anyway, the prize is generously supported by our donor, The Humanity Foundation, and it was instigated by its director Talya Masel, in conversation with Professor Robert Hassan, Kate's partner of course, and the academic staff of VCA Art.

The Traveling Prize offers a wonderful opportunity for a second year undergraduate art student, to extend and strengthen their developing artistic practice by providing access to critical research resources, which they may not otherwise have had. This year, there were 23 outstanding applications, from which six exceptional, young emerging artists were shortlisted by a panel including Robert Hassan, Simone Slee, Vikki McInnes, and myself. It was frankly, very difficult to arrive at the shortlist, and the panel was extremely impressed with the range and sheer quality of all the applicants. So on behalf of my fellow panel members, I extend my warm congratulations to all of you who applied, and to those who were shortlisted. But of course, alas, there can only be one winner, and this year it is the VCA painting student, Francesca Whitcroft Lanksy. Francesca. Francesca, congratulations.

Simone Slee:

Thank you so much, Jennifer. Francesca's too shy to come up, but there she is, up on the stage, and we're just so delighted for you, Francesca. Sorry to put you on the spotlight there.

Thanks Jenepher Duncan as well for tonight. But before we leave the auditorium, I just would like to thank you all for coming. And really this lecture has been, and the lecture last year, there's been such overwhelming interest and it's a great credit to the ongoing love we have for Kate, who was the prior Head of the Art School, and also too the things that hold us all together in this room, a kind of sense of the immeasurable, and we also understand that mystifying power of art. So I also, of course, want to say a huge thank you, Jennifer Higgie, our great VCA alumni, it's such a treat to have you back with us, and she really was astonished by how posh it is in the stables, when we walked around today. So thank you, and it was great to have that conversation, too Pip. So really great to get into some of that content, and great to know that you also get tired with things that we have to do, as well.

I'd like to also thank the wonderful MUMA team. I'd like to extend my thanks to Kate, Pip and Warisa, and Kelly, thank you so much from the Sheila Foundation, and fighting the good fight for us all. I'd also like to again, thank the support of The Humanity Foundation who's supported the Kate Daw Prize. And I do know that Pip also thanked a lot of people, so I'm kind of repeating some of this. I'd also like to thank the director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Professor Richard Kurth, thank you so much. It's wonderful to be in this great space here at the Hanson Dyer Hall, thank you. I'd like to also thank our VCA director, Professor Emma Redding, and of course our dean, Professor Marie Sierra, for the support of this important annual event.

Of course, behind such a seamless and really beautiful evening, I would like to thank our faculty Engagement Partnership Manager, Susan, as Pip also did, but also really that goes down to our wonderful P and O team. Thank you so much, all the front of our house staff, the tech teams who are up there filming this, which you'll be able to see in the future, a recorded version, and also to Milly Mullina. So thank you. The bar is open till eight. Enjoy and goodnight.