Robert MacPherson “PELICAN DREAMING: 18 FROG POEMS, FOR GREG C.” (detail) 1984-2020.
Wire coat hangers and papier-mâché numbers, dimensions variable. Collection: the Artist. Courtesy Yuill | Crowley, Sydney.
Robert MacPherson: Nominal Gestures
3 December 2020 – 13 March 2021
Robert MacPherson (b.1937) is one of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists. This exhibition brings together several works exploring his fascination with wordplay and modes of classification.
MacPherson is deeply interested in the ways language creates systems of knowledge, and how objects might be designated as art. In the first room we see the artist’s personal collection of elegant water divining tools, used in the practice of dowsing or ‘water witching’ to locate groundwater. Each tool is dedicated to a figure from MacPherson’s personal history.
In the second room, a selection of recent paintings from MacPherson’s ongoing ‘Mayfair’ series use a myriad of painted surfaces and supports to play with the possibilities of reading and seeing.
Painting has been one of the central concerns of MacPherson’s 40-plus year career as an exhibiting artist, and in his hands has been a continually ingenious vehicle for thinking about art as well as the pleasures of invention and mark-making. The framed text piece linking all the works ‘I ALWAYS BUY MY LUNCH AT THE MAYFAIR BAR’ 1983 is an account of sandwich-making that MacPherson has also called ‘a recipe’ for abstract painting. Once again, dedications to individuals are noted in each work’s title.
In the final room, “PELICAN DREAMING: 18 FROG POEMS, FOR GREG C.” 1984-2020 is a major installation conceived in 1984 and realised here for the first time.
For thousands of years the waters that cause occasional flooding of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, in the lands of the Arabana people of far north South Australia, have flowed from rivers running through Channel Country in south-west and central Queensland. The filling of the lake creates a major breeding ground for birds including Australian pelicans, gulls, sandpipers and terns—alluded to here by simply-folded wire coat hangers.
MacPherson’s ‘Frog Poems’ series involves the conjunction of objects with forms of language and classification, in this case papier-mâché dates indicate records of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre’s flooding within the recent settler past.
MacPherson’s nominal yet capacious gestures invite us to delight in the transformative and playful potential of language and artistic hierarchies.
Curator: Angela Goddard.
- Robert MacPherson “PELICAN DREAMING: 18 FROG POEMS, FOR GREG C.” (detail) 1984-2020. Wire coat hangers and papier-mâché numbers, dimensions variable.
- Collection: the Artist. Courtesy Yuill | Crowley, Sydney