Jennifer McEwan Bequest
Tasmanian Child was created in the Premaydena studio as part of the Jennifer McEwan Bequest.
Jen McEwan, herself a creative, studied under the legendary potter John Campbell. Through her travels with her husband David—whose work in the Australian wool industry took them internationally—she encountered major art institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She was attuned to art’s evolving global legacy and drawn to abstraction and spiritual modernism, admiring artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as J. M. W. Turner, Gerhard Richter, and Tasmanian painters Philip Wolfhagen and Bea Maddock.
In response to the commission, I extended my current figurative practice, seeking a dialogue between these works and the historic portrait collection of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.
Historically, women in painting have been rendered harmonious and non-threatening. As Jacqueline Rose observes, women are positioned within an “economy of vision” that demands perfection and coherence. Engaging with feminist art history, including Griselda Pollock, I approached portraiture as a site where identity is constructed and contested. I am also informed by Isabelle Graw’s writing on painting’s capacity to conjure a vitalistic fantasy — the tension between presence and absence. Through the physical act of painting, the sitter seems to appear, yet remains withheld; the image offers both embodiment and loss.
Tasmanian Mother and Tasmanian Child portray sixth- and seventh-generation Tasmanian's. Referencing the McEwan's maternal lineage, these works evoke a ghost trace of the feminine. Each painting began by crushing a printed image of the sitter, distorting form to introduce movement within the still frame. This process reflects on the fragility of identity and the vulnerability of the body in an image-saturated world, foregrounding what is discarded, obscured, or unseen.
Griselda Pollock Chapter 8 Painting, Feminism, History
Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting, Genealogy of a Success medium, Sternberg Press, 2018, p 51
Tasmanian Child was created in the Premaydena studio as part of the Jennifer McEwan Bequest.
Jen McEwan, herself a creative, studied under the legendary potter John Campbell. Through her travels with her husband David—whose work in the Australian wool industry took them internationally—she encountered major art institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She was attuned to art’s evolving global legacy and drawn to abstraction and spiritual modernism, admiring artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as J. M. W. Turner, Gerhard Richter, and Tasmanian painters Philip Wolfhagen and Bea Maddock.
In response to the commission, I extended my current figurative practice, seeking a dialogue between these works and the historic portrait collection of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.
Historically, women in painting have been rendered harmonious and non-threatening. As Jacqueline Rose observes, women are positioned within an “economy of vision” that demands perfection and coherence. Engaging with feminist art history, including Griselda Pollock, I approached portraiture as a site where identity is constructed and contested. I am also informed by Isabelle Graw’s writing on painting’s capacity to conjure a vitalistic fantasy — the tension between presence and absence. Through the physical act of painting, the sitter seems to appear, yet remains withheld; the image offers both embodiment and loss.
Tasmanian Mother and Tasmanian Child portray sixth- and seventh-generation Tasmanian's. Referencing the McEwan's maternal lineage, these works evoke a ghost trace of the feminine. Each painting began by crushing a printed image of the sitter, distorting form to introduce movement within the still frame. This process reflects on the fragility of identity and the vulnerability of the body in an image-saturated world, foregrounding what is discarded, obscured, or unseen.
Griselda Pollock Chapter 8 Painting, Feminism, History
Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting, Genealogy of a Success medium, Sternberg Press, 2018, p 51