Promiscuous Provenance, the latest exhibition from Shoalhaven artist Anna Glynn, looks set to not only be a milestone in the artist’s career but spark some interesting conversations.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It’s a body of work about Australia’s history and the conversation we continue to have about the impact of colonisation and what it means to be Australian.
The exhibition, currently on show at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery before starting a three-year tour around Australia, is one that has incredible depth in the commentary on Australia’s history.
In the Promiscuous Provenance series, Glynn indulges her perpetual curiosity to go back in time to an intersection of worlds.
By re-interpreting images of the Australian colonial painters through playful engagement, the artworks express a nostalgia for an antipodean wonderland before the imprint of colonisation was stamped over the landscape and its inhabitants.
“This is a world of fantasia, a place on the cusp of reality and imagination, populated by bizarre, reimagined hybrid characters and featuring strange natural history tableaux,” Glynn said.
The exhibition is an imagined landscape leading the viewer to reflect and reawaken a sense of wonder with the surrounding environment and contemplate the reality of this period of history when Aboriginals met Europeans for the first time.
Bronwyn Coulston, manager at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, has seen the development of the series over the past two years and describes the works as “quirky, accessible and engaging ”.
“Regardless of your understanding of colonial history, your familiarity with the works of the colonial artists or your interest in the big questions being asked – this is an exhibition that will make you smile and will encourage you to look at the works to discover all the beautiful detail,” Bronwyn said.
When Glynn approached Bronwyn in 2016 with some samples of the new work she was developing, Bronwyn immediately connected to them and recognised the colonial references within the works.
From talking about these pieces and the interest Glynn had in the colonial artists and her understanding of the tradition of copying that informed so many colonial works, the idea for the Promiscuous Provenance exhibition was born.
Glynn travelled and studied extensively to research the early colonial works that have informed her art, including the Natural History Museum in London, where she was able to explore a wealth of multiple First Fleet original artwork folios.
She was able to view original works in collections across the globe, including Stubb’s iconic The Kongouro from New Holland (Kangaroo) and Portrait of a large dog (Dingo) as well as speak to experts in fields as varied as botany, colonial interiors and colonial texts.
Glynn has not only captured the details of these colonial images, but in conjuring up tableaus and hybrid manifestations, she forces the viewer to an uncomfortable realisation that much of Australian art from the past two centuries has come from, “a European lens, a lens that tried to force a foreign aesthetic onto a landscape that didn’t fit the mould”.
Her panorama work ‘Eurotipodes’, includes inverted upside images taken from colonial landscape painter John Glover’s British sketchbook. In a display of Anna’s wit, she has reclaimed Australia’s position in the world by turning the European world upside down, questioning the notion that we are somehow the nation Down Under.
Glynn hopes that the Promiscuous Provenance exhibition will encourage a re-examining of our relationship with our colonial past and inspire Australians to use this as an opportunity to engage with the many conversations that are happening about this period in our history.
Throughout the past year she has worked closely with Aboriginal archaeologist and anthropologist, Les Bursill.
He has helped Glynn in recognising important links between her work and the connected aspects of Sydney Aboriginal cave art, especially in relation to her repositioning of early and precolonial works.
Glynn’s work is a reinterpretation of that sense of the strangeness of the early colonial artists’ first encounters with the Australian landscape, its flora and fauna.
Drawing upon skills learnt from a lifetime of creating, she has created her own antipodean world with strange hybrid manifestations that invoke the curiosity and wonder of the past.
The works remind us of just how wondrous and alienating the Australian landscape was, so puzzling and new that it seemed almost the stuff of fairy tales.
Once the exhibition wraps up at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery on June 2, it will begin a three year tour around Australia, ending up full circle at the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum in 2021.