Processual

I found these notes this morning trying to tidy up my archive. Compared to the previous post, this is written just seven years ago. As time goes by, the present seems to include the whole of one’s life. The ‘present’ sits in expanded space.

Sculpture by The Sea Patrons Lunch.

Friday, 1st November, 2019

Buon Riccordo Restaurant.

 

I am delighted to participate in today’s acknowledgement of patrons of Sculpture by The Sea, and I have written a short statement to commemorate the occasion.

More specifically, I am bringing a word.

That word is ‘Processual’.

It sounds like a made up word but it is in the dictionary.  It means ‘Relating to or involving the study of processes rather than discrete events.’

It was employed by my partner Jacqueline who is not here today.

As we were walking around Sculpture by The Sea she said of a particular sculpture, that’s ‘processual’.

I hate made up words and academic complication, but we looked it up and there it was.

What she was describing was a type of work, which was that work which was produced out of the act of making. Much work is made from ideas and is ‘executed’, where there is no scope for an ‘in process’ voice.

Much work is ‘fabricated’, where drawings or models are blown up.

The Sydney School of Sculpture, out of which Sculpture by The Sea was born, is committed to a ‘processual’ philosophy.

If one does not give oneself to the act of making, if you do not allow yourself to be subjected to the realm of possibilities that lie within that field of working the material, then you are dealing with trifles, entertainments, distractions.

If you cannot bear to dive in, you don’t get to swim and the only way to get to the other side, is to swim there.

There was a school of thinking, there were several schools who believed that that supposed ‘infinite’ well was dry and that all that swimming yielded predictable results.

Only ‘ideas’ would set us free, they said. Only ‘taking responsibility’ would take us anywhere new, anywhere surprising.

Swimming had become ‘processual’ soup.

In the context of an acknowledgement to patrons of Sculpture by The Sea, I shall keep my speculations brief.

What Jacqueline had identified was a trend where ‘processual’ can become prosaic.

When you are going through the motions of a perfect swimming style, that style can lead to only a ‘representation’ of a perfect world.

It’s kind of stating the obvious, I know, but we should stay alert.

I would ask you, when you have a moment to tick off in the catalogue, which of the works are ‘processual’.

Is it good or bad that they are? Perhaps it is neither.

Thank you.

 

East Sydney Tech, The National Art School

Things have changed at The National Art School since I taught there through the seventies, eighties and nineties. More things haven’t changed, which gives this poem have an historic interest. It was written in 1992

 

You have entered a place of great beauty and power.

It is dark, it is quiet and you have to enquire.

 

There’s a queue and a test, best dressed is poor.

The machinery’s broken, don’t break the door!

 

Of winning and status, of dreamed success,

Qualifications, B. A. / R. S.

 

If you think you can make it, then make it again.

To make it from here, is to break from the pen.

 

The messages, the lessons, are etched in the walls

The veins are the teachers who lurk in the halls.

 

They think, but they’re actually carried along

Their voice is a trick laid down by the song.

 

The waves are the students who slightly demur

They ripple and tease a distant shore.

 

The water is left in puddles and pools.

And each generation walks through the news.

 

There’s lock, stock and barrel, a range and a zoo.

Every opinion is riding, make that one, make that two.

 

We know that it’s happening. It’s happened before.

There’s a clock in the passage, a knock on the door.

 

The hour is coming, the hour is here.

The hour comes every year.

 

To be neither in fashion nor out of date

To be neither too early nor ever too late.

 

To be part of the middle of a missing core,

Is never to need to ask  for more.

 

 

Michael Snape 1992

Getting Over Picasso

As time goes by, perspective gets refreshed. We can look at Tony Tuckson anew.

After all these years, we’re still trying to digest Picasso. 

You have to get through Picasso to map out a different place. 

You can’t go hiding in a pre-Cezanne world and pretend Picasso was an aberration. 

Artists get through Picasso in different ways. They think they get through him, but you really have to get him to go through him. 

Did Tony Tuckson really get through Picasso? 

He got the look of it, the raw energy of it. He got the new space. He got past Picasso the same way as De Kooning. He got through, over, with the assistance of all those people. Mark Toby, Motherwell. 

In the end you probably get past Picasso and lose ‘drawing’ in the process. Everyone who got past Picasso lost the capacity to steer form with subject.

Without subject you are left with gesture (Pollock, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, all the Americans really.) 

We didn’t notice much at the time. The farewell to drawing seemed like a fair exchange for the new pictorial inventions and opportunities. 

Fifty years later though, or a hundred years later we do miss the pleasure of the arrangement of form that drawing brings. 

For those of us who didn’t know better, who grew up in a post-cubist world, the making of art could not be made outside the context of Picasso. 

Picasso wasn’t just inventing something. He was describing how we perceived a new world. His success was in providing the shape the new world took.

Nothing would ever be just one view again. We would forever look at something from every orientation and from every cultural perspective at once. 

Just as it’s hard to get around Picasso, it’s hard to identify that you have got around him from what an artwork might look like. 

Tuckson was aided in his Picasso crossing by the indigenous world.

Pollock might have shown us that you can steer the flow of paint more successfully with a stick than a brush. 

Tuckson noticed that an ochre smeared hand could leave a mark on a body that was no less precise.  Tuckson learnt that roughness was the new refinery. You could tune a painting precisely by building the whole picture ‘at once’. 

Fairweather was assisted by Chinese art to bring about his Picasso cure. 

To achieve the purity of form desired both Fairweather and Tuckson relinquished drawing in the same way. 

Ultimately, you cannot steer a line that is convulsing. At the time we all thought we had to convulse to get to the essence, the core, the substance.

We were attempting to integrate an unconscious process as directed by Freud, However, having a virtual nervous breakdown provided no access to surpassing Picasso. 

If we have failed to surpass Picasso, we should not be too concerned. Picasso had failed to surpass Cezanne, who was the purest Cubist.

Compared to Cezanne, Picasso was a show pony, fodder for the fame machine that twentieth century printing and publication provided.

This new project that seemed exhausted mostly, by the mid twentieth century is still in its infancy so we can relax.

The Chalk

If the ‘Blackboards’, (see previous blog posts) are an indulgence, that should be the extent of it. The ‘Blackboards’ are the extreme end of a deviation from seriousness from which I shall not deviate further. 

Employing the same marker, challenge, to a different surface however seems to have more opportunities. 

From having given permission to myself to mount a broad platform from which to mount my life’s focus, that platform wants to spread further. Not concrete at all, this foundation  I have laid over fifty, sixty years wants to spread further. It now has a watery base. There is no roof to protect a ‘Chalk’ from being deleted by the next shower, no shield to withstand the next overflowing high tide. 

This place though, from my spending so much time here, despite it being a mere working dock remnant and therefore perpetually anonymous and un-nameable does deserve a name. 

The Footbath Mort Bay, Balmain

So this is not a Chalkboard. It is a place name. ‘Footbath’. Its name exists in relation to the users of the space, dogs who swim together, (they swim together more than they do anything else together). Humans too discard their shoes and ‘have a dip’. I call it ‘swimming’ with laps mostly imagined and not numerous. 

A ‘Footbath’ might be more a venue for reflection on the hop. A spot to meditate briefly on the prospects of the day emerging. 

A dog contemplating.

We do emerge finally from The Footbath, cleaner. The human skin and dog skin too seem to delight in the afterglow the ‘bath’ provides. 

A footpath reliably takes us to a place. It is not a track but something that others share. A trampled track finally becomes a path. While a footpath might offer the opportunity to travel at some speed along it, a Footbath offers limited destinations even, none at all. 

Although the chalk will wash away, the name will stick. This is how culture works. Stuff gets thrown up and some of it sticks if it hits the mark, if it identifies something that was there that just needed to be identified. 

The great thing about Australia is, that while we do make stuff stick the right way we are still so deeply in the middle of making that we can’t focus. 

We miss it and that keeps us alive. 



Then and Now



Upcoming exhibition at Australian Galleries, Paddington

17th February - 7th March, 2026

“A carved account of the history of the referendum.”

The Voice 2023 Wynne Prize. Installation AGNSW 2023



What a moment. 

The first remark of a newly elected Anthony Albanese was to declare the Uluṟu Statement would be fully implemented.

It came out of the blue, so much sweeter than a mere victory claim. This was visionary leadership, Whitlamesque.

This show charts the joy this moment brought. 

It charts the way that doubt changed its shape. 

It charts the way a song of joy became a subject of argument, of shrinking thinking. 

What’s in it for us, they asked? What will we lose? Why should the Indigenous people be preferred? Australia was about equality, they declared.

Dutton, the doubt drover.

This show charts the way The Voice fell over, was put away. 

The show charts how, for all this, The Voice became more ingrained and sits in us more than it ever did before.

This show is an account of these moments.

From having been autonomous Voice and Yes sculptures, I began to make human figures to scale the work, to make the voices large or small, loud or soft.

The figures began to have their own spoken part which we are in the process of interpreting.

The Witness 2025 Wynne Prize AGNSW 2025

Dear Harry

Harry Georgeson and I were students together at The National Art School in the early 1970’s. Harry went to America not long after, to extend his education at The New York Studio School and to steep himself in New York’s culture. He and I have maintained our connection and he has maintained his engagement with sculpture. He follows my blog and offers feedback. He argues that my conclusions about the sculpture made here since that time is an overreach.

 

Dear Harry,

It may have been a beginning for you Harry, at the art school. For me it was the end of my education. 

I was ready to go in 73. 

In the same year, my father determined Australia was a mistake and returned to England, (this despite his being Australian born), and lived out his days there. 

‘Australia is barren’, he said. ‘I need to be where culture runs deep.’ 

‘You go then,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay and help to build culture here.’

The world is your oyster when you’re young, and stays that way if you can make setbacks work for you. 

Around that time in the mid-seventies, there was a flowering in all the arts, and in politics here in Australia. Gough Whitlam had proposed a new independence. We could speak with our own voice. 

Depending on who you talk to, that awakening was delusory or exhausted after twenty, thirty, forty years. This culture building is slow. 

We were fortunate in Australia to have enjoyed an educational foundation at The National Art School. With that knowledge we were reasonably equipped to make sense of where we found ourselves.

In Australia we are speaking alongside ancient landscape and ancient culture. This puts the whole of Asian and European culture into a virtually modern history context.

What we have an opportunity here is to navigate a well without a bottom.

You gave me feedback Harry, on my last post about The Sydney School of Sculpture. You argued that the history of sculpture I described was no more extensive than what has emerged from other art schools, citing St Martin’s, Stockwell Depot, The New York Studio School. These schools were interpreting the same history of Modernism in the same way, you argued.

You suggested that as lively as the possibilities seemed for the new sculptural language at the time, it was exhausted by the mid-seventies, both here and everywhere that that those histories were being explored. 

When Rayner Hoff undertook the formation of The National Art School in the 1920’s, he furnished the studios with excellent benches. I used those benches when I was a student and I notice they are still there.

Progress is slow and non-linear. It presents itself as peculiar initially, which is fair and fine.

All the best,

Michael

James Rogers

James Rogers and The Sydney School of Sculpture

Mostly, sculptors don’t want to be identified with The Sydney School of Sculpture.

Sculptors quite reasonably would prefer to be separate entities unattached to a movement. They would like to soar above their peers to fly free, more alone than grouped.  

Having said that, there is a link between several sculptors that is clear and needs to be acknowledged.

There is a strong thread the market and the art audience hide. This thread is so clear and evident, but we are culturally unprepared or reluctant to do so. We do not need to emulate our shy Australian mammal cousins however, who prosper in the darkness and the quiet of the night.

We need to declare ourselves. In the absence of sustained advocacy, this blog seeks to provide that.

Siren’s Song James Rogers Sculpture by The Sea Bondi 2025

James Rogers lives at Walcha, far from Sydney. He has built a strong independent visual language over forty years. Recently his progress has been acknowledged with awards at Sculpture by The Sea in Perth and Sydney and at The Wollombi Sculpture Festival.

Some of the sculptors, I include myself here, have not held that focus and have paid the cost by not building a language strongly and sustainably.

To wander here and there brings its own pleasures and rewards but sometimes at the expense of a stronger steady growth.

Sometimes sculptors emulate an idea of steady growth by developing a signature style. This is not the case with Rogers.

Unlike many sculptors Rogers shapes the steel. Through various means of heating and cutting he achieves a coherence as if the material was clay. Where the stickiness of clay induces the material  to stay together, the strength of steel allows for space to open between parts. The pre-shaping of elements by cutting different types of steel pipe and plate beforehand brings a life not otherwise available.

This language available from building a process also needs to be enriched by a subject. Rogers makes reference to surfing, to the movements and changes this activity brings, but also the works are sometimes three dimensional evocations from paintings. They replicate the flow of paint, big suspended globs and lines moving quickly or slowly as the composition requires. The works also have the sense of being played as if heard as much as seen. The works of Sydney painter Ildiko Kovaks often come to mind.

On a purely formal level, Rogers achieves what all sculptors seek in their work, which is to get off the ground acceptably and to stay there for as long as possible. The object is to achieve a sustained walk around profile.

To achieve that without sculptural cliché is the sculptor’s objective.

When we, the sculptors, wander away from that objective we pay the price of stalled progress.

I won’t list here who the sculptors are who have wandered from their task, but those more reliably stay loyal to the task recently  are Michael Buzacott, Paul Selwood, Orest Keywan, Jan King, Harrie Fasher, Leo Loomans and Paul Hopmeier.

Even without a strong market for sculpture, there are another ten sculptors who might be considered part of The Sydney School of Sculpture. From this writer’s perspective some sculptors do not consistently qualify because of a reluctance to shape the material, but rather attach isolated parts together to forge a union, in the manner of English sculpture.

Some of the sculptors are good for a show or two. They might make a standout work here and there. Sculptors often don’t acknowledge progress of others when it’s made, but even if they can’t or don’t, that progress sneaks into the collective work and keep the stream of progress alive.

The strength of sculpture’s lineage ironically, feeds off our reluctance to acknowledge it.

***

Rogers is to be congratulated for not distancing himself from the nature of steel by painting it, by making it more ‘attractive’ to an audience. There is an argument that paint neutralises the material, to allow the shape full attention. Sometimes however, the paint is added like gift wrapping, to hide a ‘rusty, industrial look’.

With his recent works, Rogers has provided another strong link in the chain which is, the history of The Sydney School of Sculpture.

 

The picture

A story without pictures may come across as unappealing.

We have come to accept, with the advent of phone photo and cut and paste techniques, stories will be accompanied by pictures, to show the way the story is advanced, or point where the story is headed. 

As a child, consecutive pages of text unbroken by pictures was too hard to bear. You had to hold your breath between pictures. The older we got, there was a  longer space between pictures in our reading. 

With the advent of horror/erotic adventure movies for grown ups, we have all become children again, in our need to be entertained, in ways we remember or were accustomed, or need to retrieve in light of other deficits. 

The  story I tell today has no pictures and presents itself here as blocks of text on the screen. 

The reader will need to imagine the pictures the text describes. 

Here is the story. 

A tree has grown quickly, appeared suddenly between trips to Patonga, and had considerably obscured the view of the water, which is central to our enjoyment  here. 

Growing next door, we thought we should check with the tenants, if not the owners of the house, would they mind if we trimmed the tree to retrieve our view of the water? 

 ‘Not at all, go ahead’. 

The combination of flimsy permission, a stiffening older body, rain, and a rusty saw made the trimming task a challenge. 

A snake had been sited last week in the garden in which the tree was growing. Bare feet and slippery conditions  were hazard lights I ignored. 

(Hazard lights are part of all landscapes now. They compete for attention with  Pokémon characters also scattered frequently.)

How much is too much of the tree should be removed? Hacking a living organism is cruel.
The limbs fell as I cut them, landing in the creek. They seemed modest in size contained within the tree but spread in size, so the little bay in front of the house is full of them and the view still not retrieved. 

When painting a picture, you make a mark and you step back to make an objective judgment. With every branch removed now, a new determination was available on what would be the next move, the next branch to be removed. 

You have to be bold but not reckless to make progress. Two other sets of eyes provided further assessment which was integrated. 

Bit by bit, the view emerged as we remembered. The blunt saw had produced a rough cut but the tree retained a character and shape we found acceptable. 

Much of the waste was dropped into the gulley behind the house. The gulley is quite big but dumping the full load was beyond the gulley’s capacity. 

The rest would be put on the dinghy, hauled across the creek and strapped to the truck parked in the caravan park to be dropped at the tip. 

There were three us who would drag the loaded dinghy across the creek but the largest branch fell off half way.  While I  held the branch from sinking, J & P rowed the remainder ashore. 

It is an unusual burden, a tree, no longer full of air and wind. The branch cut was full of berries. Glistening berries submerged now held no promise of a future life.

The reader can picture the scene now, in their mind. Overcast, chilly, the pull of the outgoing tide.

They can picture J & P rowing the remaining load ashore, unloading the branches one by one and carrying them to the truck and then upending, side-ending the boat to remove the water from last night’s storm. 

Is it possible to be a spectacle and watch a another spectacle at the same time?

Finally, J & P return with the emptied dinghy. We manage to haul the branch from the water into the boat.  

The berries have become the eyes of a fresh catch. The breeze the tree so recently caught was its last breath. 

With J hauling us from the water, with my rowing and P using the branch as a rudder, we achieve the other shore. 

We will drop the load tomorrow at the tip on our way home. 

Today I trimmed the rough cuts from the tree. 

Were you able to read without holding your breath? Were the words pictures?

***

This post was written four years ago next January.

The tree has been removed by the new owner of the house.

I didn’t publish four years ago. The picture I painted wasn’t quite compelling enough. Either my standards have dropped or I can forgive the story meandering or see its attenuated nature now as ok.

While the tree has been removed to reveal the view, the house has been, is being demolished, and will be replaced by a much larger building. Watch this space!


'Maennerchor' 2025

‘Maennerchor’ was exhibited at Sculpture by The Sea in 2025. The title means ‘Men’s choir’ in German. Different voices coming together in harmony hopefully. The work is the second last of the compilation sculptures which were made from individual works from “The Folded Forest’, from my exhibition at Australian Galleries in 2020.

Different views and light conditions show the onerous task of photography to represent a sculpture.

Painted Corten Steel

‘Maennerchor’ at Sculpture by The Sea

Photo courtesy of Charlotte Curd

NAS Notes

NAS Notes

I studied sculpture as a non-diploma student at NAS in 71 and 72. The diploma course officially ran for five years.

At that time ‘qualifications’ were anathema to seriousness. When I left at the end of 1972 however, I was deemed to have ‘fluffed out’ by several teachers. They felt I was unequipped to proceed alone in the art world.

Several years later, I was fortunate to be employed in part time teaching in drawing and sculpture at NAS. It was through teaching that I learnt how much I did not know about sculpture and drawing. My students and I learnt about these areas together.

More recently in the sculpture department, new staff have been employed without the benefit of a thorough art education. Teachers now are graduates of university art schools. They have little to no knowledge of the fundamentals of sculpture, painting or drawing. Graduates of universities tend to be visual illiterates, unless they have had other education. Qualification to teach now requires post graduate qualifications only achieved from universities.

New teachers now are as unequipped as I was, when I started teaching.

I hope that new staff learn about sculpture (and drawing), on the job as I did, with the benefit of those equipped with the skills that have been reliably offered at the school.

The university trained artist has limited language to speak. Their training is in the manipulation of ideas. The works made are illustrations of ideas. These artists tend to rely on ‘materiality’ to deliver a life in the work, in the absence of a more formal language. The material is always the servant of the overriding idea.

The National Art School has argued recently, that there was a need for turning a new leaf, that the sculpture school in particular, had become mired by a limited vision. To bring about new life, extreme changes were necessary.

Ironically, the school was now overrun by the philosophy to which it had for fifty years been in opposition.   

Having previously been overwhelmed by opposition to well-meaning improvements to the school, I am happy to take a back seat and watch, or not watch what ensues.

The buildings have always insinuated themselves into the philosophy of the school. The buildings, the history have always had the final say. 

The End of Trump

We have seen everything of Trump but the end of him.

In the absence of that end, here it is.

The work is related to recent ‘blackboards’ but here applied to steel, where, unprotected from rain, the words will be erased, unless the chalk be replaced with a greasy chalk to emulate the chalk.

Alternatively the letters could be cutout and removed, but can politics enter art that far?

The End 2004 - 2025

The End 2004 - 2025

Gaza. People as Architecture

 

We have been startled recently by video footage and images of Gaza in ruins.

People are moving around as if they still are able to live there despite the devastation. 

It is as if walls and rooves intact are not the precondition for living there. These people are moving around in a grim acceptance of, ‘This is our life and it remains our home’. 

That ‘ruins’ can still function as ‘home’ interrogates what home is.

Gaza now

These broken environments draw the eye for reasons other than shock and horror.

As a result of the bombings, the usual divisions between boundaries is broken. The roads no longer divide the houses from each other. Boundaries between properties no longer exist because they are no longer there. The dominating vertical and horizontal lines that are a feature of most built environments, are absent. As a result there is a new unity in the images, between the people  and the broken buildings.

These broken buildings can still present themselves as ‘home’ to the Gazans. They are clearly determined to stay.

Gaza now

Perhaps Israel and the US believes that with destruction comes abandonment, but this increasingly does not seem to be the case.

It is as if the Palestinians themselves become the surrogate architecture, to become the dominant vertical feature, to replace the buildings.

Note: These images are drawn from the internet from various sources. We should be wary of manipulation but also trust our interpretive capacity.

Blackboards

Sculptor Michael Legrand describes occasional deviations from his central practice as ‘aberrations’. I’m not sure if he still entertains such urges.

My practice sometimes seems governed by ‘aberrative’ inclinations.

When one finds oneself compelled to do something and the intellect has no power to overpower or contextualise that urge to desist, you do it.

My blackboard works counter my usual art practice by being ephemeral. They occupy outside an art context. They are realised without my usual appetite for weight and scale and the pleasure of physical effort.

My blackboard works are ‘slight’. They are also conspicuously unnoticed. They seem to tire quite quickly, needing to be renewed every month or so.

Having said that, I am motivated to keep doing them. I rejoice in doing them. Their futility and commodity independence liberates them and me. That they are erased and to find only a modest afterlife in the blog, seems adequate and fair.

YAY and Still Alive is the first ‘blackboard’ that uses both panels, to make a dialogue across the dividing door to the other panel.

Many thanks to Courtney at Ciao Thyme, Darling Street, Balmain, for providing this platform.