Primavera 2021
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Primavera exhibition showcases the works of young, emerging artists who live and work in Australia. In Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Aboriginal curator, Hannah Presley, introduced us to five artists whose unique practices brought new perspectives on the exhibition’s focus on the contemporary and the emerging.
Living and working in Naarm (Melbourne), Presley has recently delivered a number of exciting and distinctive exhibitions. Most notably, her curatorial voice in , 2021-2022, at the National Gallery of Victoria provided an intrinsically Indigenous perspective on climate change. Presley explains in a soundbite on the exhibition were Aboriginal, the origins of each artist’s techniques, the histories held by the materials they use, and the importance of community to their practices ignited many conversations about “what is important.” For instance, the very different works of Quandamooka fibre artist Elisa Jane Carmichael and Naarm-based textile artist Hannah Gartside shared a careful consideration of materials. Carmichael utilised the traditional weaving fibre, talwalpin, to weave a large, fully functional net embellished with thousands of fish scales in her multimedia work, , 2020–2021. In placing Carmichael’s work in the middle of the space, it was possible to view Gartside’s five kinetic textile sculptures through the gaps of the expansive net. This curatorial decision united the two different conceptual relationships the artists had to the materials they used. While Carmichael called upon the traditional weaving techniques of her ancestors, the Ngugi people, as a source of connection to her Country, Gartside called upon the dressmaking skills her grandmother taught her to breathe the lives of five iconic female artists into the vintage garments she repurposed. It is noted in the list of materials that four of the five kinetic sculptures included garments that were gifts from someone else, highlighting the sense of community that these garments held.
