Kylie Banyard, soft landing, 2024, Verge Gallery, the University of Sydney
"By wrapping her sons into both the creation and imagery of her paintings, Banyard consciously counteracts the traditional push-pull that exists for so many mother-artists between the demands of family and the call of creativity. In doing so, she creates a realm that temporarily holds and protects her growing children, encouraging them, and us a viewer-participants, to discover ‘more gentle ways of being in and of the world’ (3), and of re-imagining and re-making that world with an emphasis on connection and care."Kelly Gellatly, 2024
“Now living far from her coastal hometown and making a new life in country Victoria on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, Banyard is raising her young family with the urgent desire to provide the protection and security she grew up with. The ‘soft landing’ she wants for her children can be viewed through the lens of her own history - mermaiding in the salt waters off the Illawarra coastline and soft-footstepping through the rainforests of the escarpment. She teaches her children of the magic and the power of the natural environment. Inviting them to touch, to feel, to smell all the small wonders of the bush in her adopted home hoping that they too have the same sense of protection that was instilled in her by her own elders. soft landing is a homage to an ancient land in all its forms. It shows us that protection can be the touch of a flower; the gentle stepping through the bush or a glimpse of sunlight on the face of a child.”Tess Allas, 2024
"The relationship between painting and photography has long been of interest to Banyard, whose previous works have reconstructed historical photographic archives and investigated obsolete cameraless photographic techniques such as the cyanotype. Earlier bodies of work have reanimated the activities of the radical Black Mountain College (1933–56), foregrounding the contribution of the school’s female participants. Driving this impulse to engage in historic materials is a desire and belief in alternative possibilities of living and working. In Banyard’s practice, pedagogy of imagination and utopian thinking is key to the speculation and potential creation of a more just and ethical world. This new body of work maintains this commitment, whilst turning from the historic photographic archive to what curator Martin Clark termed “archives of sunlight”: the vegetal world."Amelia Wallin, 2022
"Kylie Banyard is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is grounded in painting and intersects with photography, video, sculpture and immersive architectural spaces. Through her practice, Banyard uncovers the political potential of the utopian imagination through an exploration of alternate models for living and learning. Her speculative images combine historical references with fantasy, drawing on ideas from the past and bringing them into the present, in a way that invites contemplation about what the future may hold."Anna Davis (MCA), 2019
"In Banyard’s work, canvas (the heroic material that was used by American Abstract Expressionists as a field for colour and form and expanded to macho proportions) connects the work to the history of painting. However, the material also links to the feminine. The large spans of fabric connote the American tradition of quilting and ‘women’s craft’. The repositioning of the historical images invites us to look towards an alternative future. Women are strong and capable protagonists, working outdoors and using their hands to make art, tend fields and build alternative futures. Banyard has long been interested in intentional communities, and she has choreographed one that presents women in ways that appear nurturing, cooperative and non-combative. In highlighting these traits that are often associated with women, she brings a shifted lens to what is valuable."Kezia Geddes (Lismore Regional Gallery), 2021
"In Kylie Banyard’s newest paintings the mood is simultaneously mystical, technicolour, strangely nostalgic and enduringly hopeful. While her latest oil and acrylic works emerged from interests in the experimental American art school Black Mountain College, which in the mid-20th century emphasised holistic learning, this isn’t necessarily clear. Yet the aura of the influence is apparent, particularly in the most compelling paintings that depict women working together in acts of toil and farming, their skin tinged by vivid pinks and blues, blending into the environment in which they work. Existing in luminous lighting, the women’s movements are choreographed in ways that feel caring and reciprocal, not exploitative or competitive.For an artist with a practice across many mediums, it’s clear Banyard knows painting: colours expertly morph into one another; shaded and flattened areas are designed for maximum impact; a single painting of a house is masterfully skewed, drifting on a pink background, curiously emerging as both a relic from the past and a dream of the future. Alongside the paintings are textile and sculptural forms, yet these don’t quite enhance the atmosphere the paintings so brilliantly conjure − a reverie on labour and creation, and women being with women."Tiarney Miekus, 2020 (for The Age)
"Banyard’s work is part tribute to the trailblazing women of Black Mountain, part proposition for a values revolution. It repurposes Black Mountain’s progressive vision of art-driven sustainable living for contemporary times, and it does so by repurposing painting away from its self-reflexive discourse and towards imaging joyful alternatives to being in the world."Jacqueline Millner, 2019
"Kylie Banyard’s previous work mostly consists of nostalgic scenes from American counterculture, focusing less on historic pioneers than on alternative forms and technologies connected to radical visual practice in the 1960s and 1970s. Comprising four framed paintings and five painted banners, this exhibition sees the artist transform her typically muted creative environments into sites of joyful contemplation. Using black-and-white photographs as source material, which were taken at Black Mountain College between 1933 and 1957 and which Banyard found online, she has concentrated not on the celebrated male artists of the famed art school but on its female cohort, many of whom are unidentified. For instance, Anni #1 (all works 2017) is a sparsely painted portrait of textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers absorbed at her loom, and Ruth shows the under-recognized sculptor Ruth Asawa on her back, tending to one of her tubular wire pieces. In all the works here, Banyard employs appropriation to great effect, enlivening her sources through careful color combinations and subtle erasures. Particularly in the large-scale paintings, Banyard’s enthusiasm for her subjects is obvious, portraying teachers and students working together, including on the preliminary construction of an early version of one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes (Group work) and in a photography class held in a cabbage patch (Photography and Cabbages). Suggesting that the job of all good art schools is to foster a community of artists to engage in serious play, the show reminds us that process-based, interdisciplinary, and communitarian ideals became central to fine-arts education in the second half of the twentieth century, setting a laudable standard that seems increasingly out of reach today."Wes Hill, 2017 (for Art Forum)
“Banyard’s focus on the Black Mountain College in The Hereafter does not centre on its most lauded luminaries, but on the many women who built and sustained its utopian vision and who are overlooked in its histories. While previous series depicting stylised interiors or experimental dwellings feel conspicuously uninhabited, the paintings in The Hereafter are full of people and activity – a photography class held in a cabbage patch, dancing figures bounding through space, students holding venetian blinds aloft. They are imbued with an optimism and a vibrancy all their own. Banyard developed this series of paintings and painted banners from archival photographs taken of students and staff in the acts of teaching and learning. Gleaning these images primarily from internet research, she retains a critical distance from their source by manipulating and moulding them into new forms. These paintings are far from a straight transcription – they are a reframing of the official narrative, allowing new stories and new legacies to emerge, literally bringing them new colour. Their degraded, monochrome source material gives the works a graphic quality. Objects and figures are flattened against ambiguous backgrounds in romanticised shades of dusky pink and butter yellow. Confetti Dance shows expressive figures in red and yellow against a pink sky, a classmate in a lavender dress watching from the foreground. Group Work is anchored by the statuesque figure of Elaine de Kooning in bold red and blue, a web of venetian blinds held by the teacher and her students ribboning across the composition. Their joint effort is mirrored in the building behind them – the faculty building constructed by the students. Banyard has diverged from the original photograph by flipping the image, adding colour, and, most significantly, erasing Buckminster Fuller from the cluster of gathered figures. Elaine de Kooning becomes the central focus.”Eleanor Zeichner, 2017