Holding Ground at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
11 - 29 November 2020
Holding Ground continues Banyard’s exploration of alternate models for living and learning. Her work explores and brings to a new audience the radical pedagogies of American mid-20th century art school Black Mountain College. Those pedagogies are based in practices of care for others, the development of the whole person, and care for community and environment. The paintings in this exhibition focus on a small group of archival photographs in which female artists and students are engaged in intimate exchanges and moments of co-creation, responsive to the wild mountainous land surrounding them: farming, making, reading and dancing. She combines archival research with fantasy, drawing on images and ideas from the past, bringing them into the present through a painting process that conflates and overlays facets of her own domestic space and lived experience with Black Mountain College’s historical record – her paintings propose a present that is thick with remembrances of the past.
The Pilgrimage, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 92 x 92 cm
Holding ground 2, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 92 x 92 cm
Holding ground 1, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 92 x 92 cm
Making Kin #1, 2019, oil on canvas, 76cm x 61cm
Home, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 92 x 92 cm
The quiet house, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 152cm x 122cm
Blue Ridge Moon, oil and acrylic on canvas, 152cm x 122 cm
Soft Power 1, 2020, acrylic on canvas with appliqué, foam, besser bricks 42 x 49.5 x 49.5cm
Soft Power 2, 2020, acrylic on canvas with appliqué, foam, besser bricks 42 x 49.5 x 49.5cm
Red lettuce for Georgia, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 51 x 40.5 cm
English spinach for Georgia, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 51 x 40.5 cm
Rainbow chard and spinach for Georgia, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 51 x 40.5 cm
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 'Galleries' in The Age Saturday 21 November, p 9 (Spectrum)