Ode to a correa and other soft landings
Nicholas Thompson Gallery - November 2024
The works for this exhibition were made with the assistance of Saskia van Pagee Anderson, and the La Trobe University internal research grant scheme.
“If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself.” Alice Ostriker, poet (1)
One of the many things that “they” (whoever “they” might be) don’t tell you about motherhood is that your children need you more, not less, as they get older. While this is almost impossible to conceive when you’re immersed with no escape in the seemingly endless cycle of nappies and sleepless nights, tantrums and trips to the park, once they start to become independent of you, you are unable to curtail or fully control what happens in their lives. No longer the centre of their worlds, your care and influence sit alongside (or are subsumed by) the role and competing power of teachers and peer groups, hobbies and social media. Our world is complex and fractious, and notions of truth and of what is right and wrong are seriously under threat. As a parent, how can we help our children on their way and support them to be the best people they can be? How can we help them love and care for a world that has been so totally messed up by the generations before them?
These are the thoughts and feelings that strike me as I look at Kylie Banyard’s Ode to a Correa and other soft landings, in which her two sons, Wes and Hal, play a major part. In the bringing together of paintings, suspended textiles and soft sculptures, Ode to a Correa and other soft landings represents Banyard’s ‘urgent desire to shower [her] children in flowers’ and thus convey her ‘radical hope’ for their futures. (2) By creating a distinctly feminist and feminine environment which nurtures and surrounds the viewer, Banyard’s warm embrace of an exhibition encourages us to slow down and take stock, and in doing so, offers us a place of protection, sustenance and potential growth.
Paintings such as Hal with a Face Full of Correa and Hal with Artichoke and Fennel (both 2024) are based in a walking ritual that Banyard undertakes with Hal, her youngest son. Immersed in a natural environment of the family’s creation on Dja Dja Wurrung country (Banyard’s partner Leo is a keen gardener), the pair discuss the ways in which a plant feels and smells and photograph each other touching and talking to plants. This ritual at once reinforces our role in and deep connection to the natural world, as well as the invisible bond between mother and son. These simple actions are then transposed onto Banyard’s paintings, floating on top of veils of colour created by the natural plant dyes that the artist uses to prepare her canvases. These, and works such as Wes Engulfed and Touching African Daisy (both 2024) activate the senses, creating a heightened awareness that is welcomed and supported by the exhibition’s tactile elements; a space of the artist’s making in which we are encouraged to “just be”.
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.
(1) Alice Ostriker quoted in Rachel Power, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, Red Dog, Fitzroy, 2008, p. 1.
(2) Kylie Banyard, Artist Statement, Soft Landing, Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, 2 September –4 October 2024, https://www.verge-gallery.net/exhibitions-new/kyliebanyard-softlanding
(3) ibid.
Exhibition essay Kelly Gellatly, 2024
Kylie Banyard, Engulfed and sinking in 1, 2024, acrylic on canvas with cotton panels, 200 x 200 cm
Kylie Banyard, Engulfed and sinking in 1, 2024, acrylic on canvas with cotton panels, 200 x 200 cm
Kylie Banyard, Touching correa at dawn, 2024, oil and acrylic on cinerea dyed canvas (with iron and alum mordant) 102 x 72 cm
Kylie Banyard Ironbark relief 2024 ironbark dyed canvas (alum and iron mordant) with cotton applique 168 x 137 x 11 cm
Kylie Banyard, Correa for Hilma, 2024, cyanotype on cotton with weld dyed canvas (with iron and alum dyed mordant), 27 x 25 cm