What’s next for Sydney art? The National Art School’s (NAS) Postgrad Show claims to have the answers. The former Darlinghurst Gaol site is renowned for its rigorous education, and training by a suite of current artists. Funded by the NSW Government, NAS doesn’t fall victim to the amalgamating vicissitudes like Sydney’s other art schools housed within tertiary institutions like USyd’s Sydney College of the Arts and UNSW’s Art, Design & Architecture. With this focus, alongside small cohorts, and far-reaching alumni, NAS has secured itself the position of Sydney’s ‘coolest’ art school.
NAS’ 2024 Postgrad Show, exhibiting works from graduates of the Master of Fine Art, celebrates the 29-person cohort’s conceptual and material evolution. The upcoming Grad Show, opening 6 December, honours the larger undergraduate cohort from the Bachelor of Fine Arts. Accordingly, the two shows are stalwarts in Sydney’s cultural (and social) calendars, bringing in artists, art-enthusiasts, buyers and gallerists to the historical campus.
Invited to the media review, NAS schmoozed us; their slick business model became patent. Here, NAS is a promoter, rather than a mere educator, endorsing these artists through their official channels, like Instagram and the Yearbook publication. The small cohorts of graduates receive personalised publicity, and a fast-track to join the institutional ranks. And so, graduates are indelibly tied to their alma mater, and the academy becomes responsible for their career triumphs. While press wooing is the modus operandi of art institutions, it no doubt affects our moment of encounter.
Largely, the show reflected the school’s strengths; painting and drawing dominated, and the works’ reflected a focus on introspection and critical theory. The graduates demonstrate a self-conscious preoccupation with memory – a current artworld trend. Another layer of introspection reveals itself when considering the anxieties of the graduating cohort; how will they fare in the art market, and will they be remembered? Maybe that’s even more apt, after all, NAS’ campus holds the spectre of those forgotten in the annals of history.
Each students’ work represent a culmination of years of experimentation, across conceptual and material practices. The final projects took on themes ranging from geo-psychoanalysis, politics of found objects, digital ecosystems, the gendered self and tensions of phenomenology. Painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, collage, 3D printing, performance, photography, drawing, and ceramics were mixed and scattered on display across the spaces.
Scattered across two main campus locations, the graduate’s final works are allocated space not by discipline or theme, but by their installation needs.
The exhibition starts in NAS’ main gallery building where the first floor’s black walls set the tone for the viewing experience. Placed before you enter the large space, Artemesia Cornell’s small work, Repose, illustrates a deer as it bleeds out and a wolf cries out in pain. Cornell’s stylistic imitation of children’s book illustration requests audiences to reconsider fictional storytelling and their childlike-wonder.Within the first room, Harry Merriman’s inkjet prints, A Dream of Mine (Triptych) took on expansive and striking colonial iconography.
In the middle of the next room, Bronwyn Vaughan’s Bodies of Water series – 19 ceramic works – are installed in a set of clusters. Vaughan, who usually works with steel sculpturing, ventured into and incorporated the ‘holy water’ of Mahon Pool beach as a nod to her mother’s working class experience and her own fascination with hydrofeminism. The ceramics are textured and asymmetric with some still harbouring the dried salt of the Maroubra ocean.
Others like Rachel Mackay explore materiality through video, a salt pool installation and a large textile work made of latex, yarn and digital prints entitled Pores. Initially the three components feel discrete, but the wall label pieces them together; Mackay’s material variety intends to portray the porous nature of bodies.
The underground atmosphere of the first gallery is reprieved by the aeration in the upstairs room; white walls show us ceramic installation, street sketches and inkjet prints. The room opens with Isabella Kennedy’s projected video work still held (breath). The audience looks onto the work, casting their own shadow into its frame. Nearby Oliver Abbott’s oil paintings poke at how “memory distorts”. Abbott’s risen canvases present a memory so familiar, but ultimately distorted — the virtually created landscapes play tricks on our eyes.
Lucinda Bird’s selected works – a collection of aluminium arches, and a curtain of silkscreened graphite on paper – is a highlight. The draped, sewn together images reimagine familial photographs Bird collected from junk shops. Words are etched in a serif typeface on the aluminium arches, and the audience becomes a collaborator in the folding and bending of memory. Do we lose our agency and bend to the will of memory?
Nearby, Benjamin Akuila’s clay sculptural works, most memorably the Bumping Purses series, capture their ideas of cultural authenticity, and identity performances. Mitchell Davis’s assemblages – free standing metal frames with tarpaulin (SUTURE) and found hooks (Sorcerer) as well as a wall-positioned work depicting a circus tent (tent of conception) – act as confessionals on masculinity.
Upon entry to the next gallery space, Block 25, we are met with a much more intimate, compartmentalised exhibition. To your right is Emilee Robinson’s transportive collection of print pieces, exploring memory as a portal to the phrenology of maturation. Originating on either composite panels or board, these vinyl and CMYK print works blur nostalgic images alongside a muffled sound and video work. Robinson’s works felt disarming and confusing; a nod to the experience of memory recollection.
To the left are Criena Court’s series of gestural sculptures and paintings. The series combines sword-looking ceramics, angular, thin pieces and a composite work that holds up an acrylic blue painting by rope, much to the canvas’ chagrin. Using force and tension, the sculptures feel at once shaky and secure — a parallel to Martin John Oldfield’s work in the same space. Oldfield’s sculptural works investigate his personal history as a tradesperson. Working with porcelain, paper and lavender oils to create homely, childhood objects, Zara Collins’ sculptural forms question memory and nostalgia.
In the far right corner of this space is Jake Starr’s video and accompanying installation, A Weak and Panicked Animal. The 12 minute single-channel video can be heard through Bose headphones and thrusts viewers into the unsettling illusions of the wild clashing with the anthropocene. Starr’s installation used construction fences and fastening tools — one of the few video works effectively combining large scale sculptural elements with the technological form.
Quan Zhu Ma’s striking exploration of the Chinese philosophy of the 5 natural elements is on display with their piece, State of Mind. Ma’s experiment with materialism through charcoal, ink, ash, coffee, tea, paper and paint acts as a modest but impactful nod to a proud visual language.
Jake Starr, ‘A Weak and Panicked Animal’, 4K video (runtime 12 mins), construction fence, child safety straps, aluminium bench, TV screen. 
L-R: Jake Starr, ‘A Weak and Panicked Animal’, 4K video (runtime 12 mins), construction fence, child safety straps, aluminium bench, TV screen; Quan Zhu Ma, ‘State of Mind’, house paint, ink, ash, coffee and tea on paper.
The exhibition finishes with a view of the artists’ workshops containing an extension or deeper rationale of the art displayed in the two galleries. The workshops have been cleared out and repainted, and adorned with works not selected for the main galleries. Perhaps, this doesn’t end the exhibition but reminds us that art is always made, remade and unmade, in such tertiary spaces. ‘Practice’, the wanky term preferred by professional artists and art writers, embodies this concept. Being an artist is a commitment to creative exploration, rather than a finalisation of any specific piece.
Although not all present, we were able to open dialogue with artists regarding their rationale and experience both prior to and during their Masters experience. Many have come from NAS, and seek to continue their artmaking practice initiated by the BFA. Others reflected on NAS’ strengths and weaknesses with other art schools; the school offers impressive access to resources in the studio traditions of painting, drawing and printmaking, but a lack of technology and digital equipment.
The NAS’ historic campus is a collection of those now and those who came before. It’s haunted by two things; Sydney’s criminal history –– with its sandstone blocks and leaf-collecting dungeons –– and artists’ former practices –– in discarded works and paint marks. Like the ever-seeing eye of the gaoler, there’s no space not touched by art, or not examined through an artist’s gaze. It makes sense that this space comes to fore with a memory-obsessed graduating cohort.
For us, mere USyd humanities students and 352-route cynics, this active campus environment served as integral to our viewing experience. Despite insular prescriptions, NAS’ work in safeguarding practices and development of disciplines has a rare potency and identity we recommend you experience for yourself.
The NAS Postgrad Show kicks off this year’s series of graduate art shows, followed by SCA’s New Contemporaries opening on 28 November, UNSW School of Art & Design’s The Annual opening on 4 December, and NAS’ undergraduate Grad Show opening on 6 December.
