Katy Woodroffe, Family Heirloom, Allport Museum, 2018
Family Heirloom – Katy Woodroffe
Katy Woodroffe asked me to speak tonight and my initial feeling was that I would have to, with greatest respect, decline to do so. The reason for this hesitancy was simple: I felt unqualified to introduce Katy and her work. One of the reasons that I felt unqualified is because of who Katy Woodroffe is. Many of you know Woodroffe, as a friend, as a colleague, as a distinguished and highly successful artist. Indeed, the list of her accomplishments is daunting. You know of her impact as an educator (Woodroffe taught my wife and two of her siblings). The point I am making is that Woodroffe’s career as a prominent Tasmanian artist and as an educator is far-reaching and influential.
Another reason why I might feel unqualified to speak is because I only arrived in Tasmania in 1996. That’s nothing compared to 40,000 years of indigenous history, or Woodroffe’s own family history, most evident in this exhibition, which commences in 1826 with the arrival of the Lyne Family and 1855 with Johannes Kalbfell. Indeed, the history of Woodroffe’s antecedents is entangled with defining moments in this island’s history – the introduction of a bounty on the thylacine, for example, or a café/bookshop owning art teacher that taught in an art school that once stood on this very site.
So, having said I am unqualified what am I doing here? Well it is actually this last point that allows me to speak with some confidence – the history and legacy of migration to Tasmania is a compelling subject and I share with Woodroffe a concern for how we, as artists, might render these complex stories visually for others to appreciate. Consider how, when relaying your life story to another, you may share stories and anecdotes, perhaps exaggerating or embellishing a little as you do so. But often, as we move further away from historical events and facts, these anecdotal accounts (unverified, small stories) get lost. The job of the artist then, is to enliven the historical fact with a sense of the anecdote – or the feeling that there are stories between the facts. And so, what you can see in this exhibition are bits and pieces of historical fact, of anecdote and the implied presence of people long gone jostling together to create new stories and new ways of understanding or thinking of history. This seems especially important to be doing this at the present time in lutruwita/Tasmania as we collectively reimagine and hold in the present our complex and contested past. History is not something that is done and finished, something that we simple ‘move on’ from. It is used productively in the present to better envisage the future.
It would be simple enough to describe this exhibition of work as “pictures of artefacts, objects, flora and fauna associated with Katy’s Woodroffe’s antecedents” but of course that is inadequate. Whilst it is true that all of those things are present it is the masterful arrangement of these fragments that provoke a restless, aesthetic enquiry into undisclosed or unknown human presence that moves between the objects. If you look carefully you can see many instances of decorative pattern whether this be on ceramic plates, fabric or wallpaper. This pattern is often gorgeously coloured and prominent but if you look closely you will also see it in the shadow areas, barely there, only visible because of a slight variation in the sheen of the surface. It is these darker areas, that for me, speak so eloquently of a barely discernible presence that nonetheless holds the intricately positioned objects together in a play of ‘artful imbalance’. I borrow that phrase from the writer and artist Ross Gibson who writes - and this is so appropriate to Woodroffe’s work - :
“By restlessness, I mean the way an artwork – be it a book, a database, a building, a garden – can activate your imagination by offering to your mind a system of artful imbalances and implied possibilities that are available for patterned completion inside your own imagination.”[i]
I encourage you to read the labels and to discover the fascinating historical facts that swirl around these wonderful artworks. I haven’t done them justice here – so please take your time to discover them and then consider how the artworks themselves bring us meaningfully, intimately closer to those facts.
[i] Gibson, R. 2015, Memoryscopes: Remnants, Forensics, Aesthetics, UWA Publishing, Perth