Onkaparinga Arts - Sauerbier House

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | ABX Group
[GRAFTd] Exhibition August - September 2017
STORY COUNTRY

ABX Group | Isabel Lopes Lopes uses real and imaginary landscape story telling using mixed media, combining whimsical illustrations and abstract techniques. Her work explores minimal colour combinations with an emphasis on texture and pattern. | Cher McGrath This book project is a vehicle for a new exploration of our own country. For Cher, each print is an expression of her care & concern for the peninsula that is home. The collaborative experience is a silent but eloquent conversation about our country. | Mary Pulford Story Country is about experiencing, observing and translating the natural environment into process driven printmaking. Both Mary’s individual artist books Antipodean Alphabet, Lifeboats, Wilderness and City Birds and the collaborative works are reflections on both the local and broader Australian environment. | Debby Haskard-Strauss Story Country is about my move to the Adelaide Hills, the wide open space, the light, the sky, the view of the Summit, its surrounding hills and the land that I live on. The wall pieces are an extension of the type of mediums I have used and the story I am telling through the images in my books Winter Hill and Night Sky. | Boo At home in the Top End bush, Boo’s world is populated by birds, from which she draws inspiration for her fabric designs. The Little Book of Birds is a collection of some of those inspirations, digitally printed onto fabric. | Luna Bird My Story Country is told by the plants I am now surrounded by, living in the Northern Territory. The land and weather is hash and extreme; and so are the plants and people that survive and thrive here.

Images: SH

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Paloma Concierta
Artist in Residence, July - September 2017
UNWOUND

Spanish slate skirts the interior of Sauerbier House. (that was once the roof of the Port Noarlunga Life Saving Club); The blackboards and their linear condensing of geography into dark portraits of chance and voyage; The external lines of the reflective copper strips that prefer the Western aspect; The ‘Unwound’ soundscape that uses the house itself as an instrument to create a zone of contemplation; The wool-wound old teak bowls that conceal and reveal simultaneously, of Tree, of Sheep, of Hand and the organic mathematics of human error that is also present in nearby pastures and conversations; The German piano on the verge faces a choir of She-oaks, back to the house, no longer permitted to sing amongst natives - he still-calls in delimited shapes from the levy wall to the fruiting harp of the ‘Woman’s River’, the Nganki Paringa River, The Onkaparinga River, in Kaurna Yerta: All these things are part of what I call. The Palette of my Location.

Images: SH

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Christobel Kelly
Artist in Residence, 4 July - 30 September 2017
WALKING BACKWARDS

This project began as an atavistic investigation into a geographic triangle. The coastal area from Port Willunga, up to the Willunga Hills and over to Port Noarlunga, was my first stomping ground; the place where I came into the world step by step. By embedding the project at Sauerbier House it was possible to revisit this area whose physical landscape could declare at a whim, either presence or absence. The first ten years of my life were spent in the sleepy town of Aldinga where I walked to school and the beach along the Port Willunga road. Those places are now almost unrecognisable due to urbanisation although sometimes there are vestigial memories that rise up when I return, a kind of walking backwards in time. Gradually as the project developed, other questions arose such as, whether it was possible for houses as mnemonic entities to create systems for the revelation of former selves. Not necessarily the particularities of individual houses, but houses like enough to arouse a form of rhyming in the recollection of place. Thus the residency at Sauerbier House also became a method of conversation between deeply storied structures by way of the people who live or have lived in the area. The constraints of working with a denuded set of letterpress meant that there was a process of slow thinking used in the formulation of each printed word. Even slower than handwriting, the act of printing became a way of scraping away until the substrata of time and place were revealed.

Images: Suzanne Muston

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Lindsey Nightingale
Artist in Residence, 4 April - 1 July 2017
THE HOUSE THAT SANG

“An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” - Charles Dickens. | The idea of a house with a mind or even a soul of its own, is of course not a new idea; buildings of all kinds have long been endowed with magical or uncanny qualities, either by their inhabitants or by the wider communities in which they are situated. Often, the legends or stories which become attached to older houses contain a grain of truth and in attempting to uncover these gems; the seeker is drawn in further than expected. What went before is frequently more interesting than what remains. In spending time at Sauerbier House, becoming acquainted with its odd corners and its quirks, I allowed my ideas the time to “explain themselves” and to find their own routes into a story. On quiet days, walking between gallery and river or along the seafront, I began to link the urban myths, the factual and the fanciful stories attached to the house and grounds to those attached to the river and to the beautiful stretch of coastline at Port Noarlunga. Rather than telling a story solely based in known facts, I instead, joined the dots and let the place tell me a story of its own making.

Images: Suzanne Muston

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | BUTTERGIRL (Kim Shanahan)

Artist in Residence, 4 April - 1 July 2017

"... and, when it was melted, ree swallowed it" - My research and focus of my Art Residency at Sauerbier House has been directly concerned with migration of the Calidris Acuminata, the tiny Sharp Tailed Sandpiper, and in fact the female of the species the “Ree”. This Bird annually migrates from the Arctic Siberia to the Onkaparinga River of South Australia, in search of tasty, nourishing, plump worms, molluscs and crustaceans. It flies in large flocks often with other waders. Their departure is highly organised with the male of the species leaving first, to be followed by the females and finally by the young. There is much secrecy, and still so much unknown about the liminal space they journey. When the Sharp Tailed Sandpiper’s have feasted on the splendours of the Onkaparinga region they will once again fly back to the tundras of Siberia to breed. The females incubate the eggs in well hidden hollows on the ground and raise their young alone. I too have journeyed from my home in Katherine in the Northern Territory of Australia to undertake my residency at Sauerbier house… weekly I have prepared myself for long flights and emotional departures from family, my experience has paralleled that of the tiny shore bird I research… I have wandered the banks of the Ngangkiparingga (Onkaparinga) that is symbolised as a Coolamon (a Kaurna Woman’s Large Dish or Bowl) I respectfully acknowledge this, as I have searched tirelessly for the exact place that the fresh water meets the salt, and it is here that I have stood beside a single, female Sharp Tailed Sandpiper that didn’t return to Siberia with her flock, and it is her story I tell…

Images: Suzanne Muston

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Rosemary Whitehead

Artist in Residence, 25 March - 29 April 2017

Rosemary is a textile and colour environmentalist whose weaving of large and small tapestries; collaging of love-song sheets; clothing of hangers and construction of beauteous nets have regenerated donated, discarded or found fabric and objects. Many of her works are inspired by the texts she has read and the people she has met and since 1999 much of her work has been informed by the place she calls home -- Kangaroo Island. Having first fell in love with the landscape around Port Noarlunga while attending a tapestry weaving residential summer school at Tatachilla in 1976, Rosemary fell in love all over again while at Sauerbier House, working towards a ruminative exhibition and through generously skill sharing the many textile processes she has learnt over the last 40 years. Her work explores the inseparable connection between art and life via the domestic opportunities which fabrics afford us.

Images: Suzanne Mustan.

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Nic Brown

Artist in Residence, Oct-Dec 2016

THEN CAME THE CLOUD BURST - Excerpt from exhibition essay by Stephanie Radok.

'Whatever she initially planned to do, once Brown did research into historical records and saw photographic images of floods in the area, she knew that she wanted to study them further and use them as the basis for her evocative paintings that recreate sensations and history at the same time.

Here is the past, here are houses, landscapes and here are past lives spilling out of buildings surrounded by water. Brown has even suggested that the flooding is rising out of the buildings. Thus the work is not literal but imaginative and has layers of meanings that viewers may either guess or dream into the work.

The water that is above and below the houses and the landscapes makes it seem as if they will dissolve while at the same time, as in Piguenit’s work, it opens space for reflection.

Brown’s recurring palette is chalky and pastel, she uses water-mixable oil paint and often floods the work with clouds of white and dripping liquid paint that leave traces that deconstruct the exactness or primness of her subject matter by adding in accidents and suggestions of mortality, error, elusiveness and mutability'.

Images: SH

Celebrating 10 Years! 🎉

Throwback | Margit Brünner
IT'S NOW FOR NOW

Artist in Residence, 25 February - 29 March 2017

IT'S NOW FOR NOW - 'If we prioritize joy, will we be generating paradise?' Artist in Residence 25 February - 29 March 2017 • The Sauerbier House Residency presented the artist Margit Brünner with the opportunity to further investigate the aesthetic and ethic potential and effects of joy-production. Margit’s practice is motivated by a firm belief that we become and co-emerge in relation to others and the course of our becoming matters. To put joy-based exercise in perspective Brunner borrows from the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who suggested that we are partaking in the dynamics of a highly affective universe, where each and everyone's expressions, including those of ants, plants, minerals, thoughts,... have an effect on the whole.
Margit used of the residency to make visible fragments of joy through performative drawing and installations, responding to the encountered environments at Sauerbier House and its surroundings

Images Courtesy Suzanne Mustan.