“. . . [a] multilayering of
visual history and narratives . . .”
Ceramicist Glenn Barkley creates a rich visual journey by excavating his rural community’s colonial past. For his exhibition Plant Your Feet at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Barkley wears two hats. He describes the show as both a creative and curatorial act, in which he combines his own pottery with museological artefacts and materials, alongside a collection of art pieces created by the Nowra community. These sections intersect and interrelate, building up a dense interior space filled with fascinating cultural history.
Glenn Barkley, Shoalhaven still life, 2022, earthenware and lustre. Photograph: Jules Boag. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, New South Wales
Barkley has held a long fascination with craft-based forms and how they feed into contemporary art. Over the past decade, he has devoted himself to creating exuberant, colourful vessels encrusted with bright decorative shapes, patterns, plants, and animal life. He hand-builds his pots, using a coiling method and a banding wheel. As a largely self-taught artist, what the ceramics lack in finesse, they gain in an energetic and expressive spontaneity. He incorporates glossy and gaudy majolica glazes that were popular in the late nineteenth century but rarely used today. With riotous colour and a loose structure, there is an infectious sense of joy and playfulness inherent in his work that immediately engages an audience.
Plant Your Feet explores the artist’s strong connections with his home near Berry, anchored in childhood memories, personal history and stories, as well as a place of shared social and community history. Emulating the “cabinets of curiosity” of nineteenth century colonial exhibitions, this multifaceted collection entices the viewer to find their own personal connection with the artworks on display and, by doing so, to engage openly and critically with the cultural history of the Shoalhaven region. In particular, he wants to examine the whitewashing of the treatment of local Aboriginal communities from the history of small regional museums.
Glenn Barkley, Fern Vase, 2022, earthenware. Photograph: Jules Boag. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, New South Wales
Born and bred at Sussex Inlet, on the NSW South Coast, many of the motifs on Barkley’s ceramics have some kind of personal or historic reference. Featuring local flora and fauna, from kangaroos to lyrebirds and wombats, ferns to sea shells, Barkley has a curator’s fascination with cultural history, that informs his practice as a ceramicist. His interest lies in how these botanical specimens and animals have been represented in the history of decorative arts, as well as in local community folk tales and legends. He features the lush green fernery of the region as a decorative image, referencing the “fern-mania” that took place back in early nineteenth century Australian design.
Even the odd nostalgic memento from his south coast childhood appears, such as the red rocket from the Bomaderry children’s playground, or the lyrebird which appears on the Shoalhaven City Council crest. Other works introduce the legendary “Kangaroo Valley panther,” rumoured to roam the nearby bushland.
Glenn Barkley, #3 history that has sunk many islands in its good time – black swan, Portland vase and Della Robbia (for Judith Wright), 2022, collage and synthetic polymer paint on paper, 76 × 56cm. Photograph: Aaron Anderson. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, New South Wales
The exhibition is divided into three components, with a major feature being a large still life installation by Barkley made up of approximately thirty pots and vessels. The historic objects, selected from public museums in Wollongong, the Shoalhaven and Berry among others, are scattered among his own work. Some of the eclectic items on display include fern specimens collected from the late 1800s, a convict brick from Alexander Berry’s estate, and a paw print supposedly made by that fabled local panther.
Alongside will be a Salon-style room of paintings of the region – from scenic views by Conrad Martens and Samuel Elyard to contemporary Indigenous artworks by Mona “Mary” Brown and Reuben “Ben” Brown. Barkley has also handmade wallpaper featuring native birds and shells derived from Wedgwood ceramics that can be spotted throughout the exhibition. In the third part of the exhibition, he and the team at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery have built a small house covered in clay tiles made by school and community groups, with the brief being to create an image that reminds you of home and what is special about the Shoalhaven.
Through this multilayering of visual history and narratives, the artist hopes to honour his regional homeland, while casting an honest and critical eye over the complex history of the land since European colonisation. It celebrates a contemporary rural community that is dynamic and robust whilst hopefully ready to acknowledge and address the wrongs of the past.
Victoria Hynes is a Sydney-based arts writer and editor.
Shoalhaven Regional Gallery
10 December 2022 to 28 January 2023
New South Wales
