writing+art
Screenshots (~10MB PDF)
Gloria Stern is a visual artist currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia. She grew up in Melbourne and originally trained in Graphic Design. After working in the design industry for several years both in England and Australia, she then switched across to full time painting. Since 1996, she has had 12 solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous group shows.
Gloria’s paintings have been acquired for private collections in Australia, UK, USA, and New Zealand. Her works are also featured in the collections of Cowan Design, Melbourne, and the City of Boroondara Collection, Melbourne.
I have always been interested in exploring both figuration and abstraction in my painting, however, over the last couple of years, I made a conscious effort to remove the figurative element from my work in order to explore spatial relationships, colour and atmosphere within abstraction more deeply. This body of work led up to my last solo exhibition “Altered Space” in 2019. Since then, my interest in the figure is returning, but I think, in a less literal way than before. I am currently exploring ways of using figurative elements as more integrated abstract shapes, that allow for a freer interpretation of meaning.
Gloria Stern
Website: ‹www.gloriasternart.com›
Instagram: ‹www.instagram.com/gloriasternart›
Facebook: ‹www.facebook.com/gloria.stern.18›
Judy Johnson is an multi-award winning writer who has been publishing her work for over 20 years. She has written five full-length poetry collections, several chapbooks and a novel. Her verse novel Jack was the result of a mentorship with the late Dorothy Porter. Jack won the Victorian Premier’s Award for poetry and was a text taught in University of Sydney and University of Melbourne . She has had writing residencies in Ireland at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Western Australia, and in many other places. Her interests have always centred around Australian history and her latest poetry book, Dark Convicts, deals with the life and times of her two First Fleet African American convict ancestors.
Steven Warburton is currently working (in Emerald) and exhibiting in Melbourne, Australia. Since completing a Fine Arts degree at Monash University, Steve has exhibited widely, in group and solo exhibitions. His paintings and drawings are held in collections Australia-wide and internationally.
As an artist’s work is a reflection of his or her emotions, ideals, thoughts and influences, it is necessary to understand the importance the work plays in the artist’s life.
My work is the direct result of things that I have borne witness to, overheard in conversations, observed in the media or dreamt. It reflects my right to express my thoughts, in a way I hope will be accessible to the viewer, both aesthetically and literally.
As the world around us changes, the environment, the politics, our society, thus my imagery changes too.
Steven Warburton
Sebastian Steensen is a Melbourne-based artist who has worked for over 20 years in the areas of painting, drawing and, occasionally, printmaking and photography.
After tertiary studies in Fine Arts, and a stint as an art teacher in China, I’ve staged a few one-person exhibitions, and been included in group exhibitions.
My work is strongly figurative, and it follows the tradition of western narrative painting. I believe it is informed by my drawing ability. But, technically, I always wish to combine this with painterly aspects, by which I hope to move the imagery beyond illustrational ‘recording,’ into more robust psychological territory.
Sebastian Steensen
Ali Whitelock is a Scottish poet and writer living on the South coast of Sydney with her French, chain-smoking husband. Her latest poetry collection, the lactic acid in the calves of your despair, is published by Wakefield Press and her debut collection, and my heart crumples like a coke can (Wakefield Press, 2018) has a forthcoming UK edition by Polygon, Edinburgh. Her memoir, Poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell, was launched at Sydney Writers Festival to critical acclaim in Australia (2008) and the UK (2009).
Poetry was not something I ever thought was for me. I hated it in school and never read it as an adult. Then I turned fifty and, by some bizarre twist of fate, started writing my own.
The more poets I got to know, the more I was astonished to learn that many of them had been writing poems since they could hold a pen and had parents who’d recite verse to them morning, noon and night. How I longed for one of those poetic pipe-smoking fathers in corduroys sporting a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, who’d read poetry to me in the evening by a roaring log fire. In my childhood, the only poem remotely hinted at in our house was ‘A Red, Red Rose’ once a year on St Valentine’s day. In short, our house was empty of poetry, literature, logs and books in general.
In an interview, brilliant Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan told the interviewer there were no books in his home when he was growing up. After the interview Andrew’s father called him, more than a little annoyed, “What do you mean, you grew up in a house with no books? Sure there was a green book sitting on top of the fridge for years!” To which Andrew replied, “Dad, that was the Kilmarnock phone directory.” So the great Andrew O’Hagan and I shared similar book-less upbringings, but clearly that’s where the similarities between us end.
Two-thirds of the way through high school I was removed from the English class in order to make way for a student with more promise. I was put into geography. It wasn’t entirely useless—I can now read an ordnance survey map with great confidence, name the deepest ocean at the drop of a hat, dazzle at dinner parties trundling out the capital cities of the world like a trained chimpanzee.
Eventually I ran away from my geographical and non-bookish past in Scotland to Australia. Did my past catch up with me? Absolutely. But Australia offered me something Scotland at that time did not: endless skies, super-sized servings of ‘she’ll be right’; affordable therapy and a chance happening upon a secondhand book, when I was forty nine, called Eight American Poets. When I opened its pages I discovered John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. My mouth fell open like a drawbridge and I allowed these poems to march on in.
Ali Whitelock
Review of the lactic acid in the calves of your despair.
You can read more about Ali at her website, ‹www.aliwhitelock.com›.
An UNFURL special project
Steve Cox is an artist and writer. He has a forty-year exhibition history and his work is held in major public and private collections throughout Australia and internationally. As an arts writer, since 2000, he has contributed articles and reviews, and has conducted interviews with artists, for numerous newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Guardian; VAULT: Australasian Art & Culture; Gay Times, UK; FilmInk.com, amongst others. Cox writes on a range of subjects, including contemporary and historical art; LGBTQI issues; social issues; cinema; contemporary music.
Between 2013–2014, he was the London Arts Editor of NakedButSafe magazine. In 2019 he was on the judging panel for the Young Arts Journalist Award (YAJA). Also in 2019, he was the inaugural Writer in Residence for Brunswick Street Village, an innovative building complex, which espouses green values and arts in the community as a primary concern. During the residency, he produced a collection of fifty poems, on a range of subjects.
unfurl.online