Unconnected Yet –
Lorne Curators
We acknowledge and respect the separate and distinct Eastern Maar and Wadawarrung Peoples as the Traditional Owners of the lands, waters, seas, and skies upon and beneath which our activities are held. We pay our respects to their Elders, both past, present, and emergent, their lore, customs, and creation spirits. We acknowledge their cultural wisdom, practices, and caring for Country for tens of thousands of years. We recognize that these lands have always been places of teaching, research, and learning.
We summoned a frequency greater than chance in the collocation of writing this essay and curating together the Australian iteration of Unconnected Yet with the support of Lorne Community Connect, lead curator Todd Bartel, and the visionary provocations opened by Dr Ujjal Sarkar. We were equally inspired by the works of artists and curators who participated in the iteration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata in January 2023.
We extended invitations to six other Australian artists deeply committed to innovative practices, urging them to respond to the overarching theme of creating new junctions that showcase unconventional cross-curricular, art-science, and philosophical explorations. Each artist has presented a unique visual work, articulating exceptional ideas by amalgamating materials and methods in response to the themes that inspired them. Correspondingly, the exhibited works foster refreshing dialogues between personal, cultural, material, and ecological concerns. The artworks also demonstrate a refined integration of scientific, spiritual, emotional, and cerebral entanglements that imperceptibly link the personal with the local and the global. They contribute expansive visual and intellectual conversations initiated by the Kolkata iteration of Unconnected Yet. This approach aligns with Bartel’s perspective on collage as a form of ‘glue,’ joining, altering, transforming, and becoming.
Historically, collage has been a potent instrument for critiquing social constructs. German Dada artist Hannah Höch (Germany 1889-1978) dismantled dichotomous fables of the ‘new’ androgynous, professional woman as equal to man. Kurt Schwitters’ (Germany 1887-1948) works spanned Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism and incorporated diverse materials like wallpaper, fabric, bus tickets, newspapers, and playing cards. In the contemporary context, American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger (b. Newark, NJ, United States 1945) employs raw red, white, and black billboards, intervening with texts that address cultural constructs of sexuality and power. Wangechi Mutu (b. Nairobi, Kenya 1972) a Kenyan artist based in New York, combines various culturally specific materials and creative methods, subverting and speaking for indefinable female experience and cultural hybridity. Australian artist Greg Moncrieff (b. Melbourne, Australia 1950) employs multifaceted production methods, such as screen printing collaged over found images to seamlessly blend utilitarian handmade aesthetics with everyday elements.
We think of collage as an inclusive, open, and egalitarian method of visual storytelling that opens to ideas of recreation, reconfiguration, and the serendipitous through the interconnection of old and new materials. The ability to construct unconventional combinations opens possibilities for previously unarticulated themes. Collage deploys artistic processes that play with shapes, colors, and various forms of mark-making using found photographs, text, and painting. Each artist engages in an intuitively driven impetus of editing and selecting, ultimately divining meaning via that which adheres and that which falls away.
Intriguingly, the show also encompasses works that deploy décollage or peeling away of layers, digital collage, assemblage, performative methods, and mind mapping to offer enticing variations, asserting the creative ability of artists to create and disrupt meaning. We contend the ambitious scale of the exhibition covering multiple places, artistic practices, and interpretations honour and extend the legacy of collage and décollage by visual artists. While the original dimensional, tactile construction details for each work are absent in this exhibition, the intrigue lies in the exceptional quality of the printed work and the profound intentions driving the showcase.
Unconnected Yet unfolds like the pages of a book, maintaining collage’s pivotal role within visual art discourse. Affordable, ready-made, recyclable, transportable, and democratizing, it embodies a DIY spirit that delivers a decolonizing action. Cutting, pasting, assembling, and placing pictures and materials imperceptibly weaves narratives, with new and forgotten stories at the brink of obsolescence opened for thoughtful contemplation. The exhibited works provide a highly refined range of works as exemplars by contemporary artists across transnational boundaries. The focus now shifts to how disparate works converge and the new readings they generate. Exhibited together, the rich conversations and interconnections between many works surprise, inform, and connect with the viewer.
The traveling and expanding model for this collection of digital prints democratized into an A2 format, actions decoloniality via inclusivity and accessibility. The commitment to continuing the show beyond Kolkata opened up possibilities for ongoing activation, curation, conversation, and participation. Ensuring the portability and careful storage of the works involved removing them from frames, carefully wrapping the prints in tissue and clean white cotton sheets, and utilizing soft plastic bags similar to those used for purchasing bed linen. This personalized approach to care and continuation mirrors the cross-cultural reverential nurturing of family heirlooms and embroideries across generations and homes. The printed artworks were tenderly carried and exchanged by human hands across the globe, cocooning the messages of seventy-four artists from eleven countries in deep trust that a place for their voices would be found. Unconnected Yet’s performative action in evoking the transpersonal is but one of the project’s multidimensional legacies.
The sentiments were further activated by the artists based in Australia, for the Lorne iteration crosses traditional boundaries of craft, art, and performance, and the compositions span diverse methods underpinned by their theme. Opening endless possibilities by incorporating montage, bricolage, assemblage, digital collage, cyanotype, stitching, and mind mapping. The artists: Caroline Austin, Wendy Hutchison, Priyanka Jain, Genine Larin, Karen Milder, Meaghan Shelton, David Wlazlo, and Chrys Zantis present works that initiate discussions on various themes and subjects without adhering strictly to the traditional concept of collage. The common thread among artists in both iterations of Unconnected Yet is the sophistication with which they have connected disparate elements in unconventional ways to convey the message described in their statements. The artworks may appear similar at first glance, primarily because we cannot immediately discern the materials used or, in some cases, the three-dimensionality behind them.
The artworks featured in the exhibitions in Kolkata and the current iteration in Lorne of Unconnected Yet expand conventional understandings of collage in creating and combining elements that create new subjectivities. As artist peers and researchers completing our PhDs in practice-led research from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), we have enjoyed the challenge of mitigating temporal distances between Boston, Brisbane, Lorne, Kolkata, Delhi, and beyond.
It is with great honor that we take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Lorne Community Connect Committee members and volunteers for their unwavering support, without which this project could not have happened.