It’s funny, a dear friend of mine, I told her about the project and she was like, “Del! Apart from the fact that I was also very, very earnest about doing well, which is not very cool. I can’t fully explain, it’s just there.How do you then make that distinction?
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2011/28901 Del Kathryn Barton [Australian b. It’s like there’s ‘sex in movies’ and then there’s ‘sex’. At the moment I’m working on two creative collaborations—a fairytale film project with Brendan Fletcher and Sarah Blasko, and I’m also creating artwork for an Oscar Wilde fairy story. Do you read those stories to your own kids, the Grimm fairytales and Oscar Wilde? But definitely I feel that… Clearly some of the best work that’s ever been made has come through those dogmas. Without that, I'm not even sure I would still be here, to be honest. I am SO moved by the diversity, beauty and courage of the work sent in for the ‘Inner worlds’ exhibition.In times like this I think it is important to be able to escape to your inner world, where anything is possible.My sketch is of a budgie and a dingo. What I’m trying to say is that isn’t necessarily what I need. You don’t get that otherwise. Do you realise that was the book I used to read when I was sixteen to make myself cry?” And I was like, “Perfect!” [much laughter] Although, like yourself, a friend recently commented that they look like they were in agony or something.I think for me, talking in terms of big themes of life, like the longing for connection, that that’s what drives a lot of the narratives in my work. Metamorphosis, transcendence, agony of the soul, love, melancholy, longing. I’m very interested in the idea, even just conceptually or intellectually, of the orgasmic body. There is nothing that compares to that for me. It drives him crazy, but he’s very good at managing that.I totally know what you mean. Because they’re very hard industries, I think. Del Kathryn Barton was born on the 11th of December 1972, in Australia. Like you can never go back to that. A good story, I should go back to that story. It’s hard. ‘Cause I do resonate with that as a delineation. She is married to Christopher Plater, who is a financial services executive. Our conversation is punctuated by trips to the freezer for more ice, and shared turns in front of a small fan. But not menace.Yeah, I think so. That’s my sense of it. Del won that one. But I see a sexual energy as being very close to a life-giving energy, so I think that the iconography often stems from that also. It’s addictive, I think. I'd never met them and then we went and told them we were having a baby and were engaged. Dec 3rd, 2015. I love that. I know what feels right for me, and what feels right for me is not going to feel right for someone else. And for the dad to be involved in that too, it’s just so bonding. In a room, I think she almost feels she has to fill the vacuum. 1972] free-er and more dilation, 2020 Acrylic, oil stick on paper, hand finished frame Framed dimensions: 65 3/4 x 47 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches Del Kathryn Barton won the Archibald Prize in 2008 with a self-portrait that depicted her with her son and daughter.
Photography by © 2020 Dumbo Feather. My relationship with my work is my greatest love affair.
It’s a whole being kind of arousal.
I didn't tell him immediately, I went to the Blue Mountains [west of Sydney] and sat on one of my special rocks and just felt into the reality of what it meant. He’s difficult too in his own way, but my brain is not stable [laughs]. That might sound a bit herbal much [laughter].Maybe I find that longing a bit threatening [laughs].Because I think there’s always a real undercurrent of menace in your work.Well it’s everything all at once, and it is abject, but it’s abject pertaining to ecstasy I think. “All I can say is that the work does mean everything to me and it is like a life source,” she explained. More than anything what I need from my studio is a feeling that the outside world doesn’t exist, so it’s like a cave. I mean the one that stands out most to me, and she remains my favourite artist, is Louise Bourgeois. Propped against one wall, just under a fluorescent Adam Cullen, is a framed photograph of her son, Kell; the work that caused a minor turmoil earlier in the year when it was pulled from a charity exhibition. It’s all about longing. Can can you embody the work as much as you are embodied by making the work?And Oscar Wilde. Thank you to all our young artists for your great work! She and Upton have three sons.
The result is a hallucinogenic chaos, where sexual energy not only drives creation, but blurs the boundaries between child and adult, landscape and figure, gender and sex. You talked about embodiment and I think that’s the perfect way of putting it, but that it can also feel as though something is moving through you, even when you know it’s your own process It’s interesting though, because when you’re in the viscerality of being a mum that’s when you’re talking about it, and that’s when people do start talking about it. Of course if something’s going wrong you want the best that modern medicine can offer you, but I don’t think that we need to be taught… There’s certain pain… I don’t wanna sound like a martyr, it’s not about that at all.Exactly. She is currently 47 years of age. Maybe it’s part of some weird work ethic or something that I have, or an internal values system. He’s very cerebral and always the voice of reason. And I think it definitely comes from an extension of my experience of being a mother.