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MANLY GALLERY & MUSEUM: 1st September - 8th October 2023 | MANNING GALLERY: 1st February - 17th March 2024 | TAMWORTH REGIONAL GALLERY: 13th April - 16th June 2024 | ARARAT GALLERY TAMA: 13th July - 13th October 2024
Heather + Kate Dorrough: Lineage
Artist Statement
HEATHER + KATE DORROUGH : LINEAGE
In conversations across time, the multi-disciplinary works of mother and daughter Heather and Kate Dorrough explore the nexus between the arts and crafts movements, female creative lineage, body and landscape, river and fertility, and environmental issues and activism. This dynamic contemporary exhibition encompasses fibre art, paintings, prints, ceramics, sculpture and video.
Heather Dorrough’s (1933 - 2018) a renowned textile, sculpture and printmaker, is noted for her contributions to the shift from a craft- based tradition to the arts in the 1970s to 1980s. The exhibition includes her earlier fabric hangings and low relief sculptures that were her most significant works, including the textile works. Originally trained as an Interior Designer, she worked in London and New York before arriving in Australia in 1962 and began making fabric and fibre works after the birth of daughter Kate. She developed her own techniques with machine embroidery, painting with dyes, and sculptural use of fabric. Her work is represented in the National, State and Regional Gallery collections including significant public commissions.
The practice of Sydney-based artist Kate Dorrough (b.1964) sustains a conversation between paint and clay, launching an inquiry into the interplay and tension between the gestural mark and the hand built ceramic form. The artist's recent work explores the River as metaphor, bestowal of fertility with a cyclicality of renewal and destruction. Her painterly gestural marks evoke totemic symbols and an inferred language of an enduring landscape. Dorrough’s work as a painter and ceramicist has led to an extensive career exhibiting work at leading galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, as well as a number of residencies and prizes. In this exhibition her work will directly respond to her mother’s, creating a dialogue and an interplay exploring memory and the personal in recognition of her mother as mentor.
The exhibition will launch a timely book on Heather's extensive career spanning sixty years. Including essays by art writers and curators, Christine France, Julie Ewington, Dr Peter Emmett, and Anne Brennan.
Essay
Julie Ewington
Heather Dorrough and Kate Dorrough - mother and daughter - shared family ties, love, art, ideas, laughter. They were, as Kate says today, great friends. And a crucial part of true friendship is the mutual recognition of what makes each person distinctive. Here we have two artists, mother and daughter, and two different life trajectories that intersected, and productively so. This exhibition recognises those links and lineages, and those differences, over six decades.
Heather Dorrough (born 193 3) and Kate Dorrough (born 1964) are, as an early commentator remarked of Heather, 'born artists'. The difference was that Heather escaped small-town England to dive into the wider world of art and design, while Kate grew up within the creative pool of the Dorrough family's Sydney home: her architect father Terry worked together with interior designer Heather on many commissions. For Kate, the home was a hub of constant activity: Heather and Terry's energy and commitment set the pattern of her life long before she embarked on formal art training. This was a rhythm of making, thinking, reflecting, learning.
In this exhibition, with her selection of Heather's work and her own recent ones, Kate recognises and honours her mother's role as her first and longest-lasting mentor. Heather's sumptuous 1965 wall hanging, and playful wearable stitched works from 1979, suggest the lively textures of 1960s/1970s modernist Sydney; Kate was just a child when the rich colours of Heather's hangings enlivened the restraint of Terry's modernist spaces. Her development as a painter led her to share interests with her mother-working with fabrics and patterns, thinking through feminist imagery bracketed by a longstanding interest in landscape: her graduation piece, Abstracted Landscape (1994), is Kate's earliest work in the exhibition. Whatever the interests of the moment, however, the enduring pattern is the indissoluble interweaving of life, art, making, design: all came together in the Dorrough family homes, where cloth, paper, canvas, clay, wood, were put to the service of so many creative projects over the years.
Importantly, there was a constant desire with both artists to find new ways of working, and a willingness to explore a wide variety of genres and materials: fibre, painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, video. During her long productive career Heather Dorrough undertook a remarkable variety of projects, commissions and exhibitions; she collaborated with Terry Dorrough as an interior designer for architectural settings, creating a number of major works for public buildings, including the New South Wales Parliament House (1980) and the Hyde Park Barracks (1991). Heather's exhibitions in the mid-1980s were equally notable: her two major series of feminist-inspired works exploring the representation of the female body, the Self Portrait series (1982) and Covert Covers, The Lie of the Land (1987 ), were both important contributions to the development of feminist art at the time. Forty years later, Kate's recent Recollections series (2023) is a direct response to the legacy of Heather's inquiring and self-reflective 'Self Portraits'.
Always there was drawing, a fundamental discipline of inquiry for the entire family: the cabinets included in the exhibition testify to the constant use of drawing in all its varieties by both artists. Originally trained in the exquisite sketchy ink-drawing style of 1950s London, Heather remained an indefatigable student; she was constantly looking to understand new techniques or materials with great thoroughness, taking many art courses, including a Master's degree, to update her ideas and skills over the years. In her sixties, Heather returned to a thorough study of European oil painting, so she could satisfy her desire to capture the days and nights of Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury River, flowing in front of her Dangar Island home; these quiet intense loving paintings, and associated prints, are seen together for the first time in this exhibition.
The commitment to experiment that marks the work of both Heather and Kate Dorrough continues to the present day, with Kate now painting on clay as well as on linen-she has learned over the last two decades how to make ceramic vessels, so she could transfer her painting onto clay surfaces, such as River Icon and Tidal marks, River Landscape (both 2023); since around 2012, the expansive paintings such as Reflections on a River (2012), together with the painted ceramic vessels, show the Iongevity of Kate's preoccupation with this subject. There is, similarly, great clarity with the distinctive purpose of Kate's explorations, while the eventual outcomes are so entirely different from her mother's works about a similar subject: Heather's paintings and prints focusing on Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury are contained, still, reflective, while Kate's larger works inspired by the rivers of the Sydney Basin are all fluid energy and open gestures.
Now Kate has taken that exploration into video: River Theatre (2023) brings together painting, ceramics and moving image to evoke the constant restless passage of the river waters that she knows and loves. She has long been familiar with Dyarubbin at Dangar Island, where her parents lived from the 1980s, and which enters the ocean some few kilometres north of Manly Art Gallery and Museum; she has undertaken residencies on the Murray and Manning Rivers, the Shoalhaven at Bundanon, and now lives very close to the Cooks River in southeastern Sydney. We sense in the broad washes of colour and large gestures in her paintings that a myriad of overlapping associations and memories are provoked by this long connection with these rivers.
The ways that Heather and Kate, in their turn and their own times, have tackled the Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury River, and the broad metaphorical theme of the river, could not be more different: Heather's rather modest studies are just that, close evocations of specific different times of days, and various plays of weather and light on the water's surface close to her home; her very last work, in 2013, is the painting Across the river. With Kate, the large watery gestural paintings suggest energy, the waters of life, even the flows of fertility. Yet despite the differences in their approaches, over recent decades daughter and mother shared concerns about the pressing environmental issues that affect the region's waterways, and a commitment to activism on its behalf, expressed through punctilious looking at the life of the country; Heather's 1995 The Hawkesbury sandstone garden detailed the flora of the region, and her lovely 2012 'Lunar' series of mono prints gestures to connections between women's bodily cycles and the River.
Indeed, Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury River, along with the image of a river as a symbolic emblem, remains the connecting link between Heather and Kate Dorrough, between mother and daughter: a fluent always-present site, a set of images, and a metaphor for the Dorrough family's life and work. For the River - all rivers - is the source of life, and of continuing fertility. Without its waters the country around it would wither, and so would the families that have loved it for millennia and continue to do so.
Notes.
1. Barbara Campbell Allen, teaching at Willoughby Arts Centre, taught Kate Dorrough how to coil ceramic forms; she fires her works at Sydney Clay Studio at St. Peters.
2. See Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2020, for a wonderful history of Dyarubbin/ the Hawkesbury Nepean.
Media Release
TOURING EXHIBITION
This is an exhibition of two artists, a mother and a daughter, Heather and Kate Dorrough, it is a conversation across time. Exploring the nexus between the arts and crafts movements, female creative lineage, body and landscape, river and fertility, and environmental issues and activism. This dynamic, contemporary and multi-disciplinary exhibition encompasses fibre art, paintings, prints, ceramics, sculpture and video.
Heather Dorrough (1933 – 2018) is most noted for her self portrait feminist textile works and low relief sculptures which heralded the shift of craft-based traditions to the arts in the 1970s to 1980s. Originally trained as an Interior Designer, she worked in London and New York before arriving in Australia in 1962 and began making fabric and fibre works after the birth of daughter Kate. Heather developed her own techniques with machine embroidery, painting with dyes, and the sculptural use of fabric. In later years she turned to painting and printmaking to capture the spirit of Derubbin/the Hawkesbury River surrounding her home on Dangar Island. Her work is represented in the National, State and Regional Gallery collections and included significant public commissions.
Her daughter, Sydney-based artist Kate Dorrough (b.1964) exhibits paintings alongside hand built ceramic vessels. Her painterly gestural marks evoke totemic symbols and an inferred language of an enduring landscape. Focusing on the River as metaphor, a bestowal of fertility, with its cultural, political and ecological significance. With an extensive career over the last 30 years exhibiting in leading galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, as well as a number of residencies and art prizes. In this exhibition her work directly responds to her mother’s, creating a dialogue and an interplay exploring memory and the personal in recognition of her mother as a mentor.
This exhibition reveals themes that link both mother and daughter. The love of the natural world and the river; the Hawkesbury River at Dangar Island being Heather’s home for the last part of her life, and Kate’s home, the Cooks River, Sydney, alongside various art residencies and childhood memories swimming in the Wollombi Brook on a shared family property. Also including explorations of identity, the female form as an archaic and eminent presence, fertility and the role of motherhood for sustenance and protection. There is an apparent joy de vivre, a pleasure in making, drawing, experimentation, extending one’s artistic practice that is evident in this intergenerational exhibition. Highlighting the impact of lineage in fostering a love of creativity. It is the role and importance of art in all our lives; to sustain, to inspire, to be a transformative place of depth and meaning, that this exhibition seeks to promote.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and a beautiful richly illustrated book on Heather's extensive career spanning sixty years, ‘Heather Dorrough, Life, Design, Craft, Art, Life’ by Terry Dorrough, and including essays by art writers and curators, Christine France, Anne Brennan, Julie Ewington, Peter Emmett.
TOURING DATES:
1 September - 8 October 2023 Manly Art Gallery & Museum, West Esplanade Reserve, Manly, NSW, magam.com.au
1 February - 17 March 2024, Manning Regional Art Gallery, 12 Macquarie Street, Taree, NSW, mrag.midcoast.nsw.gov.au
13 April - 16 June 2024, Tamworth Regional Gallery, 466 Peel Street, Tamworth, NSW, tamworthregionalgallery.com.au
13 July - 13 October 2024, Ararat Gallery TAMA, 82 Vincent Street, Ararat, Victoria, araratgallerytama.com.au
Media
ART ALMANAC
September, 2023
'What's on near me'