THELOCKUP.ORG.AU | 90 HUNTER ST NEWCASTLE

COVER Penny Thwaite & Matthew Tome, Tower 2018 (detail) 900 handmade mudbricks. Dimension variable. Photographed by Matthew Tome. Image courtesy the artists.

BEHAVEPENNY THWAITE & MATTHEW TOME

1 – 23 SEPTEMBER 2018

The Lock-Up is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW and Crown Lands

he exhibition Behave began with the law; a discovery that in NSW Australia, an artist is not able to use native flora and fauna (or parts thereof like teeth, bones or feathers) in public exhibition if they do not have a licence to do so.

These licences are granted under specific circumstances e.g. to a taxidermy or floristry business, or a ‘general licence’ which may be granted to an artist for a specific project. Without this licence, the artist is restricted to working with certain animals as listed in Schedule 11 of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 (NSW) including bears, cats, dogs, lions, horses, donkeys, rabbits, apes and elephants, and introduced or imported domestic animals including rats and mice (not native), pigeons, turkeys, quail, house sparrows and chickens, and native plants if obtained from a licenced source e.g. a florist or nursery.

Moving on from a plan to work with native bird feathers, our art works came to embrace pests and weeds, mice, cane toads and the feathers came from chickens, ducks and feral pigeons.

We behaved.

Native birds and animals became represented by electronic sound, the human voice, and the woven image.

Edible weeds from our garden, introduced and farmed species, became the plants that we used – plantation pine, sugarcane, dandelion and thistle.

Melaleuca was sourced from a licenced nursery and grown in our own garden

We behaved.

As the exhibition developed, we drew on our shared interests in architecture, performance, history and in a variety of techniques of making – we explored materials and processes; welding, sewing, fabrics, electronics, carpentry, taxidermy, casting, animation. We aimed for a melding of multiple sensations to achieve theatrical experiences that link to universal architectural forms, to human psychology and behaviours, including ideas of ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’. We wanted to make a contrast between Nature and the natural world and the prison architecture of The Lock-Up.

As a collaboration, we feel this exhibition pushes our ideas and processes further than we imagine would have been the case if we had simply stuck to our individual thoughts and practices.

…………..…. and now we invite you into a participation that is beyond just viewing.

We ask you to touch, interact, experience, smell, look, hear, laugh, think and in doing so, perhaps behave in a way that is different from how you usually behave when you attend an exhibition of contemporary art.

Penny Thwaite & Matthew Tome, 2018

*Indigenous Australians may use native plants and animals for non-commercial, domestic activities or in traditional activities conducted by native title holders on their traditional lands

Source: The Arts Law Centre of Australia, Information Sheet ‘Artwork Made Using Animal and Plant Material NSW

TThe artists would like to thank: Jessi England, Courtney Novak and the whole team at The Lock-Up, Nicky Crayson for voice and enthusiasm, Keri Glastonbury for catalogue essay, Sugarcane: the Wicks family of Dunduggan, Grafton; Chickens: Buzz, Coco and Rosie, The Dolman Girls, Michaellarry and his harem, the chickens living with Elizabeth and Geoff, Chicken feather collectors: Meg, Rhegan, Nate, Louise, Liam, Caleb and all our installation and support team.

BEHAVE PROGRAM OF EVENTS3pm – 4.30pm Saturday 15 September

ARTIST ‘IN CONVERSATION’ AND PERFORMANCEPenny Thwaite and Matthew Tome in conversation with Rob Cleworth. Performance by singer Nicky Crayson.

2pm – 3pm Sunday 23 September

CLOSING DRINKS

11am every Friday, Saturday and Sunday

SMELL EVENTExperience the scent of lemon scented melaleuca shredded on site.

11am – 3pm every Friday, Saturday and Sunday

HUT CONSTRUCTIONCome and watch or get hands-on involved as you and the artists build a grass hut on site.

ne of the things I love about The Lock-Up is that for an obviously heritage-listed (and historically loaded) venue, visitors are able

to move about the cells without feeling like they are on a school excursion. Only the soft leather-clad chambers of the padded cell are cordoned off, like an old baseball glove. Yet our relative freedom in this space is always haunted by its original purpose: a judiciary pen greets you as you walk in, the claustrophobia of the cells, inmates’ graffiti etched into the walls like a linguistic palimpsest. The long finger of the law is never far from consciousness.

And while contemporary art goes some way to ameliorating the utilitarian authority steeped into the sandstone, art too carries with it certain expectations of its audience. We are always policing our behaviour, questioning the appropriate way to behave when we encounter art, bringing with us diverse expectations, attitudes and forms of bafflement.

In Behave, multidisciplinary artists Penny Thwaite and Matthew Tome, aim to brazenly transform the space inside The Lock-Up into an almost Prelapsarian agridome, an alternative society where (to mis-appropriate Karl Marx’s famous phrase) ‘all that is solid, melts into air’ (or rather sugarcane, bees wax, pigeon feathers, cockroaches, gold-leaf crickets, mud brick, mice,

enterprising children gone feral in a futuristic young adult eco-fable, interacting with myriad infestations and plagues.

Behave is a collaborative exhibition which merges art and life for local artists and partners Thwaite and Tome, rather than an exhibition of their singular practices. Tome (who has taught painting at Hunter TAFE for over a decade) hasn’t contributed a single canvas, and Behave draws instead on both artists’ shared interests in sound, sculptural, textile, performative and architectural elements and an over-arching obsession with materiality. Considerable research has gone in to the materials that can be legally used by artists (with reference to state and federal laws on the use of organic or animal products). While much of this exhibition has been gleaned and foraged, Thwaite and Tome have taken a DIY or handmade ethos to heart, spending considerable labour and toil (I can imagine them painstakingly hand-weaving the bee-rug after dinner each evening). The image of a bee suggests the prevailing anxieties of the Anthropocene.

All the elements of and objects in Behave (from the larger structures to the more miniature curios) were predominantly built in the artists’ garage studio, backyard and house. When I visited, their backyard was covered with piles of what looked like junk and debris, but the plaster and bricks were not the result of any ubiquitous bathroom or kitchen reno. The synthesizer in the garage was not evidence of a band rehearsing for an 80s

BEHAVEPENNY THWAITE & MATTHEW TOME

1 – 23 SEPTEMBER 2018

Penny Thwaite and Matthew Tome Feathers 2018 (detail) Chicken feathers Dimension variable Photographed by Matthew Tome Image courtesy the artists

Penny Thwaite and Matthew Tome Curiosities 2018 Taxidermy mouse and locust Dimension variable Photographed by Matthew Tome Image courtesy the artists

Penny Thwaite and Matthew Tome Sugarcane 2018 (detail) Harvested sugarcane Dimension variable Photographed by Matthew Tome Image courtesy the artists

PENNY THWAITEPenny Thwaite’s formal art studies were at East Sydney Tech and Sydney College of the Arts in the late 80s and early 90s. Since then, she has continued a studio and exhibition practice, participated in an artist exchange program in Canada, worked in arts administration and curating, including at First Draft and The Performance Space in Sydney, and spent 7 years as an artist in the Youth Arts Program at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Her work is based in performance, sculpture and installation with her most recent exhibitions being at the Newcastle Community Art Space, SilkHouse and The Emporium in Hunter Street Mall and Eden Art, a Renew Newcastle gallery. Her interests range from taxidermy to performance art. She earns money as a nurse, and has recently learnt to spin.

MATTHEW TOMEMatthew Tome is a painter, drawer, printmaker and installation artist. Tome’s practice is multidisciplined, centred on drawing but using many forms, methods and scales. He has a deep interest in history and science and has an MA in Ancient History. His work however deals with a wide range of subjects and cultural references. Tome has exhibited extensively since 1986 in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Australia. He studied at Meadowbank College of TAFE (Art Cert, 1984), City Art Institute SCAE (BA,1987), College of Fine Arts, UNSW (Grad DIp,1990), UTS Sydney (Grad Dip) & Macquarie University (MA,2001). He is currently Head Teacher, Fine Arts at Newcastle Art School, Hunter St TAFE.

bee larvae, tanned cane toad skin) (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848). Drawing on, what Gaston Bachelard would argue is a universal human desire to take shelter (The Poetics of Space, 1958), the artists have devised an alternative use of The Lock-Up interior, constructing something of a parallel Fluxus-inspired universe within. The piece de resistance is a grass hut being assembled in the exercise yard, with the assistance of gallery viewers, over the duration of the exhibition. The whole show is one of participation, where the human predilection for sensory experience can be sated, rather than liberty deprived.

In the main gallery the artists have erected a mud brick circular structure based on dovecotes in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Each of the over 900 bricks was made in the artists’ suburban Mayfield backyard. The exhibition urges the audience to go into deep time, as much as back in time, exemplified by the Greek and Roman columns that seem to echo the Post Office structure next door. The columns suggest the wrack and ruin of Empire: some made out of translucent paper stained by a homebrewed decoction of edible weeds, others built out of fractured plaster cylinders, held together by sewer pipes, tins and rags. I’m reminded of a dystopian speculative novel, or perhaps Kafka (as animated cockroaches crawl over you while you lie on a plush cushions in the shape of their larvae). The playful element of the exhibition also suggests

night, but part of a hand-made system of circuitry designed to replicate the sound of an insect chorus. The un-initiated visitor would suspect that they had entered the home of a couple of hoarders or pathological crafters (whose stuff could never be listed on Gumtree or Etsy). As mid-career artists with day jobs (nurse and teacher), there’s something of the old-school ethos of the studio-based artist in their process, which resists the contemporary notion of creative industries, though is nothing if not industrious.

While the immersive art ‘experience’ dominates blockbuster shows at major galleries—over Summer I saw Yayoi Kusama’s dotted room at Melbourne’s NGV, Pilpilotti Rist’s home interiors with beds to lie on at Sydney’s MCA— Behave offers a chance to see something more home-hewn, and to, as the working title of one piece suggests, ‘Pluck-a-Duck’. The exhibition is a testimony to The Lock-Up’s policy of encouraging artists to extend their practice and use the exhibition space for experimentation, albeit with the inherent challenges of the space itself. Behave also includes a live performance by vocalist Nicky Crayson and her collaborative soundscape in the Women’s Cell draws on human mimicry of various animal noises surrounding her bushy home —a testimony to the capacity of competing sounds to invade different environments.

In Behave Thwaite and Tome have created a generous and absurdist arts economy, one that wants to invite the viewer in and encourages us all to work with the materials at hand (the discarded, non-husbanded, even the bad!).

Keri Glastonbury Senior Lecturer, English and Writing The University of Newcastle