ART

You could never accuse Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran of being understated. The Sydney-based contemporary artist radiates an exuberance in life and in work. Audacious and politically charged, his genre-defying sculptures explore themes of gender, eroticism, religion and popular culture — all in hypercolour — and this latest exhibition probes the motif of the mask and the intricacies of
self-representation.

This year marks a decade of professional art practice for Nithiyendran, who studied painting at the University of New South Wales’s College of Fine Arts before shifting much of his focus to ceramics. His new exhibition, “The Self Portrait and the Masks”, which runs until October 12 at Sullivan+Strumpf gallery in Sydney, expands on his material exploration, with ambitious new works in bronze.

The central work is a large-scale, multi-limbed, robotic-like figure, painted in psychedelic hues. Its eyes are closed, like a cyborg deep in contemplation. On closer viewing, it’s Nithiyendran’s face, cast in bronze and surrounded by a constellation of wall-mounted bronze masks originally made from cardboard.

For an artist frequently the subject of his own work, Nithiyendran once struggled with his identity. He moved to Australia from Sri Lanka with his family as refugees during the civil war in the late 1980s. He was less than a year old at the time, and grew up during the emergence of politician Pauline Hanson, whose maiden speech to parliament included that famous claim of Australia being “swamped by Asians”.

“I wasn’t necessarily proud of being from that region, if you know what I’m saying, and, because I didn’t have any memories of it physically, there was no kind of sentimentality around it until I went to university,” he says.

“This whole idea of South Asian representation in art didn’t even play into my mind before that, because it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem that you could have a contemporary artist that was from a South Asian background practising. I didn’t grow up going to galleries or anything like that. I came from a very working-class background and there were no people in my extended family who worked in creative industries. I was a really academic child, but there was definitely an artistic side.”

Art became a vehicle for Nithiyendran’s cultural reconnection.

“That’s when I started to become politicised and to learn about the structures of representation and the systems that impact how some people’s careers are naturalised,” he says. “I looked at ethics and exhibitions and curatorial strategies with more rigour and detail, and that’s when I noticed that the South Asian diaspora, and even the Asian diaspora, was very seldom represented within a contemporary art space at that point in time.”

Nithiyendran’s work is helping to close that gap. His art is held in various private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and The Ian Potter Museum of Art. His first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and Europe, “Idols of Mud and Water”, launched last year at Tramway in Glasgow and resulted in a significant acquisition by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Fine Arts in New Delhi.

There’s childlike playfulness in much of Nithiyendran’s art. His figurative sculptures often appear as anthropomorphic idols — wildly misshapen and layered with vivid colour, they meld the past with the present.

“For one of the sculptures in my new show, I used two-pack car paint,” he explains. “I was thinking about a type of contemporary veneration and, this sounds a bit silly, but I was thinking about the ways in which people pimp their ride or make their cars idiosyncratic or a site of creativity or luxury. I thought using that language was an interesting way to treat bronze casting, which is something that has 6,000 years of history, which started in religion.”

The framework of religion, and its application in contemporary society, is an ongoing point of interest for Nithiyendran.

“There are various fields in contemporary society that are perceived to be outside organised religion,” he says. “The way in which humans might organise themselves to idolise or worship certain types of bodies, or celebrities, or TikTok people, or chefs, or whatever, and I think some of the fundamental components of the way religion is structured is based on creating idealised imagery that then gets activated by certain rituals.

“I think that can be translated to many things in contemporary society, and not all of them are positive, but some are just creative,” he adds. “I think there’s something innate about human societies to have these activities, but what I’m primarily interested in is the system of representations embedded in those activities.”

Nithiyendran often explores representations of Hinduism in his work.
Multi-armed deities, the fluidity of avatars and the blue skin of Vishnu represent what he describes as “a kind of wild imagination”.

“In the idea of an avatar, which has foundations in Sanskrit and in Hindu mythology, a lot of the gods or the deities exist in various forms, and I’m quite inspired by the fact that, in contemporary society, our identity is predicated upon various avatars through social media and through the way we depict ourselves socially,” he says. “Within my current work, I was looking at drawing a connection to the rich traditions of masks, firstly as they relate to my ancestry, where masks hang on walls and are highly adorned and have a very specific societal function, like scaring away the evil eye.”

“But I was also thinking about the fact that people can relate to this idea of the mask in a multitude of ways,” he continues. “It can be ritual based, it can be personal. It’s about trying to bring such a loaded symbol in contemporary society and giving it a historical and a personal dimension. It feels a little bit existential in some ways, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s a site to show multiplicity, because in a way, the sculptures can be many things. You can swap the masks around.”

Nithiyendran’s attraction to highly saturated colour stems from his background in painting, but there’s also a political edge to this interest.

“I think the lens I bring to all of these works is highly influenced by a language of painting and a methodology of painting but, from a cultural perspective, I’m quite interested in the way certain colour schemes actually have social and ideological functions,” he says.

This interest extends to colonial perceptions of people from “other cultures”, where colourful adornment was often viewed as a marker of being “less civilised”.

“I think playing with this notion and bringing that into a mainstream context makes it quite mundane,” he says. “If you look at it from a regional perspective, in a South Asian context, being highly adorned, having a big colour palette, is not necessarily remarkable. It’s actually quite unremarkable. I think it’s about trying to create some discussion about what people perceive to be austere or intellectual or anti-intellectual or hyper-emotional. Colour can have a lot of connotations.”

While colour is a permanent fixture in his work, Nithiyendran has been experimenting with scale. His exhibition at Tramway, for example, featured a 10-metre-tall idol moulded from Glasgow mud. “Scale is something I’m interested in almost as a medium, and I’m thinking about how you can use scale and size to convey certain ideas and explore things,” he says. “I think, especially within some western contemporary art discourses, working large seems to be a little bit crass and there’s a lot of critiques circulating around monumental monuments in public space. That links to a lot of postcolonial critique of the histories of large sculptures in those public spaces.”

Nithiyendran’s exploration of scale serves as a kind of antidote to this. He’s interested in monuments that have the poetic effect of bringing people together. “The giant reclining Buddhas aren’t about domination and claiming land,” he states.

The central work in “The Self Portrait and the Masks” has a similar sense of transcendence.

“It’s the first figure whose eyes are actually closed,” says Nithiyendran. “And its arms are outstretched. Historically, from the regions I’m interested in or connected to, the representation of guardianship often has more of a pronounced or hyperbolic or exaggerated stance, whereas I wanted to have a stance that seemed really peaceful with this work.

“That was something I was trying to do — to have the figure appear peaceful and comfortable, despite looking somewhat bionic and scribbled on and made of bronze and bricks and cardboard and Play-Doh.”

More expert Culture and Arts coverage from T Australia:

• Meet the Women Changing the Local Comedy Scene
• Il Delfino: Yamba’s New Seaside Inn Is Inspired by the Town’s Coastal Charm and the Mediterranean
• This Sydney Practice Wants To Change the Way You Think About Your Dentist Appointments

As a host, the success of a long lunch or dinner party can often be gauged by the number of photos of your tablescape that end up on Instagram stories. Arguably, how the food looks — arranged on squiggly linen table mats and not-too-melted candles — is just as important as how the food tastes. For most of us, these shots live on social media for a 24-hour period (with a few lucky ones making it to the grid), but the Melbourne-based painter Libby Haines transforms them into large-scale works of art.

“I mostly work from photos taken on my phone which I then elaborate on, or reimagine — exaggerating elements and taking others out,” Haines tells T Australia.

Renowned for her vibrant, textural paintings centred on food and drink, Haines’s work celebrates the sometimes chaotic and always memorable nature of shared dining experiences.

“I like the notion of capturing a moment in time and presenting it in all its messy glory — like there are people just loitering on the outskirts of the painting or slightly reaching in,” she says. 

Her new exhibition showing at a-n studio in Fitzroy, Melbourne this month, features delectable elements that have appeared in her previous works—such as trays of oysters and olive martinis—while also introducing playful new motifs like toy cars and infant hands, nodding to her nearest and dearest.

“I have two children and when I host I’m always navigating around them to pull it all together,” Haines says. 

“There are always stray toys and spills and mess and little hands wanting to taste test everything — and I like to have a hint of my children in all of my exhibitions.”

Her latest body of work is titled “Table Manners,” though very few can be spotted across the 14 individual pieces. The canvases are richly layered with thick oil paint, resulting in an almost sculptural effect. While each work tells its own story, together they weave a narrative of the night, from “cocktail making” to “the last sip.” 

When Haines was asked to reflect on her favourite piece, she shared it was “Leftovers on the Bench”. “Because it took so long and was the final piece, I have a real soft spot for it,” she adds. 

This sentiment coincidentally mirrors the subject of the painting itself: food at a dinner party can often be overlooked in the moment but is only truly appreciated at the end of a long evening.

“Table Manners” holds importance beyond the memories it preserves. Ten percent of the profits made from the exhibition will be donated to Palestine Australia Relief and Action (PARA), a non-profit charity dedicated to helping Palestinian migrants and refugees settle in Australia. 

“I believe wholeheartedly in the importance of speaking out against injustice and genocide, and using your privilege to give back to the community—especially when our government continues to fail us and the people of Palestine,” she says.

Giving back is a central element of Haines’s artistic practice, a commitment reflected in her past three solo shows. 

“Table Manners” is showing at a-n studio, 415 Brunswick Street, Ngár-go, Naarm, on Saturday 14—Sunday 15 of September, with prints available to purchase online from Saturday 14 September 2024. 

Read more expert Culture and Arts coverage from T Australia:

• Meet the Women Changing the Local Comedy Scene
• Il Delfino: Yamba’s New Seaside Inn Is Inspired by the Town’s Coastal Charm and the Mediterranean
• What Is the Difference Between Functional Objects and Collectible Art?

When the Kissing Cabinet was unveiled at Tolarno Galleries during Melbourne Design Week in May, it eluded classification. The latest collaborative output from the Australian industrial designer Adam Goodrum and the French marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur, it appeared as a towering blue-grey box until a gentle spin revealed a mesmerising interior of curvaceous forms and secret compartments rendered in the centuries-old craft of straw marquetry. On closing, the shapes converged to resemble a kiss, which left questions on the lips of many. Is it a kinetic sculpture? An extraordinary storage solution? In the end, does it really matter? The captivating work took more than three years to create and was snapped up by an individual collector for $280,000 before it was even finished, heralding a new era for collectible design in Australia.

Goodrum and Seigneur — known professionally as A&A — began collaborating in 2017, and their first piece, the kaleidoscopic Bloom cabinet, was shown at Milan in 2018 and acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since then, A&A has been invited to create a piece for the Louis Vuitton LV200 project in celebration of the 200th birthday of Monsieur Louis Vuitton. Last year, each work in A&A’s Mother & Child collection, which was shortlisted for the Créateurs Design Awards in Paris, was acquired for a private collection.

As an individual designer, Goodrum has created pieces for international brands including Alessi, Cappellini and Normann Copenhagen. Seigneur, who moved to Australia from Paris in 2015, developed his straw marquetry skills working alongside Lison de Caunes, the artist widely credited with reviving the technique. As collaborators, Goodrum explains, their ethos rebels against the post-industrialist demand that objects be made faster and in multitude. But as a designer who, with Seigneur, is breaking new ground for the presentation and sale of collectible contemporary design in Australia, Goodrum says the term “collectible” doesn’t sit well with him. “It feels kind of presumptuous,” he says. “We’re just trying to create unique, one-off objects and to challenge ourselves. Maybe it falls more into the art space than the design space, but I think that’s a debate that surrounds collectible design.”

Characterised by artistic expression, exquisite craftsmanship and the scarcity created by limited production, collectible design has seen an upswing globally since the new millennium. International fairs such as Design Miami, launched in 2005, and PAD in Paris and London have helped to shape how contemporary design is bought, sold and discussed within the wider cultural landscape. London’s Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which has outposts in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, has been redefining the boundary between art and design for almost two decades. Esteemed auction houses including Phillips have dedicated parts of their decorative arts programming to contemporary designers since the early 2000s. In 2015, the curvaceous Lockheed Lounge by the Sydney-born designer Marc Newson sold at a Phillips auction to an anonymous phone bidder for £2.43 million (about $4.69 million); six years later, Ron Arad’s polished stainless-steel D-Sofa fetched £1.23 million (about $2.3 million).

While the strength of the collectible design market is evident on one side of the globe, it is still nascent on the other. But momentum is building, thanks in part to cultural institutions like the NGV, which opened its Department of Contemporary Design & Architecture — the first of its kind for an art gallery in Australia — in 2015, followed by its launch of Melbourne Design Week in 2017 and Melbourne Design Fair in 2022. Commercial gallerists like Sydney’s Sally Dan-Cuthbert and Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries have since expanded their collections to incorporate the work of designers, and galleries dedicated to collectible design are opening their doors.

Dr Simon Maidment, a former senior curator of contemporary art at the NGV, launched the gallery Useful Objects in Collingwood during Melbourne Design Week this year. Specialising in collectible design, he aims to support the work of contemporary Australian designers while contributing to the discourse that surrounds it. The gallery’s opening exhibition, “Desire x Design”, featured works from emerging practitioners such as Marlo Lyda and Joanne Odisho, as well as acclaimed established designers including Trent Jansen.

“I think the storytelling aspect of collectible design is key to my interest in it and that of various collectors and the makers themselves,” Maidment says. “But a common refrain I was hearing from designer-makers was that while events like Melbourne Design Fair are great and create a lot of interest, there was little opportunity to show their work in between.”

The Melbourne gallerist Sophie Gannon’s enthusiasm for collectible design was evident in 2017 when she began exhibiting the work of Australian designers such as Dale Hardiman. “Design wasn’t really happening in the commercial gallery space in Australia back then, but there were design galleries overseas that functioned exactly like commercial art galleries,” says Gannon, who opened her eponymous gallery in 2006. “When you live with great art, it gives a lot back to you, and it’s the same with design.” It took a while for Gannon’s clients to get onboard. “I’ve got very visually literate collectors — they understand visual art, they collect it, they travel overseas to see it — but when I first started showing design, it took them a while to get their heads around what it was, and that surprised me at the start,” Gannon says. “But I think the growth of collectible design in Australia has been multilayered and the support of places like the Powerhouse [Museum] in Sydney, the NGV and the Art Gallery of South Australia has given collectors confidence, because it’s being platformed by these cultural institutions in the same way that visual artists are.” Collectors now “love it”, Gannon says.  “I’ve had people say, ‘I’ve got no walls left, but that’s fine.’ With collectible design they often don’t need a wall.”

The Tasmanian-born, London-based designer Brodie Neill has seen the Australian market evolve firsthand. His sinuous @Chair, first produced as a rendered design in 2008, was included in Time Magazine’s Design 100 list the same year, but he struggled to gain interest from commercial galleries in his home country. “Fine art galleries in Australia are now much more interested in showing designs,” he says. “I must admit, when I knocked on doors about 10 years ago, there was not really the appetite for it.”

Neill honed his design skills at the University of Tasmania and the Rhode Island School of Design, before establishing his studio in London in 2005. He has built a strong global presence with projects for brands including Mercedes-Benz, Swarovski and Alexander McQueen, as well as limited-edition pieces for galleries and private collectors. His sculptural designs demonstrate his commitment to sustainability, with pieces made from ocean plastic, reclaimed timbers and circular metals. His multicoloured Remix chaise longue, made from reclaimed and salvaged materials including plastics and woods, was created as a limited-edition design in 2008 for the Apartment Gallery in London, where it sold for £32,000 (about $61,000; final editions are now valued at triple that figure).

In 2016, Neill represented Australia at the inaugural London Design Biennale with a critically acclaimed installation, “Plastic Effects”, where he launched his Gyro table, made from more than half a million ocean plastic fragments. In 2022, he presented a new collection of work at Sotheby’s on London’s New Bond Street as part of the auction house’s ongoing design series. “It was an amazing platform, because for two weeks you had the collectors coming through,” Neill says. “It wasn’t an auction, it was a private sale, and I still have clients that I met through there that I’m working on projects with now.”

The Alice Springs-based designer and artist Elliat Rich describes the growing interest in collectible design in Australia as “highly rewarding”.

“When I first graduated, it was lucky to find any opportunity to show your work in a gallery setting,” says Rich, whose limited-edition works, represented by Sophie Gannon Gallery, are held in numerous public and private collections. “Even just the appreciation of the word ‘design’ has increased, and there is a cultural sophistication around design practice. I think collectible design is the front wave of that, breaking new ground and building new understandings. There’s a global progression that we are now fitting into.”

Rich’s 2018 solo exhibition, “Other Places”, presented by Sophie Gannon Gallery, featured Weaver, a suspended aluminium shelving unit cloaked in a “wig” of synthetic hairlike fibre that tucks behind a glass hook when opened, eschewing the notion that furniture design should be purely practical. “I think collectible design plays that role of delivering expression that sits outside those archetypal industrial expectations of ‘functional objects’,” Rich says. “Weaver is a work that looks beautiful, but the sensual experience of using that shelf is quite distinct. Anybody who’s tucked hair behind somebody else’s ear will recognise that gesture that is one of care and intimacy, so putting that into a design typology — into a shelf — all of a sudden opens up all these other ways of relating to an object.”

For Goodrum, the growing interest in collectible works reflects a lift in the standard of Australian design. “It’s quite amazing what’s happening at the moment,” he says. “In the beginning of my career, I almost wanted to focus on becoming an artist of sorts, but then for whatever reason I studied industrial design and fell more into product design. Through this close collaboration with Arthur, it’s an absolute pleasure to be working on pieces that are more artistic and to have more of that freedom to do things differently.”

The kinetic qualities of A&A’s Kissing Cabinet mark a leap forward for their creative collaboration. Goodrum says it’s an aspect they plan to explore further. And while A&A’s work intentionally fuses art and design, the pair are curious about how it functions in the homes of their collectors. “We installed the Kissing Cabinet in a house in Melbourne and the owner was incredibly keen to know how all the hidden drawers work, so I guess he plans to use it,” Goodrum says. “I don’t think he’s going to put his socks in it, but I’d like to think that it will be used to store an item that’s really special.”

More expert Culture coverage from T Australia:

• Meet the Women Changing the Local Comedy Scene
• Il Delfino: Yamba’s New Seaside Inn Is Inspired by the Town’s Coastal Charm and the Mediterranean
• Recipe: Oncore by Clare Smyth’s Bilinis and Smoked Salmon Rillettes

Over the past two decades, a number of internet terms have jumped the barrier from the digital realm into real life, changing the way we use certain words. When I was a young boy, “hash” described a rarely used button on the telephone. A “troll” lived under bridges in fairytales. “Spam” came in a can, or in “Monty Python” sketches. And “catfish” was an animal that lived in the far-flung lakes of North America. Now we have “hashtag” (for cross-referencing topics of conversation), “trolls” (bigoted bullies), “spam” (junk), and “catfishing” (faking one’s identity to deceive somebody). The language has mutated, as language inevitably does, but none of these redefined words bother me as much as “content”.

Not too long ago, “content” was largely associated with social media. Content creators made pimple popper videos and cat memes for YouTube or TikTok, or streamed themselves playing video games on Twitch. As Kate Eichhorn put it in her 2022 book, “Content”, this kind of content was — and still is — digital stuff that “may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating”. But the term has taken on a life of its own, and content is increasingly used to refer to far more than just that viral short of a young woman honk-laughing like a hyperventilating goose. Now “content” also means the things we binge-watch on Netflix and Apple TV. Disney likes to boast that its streaming platform offers more than 8,000 hours of “content” from more than eight decades. Marketing executives talk of “dropping content”, as though it were some kind of stealth bomb.

“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” the actress Emma Thompson said at a conference in 2023. “It’s just a rude word for creative people.” Turning to address students in the audience, she added: “You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content’. That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”

Emma Thompson is correct. “Content” is derogatory — a term that diminishes works of imagination. Martin Scorsese has made movies for both Netflix and Apple, which technically, I suppose, makes him a “content creator” in the newly capacious definition of the word. But to call him that feels almost blasphemous; it would be like labelling Don DeLillo a typist. Can we really refer to “Killers of the Flower Moon” as “content”?

It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between art and content. Art — a notoriously difficult concept to pin down — is the confluence of self-expression and craftsmanship. It is intended to evoke emotion, convey an idea or conjure up
a mental state. It can be illuminating or challenging — or both. Content, however, is primarily concerned with comfort. When I think of online “content”, I think of an animal with an insatiable appetite, clamouring to be fed. The writer Thomas Bevan put it well on Substack (another medium infamous for its “content”) when he wrote: “It’s all so much ballast used to fill the holes in our souls and in our schedules and to help kill time in our extremely online present while real life — whatever that means — goes on some place else. This content keeps us just above water, existentially speaking. Or it certainly seems that that is its true purpose.”

If art is meant to nourish us, “content” sounds, to my ears, like junk food: enjoyable yet disposable, and ultimately not all that good for us.

This gets at the question of value: how much something is inherently worth. Art and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship. Even Michelangelo worked on commission for patrons such as the Medici family. But Michelangelo was paid to create works that would invariably transcend the original financial transaction.

The money that swapped hands was never really the point. With “content” — or at least the way it is often discussed these days — the economics remain front and centre in the definition. Content is meant to be consumed; it is produced for consumers. By labelling something “content”, we choose to emphasise above everything else its status as a product. We are choosing to define it according to its value on the market, rather than its aesthetic or emotional worth. It seems to me that a great deal of the contemporary art scene is doing something similar, reducing artworks to “content” by treating them more as investment opportunities than examples of human ingenuity.

That capitalism has infiltrated all corners of our lives and language is hardly a new observation. But when it comes to “content”, at least, this is not something we need to accept without resistance. Just because marketers want to package Oscar-winning features as “content” doesn’t mean we have to follow their lead. Here is one internet term we can actively reject. Like Emma Thompson, we can shrug off the word as an unnecessary insult against creative people. (Although “creatives” is another fraught term, lifted from advertising agencies and applied, with increasing meaninglessness, to artists and writers and just about anybody else who happens to use imagination in their work.)

It seems to me that many of us also wish we could shrug off the unsatisfying diet of “content” served up by Hollywood. In 2023, an extraordinary thing happened at the box office. One of the films of the year — a movie that drew millions upon millions of viewers — was a fiendishly complicated biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was defiantly artistic, released in a season more generally known for mindless popcorn fare. Making the success of Nolan’s film even more amazing, it opened the exact same day as “Barbie”, directed by the arthouse darling Greta Gerwig. “Barbie” reversed the trend we’re talking about here: it took what is arguably content (a child’s toy, the literal product of Mattel marketing) and reframed it as something rich and complicated. That both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were runaway hits speaks to a desire people have for more meaningful material.

In other words, while executives may be trying to feed us a steady stream of content, what many of us actually want to eat is art.

More expert Culture coverage from T Australia:

• Meet the Women Changing the Local Comedy Scene
• Il Delfino: Yamba’s New Seaside Inn Is Inspired by the Town’s Coastal Charm and the Mediterranean
• Just Announced: The 2024 Winners of Australia’s Longest-Running Indigenous Art Awards (NATSIAA)