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| Emma Beers, Tributary Project room shot |
By Caren Florance
If you’re heading out
to Fyshwick any weekend, maybe for some Sunday shopping or a sausage at
Bunnings, take a small detour and have a look at a gallery that you might not
know about: Tributary Projects. It’s up in Molonglo Mall, that strange little
concrete complex that sits at the top of the roundabout at Wollongong and
Newcastle Streets. There’s always something interesting happening there. A case
in point is the most recent show, called ‘NOFEARSEMMABEERS.’
Emma Beer is a young,
engaging artist who is just past that stage we call ‘emerging’. She wants to question, through material and process, what painting can be. She is thoroughly grounded in her art: she
has been a technical assistant to a number of important contemporary artists,
she’s the Technical Officer in the ANU School of Art + Design’s Painting
Workshop, where she stretches canvases and wrangles classes, and she is an
alumni of that workshop. She’s paid attention to the activities and attitudes
around her. The work she makes is strong, abstract, and interesting, full of texture
and feeling. People are starting to notice her efforts.
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| Emma Beers,'sink or swim,' 2018 acrylic on canvas 160x120 |
Each of her paintings
is geometric in its composition, all squares and rectangles, each vertical and
horizontal addition overlapping without wiping out the previous layer. The
predominant colours in her show were blue and white, and they evoked a sense of
looking out of an airplane window, across layers of clouds, through some kind
of angular filter. A closer look showed that Beer made no attempt to give you
an illusion of flat surface, or that the paint is anything but paint. Some
layers are like whipped cream smoothed with a knife, others are thinner,
looser, letting the light through. They create sharply delineated veils,
crossing themselves. There are touches of red in the some of the canvases,
sometimes obvious, other times in subtle places, like the sides of the canvas,
leaving a dull glow against the wall.
I always give mental
points to interesting titles in artwork, and extra points if the artist doesn’t
use the title ‘untitled’. Often a title is what makes an abstract work sing,
shifting us from the obvious to something poetic or surreal. Beer’s titles are
always good, and they tend to reflect her life as she’s painting rather than
what she’s painting, forming an ongoing biographical record. The title of the
show stemmed from a surprise present from a friend: a mail package containing a
string of wool hung with cardboard cut-out and painted lettering, made to be a
banner or bunting, spelling the words N O
F E A R S E M M A B E E R S. It’s been hung in her bedroom for
ten years as a reminder to be bold and fearless, and judging from her output,
it’s been a good strategy.
Emma Beers is just one
of many interesting offerings by Tributary Projects, which is an artist-run
space in unit 9 of Molonglo Mall. It’s open Thurs–Sunday, 11am to 6pm, but can
also be visited by appointment. Fyshwick is one of the last spaces in Canberra
that offers small, strange, affordable spaces for artists to try experimental
projects. It has a gallery and a performance space, and each month the website
releases experimental music mixes called Spirit Theatre as a Sound Program.
Everyone involved is a volunteer, and the artists who exhibit are a broad mix
of emerging and mid-career. It’s an arts project to get behind, and always worth
dropping into once you’ve had your sausage sanga.
