Artists Talk

Thank you everyone for coming out on a Friday night to see this exhibition.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the country where we come together, the people of the Wadjuk Noongar nation, and I would like to pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging.

I’d also like to thank the Pastors, Lee and Shannon Hinkle, and the congregation of Fremantle Church, and those who regularly use this Hall, for providing me with this opportunity and generously sharing this transformed building with us all this evening and for the duration of the exhibition. 

Often a new exhibition is opened by an invited special guest or a dignitary of some kind.  On this occasion I felt that it was good to invite special guests without giving them a job to do.  As my usual job involves a lot of formalities and sometimes dignitaries, I also thought it was nice to keep things simple – and that is why you are hearing from me tonight.

Roslyn and I have been sharing information about these artworks and this exhibition for some months. So, many of you will have already seen images of a lot of the works in this show, and perhaps also read some of the text that I have written about them. This is also available in the gallery sheet for those who are interested.  For this reason, I won’t talk too much about the works now.

But I thought I might say a little about how I come to be showing a substantial new body of creative work here at Fremantle Church after fifteen years in which I have made very little art. 

Professionally, over the past 10 years I have been blessed with opportunity to earn a living in what the cultural economists would call “arts related work”, firstly as a PhD student on scholarship at ECU – studying the working lives of professional artists in WA -  and subsequently in local government where my work has been focused on the administration of public art and municipal art collections and arts programming.  

But In the same period, life with a young family, full-time work, rented housing and limited resources hasn’t left much room for a creative practice of my own. In my PhD research I spoke to many artists who have successfully juggled many similar circumstances and have managed to maintain an art practice throughout, which is a great credit to them.

Of course, as someone who is wired to think creatively and visually, one does not cease to have ideas and the inclination to investigate and to make, and to search for outlets for these urges.  In my case some of these energies have been channelled into pursuits that contribute to the household in some practical fashion: cooking interesting meals; working in the garden; building a chook-house and veggie patch; solving storage issues and assembling IKEA flat-packs!  But these things don’t entirely scratch the itch. 

In 2016 my good friend Peter Davidson - who has been an inspiration and a role-model for the committed professional artist since I met him in the late 1990s - invited (and perhaps bullied) me into creating a few drawings and paintings for some international group exhibitions that he organised featuring the Wild Swans Art Group of Western Australian Artists.  These were the first pieces I’d made in a decade, and I was more than a little intimidated by the roll-call of those who I considered to be “real artists” that he had invited to show work in the same exhibitions.  But, thanks to Peter, I did make and show some works.

Not long after the first of these new works were shown, my wife Roslyn and I had the pleasure of meeting Shannon and Lee Hinkle. They were fairly recently arrived in Perth from Indiana, USA, and had a vision to minister to and provide opportunity for the Arts community in Fremantle and Perth in the same manner that they had been intimately involved at the Harrison Center for the Arts in Indianapolis.  Since that time we have had the pleasure and blessing of their friendship and have been watching with admiration as they have been patiently laying the groundwork to realise this vision of theirs.

In 2019 and 2020 Fremantle Church has been a Fringe venue for live music, and in late 2019 and early 2020 art exhibitions in this Hall have started.  In the protestant tradition, there has been a distinct absence of interesting visual art in the church, and an uneasy relationship with artists, since the reformation and its great acts of iconoclasm.  It is both exciting and refreshing that some churches, like this one, are realising the missed opportunities to connect with people through contemporary visual art, and are embracing an approach that welcomes creative exploration and encourages dialogue on both art and faith in times that are challenging for both. 

It was early in 2019 that Shannon and Lee first spoke to me about the possibility that I might create work for an exhibition in the Hall for 2020.  I jumped at the chance.  As a lapsed artist, (and a person who is often a project manager when I’m not an administrator) a definite goal and a deadline were enough to get the cogs turning.

In my circumstances, it was helpful to know the space, and to know how many pieces were required to fill the space.  It was also an opportunity to exercise my creativity in realising a pretty large body of work with very limited resources.  The pieces you see here tonight have mostly been made created using materials that I bought decades ago and have kept  – such as a large roll of raw canvas, recycled plywood boards, and a number of tins of old paint. 

Having limited time and space, and finite quantities of material to make work also meant that there were pressures to get the works right the first time.  So, much of the developmental work for these pieces happened in a sketch book whilst riding the bus to work, or as mental explorations.  The works needed to be simple so that I could make them with what I had, and in the time that I had – but they also needed to be interesting and thoughtful. 

Anyway, I will let you all be the judge of what I have produced.  All of the work is for sale, and you are welcome to come and speak to Roslyn or myself if you have an interest in purchasing a work.  If you are interested in the vision and the work that Shannon and Lee have for Art at Fremantle Church, I would also encourage you to make yourself known to them and ask them about it!

A final “thank you” to my wife Roslyn, who is almost solely responsible for any online presence that I have had as an artist – which may be why some of you are here tonight.  She has also been incredibly encouraging and supportive, as have our girls Matilda and Quetta, over the several months that I spent intensively producing these 21 pieces, mostly at the expense of family time on weekends.  It is nice to be celebrating the end product of this collective effort with you all, and I hope that you enjoy the show and the delightful hospitality that Art at Fremantle Church has extended to us all.

Duncan McKay

14 August 2020