Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 – Body of work analysis – 04. Sonia Freiburg – Beyond Humanity

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DANIELLE PALMER: Hi. I'm Danielle Palmer. I'm a visual art teacher from Tempe High School.

MELANIE CASSIN: Hi. I'm Melanie Cassin, Head Teacher, Visual Arts, from Bossley Park High School.

DANIELLE PALMER: We're going to talk about these drawings that have been selected for ARTEXPRESS. Mel, I'm really impressed with this particular little body of work, yeah.

MELANIE CASSIN: Look, what I found really interesting about this one, Dani, is it's almost like we're starting from at the surface of the water, and then progressively, as the work continues down, we're getting deeper under the water. So, we have that progression of the white background through to the grey and then the black. You know, so that's what was my first overall observation of this work.

What I find really interesting is the macro and the micro in this particular work, where the student is really swapping the viewpoints of up close as well as keeping us at a distance in this particular environment that the animals live in.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah. The fine pen drawings, there's this repetition of marks making, especially this one, this top panel, which is quite a brave work for a student, I think. It's just a horizon, and you can see the light on the water as well as there's a sense of tonality. There is the sense of maybe the setting sun or the rising sun, so that light filtering down through the images, and the white light eventually illuminating from the dark. On the scratch board, as we know, these lovely, very deep-sea creatures.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yeah. You raise a great point with the white, because I see in this particular work that the positive and the negative spaces are just as important as one another, and there is that push and pull with the white and the black and the negative and the positive, and we have these, then these really interesting ranges of grey coming through.

So, the student's pen work particularly is really impressive. The stippling, and their line work, and that variation between those 2 is quite sophisticated. We've got the use of pen here, and then we move down to the scratchboard works. Again, interesting choice of mark-making here.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah, you can tell the student's really done a lot of research into these figures. I mean, they're realistically drawn. But they actually are drawn still using a technique that is allowing them to have a little bit more expression, a bit more slight abstraction to the way the marks have been put onto the surface, and they have moved through a range of materials here. So, we've got our fine pen, our outline pens here, and then we've gone to what even could be--

MELANIE CASSIN: A felt tip.

DANIELLE PALMER: A felt tip or an ink and a white pen over the top of that sitting on top.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yes, yes.

DANIELLE PALMER: But it's allowed for that level of detail.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yeah.

DANIELLE PALMER: And allowing the white to come. Like, using that grey as the in-between colour has really made that little drawing really, like, rich in tone.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yeah, the solidity of these are sort of coming forward with the muted background, the neutral background, the blacks and the whites are the hero here, and you can look at-- really up close at all of these really lovely areas. But then you're able to pull back and look at them as a whole.

And you do, you find yourself doing that with the artwork, the whole entire body of work is that you can stand back and look at it as a story, as a narrative. But then you can individually come up close and look at these cross-hatching and this almost X-ray style work that's happening as we get deeper down into the water.

Again, we're looking at the animals, and we're looking at their environment, and typically, sometimes, we see works that have one or the other. They have a focus on the animal. They have a focus on the environment. But this student has really brought in that holistic understanding of the animal and the environment that it lives in is-- seeing it as being even and both important to the messaging that they're bringing across in this work.

DANIELLE PALMER: The drawing skills of the student, as we're talking about--

MELANIE CASSIN: They're really strong.

DANIELLE PALMER: Very strong, a lot of detail. But what I'm seeing, too, is like in this whale, I sense the weight of the whale shark, but it's still gliding through the water, whereas since the fragility of the weedy sea dragon, seahorse, and then, like you say, that more X-ray sense of these ones which are down underneath dark, and any time you've ever seen these represented, they're always having to be lit from in that darkness. So, yeah, the student has really considered the surface in relation to the animal.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yes. There also is a sense of danger as we're getting down because we have that-- straight away that personal experience with sharks or that fear of sharks, perhaps.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah.

MELANIE CASSIN: And you can see that this work is progressing through in an emotional sense--

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MELANIE CASSIN: --from this sort of positive down to something that could be quite fearful.

DANIELLE PALMER: I'd see these on my holiday.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yes.

DANIELLE PALMER: But I don't want to see those on my holiday.

MELANIE CASSIN: That's very true, and again, it's that inclusive curatorial decisions that the student is making that they want to bring on all aspects of this one environment that they're highlighting in their body of work. The title of this artwork, 'Beyond Humanity', I mean, there's that-- another layer of meaning opening up.

DANIELLE PALMER: Absolutely, yeah, the lack of human footprint in this image, and we know there is an affect that we've had on this environment. But that isn't what this student is talking about.

MELANIE CASSIN: It's not the focus of the student's concept.

DANIELLE PALMER: No.

MELANIE CASSIN: And it wasn't part of their main intention of the work. The main intention was to focus on the organisms and the habitat and the ecosystem and how all of these elements are relying on one another here in this particular ecosystem, and yes, there is a human element that lives outside that. But I think they've deliberately chosen to not focus on that in this particular work.

DANIELLE PALMER: This is a work of deliberate choices. It really is. The size of the smaller works, which are the more, you know, those very hard-to-see--

MELANIE CASSIN: The micro, making the micro macro.

DANIELLE PALMER: It is very much the micro. Even the sustenance, so even zooming in on that-- the weed down the bottom as a nice little nod to what's up here--

MELANIE CASSIN: What's up here.

DANIELLE PALMER: --and in the sustenance, I guess, for the animals. But they really have made a lot of choices, this student. The size of those panels and the colours, the range of colour, it's very, yeah-- the consideration is strong with this student.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yeah, and the considerations also in the mark-making, deliberately choosing different surfaces to work on, showing us that they can use pen, ink, as well as the scratch board implements. The intricate marks on these scratch boards are quite impressive.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yes.

MELANIE CASSIN: So, it's really-- the student has explored drawing in such an innovative way that drawing on-- of a range of surfaces, again, with a variety of implements, they're showcasing their strength, and their understanding of line, and how line creates form.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah. So, look, again, we've seen another very strong body of work here, and all the components of this body of work are interrelated with one another. They're connected. They are demonstrating the student's highly developed skills, and they are delivering a concept which has got a range of ways of being interpreted and unpacked for us in this.

MELANIE CASSIN: Yeah, it's very well-considered, and yeah, this does open up to a multitude of layers of meaning.

DANIELLE PALMER: Yeah.

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