The Art of Collecting
Rushcutters Bay Gallery
Sydney
6-27 November 2007

A hunter-gatherer passion for the weird and the wonderful inspires an exhibition of splendid curiosities. STEWART WHITE reports.   

We do love a good collection. And this is a collection of collections. Artist Sylvia Griffin suggests her exhibition is a product of her own obsession with accumulating nature's treasures and a passion for the wunderkammer of old. 

Here is a collection of styles and approaches depicting collections of things of a natural history bent. This assortment of her work ranges from the graphic to the predictable, the pleasant to the intriguing. It presents groupings from brilliantly coloured beetles portrayed in distressed compartments of printers' type drawers, to a pheasant family portrait, a tad reminiscent of Joanna Braithwaite's guinea pigs ( aAR12). 

 "I've collected feathers, dead insects, objects from the sea and more, often over decades, hoping they will eventually insinuate their way into my art either as inspiration or actually incorporated into the work. This body of work realises this intention," she says. Indeed it does. Wunderkammer becomes kunstkammer.

While the collection theme is constant, and invariably painstakingly detailed, the executions are varied and sometimes uneven. Vibrant realism mixes with the more stilted decorative style that echoes scientific illustrations of centuries past. Griffin's studies of shells, eggs and feathers are more still life paintings than the conceptual quirkiness of her other composite renderings. Is this intentional, is this older work - or perhaps born of a shifting and different mind set?

But there is a dynamic playfulness about the graphic style she employs in some of the pieces, especially those with the rhythm of philatelic backdrops. Her early Sydney College of  the Arts training in printmaking appears evident here, where she seems more adventurous and comfortable with shapes and patterns.

Her Grebes and robins see a whimsical use of dimension and texture with post-marked sheets of ornithological-themed 20-cent stamps. An overlay of superimposed images of bird eggs that have succumbed to the sheet's perforations tease the viewer, while a subtle pattern logic emerges from the cadence of the stamps' repetitiveness. Seba coral follows a similar path in a more geometric, albeit inter-tidal, theme.

The Art of Collecting is an engaging accumulation of studies. It is as varied in its individual execution and detail of "specimens" as nature is.

Top image details: Sylvia Griffin, Chafer beetles, 2007, oil on board, 37 x 42cm. Courtesy the artist and Rushcutters Bay Gallery.


[Sylvia Griffin, Grebes & robins, 2007, mixed media, including stamps, post marks and oil on board, 35 x 28cm. Courtesy the artist and Rushcutters Bay Gallery.]