Artworks - Work

Darkness is about to pass encaustic and watercolour on hand ripped paper on board
Keeping Time solo exhibition www.egganddartgallery.com.au
Egg & Dart, Shop 2, 175 Keira St, Wollongong, NSW, 2500 | [email protected]

Counting the Dead watercolour and Encaustic on hand cut paper Each piece is the name of a woman killed by domestic violence in 2021 and
2022.

Helen's Tablecloth and Julia's Tablecloth
Watercolour on hand cut paper
A Way with Words Installation

Women Hold up half the Sky
Watercolour and piercing on hand cut paper on board 150 x 105 cm
A Way with Words The Egg and Dart Gallery Woolongong www.egganddartgallery.com

At the Edge Encaustic on paper on board 85 x 85cm

Duration Oil on paper on board

Hope is a thing with Feathers
Watercolour on hand cut paper 180 x 145

The Shag Pile Carpet Watercolour and graphite on hand cut paper

Quintet @ Hazelhurst Regional Arts Centre

The paper cut … a moment of exquisite pain, a shivering wound as paper slices skin, a juncture in time when artist fuses material and gesture to create objects at once sensual and beautiful … underpinned by a whip smart feminist edge. That edge is from paper artist Lee Bethel whose work, often process driven by the material possibilities of paper cutting, folding and repetition, is here propelled by history-making-women, catalysts for Bethel’s current body of work.

“At Moorefield Girls High School in Sydney in the seventies we had strong female teachers, Helen Reddy’s Grammy Award Winning I am Woman was our school anthem and then later … The Misogyny Speech by Julia Gillard, a pivotal moment for women. Each spoke to a moment in time.”

Gillard’s words “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man…” delivered in parliament 2012, are today the pulse to Julia’s Tablecloth, 2022 and one of five works on exhibition. Here Bethel’s large-scale panels with text cut out, actively disrupt the paper’s surface integrity, are lit creating the sense of relief sculpture. Long shadows cast from the “tablecloth” metaphor the wake of history gone before and the visibility of the artist’s intent. That intent is witnessed too in Helen’s Tablecloth, 2022. Constructed of 42 connecting circles with a line from ‘I Am Woman’ cut out on each d’oyley/plate it casts further back in history. Hand-cut ornate lace-like script throws shadows and reflections across the table underneath, one paying homage to Judy Chicago’s seminal work, The Dinner Party 1974-79.

“I am committed to drawing attention to how women work around boundaries to be heard and seen, to creating work that is aesthetically beautiful, pretty, domesticated, labored, that on closer viewing reveals disturbing truths and unveils attitudes that haven’t changed since I was 14.”

‘The D’Oyley Show/ An exhibition of women’s domestic fancywork’ at Watters Gallery, Sydney was the first feminist art exhibition Bethel saw. Grace Cochrane curator for the Powerhouse museum notes that at the time of the show there was a renewal of interest in traditional and contemporary lacemaking,

“These revivals, as well as encouraging the use of fabrics and fibres in sculpture and other expressive work, were consciously or unconsciously part of a revaluing of women’s domestic skills, exemplified publicly by exhibitions such as The D’Oyley Show of 1979 and the demands of the women’s art movement for acceptance of ‘womens’ materials and their processes in sculpture departments, alongside bronze and steel.”*

A few years prior, cultural activist and theoretician Lucy Lippard had visited Australia and was a significant influence in the establishment of the feminist Women’s Art Movement. Bethel recalls the impact of its Sydney members, Marie McMahon, Vivienne Binns and Francis Phoenix, their feminist urge to question.

“The realization that a ‘proper’ artist didn’t always use canvas and oil paint was the catalyst to my working with paper. Art school led me to artists exploring alternate materials and processes. I studied graphic design initially and at that time it was on paper. When I moved across to Fine Arts and explored material I was comfortable with the tactile, fragile, material.”

Bethel acknowledges other influences on her practice – the minimal and poetic works of American abstract painter Agnes Martin and the explorations into materials and memory deployed by American sculptor Eva Hesse. More recently the huge mesmeric ‘pin prick’ works of Fu Xiaotong have intrigued. The Bejing-based artist penetrates rice paper surfaces with thousands of needlepoint holes, a minimalistic exploration into the temporal and material properties of process based drawing that Bethel finds fascinating. But it is most with Judy Chicago and the scale of her work in The Dinner Party 1974-79 that propelled this body of work,

“I think lockdown viewing made me look more at international artists. Many galleries expanded their online experiences and that led to me expanding my thinking.”

Chicago’s work, a ceremonial banquet of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating a significant woman in history, is made up of doyleys, chalices, painted plates, objects rendered in styles appropriate to the women being honoured, “It is a single immersive installation and it is this magnitude that I worked to embrace in ‘A Way with Words.’”

“I loved those words from Chicago in her autobiography Beyond the Flower where she says, ‘Historically women have either been excluded from the process of creating the definitions of what is considered art or allowed to participate only if we accept and work within existing mainstream designations. If women have no real role as women in the process of defining art, then we are essentially prevented from helping to shape cultural symbols.’”

Where previously Bethel had sourced titles for her works from Emily Dickenson poems and inspiration from the poet’s inclusion in Chicago’s epic feminist work, in this exhibition the Dickenson plate reflects the colour palette captured in Counting the Dead, 2022, the chilling record naming women killed by domestic violence in 2021 & 2022. This delicate charged creation takes its title from the Destroy the Joint Facebook group named in honour of radio DJ Alan Jones who in 2012 commented that too many female politicians would “destroy the joint”.

Group researchers listed every woman dead as a result of domestic violence since 2012. Using statistics from the past two years Bethel has cut out each woman named, using elegant copper plate script, dipped in encaustic wax, a technique enabling the paper to build dimension and welcome light. Hung like a lace tablecloth the meticulously made pale pink paper chains, carry the heart stopping reality that little has changed in the social and political landscape for women – on average one woman per week dies of domestic violence in Australia.

‘A Way with Words’, propelled by an imperative to question that landscape via beautifully made paper sculptures as delicate as a butterfly wing and at a scale at once majestic and immersive, suggests that Bethel is at the stellar heights of her practice. Watch closely this clever creatrix, who grew up with paper - a Dad a bookbinder, a Mum a Manager of a printing factory, and a school holiday job collating books - watch closely to see where next the gravitas of her message takes her.

Courtney Kidd is a freelance art writer, and art consultant for Artbank. She lives and works on Gadigal land, Sydney.

*Grace Cochrane, The Crafts Movement in Australia: a history (NSW University Press, 1992)

Flourish at www.egganddart.com.au