The art that made me: Glenn Barkley

‘It’s about testing ideas and seeing how they work,’ says guest curator and artist Glenn Barkley of his Open Studio project, brick vase clay cup jug, on show at the Art Gallery from 1 July 2023. Celebrated for his own ceramic works, Barkley has delved into the Art Gallery’s collection, selecting works to reinterpret and display en masse.

‘I have always been intrigued by the way things are displayed in storage and the abundance of those collections. When they’re all pushed together, dialogues start to happen.’

Working with the collection database, Barkley used very basic search terms to find connections between disparate objects. ‘I think one of the things that digital databases can do is create a sort of horizontality – it’s quite democratising,’ says Barkley. ‘It’s going to be a really diverse group of things from ceramics through to paintings, to prints and photography. I’m interested in bringing out objects that people may not have seen, or may not have seen for a long time.’

Here Barkley shares four artists and works in the Art Gallery’s collection that have shaped him.

Guy Warren was my first boss in a curatorial role at the University of Wollongong. I learnt a lot about looking at art from Guy. He had an artist’s, not a curator’s, eye – he wasn’t so interested in art world hierarchies. The time working with him was a real gift. Guy first travelled down the Shoalhaven River as a young man in the 1930s and that first trip had an enormous influence on a lifetime of work. Like Guy, the Shoalhaven River looms large in my own imagination. I grew up in the area and we used to cross it daily on the school bus. You know what they say, we never saw the same river twice.

I think Margaret’s work in ceramics is not as recognised as it should be. The Art Gallery doesn’t own any of her ceramic works, but they do hold this incredible film. Tense, grotesque and irrepressibly real – it takes on sexism, familial relations and the structures of patriarchal society through our obsession and dependence on the motor car. A powerful precursor to other Australian films like Mad Max, it has recently been heralded as a high point of 1980s Australian experimental cinema. Alarmingly prescient, the car is now recognised not just as a negative, masculine symbol but as a destroyer of worlds.

This Jômon pot is made using what we might think of as relatively simple means. It is composed of raw clay, unrefined, full of coarse inclusions, then pit fired. It has been made using coils and built upwards with an asymmetrical shape that flares, taking it into the realms of the fantastic. Lurching upwards, it feels as if it could have been made yesterday. Jômon pottery is why I love ceramics, and especially ceramics of the ancient past. You can still sense the maker’s presence, and I feel those makers right there, breathing down my neck, as I make my own work.

I was lucky to work on the valuation of Brenda’s archive when it came into the Art Gallery’s National Art Archive. It was an honour to look in depth at Brenda’s practice and realise its centrality to any telling of Australian art history. I met and worked with Mervyn Bishop, and he is a wonderful human being and incredible photographer. I was not fortunate enough to meet Joe Croft, but he, like Brenda, was a pivotal figure in Australian Indigenous life. I love this series for the brilliant way Brenda’s snapshot methodology creates stoic visual monuments out of people in the Aboriginal community, which now exist as a paean to a lost city.