GREETINGS DEAR VOXFROCKERS AND THANK YOU FROM OUR PEACHY BOTTOMS FOR YOUR PATIENCE IN THE PAST FORTNIGHT AS YOU WAITED AND TWIDDLED FOR OUR WEEKLY INSTALMENT OF FAB-FROCKY NEWS AND SUNDRY GORGEOSITIES.
AS MANY OF YOU KNOW, CERTAIN SAD EVENTS OCCURED BOTH NEAR AND FAR FROM THE VOXOFFICE THAT KNOCKED THE PROVERBIAL STUFFING OUT OF US AND TRIGGERED A CREATIVE LAPSE NOT SEEN SINCE THE AWFUL OCELOT AND FLORAL KNICKERFLASHER PLATFORM INCIDENT OF AUGUST 2013 (WE TREMBLE TO RECALL AS UNDOUBTEDLY DO YOU).
BUT, WE ARE BACK, DEAREST VOXFROCKERS, WITH TINSEL AND BELLS, A BRACE OF NEW INTERNS DUE ANY TICK, AND BRISTLING ENTHUSIASM FOR THE IMPENDING NEW YEAR! YES! OUR LONG-FORM FROCKY JOURNALISM WILL CONTINUE IN 2015, INTERSPERSED WITH VOXFLIPS AND FROCKY FRAGMENTS ON OUR TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND INSTAGRAM FEEDS, AND MORE SHORT-FORM INFO-CHIPS EMBEDDED REGULARLY AND RIGHT HERE IN FASHION’S FLUTTERY HEART ON VOXFROCK.COM.AU.
Hello. xx
FROM US, TO YOU, AT THE FAG-END OF A WEIRD AND WONDERFUL YEAR, WE WISH YOU JOY; THE FIZZY, TINGLY, JANGLY KIND KIDLETS CONJURE AT CHRISTMAS. TROLLIES OF IT.
BUT, BEFORE WE ALL DEPART FOR TUR-DUCKEN AND PUDDING, HERE’S A PARTING TIP ESPECIALLY FOR VOXFROCKERS WITHIN COO-EE OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA, OR WHO PLAN TO BE, ESPECIALLY WITH KIDLETS IN TOW, THIS SUMMER. THE STORY BELOW FIRST APPEARED IN THE NGV GALLERY MAGAZINE, AND ITS SUBJECT, EXPRESS YOURSELF: ROMANCE WAS BORN FOR KIDS, AN INSTALLATION BY TWO OF VOXFROCK’S FAVORITE FROCKY PEOPLE, IS NOT ONLY FREE AND FIRING ALL SUMMER LONG, IT HAS BEEN EXPANDED BY THE NGV, INTO A TEN-DAY, SIX-CYLINDER, ALL POP-GUNS BLAZING KIDERAMA FROM JANUARY 17 TO 27. JOY INDEED!
FROM US AND OURS TO YOU AND YOURS, CHRISTMAS KISSES AND CLICK HERE FOR KIDDIE NIRVANA. XXX
EXPRESS YOURSELF!
A couple of crazy country kids who found each other at a city fashion school and invented a thousand new kinds of joy are shaking up the National Gallery of Victoria like its never been shaken before. Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales are the “kids”, graduates of East Sydney Technical College’s renowned fashion school and the Australian industry’s undisputed “enfants joyeux”. Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids is their interactive exhibition-slash-playland pitched at primary children but proving to be as enchanting for whole families and punters of all ages.
Plunkett, originally from Albury, and Sales, from Maitland, are all grown up now and as famous for Romance Was Born, their multiple award-winning, cult clothing brand renowned for its original art prints and stockists around the world, as for the mad, fabulous dreamscapes and beings they’ve conjured with artists including Kate Rhode, Nell, and Archibald prize-winning painter Del Kathryn Barton, to design and show their collections since 2005.
“Pure, immersive theatre,” says Katie Somerville, NGV senior curator, fashion and textiles of the shows that are now key components in Express Yourself. “They’re about the juxtaposition of elements you’re not used to thinking about together.” In Romance Land, old ladies take tea at the bottom of the sea, iced Vo-vo biscuits make fetching frocks, mermen wear lush doily beards and crochetted suits, there are fairy-bush beings and rainbow creatures never before seen but still somehow familiar, and tiny antennae have been known to wiggle up from girls’ pink toadstool hairdos. Plunkett and Sales’ friends say they just think differently: “Two maverick creatives,” says Del Kathryn Barton; “They dream big, are crazy talented!” Others describe the partners sparking off each other like crossed jumper leads, then collaborating with artists who think differently yet again so their creative switches are constantly being flicked. The result is wondrous gobsmackery, all-creative-guns-blazing fashion collections and shows whose memories cling a little to the garments – the whole point, when you get right down to it – eventually draped dumbly on shopracks in David Jones or Harvey Nichols.
“We try and make things beautiful,” Anna Plunkett says, a fantastic understatement. “We could never just do runway (catwalk shows); that’s not who we are. For that kind of fashion show, you could sit at a bus stop and just watch people go by. We’d rather create a world, a new environment, make some crazy thing a reality, do something beautiful.” Beautiful, amazing, heartsoaringly different; every one of Plunkett and Sales’ whimsically titled shows, from Doilies & Pearls Oysters & Shells, Mushroom Magic, Oracle, Tripsy Gypsy, Renaissance Dinasaur, Weird Science, Berzerkagang and a dozen or so others, were so remarkable, they’re embedded in local fashion folklore. Their battery of odd-ball otherworldly surprises are in the history books for moving fashionistas to tears and editors to rave reviews. And Express Yourself is a jigsaw of pieces of them all: pictures, props, clips, garments mixed into Plunkett and Sale’s shopping list of artworks from the NGV’s collection.
Katie Somerville has acquired and exhibited Romance Was Born for the NGV since 2009 and was the spark, then the muscle behind Express Yourself. Two years ago, her hunch that Plunkett and Sales’ artful fashion and passion for art would chime with children was a calculated risk; now it’s a virtual certainty. Record numbers of children and families have already swarmed through the gallery’s dedicated exhibition space for a playful segment of the NGV’s sprawling, blockbuster Melbourne Now exhibition, and more recently 50,000 children have larked through Pastello: Draw Act, a wild installation by Mathery Studio that encouraged them to squiggle with their feet, head, even their backside if they wanted to, using crayon helmets, shoes, pendulums and rolling wrecking balls. This gallery and everything in it, were conceived as a blessedly far cry from any old-fashioned notion of an “art excursion”. “This definitely isn’t a “sit down, learn this, fill out your questionairre, follow me” kind of experience,” Somerville laughs. “This is something to access children’s instinctive curiosity, and their love of humor and playfulness. It’s about children walking into the gallery space and wondering and marvelling: circus meets funfair, meets wonderland meets…”
Romance Was Born’s scrawled logo juts out on a little sign from the families’ exhibition space located in an airy, ground level corridor cleaving off the NGV’s central courtyard. Two entrances are cut into the gallery’s “skin”, a shivering grid of thousands of glinting metallic coinscale sequins organised into a Romance Was Born print pattern. Beyond the first door, collages plug into the nostalgic idea of an “exquisite corpse”, not only a memory from Plunkett and Sales’ childhood, but a metaphor for their creative process. The “corpse” collages fuse oddball combinations of old and new art objects, antiquities and image fragments from Romance shows into the “head”, “body” and “feet” of new creature concepts. The components were harvested and fused by Plunkett and Sales and, importantly, with a pre-exhibition crew of schoolkid collaborators who also worked with them on a major activity book to complement Express Yourself.
“It was really hard to think about what the kids would want to do, what they’d instantly “get”” says Plunkett. She and Sales plumbed their own childhoods and came up busting with ideas. Plunkett loved dressing up, making things, drawing. Sales remembered smells and sounds and the intense, connective joy of looking deep into finely detailed images. “I remember being quite obsessed with one; the cover of Xanadu the album. It was awesome, space-agey, the artwork quite stylised and visually rich.” He remembers returning to it, and other images, and looking and looking. Children’s capacity for fascination, he realised, had to be a priority in Express Yourself. “Things around the house that aren’t necessarily meant to be inspirational can be awesome,” he says. So, Sales and Plunkett mixed Milo tins, basketballs, cupie dolls and other reputedly mundane objects mixed into their harvest of fine artworks, curios and antiquities from the NGV’s collection and, especially in what is known as the “Rainbow Room”, worked out ways to tease out what they know to be instinctive among children; inspiration is everywhere.
Particularly in Plunkett and Sales’ extraordinary orbit. “In the end we had so many ideas we couldn’t stick with one concept so we thought of breaking up the rooms into three,” Plunkett recalls of planning Express Yourself. And so they did. Beyond the exhibition’s glinting skin and “exquisite corpse” imagery are three distinct rooms: the Tomb, Bush Magic, and Rainbow.
Their first band of ideas pinged with the power of fashion and art to transform and bring joy and resolved into the “Tomb Room”, a prelude to the first activity zone. An exotic, imaginary queen rests in a sarcophagus created by multi-media artist and Romance collaborator Nell (she uses only her first name). It’s displayed in a pitched glass case usually reserved for the ancient Egyptian collection. “It’s a sort of rock ’n roll, yoga, contemporary sarcophagis, like a coffin I’d make for myself,” Nell says. Her collaborative print design for Romance’s 2011 Oracle collection also papers the Tomb Room’s walls. Cut at regular intervals, recessed niches house the queen’s ostentatious wardrobe of gowns, shoes, headdresses, jewels and wigs curated from Romance archives. “Imagine; here is the mummy in her resting place and all around her, the lush and glorious trappings of her adornment,” says Somerville. “It’s almost the ultimate walk-in wardrobe.”
Beyond the Tomb Room, children are unleashed in their first activity zone, a thrilling space papered with a mashup of Romance’s fashion shows and lined with kid-height Hollywood-lit mirrors, benches and makeup stools. Here they embellish their own paper template of a “Doilies & Pearls Oysters & Shells” beard or chunky neck jewel with the sequins, pompoms and any other colourful, shiny fashion flotsam they fancy picking out of a giant compact clam nearby. A quick snap on the “papp” (papparazzi) wall to model their bling, and they’re ready for Bush Magic, a deep immersion into Plunkett and Anna’s Australian childhood and love affair with kitsch Australiana.
In here, it’s a quieter, moodier, twighlight room of soft clicks, froggy croaks and watery splashes. At its centre, a strange “billabong” is projected down from somewhere above a bushy canopy of slender lazer-cut paper leaves and flowers. Children can sit by the “water”, or walk or skip across. At any touch, the billabong’s surface ripples and fantastic creatures; fishy, lizardy things with richly patterned Romance Was Born skins, glide, or flick away below the “water.” Somerville is understandably at a loss to explain the intricacies of this technical wonder except; “We engaged some seriously super clever developers.”
Naturally, Express Yourself is also an activity book, available at the NGV shop for $14.95
Beyond the billabong, Plunkett and Sales picked a menagerie of evocative objects to strum Aussie heartstrings. Among them, the first known illustration (late 18th century) of a kangaroo and a glamourous cockatoo feather fan, a vibrant screen-print of gumleaves by Linda Jackson, hand-knitted koala jumper by Jenny Kee, familiar pieces of unmistakeably Australian ceramics, circa 1930s, and film clips on the same tack, including Dot the Kangaroo. Artist Del Kathryn Barton’s specially commissioned work “We Shall Ride”, inspired by waratah, kangaroos, May Gibbs of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie fame and by many of the objects around the room, is mounted on Bush Magic’s main wall. “Anna, Luke and I have long shared a love of Australiana, decoration and detail,” says Barton. She was the first artist of many to collaborate with Plunkett and Sales. They imagined her elegant paintings, rendered with scribbly whimsy and impeccable, pernickity detail, would translate easily to fabric, which they did. “Del was the first artist and we’d worked with and her response to us was so open and genuine and excited, it gave us courage to approach other artists,” Sales recalls. Now, the list of Romance Was Born collaborators grows every year: “No one has ever said “No” to us,” Sales happily confides. “Which is pretty awesome!”
Back in the Rainbow Room, another long-time Romance collaborator, sculptor Kate Rhode, has created a “crazy, fantastic weird fox that’s not a fox as we know it” for Orange, one of six spectacular curved divisions including Blue, Purple, Yellow, Green, Orange, Pink and Red. This is where Plunkett and Sales intended children to look – really look – at objects in that curious, probing, fascinated way that children do. A sculpture, painting, photo, toy, jewellery, lavish Romance gown, crazy fox-like creature, or even a simple Milo tin; dozens of colour-linked inspirations are mounted high on the walls or, if small and delicate, set low at eye level in museum cases, to spur the creative urge to DO something, MAKE something, MARK this moment. At a bank of ipads/digital tablets, set for young artists on low benches, they can draw the object that most compels them, then email it home and share it later with classmates or on social media. “It’s lots of fun,” says Kate Ryan, the NGV’s Truby and Florence Williams curator of children’s programs, “But it’s seriously redefining what the gallery does and how we can make it relevant and inspiring for new audiences. It’s an exciting time for everyone.”
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
