Reflections

Firstly, the plurality of the title <abstractions> was intended to suggest the multiplicity of implications through which the creative processes of the artists involved could be manifested in the range of artistic styles and traditions encompassed by the project, and hopefully, to reveal another level of cross-cultural potentiality worthy of critical examination.

Selfishly, from my own point of view, I was keen to see how the work of an artists as diverse as Julie Gough and Phaptawan Suwannakudt would force us as viewers to consider the rubric of <abstractions> as casting a new light on creative processes, their form and content, and the divination of meanings derived from cross-cultural similarities and differences. Abstract art, it seemed, elicits such specific cultural identification with Western Modernist culture of the twentieth century, that it is almost too culturally insensitive (imperialist?, colonialist?) to be applied to the arts of other cultures. "Abstract Aboriginal Art", for instance, now offered as a potential art-historical category, is still considered politically and conceptually problematic, as if art-for-art's sake or abstract ideas and practices was alien to the culture of indigenous Australians. On the other hand, if the word 'abstract' is considered as a verb, the limitations of its canonical referents within a globalised modernity may be put to one side in favour of the implications of its processual commonalities across widely different cultural traditions and practices.

Nigel curated Julie Gough's works