My work is about how it feels to be a woman. And because we are more spirit than flesh, I paint woman as Goddess.

I have always been an artist. I went to the Alexander Mackie Art School in Sydney, now COFA for my BA Fine Arts.
I had many small exhibitions of charcoal and pastel drawings, interspersed with having three children. I changed my name twice – I used to be Patsy Bennett and Patsy Billy.
And then 13 years ago I decided to concentrate on painting – oil painting. I stopped exhibiting as I wanted to wait until my paintings were as good as my drawings. At last they are.
I am the art teacher at Leichhardt Primary School during the day, and at night and on the weekends, I paint.
Twenty five years ago I started practicing Iyengar Yoga and Buddhist meditation. Twelve years ago I included a Qigong practice. I am unsure as to how much this has influenced my paintings, but when I am painting I feel very honest.
I mainly do portraits – they are nearly all self portraits. Spending so much time in meditation familiarises me with an “inner sense” – and it is this that I focus on describing when I am painting.  The image looking back at me needs to portray this interior landscape.
The colours are intense, extreme and yet subtle, chosen just for the sheer joy of being beautiful. The face is often broken into intricate combinations of patterns in unexpected colours.
And the eyes reach into yours. Each painting has its own personality- when walking into a room and looking into the eyes you feel a response, and over time you realise that a relationship has grown between you both.
Everything I paint is about how I feel as a human, a woman, a spiritual being. I want to describe how every day is a search for beauty, a search for grace and for patience with difficulties, and just what a challenge at times normal day to day living can be. And yet there is beauty to be found and to be grateful for: real beauty. This is what I want to paint.
My main influences are Beckmann, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, West African sculpture and then Beckmann again…..

            -  Patsy Chingwile

Description of key works – Patsy Chingwile

Unforgettable

Oil painting on canvas, 800×1000 mm

I found a photo of Kelly Macdonald in the Sunday paper and was transfixed. Her skin is so luminous. I found her irresistible, I had to paint her! She is proud and yet restrained. And all her beauty is supported, encased by her dress- as if she is a magnificent bunch of flowers in a fabulous  vase. I wanted to capture that feeling of being beautiful, vulnerable, powerful and fragile all at the same time.

Lakshmi, Goddess of Abundance

Oil painting on linen 1200x1760mm

It was a labour of love painting this traditional Indian Goddess. Every area of life is symbolically represented here in this classical composition – she is understood to be the provider of good fortune in health, wealth, happiness and all things beautiful. She emanates good vibes. I love it that she is almost life size. Standing in front of her I feel blessed.

I Can’t Stop Loving You

Oil painting on canvas, 640x900mm

This painting is as the title suggests – all about the feeling. The stylised face and shoulders, described in a mosaic of delicate crystalline shards is set in a beautiful peaceful landscape, under a soft pink sky. The mood is reflective, gentle and yet, because she is broken up into a geometric display of colour there is a suggestion of contained turbulence under the surface – a change is coming.

Moonlight and Love Songs are never Out of Date

Oil painting on canvas, 500x465mm

This painting just painted itself. I didn’t even sketch her first- she just pushed herself out. She was there in front of me, demanding to be seen. The word that keeps coming up for me is “instinct”. That was how she came about, and it is instinct that she is expressing. The colours are raw, uncompromising, and yet gorgeous, as is she. Her body is extreme, the shapes almost ugly, and yet its awkwardness somehow cradles, even exalts, such a strong sensuality, that an even deeper beauty is expressed. It is as if her nakedness is awful and glorious at one and the same time. Intelligence, passion, honesty, suffering and understanding – it is all of this that she brings to her loving and it is all of this that she wants to be loved with in return.

For more information or larger images please contact Greg Shapley on (02) 9563-6218 or email vergegallery@usu.usyd.edu.au.

For ISEA2013, Verge Gallery hosts three very different works all concerning the inescapable cycle of decay and renewal. Ian Haig’s ‘Night of the Living Hippy’ presents a reanimated corpse (perhaps real… perhaps not…) in part to comment on the ability of current media and media technologies to dig up the dead past, sift through its entrails and present zombie-like spectacles.

Ian Haig’s ‘Night of the Living Hippy’

‘Downwind’ by Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris investigates the human plume which carries with it not only each person’s signature odour but also technological architectures and fragrances of our civilization and time. Like Haig’s dead hippy, this work is about experiencing, and making new sense of the decay (in this case scent) that is left behind.

‘Downwind’ by Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris

Nandita Kumar’s ‘eLEMenT: EARTH’ is an interactive diorama which visualizes a future where nature and technology are in- sync. Perhaps representing the most seamless integration of decay and renewal, this work is about life cycles that are as technological as they are ‘natural’ (to the point where this dichotomy may no longer make sense).

Nandita Kumar’s ‘eLEMenT: EARTH’

ISEA2013 is an international symposium of electronic art and ideas that will take place in Sydney, Australia. Presented by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and held alongside Vivid Sydney – a festival of light, music and ideas – ISEA2013 will showcase the best media artworks from around the world and provide a platform for the lively exchange of future-focused ideas.

The 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art will comprise engaging presentations and thought-provoking speakers and discussions. Join us for informed dialogues, dynamic debates, enlightening keynotes and experimental incursions into the extensive and diverse practice of electronic media arts.

For more information please see: http://www.isea2013.org/events/verge-gallery/ or contact Greg Shapley on 9563-6218 or vergegallery@usu.usyd.edu.au

Below is the catalogue for the Sydney leg of the exhibition:

TRANSLATIONS Catalogue

Join us on Friday May 24, at either 7 or 8pm for a multi-media experiment constructed especially for the Head On photography festival.

Beyond a Thousand Words – Experimental Slide Night at Verge Gallery

We all know the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. Verge Gallery’s slide night will take pictures (submitted by the University of Sydney’s student body), combine narration, music, performance art and some theatre, creating a truly memorable event.

In the mix will be Zsuzsanna Ihar (with Brigitte Gerges), who will be sleeping throughout the show but not because it’s boring! She is inviting the audience to join her in ‘slumber world’ and interact between the two realities of consciousness and unconsciousness (visually enhanced with an overlay of surreal imagery).

Axel Powrie and Jack Reilly will be dueling with sound, using their own personal musical styles – Jazz and Indie respectively, to play off one another in a challenging battle for musical supremacy.

Also on the night, theatre writers, Tim Hunt, Dylan Batty and Annika Elise Blau, are scripting an experimental narrative that explores concepts of light and dark – good against evil – white vs. wholemeal, from humorous and complex perspectives.

Cecilia White will be exploring the light shed by knowledge and cultural awareness in her work ‘The Lover Circles Her Own Heart’.

This evening is FREE and food/refreshments provided.

Image provided by Brigitte Gerges.

University of Sydney students and alumni who are Access members are invited to submit for the USU OASIS Sculpture Prize. The winning entry will be exhibited in front of Verge Gallery in the Jane Foss Russell Plaza from February 2014 to January 2015. Entry is free. Size, durability and OHS requirements apply – see bottom of page.

Verge Gallery fronts on to Jane Foss Russell Plaza. Currently barren and windswept, it is something of a concrete desert. The winning sculpture should be a sight for sore eyes – something that will disrupt this landscape, being playful, entertaining and thought provoking. To this end the inaugural theme for the prize is “OASIS”.

Entries can be submitted from May 6 to June 30 2013 online. From these entries finalists will be announced on August 1 and given $200 each to create a to-scale table top size model of their work. These must be submitted by October 1. The finalists will be on display concurrently with the Verge Festival with the winner announced at the Verge Awards night, October 10. The winner will be awarded $2,000 and have until February 28 2014 to create the work, which will be displayed for up to a year.

Please note that your work must be suitable for the long term, weather-proof, able to survive in a robust public environment, and accord to OH&S regulations. It must be delivered in pieces no larger than 1 cubic metre, be secured on a concrete base and be immovable. We reserve the right to refuse unsuitable or dangerous works. The Judges decision will be final. No correspondence will be entered into.

‘Culturally Bound Syndromes’ by Vilma Bader from instructions by Aleksander Bohnak.

‘Translations’: A Sydney Sacramento Exchange is a combined project between Sydney’s Verge Gallery, and the similarly named Verge Art Center in Sacramento. The project explores how communication through the internet can be misinterpreted by an individual’s cultural and social background. Although sharing a name, these art spaces are separated by oceans and vast distances. Perhaps a metaphor for a gulf in understanding, these chasms, revealed as misunderstandings and misinterpretations, uncover the myth of the internet as a tool that eradicates distance and difference.

Seven artists in Sydney have been blindly paired with seven artists in Sacramento. These pairs have swapped instructions for an artwork which they create with minimal input from corresponding artists. Each of the artists have been challenged to realise artworks in ways that represent the original artists’ intentions, but this is an impossible ask. Artists will bring their own skills, cultures and life experiences to the work, creating a hybridised form.

For instance, Sacramento artist, Alek Bohnak, instructed Sydney artist, Vilma Bader, to “Gradually cover…your actual self…with something that restricts your ability to move and makes you feel restricted or bound and reflects a state of feeling restricted in your life”. Her response was Culturally Bound Syndromes; a performance-based work in which a ‘patient’ is wrapped up by a ‘doctor’ into a roll of over two hundred and fifty metres of psychological disorders. A fundamental recognition of marginalised and silenced people is that all acts of naming are also acts of imperialism (as recently as the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association still classified homosexuality as a mental illness). Language is intimately tied up with issues of possession and power. In the context of this work, it is something oppressively inscribed on the subject, making ‘her’ intelligible and therefore an object of control.

In another example, Allana McAfee, has been instructed by her Sacramento counterpart, Ianna Frisby, to become a spy, using film, photography and audio to surveil the (Sydney) Verge Gallery, employing ‘moles’ (gallery volunteers) to extract information. To achieve this McAfee will use remote control toy vehicles armed with cameras and audio visual equipment, hi-tech computer surveillance software, and low-tech spy clichés (such as the window washer with the button hole camera and other classic ‘Get Smart’ devices).

‘Translations: A Sydney–Sacramento Exchange’ opens on Thursday May 9, 6pm and runs until May 31.

Working Title is a collaborative exhibition developed through partnerships between students from Eora College and Sydney College of the Arts. The artists present us with a shared expression of what is our varied and ever-changing contemporary Australian cultural identity. Participants have employed a variety of media including painting, sculpture and video.

Opening night is Thursday 18 April and the exhibition will run until 3 May.

On Opening Night Walangari Karntawarra will perform a Welcome to Country ceremony and play the Didgeridoo.

Image: Untitled, by Stella Logan, acrylic on canvas.

Australia’s largest photo festival and the world’s second largest festival, The Head On Festival is here again and The Verge gallery will be presenting a multimedia extravaganza to celebrate.

“Beyond a Thousand Words” will be for one night only on Friday May 24.

There are two ways to get involved:

• If you are a photographer, simply email us ONE photo on ‘LIGHT’. It can be anything at all as long as it fits with the theme of ‘LIGHT’ (so all of the images fit together, please make them hi-res, and landscape format). These will be projected one after the other on the night.
• The other way to be involved is to write, make music or act. We need people who can stitch these images sent in by photographers together into a CAPTIVATING, ELECTRIFYING, ENERGETIC and EXPLODING EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE. If you want to be involved we’d love to hear from you!

Photographer’s – simply send your image to vergegallery@usu.usyd.edu.au by May 4.

Others (writers, musicians, actors) – please email vergegallery@usu.usyd.edu.au and tell us what you do. We’re also going to have a meeting on Wednesday April 17, 3pm (please indicate in your email if you can make it!).

CALL OUT ARTISTS:

You are invited to contribute to a SCASS (Sydney College of the Arts Student Society) exhibition at Verge Gallery, coinciding with the USU’s 2013 Indigenous Week Festival.

Participants from Eora College and SCA will work collaboratively to theme and title the exhibition, from the conceptual starting point of issues in contemporary Indigenous art. Participants are then invited to respond to the theme in any chosen medium. Works will be exhibited at Verge Gallery from April 18 to May 3.

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are encouraged to participate. We look forward to expressions of interest!

For more information about the festival checkout:

http://www.facebook.com/UsuIndigenousFestival

For more information about the exhibition, or to express interest, please contact f.dorrell@gmail.com

Or speak to Meghan Rheynolds at Sydney College of the Arts at SCASS meetings on Wednesday’s in the SCASS office (just near Jewelry and Object design)

Applications close: Wednesday 27th March