Lighting Exhibitions for Preventative Conservation and Exhibition

One of the most frequent comments from visitors most galleries receive is “You should turn the lights up!”. It is often quite frustrating for visitors to come and view works of art on display only to find that it can sometimes be difficult to see them with the executed lighting. Why is everything so dark? The colours are not being shown to their full advantage! My selfie looks like a vampire!

The Bendigo Art Gallery is a rich source of inspiration for curators, researchers and lovers of fashion and art.  Delving further into our decorative arts collection reveals a fascinating but forgotten object, the chatelaine, which once held an essential place within women’s lives.  Donated as part of an extensive decorative arts bequest by Jean and Arthur Newson in 1977 our chatelaine is best described as both a domestic tool and a finely crafted piece of jewellery broadly popular from the 17^th Century until the early 20^th Century.

As is true for many characters in timeless fables, the beautiful name Clytie belies a tragic back-story. In a tale from Greek mythology, the water nymph Clytie’s obsessive and unrequited love for the sun god Helios sees her turned into a sunflower, fated to forever follow the sun’s chariot across the sky. Named by her eccentric aunt and guardian, the Castlemaine-born artist Christian Waller (1894–1954), the ceramic artist Klytie Pate (1912–2010) was anything but a tragic figure.

Bendigo Art Gallery Curator, Clare Needham in conversation with contemporary artist Jahnne Pasco-White the 2019 winner of Bendigo Art Gallery’s prestigious Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. 

Clare: Your winning work messmates 1, is fleshy and visceral. Can you talk a bit about the relationship of this work and the title messmates to the body?