In the lead up to the Bendigo Art Gallery’s 130th celebrations, visitors will begin to see works being hung which may not have been on display for several years. One such work is Sally Smart’s Phantom (limb) Tree, which was acquired in 2008.
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Sally Smart is one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists.
She is known for creating large-scale collages from painted felt and other materials applied directly to one or more walls.
Her wall assemblages often comprise of silhouettes of figures, objects, and architectural structures, are narrative and sometimes surreal, layered with philosophical references to identity, feminism, psychology, literature, Australian culture and more.
Smart graduated from the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide, and earned an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.
She was also the first female artist to be elected a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria.
Bendigo Art Gallery has a long history with Smart, presenting Shadow Farm, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in 2001 and organised a subsequent tour to various interstate venues.
The gallery also commissioned Smart to create a work for the exhibition Your Move: Australian Artists Play Chess in 2010.
This exhibition included works by Australian artists working across a diverse range of media all responding to the game of chess.
Sally Smart is one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists.
- Tansy Curtin
Phantom (limb) Tree was exhibited in Decoy Nest, Postmasters Gallery, New York, in September 2008.
This multi-layered work is a collage of textile, paint and other mixed media pinned directly to the wall.
Tree branches and human limbs are intertwined alluding to notions of memory, loss and regrowth.
Smart says: “This series of work has developed from my long-term interest in representations of the tree, with reference to contemporary and historical models, namely the tree house, family tree, tree of life and the tree of knowledge.
“Most recently my thinking has been organised around literal and metaphorical iconography of the tree and pressing ecological concerns with a tree as a symbolic stand-in for nature … In thinking about the idea of a decoy (masking, camouflage and metamorphosis) I began to draw connections to my art practice, in the strategies I used in conveying and creating meaning. [in this work] dissected parts are examined and reconstructions are made for explanations.
“Inevitably the conclusion is like a puzzle-picture: a maze of fugitive parts; tree parts become human parts, and body parts become abstract.”
