A Castlemaine artist’s work has been purchased by the Bendigo Art Gallery.
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Andrew Goodman’s Untitled (afternoon Tea 2188), was commissioned as part of the gallery’s ‘New Histories’ exhibition.
The piece is a re-imagination of the oil on canvas Afternoon Tea, painted in 1888 by Emma Minnie Boyd.
The 1888 painting depicts two women taking tea in a drawing room.
Asked to respond, Goodman wanted to explore both the atmosphere of female empowerment during the period, and the ambiguity within Boyd’s painting.
The women could be trapped within the suffocating world of the Victorian home, or they could be enjoying the privacy of their own space.
“I was thinking about this sort of time in early modernism when there was this great optimism for the new world,” Goodman said.
“Either they could be in this space of freedom, or it’s a representation of the oppression in the current society.”
The result of his reflections is an imposing three by two metre digital print, depicting two women looking out over a nebula.
Like Boyd’s paining, the story of the women in Goodman’s work is ambiguous.
The image is influenced by Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a 1915 science fiction work which imagines a society of women. The idyll is shattered by the coming of three male explorers.
“I was thinking how it might be different if the explorers that had come were women rather than men,” Goodman said.
“Possibly these are these two women, 200 years in the future… they’ve gone and explored the whole universe, or possibly these are adventurers, feminist explorers from outer space, who’ve come in.”
Boyd’s Morning Tea was the first work by a woman artist to be purchased by the gallery. In this sense, it plays into the idea behind ‘New Histories’.
Curator Jessica Bridgfoot paired Goodman with Boyd’s work.
“The idea of the exhibition is to open up that colonial male telescope and bring in some new voices, tell the stories that weren’t told,” she said.