Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition | Adelaide Fringe 2022 review

The professionalism evident in the works shows how seriously this show is taken as a launch pad to public recognition by artists.

Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2022. XO by Samuel Matthewman.

2022 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition

Visual Arts

Rating: *****

ACE Open at West Village

Until March 19

Top graduates of visual arts training institutions in South Australia have the unique privilege of being brought together in an exhibition at SA’s overarching Helpmann Academy, the academy generously funded by Adelaide arts patrons.

This year 27 artists are in the exhibition and the professionalism evident in the works shows how seriously it is taken as a launch pad to public recognition by artists.

It features a preponderance of three-dimensional works, some playfully capturing memories, like Camilla Fitzgerald’s fast-selling ceramic gelati with their glossy fruity scoops that you can nearly taste, or Catrina Leske’s little village of balsa houses decorated in poker work, a miniature world to show off her silverware including tiny chairs made to scale.

Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2022. Just Desserts by Camille Fitzgerald.

There are conceptual works: from the ritual of Sydelle Mullen videos shaving her long locks to make and display the crocheted fabric of her hair, or the eerie viewer-activated pedestrian crossing lights of Bianca Hoffrichter.

Politically more accented is Rosemary Helmis’s heaped pile of rubbish: disposable coffee cups, readable newspaper pages (“recycling is a load of rubbish”) and garden taps, all made of unfired clay slips that are collapsing under the slow drip from a bucket of blue-dyed liquid, a technical marvel.

In Samuel Matthewman’s elegant construction XO, two pairs of crossed arms, male and female, impeccably cast in clay and bound with cotton cord to form an impossible orb, attempts to bring together his equally unlikely diverse fascinations for art and acrobatics.

Among the more two-dimensional works is Leslie Matthews’ Between Being and Becoming, nine tiny sharply abstracted, organic, absorbing pearlescent gouaches that stand out in their small dark boxlike frames.

For the love of technique though, the graphite pencil work of Asha Southcombe’s Marker, a depiction of an old tree trunk wrapped with fencing wire and spinning out into exotic mapping, is quiet testimony to the calibre of these emerging artists.

These are just some of the highlights that point to the way the Helpmann Academy itself is causing the standard of exhibition to evolve over its many years of support for emerging artists.