SALA Festival: Robert Hannaford and Alison Mitchell Hannaford unite outside of Riverton for first time
Why acclaimed husband and wife artists Robert Hannaford and Alison Mitchell Hannaford will do something they’ve never done before at this year’s South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival.
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They’ve been married for 18 years and visual artists for a combined century, producing hundreds of world-class works between them.
But Robert Hannaford and Alison Mitchell Hannaford have only ever publicly displayed their art together in their home town of Riverton, in the state’s mid north.
Until now.
Hannaford, 80, and Mitchell Hannaford, 62, will collaborate for the first time outside of Riverton at this year’s South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival with a joint exhibition – Coffee, Turps and Devotion.
Presented by Hill Smith Art Advisory, it will be on display at The Light Room at ILA – Adelaide’s Centre of Immersive Light and Art in Light Square.
While Hannaford and Mitchell Hannaford are independent artists – they regularly create alongside one another, be it in their home studios or on location.
“Some of our loveliest times together have been on road trips, when we go and paint the same thing,” Mitchell Hannaford says.
“In this exhibition, there’s a couple of little paintings where we’re putting up the same scene.”
They include Mitchell Hannaford’s watercolour and an oil painting by Hannaford of Butlers Beach in Marion Bay.
The couple also make pilgrimages to the Royal Adelaide Show, where the chooks and cows become their subjects.
“It’s a terrific opportunity to draw because the animals are in captivity so they don’t move so much and you can concentrate on your work,” Hannaford says.
“I love the cow shed. You can sit in there all day … it’s the same every day, so you can return to it the next day.
“It’s just a wonderful opportunity to have living models in front of you … if the animal moves, you can draw the one next door and then they come back into the same position sometimes.”
For Mitchell Hannaford, being in the same field as Hannaford means they share an understanding.
“It’s nice to be working with someone next to you who isn’t hurrying you up to go because they’re bored,” she says.
“The other person is also concentrating and painting and when it comes to painting a landscape you can do about a two, two-and-a-half hour block before the sun has changed totally so that it’s not paintable in the same light … you are constrained by that, and we are both constrained by the same thing.
“We tend to do our own thing (but) it’s nice to sit back afterwards and perhaps look and comment on each other’s work … there’s a certain amount of respect that goes with that, you have to be asked …”
Mitchell Hannaford’s insights are always welcome.
“Alison has got such a good eye that I have learned a lot from her comments; she has affected my work positively,” Hannaford says.
“I hope it comes out in the exhibition, how we are stimulated by the presence of each other.
“We talk about our work together and it has been a great inspiration to me working side-by-side with Alison. It’s just better and that’s why we’re having this exhibition together.”
To many, Hannaford’s choice of a bag of apples as the subject of his major work for the exhibit might appear somewhat curious.
The award-winning artist, who was a political cartoonist for The Advertiser in the 1960s, has painted many famous portraits, after all.
They include that of former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, soprano Dame Joan Sutherland, Indigenous leader Lowitja O’Donoghue and cricketer Donald Bradman.
Sculptures of The Don and Queen Elizabeth II have also made him a household name.
However, Hannaford’s oil on canvas Apples in a plastic bag is anything but ordinary.
It’s so realistic, there’s a temptation to break open the plastic bag, steal an apple and take a bite. Except the bag itself is a thing of beauty.
There was, Hannaford says, a “sheer delight” in painting the shine on it and the fruit inside.
“But I can say that about all of my work,” he says, before elaborating: “I honed my painting abilities from painting portraits … the necessity to get it right, to honour the person you’re painting carries over into everything I paint.
“The apple that I paint is a portrait of that apple, I want to capture the unique, the character of what I paint, whether it’s an apple or a human.
“To paint an apple, or still life, is very much the same in the actual process as painting a person.”
Hannaford’s focus on Apples in a plastic bag also makes sense when Mitchell Hannaford explains Coffee, Turps and Devotion was borne out of the life they have created together, their devotion “to the craft of painting” and one another. And their dog Ruskin, named after the English art critic John Ruskin and the street in which Mitchell Hannaford’s grandmother lived.
The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and sculptures.
Mitchell Hannaford, who is known for her still lifes that celebrate domestic objects, has chosen to include her recent works.
Hannaford, who is affectionately called Alfie by family and friends, will show a mix of new and old pieces, the majority of which have not been on display before.
“I might’ve had a bit of a say in what I thought was appropriate to put in, for both of us … I don’t think Alfie really cared,” Mitchell Hannaford says of curating the exhibition.
“For Alfie, each piece is an iconic, single piece, whereas I tend to have a little bit of a narrative.
“There’s this thing now that I’m doing where I look through glass.”
Mitchell Hannaford’s “this thing” is exemplified in Impotence – butter knives, 2023, an oil on linen which made her a finalist for the STILL National Still Life Award in the same year.
The objects painted include a transparent jug half-filled with water, holding butter knives.
The artist has re-created the way in which the glass and liquid place a filter over the cutlery.
And in another work, Unlemon revisited, she shows how a bottle of water warps the lemons sitting behind it.
While their style is distinctly different, both artists use old master techniques, describing their practice as “painting from life”.
Mitchell Hannaford explains that means they “paint from the thing itself”, rather than from a photograph, or by the transfer method – in which an image is projected on to the canvas to assist the artist.
“Painting from life is just a direct painting approach … from either a scene, still life or a model,” Mitchell Hannaford says.
“We just go about painting in a traditional way that has been happening for millennium.”
Hannaford agrees painting from a photograph does not compare to the real thing, direct observation of the subject.
“To paint it from life, you’re aware of everything – the temperature, time passing, atmosphere – all these things are not recognised in a photograph,” he says.
“A photograph is a still moment in time, whereas to paint from life you’ve got the full gamut of life and all your senses are involved, not just your eyes.
“But that doesn’t mean that we always paint exactly what we see. You use your imagination. I love to draw anything that crosses my mind.”
With the art in their SALA exhibition available for purchase, Mitchell Hannaford has “mixed feelings” about selling her pieces.
“There are some paintings that I would have perhaps liked to have held on to, but it’s always nice to know someone does want that painting, wants to live with it and appreciate it,” she says.
Hannaford is more practical about sales.
“It puts bread on our table, which is necessary,” he says adding: “It brings our work into the public gaze and it is so important to get that feedback. And SALA is a great organisation. It brings art to the people and I’m all for that.” ■
TURNING THE TIDE
By Paul Ashenden
It’s a long-lost occupation that most of today’s population would have little idea even existed – let alone what it entailed.
But when Adelaide artist and researcher Sue Kneebone, 62, saw the term “tide waiter” listed on archival papers for her great-great-grandfather, her interest was piqued.
She discovered the occupation was essentially a customs officer of the 18th and 19th centuries – someone tasked with boarding ships to check incoming goods.
The job of her forebear on the remote Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, to her, offered an insight into the era of British imperialism and colonial conflict and the mass migration of people of that time.
When she learned it was the occupation of an ancestor she knew little about, she took herself down a rabbit warren of discovery that will culminate with a display that will debut at this year’s South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival.
Her exhibition The Last Tide Waiter, at Adelaide Central Gallery in Glenside from July 29, is the latest iteration of two decades of research and named after the occupation of her great-great-grandfather Christopher Kneebone.
The exhibition reimagines a warehouse of forgotten goods and strange regalia reflecting the social and environmental repercussions, both historic and contemporary, of imperial conflict, commerce and trade.
Christopher Kneebone was listed as working as a tide waiter in Port Louis, Mauritius, in the 1870s. His father Thomas (Sue’s great-great- great-grandfather) was a quarter master in the British army in India.
“I have gained some further insights into the broader geopolitical reasons, including the ruthless story of the East India Company, that led to three generations of one family sailing from one colonial maritime port to another during the 1800s,” Sue Kneebone says.
“In exploring this wider picture, I have also gained a deeper insight into the systematic processes of conflict, commerce, colonialism, indentured labour and trade. Visiting historic ports, forts and other coastal sites in Mauritius, Britain and India has also deepened my understanding of how these places were used or transformed through colonial force in the interests of imperial trade and expansion.”
The legacy of conflict, commerce and trade are reflected through the concocted artefacts for The Last Tide Waiter, an exhibition Kneebone says can be experienced “as an archaic maritime warehouse where the past shadows the present”.
She has created the exhibition using the process of bricolage – assembling a diverse range of materials often reclaimed from salvage stores, and not typically used in art.
The result is a warehouse of forgotten goods and strange regalia she says reflects “the social and environmental repercussions of imperialism as an unending current circulating across the oceans into the present”.
She describes her work, primarily in assemblage and montage, as Aussie Gothic and it has traditionally been dominated by black and grey. But she has added a dash of colour for The Last Tide Waiter, a combination of at least 50 different works including drums, banners, tea chests, wharfie vests, feral bones, camel skulls and trumpets made of funnels.
There’s also three video screens – two with underwater footage from personal snorkelling expeditions both in SA and in Mauritius. The third shows rolling footage of the moon – to recognise the lunar impact on our tides.
Below the moon screen sits a desk – handed down by another ancestor, a sea captain who once lived in Port Adelaide – which acts as a tide waiter’s bench and is adorned with sea charts and maps. The oceanic, coastal and military feel of the exhibition is enhanced by a “cacophony of sound” she recorded at a festival in Fort Kochi in Kerala, India.
“The whole thing has this sort of weird, quasi-military warehouse feel – it’s sort of this presence of the past in the present,” she says.
“I have reassembled found materials and objects to create a strange visual tension that lies somewhere between order and chaos.”
The chaos, she says, is reflective of the environmental and geopolitical state of the world today.
“I feel like it’s quite timely, what I’m doing now, because it really is reflecting the past and the present – the past is sort of collapsing into the present,” she says. “My work is a cautionary tale and it’s a way for me to process what’s happening. So, it is sort of a social commentary.”
Kneebone says collections and art such as hers helps people, who have become increasingly visually literal, comprehend the stories and lessons of both past and present.
Her family tree also includes forebears who arrived in South Australia in 1836 on the three-masted barque Africaine – just the seventh settler ship to arrive in the new colony and the first to deliver immigrants to Holdfast Bay.
So her family’s history, and her work, is tightly intertwined with that of the state even though Kneebone herself, SALA’s featured artist for 2025, was born in Sydney. She moved to SA when she was three.
She started her adult life studying a science degree but dropped out, enjoyed a gap year in Europe before returning to finish her science course and dabble in business before picking up a job in Melbourne in the very unartistic field of health services planning. But living with arts students in Liverpool had whet her appetite for a life in a more creative industry and she won entry the Victorian College of the Arts where she completed honours and masters degrees before winning a scholarship to complete a PhD at University of SA in 2007.
Her 40,000-word PhD included an examination of the history of Yardea Station in the state’s Gawler Ranges, 570km northwest of Adelaide, which her great-grandfather Arthur Bailey managed from 1903 to 1916.
The thesis looked at the impact of white settlement on both the environment and Indigenous population and culminated with the 2010 exhibition Naturally Disturbed at UniSA’s SA School of Art Gallery.
That exhibition included digital images and mixed media installations, alongside selected Aboriginal artefacts and archives from the South Australia Museum.
“Through that history I understood my own family history and connections to South Australia going right back to 1836,” she says.
“I got to understand the ramifications and the depth of what that meant as a colonial settler colony and I got to critique postcolonial perspectives.”
“I’m very much interested in the impact of past colonial practices, stuff we’re still dealing with today and the impact on the environment.”
Her PhD and subsequent work also looks at the social impact of colonisation and the dispossession of First Nations people.
“It was a way to really connect in a personal way to that history which we weren’t, in my generation, taught at schools,” she says. “So I just was able to really re-read Australian texts and histories from that perspective.”
As the SALA featured artist, Kneebone and her work are the subject of an in-depth study in the Wakefield Press book Unnatural Causes, which includes essays from curators Ella Freak and Andrew Purvis and artists James Tylor and Nicole Clift. The book will be launched at SALA’s official opening on July 31.
Kneebone and the essay writers will lead a forum in the Adelaide Central School of Art lecture theatre on August 16.
Another exhibition, Way Too Wild, has been on show in the Art Gallery of SA Studio since May and she will also have works in the gallery’s Elder Wing as part of SALA. Her piece Hardboiled, a tin-pressed miner’s hat from Arizona reimagined into a candelabra, features on the cover of the SALA magazine and her works Flight of Souls and Skullthuggery will be projected nightly onto a wall in King William St in the CBD as part of a SALA in Lights display.
“I hope my works evoke both a dark and light side to draw people in to think more deeply about the stories or messages underlying my works,” she says. “Apart from being a visual or sensory experience, I believe art can also have agency in helping to bring new perspectives in how we think or experience the world.
“I feel we need visual art more than ever to help us slow down and make sense of the challenging and uncertain times we live in.”
Kneebone says she is honoured to be the featured artist for the 28th year of SALA, a festival that will showcase more than 10,500 artists across more than 700 exhibitions and events in more than 600 venues.
“SALA is unique in that it’s one time where it brings all the artists together and highlights what’s happening in South Australia – and I don’t think there’s a platform like it anywhere else in Australia,” she says.
“You’re aware (as an artist) you’re part of a big network of people working away, which is great, but to see the amount and the effort. It’s pretty unique and special and pretty important to have that there for us all to aim for, so we can come out of the woodwork and share what we have.” ■
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