Home is where her art is
Meet the mysterious silent partner in Tasmania’s cultural revolution.
Last year, Brigita Ozolins swung by Hobart’s Detached Artist Archive, a large private gallery then under construction, to check on her work-in-progress — a miniature, domed reading room focused on Tasmanian literature.
This sleek, miniature library with a soundscape of 42 voices reading from different texts, is filled with 2000 books about Tasmania or by Tasmanian authors. It’s an ambitious interactive installation, and it was commissioned by enigmatic cultural philanthropist Penny Clive.
Ozolins, an artist and academic, recalls how, when she dropped by her installation, Clive also was there, hard at work.
Was the wealthy arts patron poring over those Tasmanian-themed books she had helped Ozolins to track down in second-hand bookshops?
Not exactly.
Grinning widely, Ozolins tells Review: “I found Penny Clive on her hands and knees, staining the floors black.”
Clive may have bankrolled the Detached Artist Archive, a bold new four-storey gallery in the former Mercury newspaper building in central Hobart; she may own all its artworks but, Ozolins says, in essence “Penny is a very humble person”.
Architect Timothy Hill, who helped redevelop the State Library of Queensland, consulted on the old Mercury building’s conversion into an arts hub, and he agrees Clive is a “visionary” who would rather get things done than talk about them. “Penny is a results person,” he says. “If the floor needs mopping, she does it because the cleaner only comes once a week.”
Certainly, this publicity-shunning, 68-year-old grandmother — who commissioned the centrpiece “performance” of last year’s Dark Mofo festival in which artist Mike Parr was “buried alive” under a busy Hobart road — must rank as Australia’s, if not the world’s, most unconventional cultural philanthropist.
She has startled staff at her Hobart arts organisation, Detached, by turning up at work with a dead Tasmanian devil, scraped off a highway.
“Don’t worry, we’re not having roadkill for lunch,” jokes resident gallerist Michael Bugelli when I visit Detached headquarters, on a day when Clive was cooking for the team. (A dedicated conservationist, Clive delivered the carcass to scientists researching the facial tumour disease that has decimated Tasmania’s devil population.)
This is Clive’s first media interview. (In fact, an original condition of Review’s visit was that she would not speak at all or pose for photographs.) On day two of my visit, she sits at a communal lunch table shared by the gallerist, architect, artists and tradesmen who work with or for her: at Detached (and at Clive’s insistence) the electricians and builders are accorded the same status as the creatives.
Her slight frame seems swamped by her bulky black jumper and thick grey scarf, though she declares: “I call myself a builder’s labourer.” She adds later, with a shrug and a shy smile: “I am not a collector, and there is no collection … I’m just working with these artists.”
That can sound disingenuous and even perverse, given Clive owns the Detached complex, which includes four levels of permanent exhibits, a temporary exhibition and performance space, and the historic Ingle Hall, an elegant Georgian home believed to be Hobart’s oldest surviving residence.
Moreover, her art archive, which will open to the public this month — but in a typically idiosyncratic way — boasts many dazzling sculptures, paintings, installations and videos by nationally and internationally celebrated artists including Parr, Patricia Piccinini, Shaun Gladwell, Ben Quilty, Tracey Moffatt, Brook Andrew and Japan’s Chiharu Shiota.
When I first encounter her, Clive is darting between the lunch table (in what was once the Mercury’s canteen) and a commercial kitchen, bearing pots of the homemade chicken and vegetable soups she has made, and urging extra vegies on everyone. “They’re fresh and organic,” is her mantra, though she is no inner-city virtue signaller.
Warmly maternal but a woman of few words, she bought the distinctive art deco newspaper building in 2013 with her husband, the equally low-key financier Bruce Neill, who last year made the Australian Financial Review Rich List, with reputed wealth of almost $700 million.
Given that it’s the vision of one woman who has not so much a low public profile as no public profile, the Detached archive boasts works of extraordinary scale and depth. The former antiques dealer and one-time single mother to three sons has the world’s largest collection of Parrs, says Bugelli.
White Labyrinth, a virtually enclosed, featureless white maze by that artist is 100sq m and no expense was spared when it was installed: French engineers were flown to Hobart to ensure the luminescent roof lighting was exactly right.
In the archive’s pitch-black basement is a characteristically unsettling Piccinini installation; a vast field of 3000 white “plants” modelled on the female uterus. The archive also features many of Piccinini’s eerily fascinating part-human, part-animal creatures including Big Mother, a sculpture of a pale-skinned baboon breastfeeding a human baby. It has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and was inspired by an African story about a grieving baboon that kidnapped a baby girl.
Equally mesmerising, The Key in the Hand includes 180,000 keys and was created by Shiota, who was chosen to represent Japan at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Matthew Lamb, a Detached writer and researcher, says that for those few art insiders who have seen the archive, “it’s an experience like no other. They’ve been blown away by an international art experience that would be unexpected anywhere in the southern hemisphere, let alone Tasmania.”
Yet few Hobart locals know the archive exists or will get to see it: in a further reflection of its founder’s eccentric vision, when it opens to the public from June 17, a maximum of 16 visitors a day will be admitted. Lamb explains that two two-hour tours a day will be offered, each catering to eight visitors. (Each tour will cost $400 or $50 a head plus GST.)
How can 16 visitors a day be an economically viable model, even for a privately funded gallery? Says Lamb: “We don’t talk about money. This is not about the numbers. It’s about the quality of the experience.” Ozolins likens the archive to “an Aladdin’s cave of secret treasures and you need a special pass to get in”.
Meanwhile, in her quietly contrarian way, Clive insists “there is no model” for her archive. “We still don’t know what it is. We have no sense, zero sense, of what it is. At Detached, we just take stabs in the dark. We just exist. There are no rules.”
She is hoping visitors will engage deeply with the art, in a building that retains the industrial sensibility — ceilings smudged with ink, industrial-sized ink vats, and even printers’ handprints — of the publishing and printing operation it once was.
She reflects that “a building that was so integral and powerful to life in Tasmania has dissolved. The building does carry a weight of lives: lives of those that worked here … (and) of those written about, their stories.” The Mercury, now located at Salamanca Square, started publishing in Clive’s building in 1860 and in its heyday employed 600 people.
Interestingly, the landmark building retains its vertical neon sign — “Mercury: The Voice of Tasmania”. The only indication the elusive Clive and her art crew have moved in is a small sign on a side entry door, and Clive admits with a sly grin that she had to be talked into that. There is, however, a large pink flag atop the building with the message, “Nobody Belongs Here More Than You”, which was clearly not the handiwork of seasoned Mercury sub-editors.
For a woman whose only plan is to have no plan, Clive certainly has a knack for getting stuff done.
Before David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art and its poo-producing machine was up and running, she was commissioning art projects that divided public opinion but also helped transform Hobart from a poor cousin of the arts to a crucible of radical cultural experimentation.
In 2011 she commissioned a work in which Shiota burned a grand piano in the Hobart CBD for the MONA FOMA festival, then spent 10 days spinning a “vast cocoon of black thread” around its charred remains. “We copped it for weeks in the paper. We were the worst people in the world for burning a piano,” Clive says ruefully. The burned remnant of that baby grand hangs defiantly in the archive.
She also co-presented Evolution, the first major survey of Piccinini’s works shown in Tasmania. Mounted at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2009, this show featured many species-blending creatures and initially incited a backlash but went on to break attendance records. Clive reveals that it “nearly didn’t go on. When something’s challenging, it’s challenging to a lot of people. It hasn’t been easy to deliver these things.”
In keeping with her “no rules” approach, she says that in 2016, she lent her Piccinini works to Brazil’s Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, “with no loan agreement in the beginning”. That solo Piccinini show drew 1.4 million people, and became the world’s most visited contemporary exhibition that year.
Remember how Parr was entombed last year beneath Hobart’s busy Macquarie Street? For 72 hours he lived without food in an underground container as cars and trucks thundered over him. It was Clive who commissioned that project, which made headlines around the globe.
Parr returns to Hobart on Friday, in another Dark Mofo project commissioned by Detached.
He will be filmed as he paints blindfolded in an undisclosed location, and footage of the artist will be streamed into the old Mercury building. An exhibition at the undisclosed location will follow. Asked about her long collaboration with Parr — who has sewn up his face, cut himself with razors and nailed his arm to a wall in pursuit of art — Clive says simply: “You’re always learning from Mike.”
Clive admits she has obsessive tendencies: as a mature-age fine arts student, she worked 36 hours straight “resolving a painting (in the process wrecking our lounge room carpet) … the mess was phenomenal”. She is fascinated by Tasmanian fungi — and has taken 300,000 photographs of different species. “See, that is obsessive,” she says, and one can only agree. (Interestingly, several artists represented at the archive have paid homage to Clive’s fungi obsession in their sculptures and installations.)
She says her first love is the Tasmanian bush and “walking wild beaches on my own” — she is happiest when the weather is at its worst; when she is being flayed by the wind and the mercury dips into single digits.
She never did complete that fine arts degree; not because she disliked being an artist but because she liked it too much: “Two years doing my own work made me realise I had a fairly obsessive nature.” The ruined carpet “made me realise that, for me, family life and art could not coexist; I would spend all the time focusing on the art”.
From the early 2000s, she started buying art. “I made an offer to TMAG to buy them 10 contemporary works of their choice. This wasn’t realised, and I decided to buy the works.”
In 2006, she bought a sandstone church in Hobart’s CBD, not far from the archive, and turned it into a public gallery. There, she commissioned a performance piece by Parr, who spent 36 hours immobilised under a tilted stage, with only his head poking through. She also has an ongoing relationship with the piano-incinerating Shiota. The Japanese artist’s The Key in the Hand was hailed as a standout work at the 2015 Venice Biennale — she had filled a room with hundreds of metres of nets made from red wool, two wooden fishing boats and more than 50,000 keys. The effect was of a dense red sky raining keys.
“There were many offers for Chiharu’s installation,” says Bugelli, “including from some big fish.” It went to Clive, who has installed this powerful yet delicate work in its full glory in Hobart: this iteration features 180,000 keys — about 130,000 more than the Venice version. “The room had to be re-engineered (with new ceiling beams added) to hold the weight of the keys,” says Bugelli. It then took Shiota’s team six weeks to install it.
Clive also has encouraged Tasmanian artists to work at scale. A six-room installation by locals Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers is focused on a fictional, obsessive collector who keeps his own teeth, urine and a perfumery of about 150 scents. It was 14 years in the making and is still being added to. For her solo project, Motherboard, Walsh spent two years carving her wall-sized tribute to an earlier generation of DIY computers. It includes 60 intricate circuit boards, and even the computer wire is cleverly rendered in wood.
The Tasmanian artists I meet — Meijers, Walsh and Ozolins — are grateful for the opportunity to be shown alongside national and international art stars. But what about that curious 16-a-day visitor limit? Meijers says the archive “is going to be accessible in a new way we are not used to; a model probably more understood internationally”.
She says Walsh’s MONA and Clive’s complex reflect how “private enterprise in Tasmania is reinventing the model of what an art museum can be”.
Given how she is drawn to out-there art, it seems counterintuitive that Clive is also a classical music fan: she has collaborated with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Detached’s current artist-in-residence is Allison Bell, a Tasmanian-born opera singer who has had a notable career in Europe, performing with Bolshoi Opera and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Bell was desperate for a career break after almost 25 years of touring and performing, and Clive stepped in, offering her an artist-in-residency gig “without any expectations”. With tears pricking her eyes, Bell says “you feel like you’ve been on your own your entire life”, and that Clive has given her “a chance to breathe” in the home state she escaped as a teenage singing student.
Clive, a keen environmentalist, has financed significant scientific research. She visits Lord Howe Island regularly, where she hits the beaches by 6am in search of shearwaters whose digestive systems are being harmed by ocean-borne plastics. Here, she works alongside scientist Jennifer Lavers, whose groundbreaking research she sponsors.
Although she grew up in the small Tasmanian town of New Norfolk, Clive was “exposed to art from an early age”. Her grandfather made woodblocks and collected and wrote about art, while her father, an industrial chemist, was involved with the New Norfolk Players amateur theatre company. Her mother ran the New Norfolk Red Cross and had been to art school. “She delivered magazines and books to the Royal Derwent Hospital (for the mentally ill) … and every Thursday (patients named) Madge, Molly and Mary would visit our house.”
Clive worked from the age of 18 and in 1996 she sold her antiques and importation business. Today, she and Neill own two up-market restaurants: Franklin, which sits alongside the Detached complex, and Peppermint Bay Hotel at Woodbridge.
Two of Clive’s three grown sons, Sergei and Dimitri Nester, work with Detached. Sergei works on electronics and the website, while Dimitri is an apprentice electrician who admits he has trouble defining as art some of the more radical works his mother champions.
The cultural patron says she started “gathering” art because she felt too many “temporary exhibitions were being lost. It is years of an artist’s work that is gone in three months, and didn’t really add up.” The archive is designed to give such works a permanent home.
Hill says refurbishing the old Mercury building has been a more “radically” collaborative project than most architects encounter, given the extensive input of Clive and her tradesmen. “It’s simultaneously very efficient and inefficient,” he says.
Mark Young, a tradesman universally known as Skinny, hangs the artworks (a job usually left to curators) but also fixes leaks. “Skinny is key; he is very key,” says Hill.
Clive is known for trying things out before committing to them: she might cut a hole in a wall, then cover it up; paint a wall red, then go over it in another colour. She says of this: “It’s a challenge. We never know how it will end up. We just take these risks.”
Hill says wryly: “Not many architects are going to breeze along with clients and builders who have better ideas or other ideas. The idea is unconventional. The way we have done it is unconventional.”
The architect says Clive has avoided the public eye because she “is determined to make sure the attention is on the vision”. While the old Mercury building has been transformed in an unusual fashion, the architect has no doubt “it is a gift that it is being used in a civic way”.
Clive’s approach may be atypical, but her collection is astonishing, her team is “tight” and, Hill jokes, “Everyone knows what’s going on because of that bloody lunch”.
Tours of the Detached Artist Archive Hobart begin on June 17. Mike Parr’s Towards a Black Square, performed as part of Dark Mofo, will be livestreamed on June 7 at the old Mercury building.
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