Interiors: Margaret Olley, Grace Cossington Smith, Cressida Campbell

Interiors make us ponder the power of objects to evoke life, and the way we surround ourselves with certain objects.

Margaret Olley’s Interior (1974), with a Ray Crooke painting on the mantelpiece. Pictures from exhibition Interiors, Orange Regional Gallery.

For ceramists, and even for those merely interested in the ancient art of the potter and its various contemporary manifestations, Clay Gulgong is a great pleasure. An international festival set up originally as a three-yearly event by Janet Mansfield, it has been carried on since her death by her son Neil and daughter-in-law Berna­dette Mansfield, and is now held every two years. The picturesque little NSW town of Gulgon­g, near Mudgee, is taken over for a week by a con­genial crowd of ceramic artists and, apart from the formal exhibitions, almost every shopfront is filled with displays of work by most of Australia’s best practitioners.

Two years ago I was invited to Gulgong to give a talk about the history of the potter’s wheel as a literary metaphor; this time I was there to take part in a writers panel. There were many other talks by artists, writers and dealers, but the most fascinating part of the event was wandering around the tents set up on the hill, watching master ceramists from across the world demonstrating their art and answering questions from the public. Afterwards everyone congregates in one of the numerous pubs, so close together that from the doorway of any of them you can see at least one other.

From Gulgong it seemed like a good idea to visit Orange, relatively close by, stopping on the way at Hill End, almost forgotten when discovered by Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale in 1947 and now an exceptionally charming place filled with old houses and beautiful trees, half a living museum, but still an active artists’ colony. The aim of visiting Orange was to see an exhibition of paintings of interiors, which coincidentally turned out to include many pictures painted in Hill End.

Leaving Hill End in the direction of Bathurst, we had only driven 10km or 20km when we found the road blocked by a road accident that had occurred moments earlier. A motorcyclist had overtaken a utility at great speed — as its shaken driver explained to us — then lost ­control of his bike and struck a small tree with such violence that he had felled it. The rider had been killed almost instantly. It was a grim spectacle, and it also became apparent that we would not be allowed to continue on our way, as various officials appeared and declared that the site was now a crime scene.

Grace Cossington Smith’s Way to the Studio (1957), with the external world glimpsed through windows on to the garden­.

So we had to drive back to Hill End, where we discovered that there was no alternative road to the south. We would have to make our way back to Mudgee and then around by a long route to Bathurst. Starting back towards the north, however, we soon came to a cross-­country shortcut, driving southwest towards Orange. As the crow flies, the distance was shorter than the road back to Mudgee, but it was a dirt road and we had been warned that we would have to drive across a ford in the ­Macquarie River.

A local had warned us that the water could be knee-deep at the ford, which would be impossibl­e for our vehicle, but we reasoned that the river would be low after a dry spell, and so decided to risk it.

It was a bit of a gamble: if we got across, we would make up the lost time, but if the river was too deep and we had to turn back, we might have to give up on the trip to Orange altogether. And of course if we got stuck in the middle of the ford, we would be in real trouble.

The crossing was meant to be only 20km away, but it was more than an hour on winding dirt roads through a wild and beautiful landscape of hills and valleys before we started a long descent. As we approached the river, our hearts sank: it was obviously quite wide and deep and seemed to be flowing rapidly. The ford, when we got there, was a weir of river stones and could easily be crossed on foot, but the last section seemed a worryingly deep pool. Fortunately the water turned out to be not much more than ankle deep, so we ended up crossing without incident, and with a great sense of relief.

And so we finally reached the Orange Regiona­l Gallery and the exhibition, curated by Gavin Wilson, devoted to paintings of interiors. But are interiors really a genre? The question is an interesting one, because genre implies a ­relevant set of comparisons and historical antecedents, and establishes what has been called a horizon of expectations, which is among other things what makes divergence from expectation meaningful.

Arguably, interiors are not really a genre, or at least one of the primary or traditional genres, but can be considered as a kind of subset or derivati­ve of one of these. From one point of view, the interior can be seen as an extension of still life, so that it encompasses not just an assembl­age of objects on a table but a whole room full of objects, furniture and so on; in this way, the interior is an expanded still life.

But on the other hand the interior can also be considered as a derivative of the genre that is confusingly also known as “genre” painting, that it is pictures of everyday life: neither ­portrait nor history painting, but anecdotal scenes, often of peasants or workers. In this sense, an interior is like genre painting without the people — the setting itself implying the lives of the people who live there, shaped by their personality, interests and habits.

Both of these suggestions about the origin of the interior as sub-genre seem useful in helping us to look at the pictures and focus our attention on them in slightly different ways, but what they have in common is to make us ponder the power of objects to evoke life, and indeed the way that we surround ourselves with certain objects — whether books, pictures, sculptures or vases — that speak to others, but even more importantly to ourselves, about our own ­natures and aspirations.

Kevin Connor’s Night Studio, Balmoral, Studios Series (1989), a view from interior to exterior.

Interestingly, several of the interiors in this exhibition represent the environment that Margaret Olley built around herself like a hermi­t crab, and which has now been recreated at the Tweed Regional Gallery.

There are several of Olley’s own interiors — which suggest the further corollary that inter­iors are akin to implicit portraits, and that a view of one’s own interior has some affinity with self-portraiture: an indirect represent­ation in which the subject withdraws to let the carefully assembled objects in her house speak on her behalf.

Many of the pictures in this exhibition speak to each other in an interesting way, most obviousl­y when we recognise in one of Olley’s interiors a painting by Ray Crooke. Even more interesting, however, are the juxtapositions of different ways of seeing, as for example betwee­n Cressida Campbell and Peter Godwin.

Campbell’s work, as it happens, also represents the inside of Olley’s house, and it is an ­example of Campbell’s distinctive way of working, which is her adaptation of the traditional Japanese woodblock print. She draws from life straight on to large sheets of plywood, which are then incised and hand-coloured; a single print is taken from each, and then both block and print are exhibited. In this case it is the block that is represented, whereas the nearby interior of a kitchen is a paper print.

Here, though, the interesting point is the slow and methodical nature of the artist’s process­. It takes time to draw the many details of a very complex interior view on to the wooden block; time and slightly changing angles of ­vision as she turns from one side to the other. The result is that there are some minor distortions of perspective, but above all that the view we see is a kind of virtual collage of many acts of seeing, extended over many hours and probably several days.

As so often, therefore, the artist shows us more than we can see with the naked eye, and certainly more than we can see at a single glance. And this is where her work makes such a striking contrast with the adjacent paintings by Godwin. His images are freely and fluently painted, not so much in an expressionistic spirit­ as with the confidence of memory: they are like things seen once and then painted from a vivid impression, happy to leave some parts unspecified, while turning other details into calligraphic signatures.

Peter Godwin’s Large Morning Light (2017), whose curtained window implies but masks the outside world.

The comparison between Campbell and Godwin reminds us of another important consideratio­n in paintings of interiors: an inside­ naturally implies an outside, but the world outside can either be explicitly shown, implied or entirely occluded. In this work of Campbell’s, the exterior is visible beyond the interior; in one of the two Godwin pictures there is no exterior at all, while in the other a curtained window implies but masks the outside world.

The dialogue of inside and outside is particularly­ conspicuous in the works painted by Grace Cossington Smith in her old age. In all of these, the viewer is enclosed in the comfortable­ and yet somehow claustrophobic interior, and poignantly aware of the external world glimpsed through windows on to the garden­, and in the most extreme case only seen reflected in a wardrobe mirror.

Two fine drawings by Kevin Connor repre­sent another extreme: the interior that is a view on to the exterior, while three pictures by Wendy Sharp emphasise interiority, not only in composition but also thematically. In three pictures all set in Hill End, she has two small studies that must be loosely self-portraits, showering in one and in the other sitting by the fire; in a third and larger composition, four friends gather around a table by lamplight.

These pictures, though, again raise the question­ of genre. Is a picture with figures really­ an interior?

Thus the painting of Joel Elenberg by Brett Whiteley is clearly a portrait, while the interior details are subsidiary.

Rodney Pople’s shark is certainly striking, but such a public space stretches the plausible boundaries of the category. Janet Haslett’s series of four drawings is intriguing, because they look at first like industrial interiors, but turn out to be dramatically simplified tonal renderings of still-life objects merging, in an unexpected perspect­ival effect, with architectural motifs in the background.

And two lively drawings by Peter Kingston — although one includes a dog and the portrait of an ancestor of Paul Haefliger, painter and critic, and the other has a small figure at a table — are clearly above all interiors in the sense that the domestic environment speaks of the personality of present or past occupants; and, like Haslett’s drawings, these too are from Hill End.

Interiors

Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, NSW.

Until June 24.