esther stewart catalogue

ESTHER STEWARTHOW TO DECORATE A DUMP

4 June – 11 September 2016

How to Decorate a Dump Esther Stewart2

How to Decorate a DumpEsther Stewart 1


In this exhibition, Melbourne artist Esther Stewart presents a three-quarter scaled model of an imagined room adorned with multiple colourful patterns. Made from portable painted panels, this optically intense diorama occupies one half of the gallery space and plays with our sense of scale. Traditional features such as skirting boards and cornices, a door with pediment, and fireplace with mantelpiece suggest domestic proportions, yet the room is disconcertingly small in relation to adult dimensions. Like a large cardboard cut-out, it has the unreality of a theatre set, while the stylised panels and pop-up fireplace are also reminiscent of a fold out dolls house. On the opposite gallery wall hangs a wool carpet that Stewart designed, its real-life scale contrasting with the smaller faux carpet she has painted onto the floor of her room.

This installation brings together several of Stewart’s ongoing creative concerns, while taking them into new territory—most notably her interest in do-it-yourself flat pack assembly, and in how we use and decorate domestic spaces. Her use of panels with hinges in the current work relates to earlier multi-panelled paintings, part of her Portable Compactable series from 2010, that were partly inspired by flat-pack furniture, and which explored ideas of function and décor.1 More recently her paintings have been characterised by geometric designs that, while derived

How to Decorate a DumpSue Cramer

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from modernist abstraction, have increasingly referenced forms relating to architecture and interior design. Stewart’s sculptural diorama continues along these lines. Its painted patterns allude to tiles, venetian blinds, lattices, marble, and the designs on carpets or wood panelling. Together they form an eclectic and intuitive catalogue of decorative possibilities.

Stewart describes this work as ‘an imagined space’, one in which she adapts and combines a range of elements. ‘It is not meant to represent an actual room, but a proposition, a moveable, transportable ideal’, she says.2 While the subject of decoration is centrally addressed by her work both visually and conceptually, she is aware that it ‘is much frowned upon when it comes to visual art, often as a feminine and thus superficial concern’3. Pop-up dolls houses made from paper or card are a particular inspiration and a further instance of flat-pack design. Recently Stewart has been looking at nineteenth-century examples with especially opulent inbuilt décor. While being drawn to such objects, she has some ambivalence; typically marketed to young girls, they perpetuate romanticised notions of domestic bliss. ‘There is something beautiful about them, while simultaneously disturbing’, she observes.4 At another level, Stewart’s How to Decorate a Dump reflects her curiosity about antique replicas especially those made from inexpensive materials—like imitation old-style fireplaces made from fibreboard. Without true antique value, such items are little more than representations of an ideal. ‘I am interested in where such ideals come from and why they are upheld’, she says.5

Stewart has borrowed the exhibition’s title from a home-improvement book written by New York interior designer Philip Almeida in 1983.6 Her enthusiasm for DIY manuals stems from her interest in what she calls ‘the utopian idea of domesticity’7—the desire to create a personalised haven, even when the reality falls short of aspirations. Almeida’s book describes exactly this. It suggests ways of creatively renovating ‘dumps’—pre-loved buildings that have


fallen into bleak disrepair—and transforming them into functional, even chic residences. Stewart takes inspiration from DIY culture, its resoursful pursuit of alternative solutions and ways of making-do on tight budgets, and this is reflected in her approach to making art.

She favours publications from the 1960s to the early 1980s, which for her speak of a time with less mass production when ‘home decoration was all about being inventive, thrifty and genuinely technically skilled, rather than just taking a trip to Kmart or Ikea’.8 Such magazines provide source material for her work, sparking ideas for projects and informing many of the abstract patterns she uses in her paintings. For all that, Stewart also finds humour in the pages of home decorating magazines. Her admiration for the DIY ethic is tempered by her sense of its absurdity when taken to extremes, as when it becomes an obsession or an end-in-itself, or proposes the ridiculously unachievable within the constraints of a space.

Her approach in How to Decorate a Dump combines hand painting with digitised drawing. Giving the work a three-dimensional picture-book appearance, Stewart’s original hand drawn design has been etched into the MDF panels via a computerised router, detailing the room and each of its elements. Working within this template, she applied paint with handheld rollers, painstakingly ensuring crisp edges through the use of masking tape. For her this layer of painted ornamentation is like a surface or façade that camouflages the original room. Through this she suggests how interiors are modified and adapted over time by successive owners according to prevailing trends.

Blurring the boundaries between art and design, the patterned wool carpet Form is Not Fixed (2016) brings a different inflection to the theme of decoration. Displayed on the wall the carpet resembles one of Stewart’s paintings, but equally it could have been placed on the floor as a serviceable covering. Stewart enjoys these multiple inferences and through them makes connections between


her works: ‘Since my paintings reference interior finishes, I am interested in the relationship created when one of my paintings is turned into an interior finish like a carpet’.9 A further twist is added by her painting a replica of the carpet onto the floor of the diorama.

Stewart sees her focus on domestic spaces as a means to touch upon broader things like gender roles, hidden histories, personal and cultural identities, ownership and privilege.10 Both visually striking and conceptually layered, her exhibition suggests much about our ideals for living, and in this reveals how decoration is so much more than a surface concern.

Notes1. See works from her Portable Compactable series presented at the

Victorian College of the Arts in 2009, http://tlsc.co/work/portable-compactable, Accessed online 28 June 2016 and the Foldout, multi-panelled paintings exhibited in the exhibition Fresh at Craft Victoria in 2010, http://tlsc.co/work/fresh-awards-craft-victoria, Accessed online 28 June 2016

2. Email from Esther Stewart 20 May 2016

3. Conversation with Esther Stewart at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 10 May 2016

4. Email from Esther Stewart, 20 May 2016

5. Notes for talk by artist at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 11 June 2016

6. Philip Almeida, How to Decorate a Dump, A Main Street Press Book, Lyle Stuart, inc., Secaucus, New Jersey, USA, 1983

7. Esther Stewart quoted by Freya Herring in ‘The Australian artist influencing collections for Valentino’, Vogue Living, 16 March 2016, http://www.vogue.com.au/vogue+living/arts/the+australian+artist+influencing+collections+for+valentino,38694, Accessed online 28 June 2016



10. Email from Esther Stewart 28 June 2016

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http://tlsc.co/work/portable-compactable

http://tlsc.co/work/portable-compactable

http://tlsc.co/work/fresh-awards-craft-victoria

http://www.vogue.com.au/vogue+living/arts/the+australian+artist+influencing+collections+for+valentino,38694

http://www.vogue.com.au/vogue+living/arts/the+australian+artist+influencing+collections+for+valentino,38694


List of Works

Form is Not Fixed 2016

wool, organic dye

Private collection, Victoria

How to Decorate a Dump 2016

synthetic polymer paint on MDF board

Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier

Gallery, Sydney

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Biography

Esther Stewart was born in Katherine in the Northern Territory in 1988 and moved with her family to Daylesford in Victoria in 2000.

She completed a Master of Cultural and Arts Management, University of Melbourne in 2012–14; a Bachelor of Fine Arts—Honours Year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2010; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, (First Class Honours), majoring in Sculpture and Spatial Practice in 2007–09

Solo exhibitions include Behind Closed Doors, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2016; Display Home, The Act of Living, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2015; Timeshare, Station Gallery, Melbourne, 2015; Endless That’s the Problem, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2014; Geometric Colour, Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 2013; Makin’ Plans, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2013; Carton, Rearview, Melbourne, 2011; and Futurity, TCB inc., Melbourne, 2010

Group exhibitions include, It’s Only Castles Burning, Station, Melbourne, 2016, The Aggregate and the Algorithm, Tristian Koenig, Melbourne, 2014; A Representation of Space, Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo, Barcelona Spain, 2014; Never Never Land, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2014; painting / sculpture / floor work / wall work, Stockroom, Kyneton, Victoria, 2013; Foldout, QV precinct, Melbourne, 2012, as part of the New Babylon project supported by Next Wave Festival; Wall Project no. 6, Obus, Melbourne, 2012, part of the Craft Cubed Festival; Group Work, Mr Kitly, Melbourne, 2012; House Me Within a Geometric Quality, Platform Contemporary Art Space, Flinders Street

Station, Melbourne, 2011; Debut VII, Blindside, Melbourne, 2011; and Fresh 2010, Craft Victoria in Melbourne, 2010

Her work was also displayed at the following art fairs: Spring 1883, The Establishment, Sydney, 2015 (with Sarah Cottier Gallery and Station Gallery); Spring 1883, The Windsor Hotel, Melbourne, 2014 (with Utopian Slumps); Art Copenhagen, Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014 (with Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo); Art Bodensee, Dornbirn, Austria, 2014 (with Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo)

Commissions include with Valentino fashion house, for designs used in their Fall / Winter 2015–16 Menswear Range, Rome, Italy, 2014; and with Chenchow Little Architects, on murals for Darling Point Apartment, Sydney, 2015

Stewart received grants for new work from the Australia Council in Sydney, Arts Victoria in Melbourne, and NAVA in Sydney in 2013. She has received awards from the Next Wave Festival (Kickstart Award) Melbourne in 2012; Rearview in Melbourne in 2010 (solo exhibition award); the Friends of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne (Undergraduate Award) in 2010; the National Gallery Women’s Association in Melbourne (Undergraduate Award) in 2009; and TCB inc, in Melbourne (Blair Trethowan Award) in 2009

Stewart currently lives between Melbourne and Daylesford in Victoria. Her work is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney.

Artist’s website: tlsc.co/esther

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition:

ESTHER STEWART: HOW TO DECORATE A DUMPCurated by Sue Cramer Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 4 June – 11 September 2016

© Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, author, designer and photographer

Design: Ramona Hamilton-Lindsay Photography: Christian Capurro

ISBN: 978-1-921330-51-0

Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Red Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia

T + 61 3 9850 1500 F + 61 3 9852 0154 heide.com.au

This exhibition has been supported by the Bequest of Erica McGilchrist, an artist and activist who advanced the standing of women’s art throughout her lifetime.

AcknowledgementsEsther Stewart would like to thank Murray Barker and Cameron Gill

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esther stewart catalogue

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