Rita Hall
Blue Bird - Skins
Oil on canvas, 85 x 92cm. 2009
http://www.ritahallstudio.com.au/
The following is an extract from the catalogue essay of exhibition, "Rita Hall. Museum Studies 1969-2009' held at the South Australian Museum in June 2009.
".......This study was not ornithological nor scientific but artistic. My interest, as usual, was in their forms, the shadows they created, their colours, textures and shapes. It became my constant project to find a way to make art out of these very real objects. The notion of making paintings out of birds which pretended to be alive seemed absurd in the presence of so much complexity and beauty, and in the way they were presented as skins.
I had no wish to add anything to the bird skins, but simply present them in an honest way, as they had appeared directly to me. The liberties I did take were to arrange then into compositions, either singularly or in groups, to provide opportunities for formal art making structures. I reasoned that the skins, like many other objects in the museum, already carried their own meanings, their relevance for scientific study and their own histories. They seemed a perfect metaphor for the ecological issues of the contemporary world and had no need for embellishment with artistic symbols or devices. I wanted the graphic impact of the real just as the earlier etchings had been."
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