Elizabeth Barnett: Milk
Milk is Elizabeth Barnett’s first solo show after having her third child. The artist describes her world growing smaller for the year that she nursed – a tender turning inwards that having a winter baby permitted. Spending time awake at night with her baby in half light made for a dreamy view of the world. One that became desaturated, with the contrast between cream and charcoal browny black giving way to the milky haze of early morning light. During these small hours the artist read constantly, diving into worlds parallel or different to her own, adding another dream-like layer of ambiguity to her reality, travelling to fictional destinations whilst sat with her small one at home.
This exhibition is a visual journal set out on linens, capturing moments, seasons and imagery from this dreamy period in the artist’s life to look back upon. The objects in Barnett’s still life paintings are less connected then they have been in her previous work, standing alone as symbolic components in a highly personal, emotional collage. Some objects represent people or places and they seem to converse with one another across compositions. Others are pared back to simpler forms; a glass jar becoming a fractal conglomeration of colour rather than form, speaking to the ambiguous landscape of the artist’s motherly introspection.
Chromatically, this body of work takes a more dramatic turn. Deeper browns complimented by milky cream, lurid yellow, autumnal coral, pinks and oranges. There are soft blue drawn nudes in open books and the last of summer blooms are arranged delicately in jars, sitting alongside small ‘gifts’ brought by the artist’s older children to the studio, ripped unceremoniously off bushes close to the flower head. Pink, cream and florals have been deliberately dialled up, embracing conventionally feminine colours, patterning, and subject matter – above all, Milk, celebrates the feminine and the role of the creative mother.
Elizabeth Barnett studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts Printmaking at The Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 2002-2004; Bachelor Fine Arts Honours – Printmaking, RMIT, Melbourne, 2006; and a Masters of Arts- Illustration, Camberwell College of Art, London, 2008-2009. Barnett was awarded the Collie Print Trust scholarship at the Australian Print Workshop in 2006. In 2010 Barnett founded Schoolhouse Studios Inc with Alice Glenn in 2010, a not-for-profit artist studios complex in the former St. Joseph’s Technical College in Abbotsford. She has been a finalist in the Hawkesbury Art Prize 2021, the Eutick Still Life Award 2019, the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize 2017. In 2022 she collaborated with Review and Nancy Bird and in 2021 was featured in Amber Creswell Bell’s Thames & Hudson publication, Still Life: Contemporary Australian Painters. Barnett is a Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial committee member and project producer.
