Michelle Cawthorn, a piece from the Anni’s Birds sequence (2025) (all photographs courtesy the artists)
BETHANY, Connecticut — Shortly after I met Peter Sharp and Michelle Cawthorn, Australian artists who had been awarded a two-month residency on the Josef and Anni Albers Basis, they invited me to go to, saying they might ensure that I might come to the “Vault” and see little recognized Albers works. A couple of days later, I wrote to Peter to plan the journey. I additionally invited myself to the studio he and Michelle had been sharing, as I had carried out some on-line sleuthing and was curious about studying extra about them and their artwork.
Each Sharp and Cawthorn work primarily in drawing (though Cawthorn’s apply intersects extra with portray and set up). Sharp defined to me that residency tasks are conceived to work together with Josef Albers’s improvements with shade or Anni Albers’s pioneering work in textile design and weaving. Throughout their residency, Cawthorn and Sharp had gone to many galleries and museums in New York and made some extent of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the biggest artwork museum in america and fourth largest on this planet, as there’s nothing prefer it in Australia. This made me take into consideration what data is transmitted and the way it travels.
Sharp had made appreciable progress on three separate tasks on this quick time frame. For one, minimize strips of printed paper are evenly crammed in with coloured pencils and woven collectively, a nod to the Albers couple. The second mission consists of masking and altering pages that he has excised from Josef Albers’s widespread guide Interplay of Coloration (1963). Within the 70 pages Sharp had accomplished after I visited, some authentic content material peered via his modifications. His objective, he stated, is to create a very altered guide, with the pages in the identical sequence, and his {photograph} within the place of Albers’s on the finish of the guide.
Peter Sharp, set up view of the Albers Drawings sequence (2025) 
Peter Sharp, a piece from the Albers Drawings sequence (2025)
The third group of works, collectively titled Albers Drawings, is comprised of charcoal drawings depicting mushrooms, leaves, and different natural world Sharp witnessed on his walks across the basis’s property. Every drawing exhibits a single object from reminiscence, a report of observations. One exception is group of summary works, for which the artist coated a sheet of paper with a layer of charcoal earlier than bringing it out into the rain; the drops dissolved the charcoal, leaving a sequence of uneven spots. I might guess the supply of some photographs, whereas others eluded me.
Whereas Sharp and I spoke, he introduced up the bark work of John Mawurndjul, an Indigenous artist from Australia with whom I used to be unfamiliar. His legendary figures and his superb crosshatching carried out on bark, a way referred to as rarrk, jogged my memory that there are separate traditions in america and Australia which have virtually nothing in frequent.
Greater than 9,000 miles of ocean separate our two international locations. Australia, which has its personal distinctive natural world, is house to 850 fowl species, with round 45 which are native to the nation. Over the past 15 years, researchers have proposed that Australia is the evolutionary house of the music fowl or oscine passerine birds, which make up half of the world’s birds.
Michelle Cawthorn, set up view of the Anni’s Birds sequence (2025)
Cawthorn’s collages, collectively titled Anni’s Birds, function photographs of birds pulled from quite a lot of sources, together with John Gould’s seven-volume information The Birds of Australia (1840–48), with illustrations by his spouse, Elizabeth Gould, and others, primarily based on specimens collected from Australia and its islands.
Cawthorn creates fantastical hybrids of birds from Australia and different elements of the world, which jogged my memory of Australia’s actual and mythic hybrids, such because the duck-billed platypus and the Bunyip of Australian First Nations mythology. In some collages, after eradicating the unique fowl from the web page, Cawthorn crammed within the destructive area with totally different anatomical elements. When she combines a fowl native to Australia with one from the Japanese seaboard of america, she reenacts the migration of the songbirds from their place of birth to different continents.
In these works, Sharp and Cawthorn are panorama artists who don’t present you the panorama. Whereas neither artist has made some extent of emphasizing Australia’s distinct ecological identification, I felt that it performed a robust function in how they interacted with nature, which is the supply of their artwork. They each house in on one thing present in nature, equivalent to a pine cone or a fowl. Cawthorn’s consideration to the historical past of Australia, from its songbirds via Gould’s encyclopedic information and Sharp’s consideration to frequent objects discovered within the panorama, has resulted in distinct our bodies of labor worthy of extended consideration.
Michelle Cawthorn, a piece from the Anni’s Birds sequence (2025)
