— Catalogue Essay by Charles and Kate Nodrum

Paintings & Sculpture

A survey of the work of Louise Forthun

Born in 1959 in Port Macquarie, where her mother had worked a dairy farm, Louise Forthun grew up in Newcastle where her father served in the merchant navy on the cargo ships and tankers moving in and out of the port to and from Indonesia, Singapore, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.  Much time was spent on those docks, awaiting her father’s arrival, or departure, under the larger-than-life Newcastle BHP Steelworks; and she would later go on to work as a cabin girl with her father during her school holidays in the 1970s. 

Since 1977 she has lived and worked in Melbourne. Enrolling first in Interior Design at RMIT, she transferred to Painting in 1979, graduating in 1981, and later completed a post-grad in painting at the Victorian College of Arts (1985-86).  During this period Forthun set up a studio in Stalbridge Chambers, an 8-story building in Little Collins Street, and it was here that abstraction took root in her painting.  In the middle of a forest of buildings with windowed facades, their form, pattern and geometry proved a rich source of visual interest, and she soon began to draw and photograph the surrounding buildings from different positions and angles.  The 1980s saw a worldwide revival of neo-expressionism – predominantly figurative in subject and painterly in style – and, in Melbourne, centred around Roar Studios.  In reaction to this (and with a touch of wry criticism) Forthun began a series of works using, as a base, thick Polyfilla smeared across plywood panels, which she then spray-painted through basic hand-made geometric cardboard stencils.  From here would grow her St Kilda Road Series, one of which is shown in this exhibition (no. 2), inspired by an aerial photograph of St Kilda Rd spotted while paying her rent at the local real estate agent. These were followed by a suite of paintings, begun on a study trip to Europe, looking more closely at the structural detail of individual buildings, such as the underside of the Eiffel Tower (no. 1).  These works formed Forthun’s first commercial solo exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne.

Over the following decades, Forthun’s work would continue to move from sweeping aerial views of cities to specific sections of a construction on the ground; she would “zoom out” over Sydney, as in Swirl, 2008 then “zoom in” on the Story Bridge in Brisbane, as in The big deep blue, 2012 (nos. 7 & 13). The range of her stencils was stretched – some growing increasingly complex whilst others were simplified to the extreme.  One can sometimes recognise the city buildings depicted: the pointed glass dome of Melbourne Central in Electrifying, 2010 (no. 8) for example, or the curved palisades and square piazzas of Rome in Crimson, 2003 (no. 4 - an image, incidentally, derived from a scale model of ancient Rome) while others, such as Pulsing, 2010 (no. 10), could be any and every city in the world. Not all were topographically accurate: if the large triptych Embossed, 2018 (no. 15) leaves you feeling a little lost it’s because this aerial panorama of Melbourne (looking west, and viewed from a commissioned plane) has its third panel reversed, upsetting our perspective and sending our city off kilter.  Airy Stairs, 2018 (no. 14) and Wire Assemblage, 2018 (no. 17) derive from photos of the zinc factory on the Derwent River, taken on the ferry to MONA in Hobart.

The most recent works in this exhibition are paper and bronze – and make a clear break with the previous work. Forthun has worked on paper in the past, including the large-scale prints in the 1990s which evolved out of a trip to Japan to study their print-making and ceramic traditions. These recent paperworks also grew out of a trip to Japan in 2019 during which her focus had been on brush ink drawing, but the paper underwent a radical metamorphosis: it became sculptural. Scrunched up, released, and spray-painted – using mauve, lemon and bronze pigments (not colours we associate with either Forthun’s previous work, or with sculpture in general) dusting the paper peaks and drifting into the white valleys beyond.  The question then became how to make these solid-looking but actually very fragile works into something more durable. Throughout the second Melbourne lockdown Forthun worked to achieve this, exploring and using a variation of the lost-wax casting method.  This involves painting layers of melted wax all over the chosen paperwork, from which the foundry can make a mould, into which molten bronze is poured; in the process the paper is destroyed and the finished bronze sculpture becomes a unique work.  Whilst these bronzes mark a clear departure from Forthun’s well recognised painting, they can also be seen as sharing some aspects of her early Polyfilla works of 35 years ago, and whilst the medium may be entirely new, the process of spray-painting and a return (again) to purer abstraction, links back to 1990s works such as Blue Room, 1996 (no. 3).

Charles & Kate Nodrum, 2022

Photography by Christian Capurro