Figurative art ‘to scale’ on show at FireWorks Gallery

Scale and material draw nature and culture together to capture “the great unfolding of now” in FireWorks Gallery’s Evidence of Scale IV exhibition.

Largely figurative in content and themed around materiality, this fourth annual show includes experimental work by artists from the gallery’s impressive stable.

Director Michael Eather says the exhibition is “a loaded concept that allows us to show drawing and sculptural works”.

“Drawing, and all art really, explores how to scale an idea,” Eather says. “This year the figure is a common denominator.”

It is sculptor Stephen Hart’s second appearance in the Evidence of Scale series ahead of a solo exhibition at FireWorks Gallery in May 2025. Still Moving III, 2001-2024, is an intriguing carved group of four male figures. Two of them carry laptops under-arm, another grasps a rolled-up newspaper. We can’t know their destinations, nor purpose, but their elevation on a looped plinth points to the circular nature of humanity, our routines and fates and the endless media cycle of imagery.

This sculpture has been rebuilt and remade over more than 20 years. Initially inspired by the events of 9/11 in the US and their seismic impact on world politics, Hart says “that storm has accelerated into the great unfolding of now”.

“There has been a lot to absorb as the century surges forward with technological, social and political change,” Hart says. “If anything, the maelstrom is even more toxic.”

Pat Hoffie’s The Background to my Days #3 also points to the news cycle, with groups of refugees undertaking journeys across a landscape that fades out, top and bottom, to abstracted grey and black circles, wavering lines and an uneasy yellow background.

Rod Moss’s Sleeping youth (Trevor Coulthard), 2003, evokes imminent disaster, with a fire raging behind a young man and no sense of repose in his form, speaking to the dual forces eroding traditional culture (colonisation, social change and climate impacts) palpable in the Arrernte/Alice Springs community.

Notably, Walala Tjapaltjarri’s bronze sculptures in the accompanying exhibition, The White Desert, perform what Eather describes as “a case study of the evidence of scale” concept.

Tjapaltjarri is a member of the Pintupi Nine. Forty years ago he emerged from the desert with eight family members – the last of the “first contact” Aboriginal people (who had never before had contact with white people). They had lived traditional hunter-gatherer lives in the desert until 1984 when the death of a senior family member led them in search of relatives. They were warmly received by family they hadn’t seen for two decades who assisted them to settle into the nearby township of Kiwirrkura in WA – and 20th century Australia.

Tjapaltjarri has been a painter since 1997 and first exhibited with FireWorks Gallery in 1998. He is known for abstracted asymmetrical Tingari designs that draw on his intimate knowledge of the Gibson Desert and country around Western Australia’s Lake Mackay. His artwork relates to male initiation rites and sites used in ground and body painting. In this exhibition they overlay the gallery director’s striped and colourful backgrounds, a collaboration in the spirit of artistic play.

A dramatic innovation is a new series of bronze sculptural works that take Tjapaltjarri’s organic rectangular shapes into three dimensions.

“His motifs have been scaled up and materially changed and he’s playing with internalised ideas of those stories,” Eather says. “We worked in ink on paper first, his forms are more open this way. Then it’s a jump from two dimensions to three. That mammoth dreaming narrative of the Tingari through the desert is brought into the room. It’s what materiality can do – these works bring those myths and stories into a contemporary reality.”

It is scale that underpins this broad spectrum of work expressing ideas that range from the material to the cultural and existential. It stimulates a wide-ranging visual conversation, demonstrating the breadth that art may sustain in every dimension.

Evidence of Scale IV and The White Desert continue at FireWorks Gallery, Bowen Hills, until November 23.

 fireworksgallery.com.au