Books
2023 artworld | curatorial | feminism | gender | analysis | education | australia
CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions Since 2008
Spoiling Illusions is a book about data - data which exposes the inequity of gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector and the history and impact of the CoUNTess data collection and analysis project. It is also a book about the lives of women artists, writers and academics navigating an asymmetrical art world, where the odds are statistically weighted against them.
Boldly and insightfully written by Melinda Rackham and Elvis Richardson, CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions Since 2008 offers insights and actions for change. Statistical analysis and biting humour combine with cultural and feminist theories to chart how the education of artists, the role of galleries and museums, art prizes, magazines, curators, collectors and philanthropists contribute to an artworld where women miss out. From original cheeky anonymous CoUNTess Blog posts to today's not-for-profit Countess.Report collective interventions, alongside excerpts of life writing by Countess founder Elvis Richardson, this is vital reading.
Boldly and insightfully written by Melinda Rackham and Elvis Richardson, CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions Since 2008 offers insights and actions for change. Statistical analysis and biting humour combine with cultural and feminist theories to chart how the education of artists, the role of galleries and museums, art prizes, magazines, curators, collectors and philanthropists contribute to an artworld where women miss out. From original cheeky anonymous CoUNTess Blog posts to today's not-for-profit Countess.Report collective interventions, alongside excerpts of life writing by Countess founder Elvis Richardson, this is vital reading.
Julie Ewington: Writer, Curator + Broadcaster Contemporary ArtWhat an achievement! Simultaneously art and advocacy, Spoiling Illusions since 2008 is lively, inventive, necessary. The Countess Report has always been compelling reading, but this hybrid melding of personal histories, hard data, and potent arguments about the inequities of the art industry is a stellar instance of the personal being political. I love Rackham and Richardson's tart combination of commitment and scepticism about being artists - what else is a girl to do!
Maura Reilly: Museum Director, Curator and Author of Curatorial Activism (2018) and The Ethical Museum (2024)Spoiling Illusions is a kickarse look at the assumptions and biases of masculinism and sexism, along with institutionalised white privilege and Western-centrism... Rackham and Richardson don’t just expose the mechanisms of these asymmetries and their gate keepers - they propose strategies for sustainable ethical change in our art communities now and into many futures.
2016 artist monograph | SALA | jewellery | sculpture | art-science
Catherine Truman: Touching Distance
- Although enduringly fond of carving jewellery from Mother-of-Pearl and English Lime, Catherine Truman's oeuvre extends to choreography, public sculpture, installation, photograph, poetry and moving image.
- Silken threads connect gestures, forms and techniques across time and location, between suites of more traditionally crafted work and those that infiltrate and augment the scientific realm. The intertwining interdependent systems in her work articulate the relationships between the felt and experienced; the seen and unseen; between medium and production.
- Drawn from generous conversations with Truman and my extensive research into her archives, photographs, process documentation, journals, hard-drives and drawings - and illustrated with seductive images, predominantly by Grant Hancock - this is the first major publication on a great Australian artist.
- Catherine Truman: Touching Distance, Melinda Rackham,
- Wakefield Press (2016 SALA monograph), 2016,
- Jacketed Hardcover, 192 pages
Julianne Pierce: Producer, Curator, Writer.
Rackham’s approach is to create a story world around Truman that is as much a biography as it is a history of jewellery and object-making in South Australia from the 1970s to the present day. Accompanied by luscious full-colour photographs by Grant Hancock, the monograph is a beautifully produced object in its own right.
Catherine Truman: Touching Distance, Melinda Rackham, Wakefield Press (2016 SALA monograph), 2016, 192 pp.
2018 anthology | adoption | trauma | loss | poetry | social justice
ADOPTED
- Four dynamic writers unearth the the ongoing effects of their adoption through poetry and prose. This anthology presents rarely heard authentic adoptee perspectives on trauma, loss and reclaiming identity.
ADOPTED was written and published by Dianna Dunning, Sophie Gregory, Rebecca Johnston, Melinda Rackham.
Designed by Helen Vaskin
This book is free for adoptees, however there are only a few left.
Message me and let me know you are interrested and I will send you a copy and only ask you to pay a $10 postage fee.
If you want to know more about diverse adoptee experiences I suggest:
+ The Primal Wound - Nancy Newton Verrier
+ Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson
+ Crazy Bastard - Abraham Maddison
+ By Blood - Ellen Ullman
2005 editor | -empyre- | online archives | digital media preservation | copyleft
November 2005: Building an Archive
A collaboratively written and published book.
It was lovely to discover the mothly discussion on the Preservation of digital art which I produced on -empyre- forum during February 2005 was gathered and published by Chris Molinski at the Art Gallery of Knoxville and freely distributed during their COPYSHOP show.
Art Gallery of Knoxville,
theartgalleryofknoxville.com, Knoxville
