Speaking Notes for Working in Canberra in the 21st Century.

by

Pamela Clelland Gray

Manning Clark House – 31 May 2003

Attraction

Australia’s National Portrait Gallery founded in 1994 as a program of the National Library of Australia was inaugurated in March 1999 and situated in three gallery spaces incorporating the former Library of Old Parliament House – and now, since November 2002, a contemporary gallery space at Commonwealth Place on the shores of lake Burly Griffin. –The national Portrait Gallery is what brought me to Canberra in June 1994.

The National Portrait Gallery is a new cultural institution and it is small. I was strongly attracted to the opportunity of participating in and contributing to its foundation. Perhaps this is what on other occasions has brought people to work in Canberra. I could see that working from the ground floor of its (NPG) development would bring together strands of my professional background and interests – in a particularly rich and interdisciplinary way – offering what has always been a necessary, and happily, present, element of my work – innovation and creativity – for the past five years under the visionary and inspired leadership of Andrew Sayers.

My professional background bridges education, curatorial studies and fine arts and has, in the context of my work in Canberra, focussed on public learning and the art museum. I am constantly re-negotiating my work and its direction, to provide for its and my personal and professional growth - which link to a personal need for knowledge and the growth and development of my field of work in the context of the art museum.

I see myself as an interdisciplinary thinker and I relish the opportunity to make dynamic and successful connections between visual culture, the role of creativity and public learning opportunities as they impact on the visitor and human experience. I am mindful of the words of British museologist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill - A Portrait Gallery makes tangible the ephemeral, makes visible the imagined, and offers a powerful space for pedagogy.

When I came to work in Canberra I had six close friends living here – friends with whom I had a shared and common cultural past in Melbourne – this circle of friends made coming to work her both possible and inspiring. Their presence and support has been abiding.

I had some professional networks in Canberra through progressive education circles - between Preshil – the Margaret Lyttle Memorial School and the then extant Association of Modern Education school – A M E.

And also the National Gallery of Australia, since its opening in 1982 was a regular pilgrimage site to which I came – particularly in the early years when its collection was forming under the Directorship of James Mollison who had a strong influence on my career directions from the time he was Director of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and I was at boarding school in that city.

In fact I think I was attracted to Canberra as a necessary training ground for a career in art galleries and particularly national ones - because of the many professional structures and practices which shape my work - and that of the wider industry - have been generated from, put in place by, and professionalised in the Australian context by the work of people in Canberra. I think of these people as formalising a first generation of museologists in Australia – people like James Mollison and Daniel Thomas – who worked here in the 70’s and 80’s. I feel I am following the professional footprints of these people. My work has benefited from the national focus, which shapes it.

The interdisciplinary nature of portraiture sitting as it does across history and biography and art has its own attractions

Place & Space

Most people I work with came to Canberra from somewhere else. Most people I know came to Canberra to work. Canberra is ‘work city’. I work on one side of the lake and live on the other – my life in Canberra is circumscribed by work and it always has been. I have had a lot of choice in my work – I have chosen where to work.
Canberra is shaped by work - Urban planning in Canberra is shaped by work. Recently I was on a ‘hedge tour’ of Canberra, with historical commentary by Meredith Walton, exploring the early housing styles for communities clustered around Ainslie and Reid. These suburbs developed around ideas of the ‘garden city’ - reflecting in scale and style the hierarchy of workers – artisans, and middle ranking, and upper public servants, and private entrepreneurs. Perhaps all cities are shaped by the habits of their inhabitants work but Canberra’s early planning is uniquely so.

Threads – kitchen tables.

In my work I have had visionaries and humanists leading – Andrew Sayers, Joyce Oldmeadow at Dromkeen - the Australian Children’s’ Literature Foundation, and Margaret Lyttle at Preshil.

My work environments have been beautiful environments and the ‘kitchen table‘ concept that has been brought up in discussion here this afternoon in such an interesting way – kitchen table – being a bridging concept between women’s work and home, celebrating human lived experience and creativity - has been a central to and major experience of my work.

There have always been ‘kitchen tables’ in my places of work. My work places have been old houses with residual patterns and habits of domestic life in them. I am attracted to these kinds of places. Another continuous thread in my work - has been underlying ideas that relate to enabling and facilitating the development of human potential, and human experience – in a range of educational settings – progressive schools, art galleries and the domain of children’s literature. Even while working in an ‘office’ the traces of a past have made the ‘office’ environment more like a ‘studio’ - enabling an ambience of creative possibility and a community of collaborative practice as apposed to a hierarchal bureaucracy

Currently my office boarders one of the most beautiful courtyards I know - a courtyard, which I experience as a white cloister - with a lid of Canberra’s magnificent blue sky. These internal courtyard spaces of Old Parliament House around which the National Portrait Gallery administrative offices are clustered – my friend and colleague Suzie Campbell reminds me – are like the spaces of installations of the American artist – James Turrell – a combination of minimal white painted spaces and startling apertures to the sky. Art works by James Turrell, like my experience of Canberra, alter perceptions of air, light and space and induce new ways of seeing and being.

These notes are the bones on which I structured my talk.