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’d make certain I may 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 completed some on-line sleuthing and was thinking 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 the earth, 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, lower strips of printed paper are evenly stuffed in with coloured pencils and woven collectively, a nod to the Albers couple. The second undertaking consists of masking and altering pages that he has excised from Josef Albers’s common guide Interplay of Colour (1963). Within the 70 pages Sharp had accomplished once I visited, some authentic content material peered by his modifications. His purpose, he mentioned, is to create a totally 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 lined 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 may 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 high-quality crosshatching completed on bark, a way known as rarrk, jogged my memory that there are separate traditions in america and Australia which have nearly nothing in widespread.
Greater than 9,000 miles of ocean separate our two nations. Australia, which has its personal distinctive natural world, is residence to 850 fowl species, with round 45 which can be native to the nation. Over the past 15 years, researchers have proposed that Australia is the evolutionary residence of the track 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 a wide range 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 stuffed within the damaging house with completely different anatomical elements. When she combines a fowl native to Australia with one from the Jap seaboard of america, she reenacts the migration of the songbirds from their homeland 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 position in how they interacted with nature, which is the supply of their artwork. They each residence in on one thing present in nature, comparable to a pine cone or a fowl. Cawthorn’s consideration to the historical past of Australia, from its songbirds by Gould’s encyclopedic information and Sharp’s consideration to widespread 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)
