ESCAPE

Eric Riddler

Cognitive dissonance is probably the best way to describe it. If I were to find myself trapped in a time loop, reliving a moment in my past over and over, I’d easily choose my time at Nepean College of Advanced Education and University of Western Sydney Nepean. And, yet, thinking back, much of my inspiration, then, and nostalgia, now, has revolved around thoughts and, occasionally, acts of escape. I think it’s called living. Anyway, I spent my time, especially during first-year, determined to document everything, oblivious (at first) to how irritating this could be to my classmates.

When I talk about escaping, it was really the routine rather than the institution which bugged me. Most of the following escapades were officially endorsed and, tempting as it could be at times, I never played truant or stormed out in a rage. The only real attendance problem I, and the other Printmaking students, faced was that the small classroom provided back then was not generous enough to hold all of us at once. This lead, much to the chagrin of the teaching staff, to an impromptu system of occupying a corner of the campus cafeteria and gossiping all day, in a pre-emptive ‘90s couch sitcom style, only popping down to the classroom whenever it was our turn to use the press or stir up the aquatint box.

I never took a photo of the cafeteria but, for eighties foodie nostalgia, here’s Nepean’s well-appointed foyer in 1987: a classic Café Bar and, much to my delight, one of the last of the old Coca Cola machines still blending the syrup with the soda water as it poured.

Field trips were an important part of the Nepean curriculum. A major part of the first-year Foundation Studies drawing course was the ‘Swallowing Warragamba’ project brief. It centred on a day trip to Warragamba Dam, spent sketching a combination of the natural environment and industrial imposition, looking for themes and motifs to incorporate into our ongoing practice. In this photo Christine Skoryk is sketching the dam wall.

The lessons learnt from ‘Swallowing Warragamba’ certainly pervaded my first-year output. Because I decided to concentrate on Photography and Printmaking during the second semester, my major work for the year was, naturally enough, a large painting-assemblage called Bucket & Gate, paying awkwardly-composed homage to Sydney’s water supply via my favourite retro Antipodean art genres of the 1960s: Annandale Imitation Realism, Central Street colour field painting and Colin McCahon’s waterfalls. There aren’t any good photos of the finished work, unfortunately, as it had to be broken down to fit into the family Datsun 120Y pictured left.

I didn’t completely ignore my chosen media: there were screen printed copies of my study photos in the lower left corner…

Salmon pink animal print bikini offcuts representing dam overflow: found objects that could have only been found in the eighties.

Another memorable escape was a day working at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, my eventual workplace, on the installation of the soft sculpture walls for Nepean photography teacher Dennis Del Favero’s Linea di fuoco, FILEF and the Gallery’s contribution to the Carnivale 1987 program; photograph by Dennis Del Favero, from the Mori Gallery archives [AGNSW MS2014.3 ARC350.510.312].

One of my more ambitious self-initiated projects was the documentation of the second-year three dimensional art students’ exhibition Curanev Pecoras at Kelly St Kollektiv in Ultimo in 1988. I had visions of producing a limited edition book of the show but, as the installation progressed, it was increasingly clear that my collection of cameras were intruding on the artists’ preparations and, as an Art History and Criticism major, minoring in Printmaking, I really didn’t have the support network to bring the book to fruition. Another escape plan thwarted.

On the whole, however, most of my early ‘escapes’ were modest, meandering walks, camera in hand, around the Kingswood campus and Peachtree studios, at lunchtime or on my way to and from the train.

One of my classmates audibly groaned when I reached for my camera… but how could I not take this picture? HK Kingswood at Kingswood Station, 1987.

In my youth I had an uncanny sense for tracking down the nearest second-hand bookshop wherever I found myself. Peachtree was no different: there was a pretty good one in an arcade at the eastern end of Penrith. It was nearly four kilometres there and back but, with a little low-impact parkour (ducking through a loading dock here, sneaking up a fire escape there, running down the ‘no pedestrians’ ramp into the Waltons car park), I could have a good look around, spend a little money (hooray for late 80s interest rates!) and be back in my corner of the studio by the end of lunchtime.

The endearingly brutalist, yet already doomed, Waltons car park ramps in 1987. The financial collapse of the department store chain a few weeks earlier was sad to witness (ok, less hooray for late 80s interest rates).

This skill came in handy in third year, when the original Street Level Gallery opened ever further eastwards. Visits to Peachtree were less common, so carefully timed lunchtime dashes to Street Level became part of the routine. I didn’t get to every exhibition, but it was great to witness the emergence of concrete proof that Nepean’s visual arts students had established a foothold in the Sydney art world.

Street Level Gallery, High Street, Penrith, during Anne Ferran’s I am the rehearsal master, 1989; photograph by Anne Ferran, signwriting by Steve Smith, from the Mori Gallery archives [AGNSW MS2014.3 ARC350.511.268].

There were a few bus trips to Canberra, starting with an autumnal trip to see some of the local galleries and studios…

… followed by a visit to the blockbuster Old Masters, New Visions exhibition touring out of the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.

By our third trip, in October 1988, things were running with clockwork efficiency as we headed south, at least until one of the buses shuddered to a halt at Towrang, just north of Goulburn, and we edged slowly into town.

The hazard lights of despair, North Goulburn, 1988, recorded for posterity on standard 8mm film. (Well, well, well, look who’s just discovered Cantrills Film Notes)

The replacement bus eventually turned up and things were completely tickety-boo from then on, at least until we were passing Towrang again that evening, when one of the replacement buses started to flash its hazard lights… and so it was, about half an hour later, a single bus carrying two busloads of art students pulled up nervously at the Marulan heavy vehicle weighing station. We were waved through but it was a tense moment: through the bus windows you could see that every warning light had started flashing.

Oh, and we went to see the Drawing in Australia exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. Had to look that up. Completely distracted by the gradual attrition of western Sydney’s tour bus fleet.

That was it for Canberra excursions, for me, at least; notwithstanding a mad, quixotic dash across Cambridge Gardens in early 1989 when I could see that the buses taking the photography students to the National Gallery’s Shadow and Light exhibition hadn’t left Kingswood campus yet. I was so close when they pulled away…

That’s not to say that local field trips and an internship at the University of Sydney didn’t keep me on the move. In my final year, the Art History and Criticism course thesis took me to a variety of regional libraries and the inevitable vicus of second-hand bookshops that surrounded them.

Looking from Newcastle Library (plan A) towards Cooks Hill Books and Records (plan B), 1989, hoping today would be the day that the elusive Émile Zola translation, upon which chapter three of my thesis depended, would turn up (Reader, it never did).

As the final semester began, one last escape became possible. Graham Marchant had been in discussions with the Print Council of Australia and the printmaking teachers at Sydney College of the Arts about the Council hosting an exhibition of student prints at its North Melbourne gallery. The exhibition, Cuts, Scratches and Bites, was slated for the spring of 1989. Besides contributing one of my prints, I innocently asked if anyone was going to write a catalogue essay and found out that I’d just volunteered for the role.

And, so it was decided, I was off to Melbourne, on a one day return train trip; my travel options being severely restricted by the pilots’ strike, the looming Art History and Criticism thesis deadline and a serendipitously inconvenient freight train derailment that curtailed my plans to visit the State Library of Victoria (who, it later turned out, actually held one of the few Australian library copies of the aforementioned elusive Émile Zola translation) but allowed me to see Glenrowan in the morning sun before visiting the Angry Penguins exhibition at the NGV in the afternoon.

Cuts, Scratches and Bites, Print Council of Australia Gallery, North Melbourne, 1989. My print is near the centre of the image, sixth from left, bottom row.

The final escape: the poster for our Graduation Exhibition, Peachtree Studios, 1989. You know you’re not in the centre of things when the image of your exhibition poster gives directions.

For more of Eric Riddler’s archive of UWS imagery, see ‘On Matthew Wood’ by Tony Schwensen and the Foundation section of the site.

Eric Riddler is the Visual Resources Librarian at the Art Gallery of NSW.