Audrey Newton

Born 1985, Karachi, Pakistan
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons)
Graduation show: 2009
Graduation ceremony: 2010

Artwork in Space YZ

The Remainders of the White Lodge, 2008/2020
Latex, polyester tulle fabric, polyester fabric, wax, resin, gloss
Dimensions variable

The Remainders of the White Lodge, 2008/2020, is a reimagined sculpture originally titled The White Lodge, 2008. The White Lodge was an interactive installation of a black hallway that housed an unexplainable and repulsive growth inhabiting the hallway’s top left corner. Using an audio loop, the growth complimented and flirted with the audience, creating a clash of attraction and repulsion when audience inched closer and were confronted by its smell and appearance. The White Lodge focused on the laborious or inexplicable ways that artists access a creative idea when working with the influence of an institution like the art faculty in Z block at UWS. It reflected on ideas that could be hidden or overlooked of any value because the artist or audience may consider them too ambiguous or strange.

The Remainders of the White Lodge has been reimagined to reflect where my practice currently stands. Through the exposure and implementation of institutional critique, my sculptural practice has evolved into creating the tension of repulsion and attraction by focusing on the tactile and sensual qualities of materials and by removing the gimmicky audio elements of my former practice. The Remainders of the White Lodge echoes the ideas, words and creation of The White Lodge but has been physically altered to reflect the absorption of the valuable critique I was given during my tertiary education.

I am so grateful that I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2009 at what was formerly known as the University of Western Sydney. The course was a test of how much one could push their creative ability to its edge. We learnt about sound, performance, collaboration, space, digital realms and were encouraged to mash it all up. Most of us did, as everything turned into an experiment and nothing was ever deemed impossible.

As a young rigid artist, I really benefitted from this structure and specifically, the demands of a unit called Creative Strategies and the Contemporary Arts theory unit. My ears and eyes piqued with ravenous interest with every lecture presented by great thinkers including Caleb Kelly, Ann Finegan, Noelene Lucas and Robyn Backen. The first lecture I had ever attended by Caleb Kelly opened me up to a world of sound and music that I was seeking. I became a sponge and soaked up all the work of performers such as Lightning Bolt, Sun O))), Lucas Abela and the amazing sound artists we were producing, Thomas Knox Arnold, Matt Earle and Adam Sussman, not forgetting Mother Eel. The combined lectures and tutorials with the electronic arts cohort broke open the restrictive cage I was in and expanded the narrow high school perspectives of what I had considered ‘good art’.

We had a weekly turnover of artworks, readings, and writing. It felt painful at the time, but I was creatively peaking without falling into the inevitable hesitation or second-guessing that all artists are guaranteed at many points in their careers. Staff such as Maria Cruz, Eugenia Raskopoulos and the duos of Terry Hayes & Harry Barnett and David Haines & Joyce Hinterding somehow surgically removed the fear of failure out of us. They succeeded because flashes of this urgency remain in my current practice. 

When I was about to graduate for my Honours grad show, Terry Hayes, my incredible supervisor shook me up when he told me he was inviting Mikala Dwyer to the grad show. I was a complete fangirl, I loved her work and thought she was the coolest thing in contemporary Australian art. I was also shocked but not surprised when he told me she was a former UWS lecturer. Terry delivered and introduced me to Mikala during the whirlwind of the 2009 grad show. All I remember is her glowing face and that she said if I ever wanted to do my Masters with her, she would take me on. It took me five years to reignite the passion after the downpour from the huge black cloud of university restructuring that rained over Z building. But sure enough, Mikala took me on for my Masters of Fine Arts in 2015 at Sydney College of the Arts, with Joyce Hinterding as my auxiliary. My desire to make was reignited and it was being fuelled by solid UWS representation.

The black cloud of university restructuring followed me but so did that UWS fire. The fire I developed at UWS also prepared me to protest for the right to creative pedagogy. A fight that was mirrored again ten years later during my Masters. These fights to study fine arts really dampened the mood for many and violently occupied creative space and time, but it has made me want to pursue my practice with a voraciousness I did not know I had.

Since then, I have been in multiple exhibitions, institutions and residencies in Sydney, nationally and in America, Asia and Europe, as a visitor or participant. Even though I am continually expanding my list of art pilgrimages, I always hand it to the UWS teaching and tech staff. They created innovative magicians in that humble space out in Kingswood. The UWS imprint is noticed whenever I enter spaces and exhibitions, it is an imprint that is uniquely urgent, punk and still raw. This is all thanks to the balance of unlimited possibility and demand in pedagogy, critique and studio practice created by brilliant minds I and many others had the privilege of being mentored by. I will also never forget the important relationships I built with innovative and like-minded peers because my fangirling habits have also moved onto their practices. We were creating magic out there by ourselves and we did not even know it.