Turbulence, Conflict and the Garden of Remediation, Charles Green, Lyndell Brown, Paul Gough and Jon Cattapan

The exhibition was the culmination of a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, 2017-2019, ‘World Pictures: pathfinding across a century of wars, 1917-2017’ (ARC DP170101912, $296,000) which brought together four artists with experience in working with the military and as war artists. The project aimed to redefine war art in artistic and scholarly research. Its premise was that public understandings of war are significantly shaped by war art and images of war and aimed to investigate the artistic potential of scholars’ methodologies –timelines and the atlas form – to revise the Australian understanding of the century-long and global aftermath of war from WW1 into the present. Through presentations, papers and exhibitions of new art the project investigated how international 21st century artists explored recent wars to produce a systematic, art historical account of international 21st century war art. Gough worked collaboratively with the painters Jon Cattapan, Charles Green and Lyndell Green [who exhibit as one artists Green & Brown] to co-author a number of publications, undertake fieldwork overseas and in Australia and to publish peer-reviewed articles such as ‘Revisioning Australia’s war art: four painters as citizens of the ‘global South’, Humanities: Special Issue ‘Pictures and Conflicts since 1945’, 2018, ISSN 2076-0787. Through the research grant Gough was able to undertake site work on the former Gallipoli battlefield in Turkey, across the Somme and Flanders battle grounds, and also visit the sites of British Army occupation during the Cold War in the former Western Germany. A suite of photographs taken on this visit to the Rhine was exhibited at the former Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne in Spring 2019. ARC Discover Grants are a highly competitive annual funding round with an average success rate of 14%. The project aimed to provide a better understanding of Australia’s heritage and of war art, and was realised through this exhibition, publications and commissions, such as the tapestry Morning Star created by Green & Brown for the Sir John Monash Centre on the Somme, France, which was critiqued in ‘Centenary: Aftermath in the Visual Arts’ in 1914-1918 International Encyclopedia of the First World War, commissioned from Gough for the peer-reviewed online resource co-ordinated by the Freie Universitat, Berlin.