Art in Space

See article in its original context here by Jo Davy for Weekly Review

When artist Greg Ades took up residency in a disused classroom at Port Melbourne Primary School, he never could have predicted the influence a bunch of children would have on his work. It was a decision based on convenience; the St Kilda artist was running the after-care program at the school and was offered the space free.

When he wasn’t co-ordinating after-school activities or working as a student integration aide in later years, Ades took groups of students into his studio, showing them work in progress and explaining what was involved in setting up an exhibition.

“It wasn’t so much teaching,” he says, thoughtfully.

“When I started, the school was predominantly kids from the commission flats, and [art] was something completely foreign to them.”

With population growth and Port Melbourne’s gentrification, Ades watched the student body swell from 120 to 650 during his 17-year tenure. But as the school developed, he found his style evolving, thanks to the way young people approach a blank piece of paper.

“Generally when kids draw, they will look at this object and that object and they’re not thinking about the whole,” he says. “I find that approach to be a really fascinating one.”

Ades has since moved from Port Melbourne Primary School to take up a three-month residency at the non-profit arts venue, fortyfivedownstairs. But the technique has stayed with him and dominates his exhibition Places on show at the gallery next month.

“[My work is] all about that spatial relationship of an object’s existence in its environment,” he says.

Ades has, in his own words, been around for a while, emerging on the Melbourne art scene in the late 1980s with works inspired by urban scenery around his home.

A working holiday in New York took his cityscapes to a new level, but also signalled the end of an era.

“The work that came out that trip was, in a sense, the last of my urban work, purely because New York takes the urban landscape to the nth degree,” he says.

A change of scenery came with a visit to Woomera in South Australia, where Ades joined conservationists protesting against former prime minister John Howard’s proposed nuclear dump in the region. “I started thinking about Australian landscape painting in general and how [a lot of aspects] hadn’t really been addressed.”

Trips to the Kimberley ranges, the Daintree Rainforest and parts of Tasmania provided plenty of fodder to stoke Ades’ new-found affinity for Mother Nature’s peculiarities.

“When I was in the desert, I started noticing the relationship of this rock to that rock and how – especially with Gibber Plains – the rocks keep the soil in place; there was this importance to them, otherwise the place would just become sand dunes,” he says. “That, to me, became much more important than the horizon.”

Ades compares the concept to that of a young child drawing a human subject. “They’ll always start with a particular feature and work from there, and then they get really jacked off when it doesn’t look right. It might be a mole or something really recognisable. That’s what the kid sees and hones in on, and it can be really funny.”

 

He started working as an integration aide at the school by chance, helping students with behavioural difficulties or socially disadvantaged backgrounds.

“That one-on-one approach of fostering some sort of creative outlet, even when they don’t have a lot of talent, it just gives them the chance to try something they’re not normally given the chance to do,” he says. “When I first started, there was a kid who had behavioural problems … his home life wasn’t fantastic and he was just really despondent.

“We would do things like, if he got to school at 9 o’clock, he could do drawing and oil painting for half an hour and he loved it. It was really good giving him that impetus to actually want to do something, otherwise he was just coming to school to show up.”

Port Melbourne principal Peter Martin says Ades plays a vital role in working one-on-one with students experiencing behavioural difficulties.

“For some students, art is the only way they can express themselves … in that capacity, Greg is a very valued member of our staff.”

Ades continued his work with troubled young people beyond the school gates, serving 12 years on the board of non-profit organisation Artists for Kids Culture.

The foundation, now in its 20th year, raises money to provide arts and cultural experiences to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Ades recalls a host of success stories; from supporting a young dance student, who went on to sign with Disney, to setting up a soccer program for the Prahran Housing Commission flats and discovering a young talent.

“To be able to fund those kinds of things and provide these kids with some opportunities, it’s been a lot of fun,” he says. For all he has learnt from the kids, it’s safe to say Ades has given as good as he got.

Places runs from July 16-27.
www.fortyfivedownstairs.com