Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/yvonne-boag

Birth Place

Glasgow, Scotland

Biography

Yvonne Boag, painter, printmaker, sculptor, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. She came to Australia in the early sixties and studied visual art at the South Australian School of Art under Franz Kemp (Dip FA – Printmaking 1977). After graduating, she moved to Melbourne, exhibiting with Niagara Galleries before relocating to Sydney and joining Australia Galleries. She also exhibits regularly in Korea and has had numerous one-person shows in Japan, Korea and France. Yvonne is represented in major collections in England, Scotland, France, Japan, Korea and Australia. She has been a resident in print workshops in Scotland and France as well as being Australia’s first artist-in-residence in Korea. Yvonne has taught art at the National Art School, Sydney University, University of New South Wales and the Australian National University and has been an invited Professor at Ewha Women’s University and Hong Ik University in Seoul, South Korea. Yvonne’s career is driven by displacement, beginning with moving from Scotland to Australia and latter, moving between Europe, South Korea, Japan and the Lockhart River Aboriginal Community on Cape York. Displacement gives Yvonne a sharp eye for her surroundings and her interactions with those surroundings. This displacement between disparate cultures drove Yvonne’s focus on interactions: interactions between people and places. Yvonne has developed a sophisticated language for representing conversations between groups of people, interactions between people and their places and her interactions with places, including the use of a mapping metaphor to represent place and time. She utilises shapes, colour, texture and composition, to represent aspects of the interactions. “I make my work wondering what it will become. I am aware of a need I have to try to make sense of my existence and hold on to fragments of time. I am very aware of the fragility and endurance of life and of how everything is only for a moment then gone changed lost. William Scott , Patrick Heron and Roger hilton have had a big effect on my work. I enjoy the way they use colour and shape to convey a place person or feeling. I like the simplicity of their work it does not include any non essential elements. Mary McQueen, the Melbourne printmaker and artist, had a great influence on me as a young artist. Mary McQeen taught me, by example, how to analyze and assess my own work.” There is a disarming simplicity to Yvonne Boag’s paintings and prints ─ though certainly not her books and ‘therapeutic’ sculptures ─ which belies the complexity of the process which begets them. And Yvonne is just as disarming when she talks about the work. “Mostly, I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I know what it is once I have done it.” This is evidence of just how instinctively she works. But it is an instinctual process which is again belied by the seemingly natural order of the finished work which suggests that it could not be anything other than what it is. This manifests itself in the rhythms across the surface of the painting where forms and colours engage in such an easy and rational conversation, and in the adroit tensions that Boag sets up between the formal character of the work and the imagery derived from the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world ─ let’s call it the context ─ is the driver of Yvonne Boag’s work. The work is a response to the world about her, not a representation of it. In that sense, it does what art has always done ─ namely, to transform sight into insight, into a heightened awareness of what it is to be in this world. Typically, we become intensely aware when there is some kind of disjunction or rendering of the familiar. This sense of disconnection, or ‘duality’ as she calls it, has become the recurrent trigger to Boag’s work. It probably began during her period in Paris (1991-94) when her work was a response to the city, or more accurately, a response to her response to the city. But if Paris was dislocating, her regular trips to the remote Aboriginal community at Lockhart River in far North Queensland (after 1997) were tectonic in their impact. The work produced from these trips pushed developments in Paris even further: flat, abstracted forms derived from the everyday world rendered without any tonal gradation and forming tightly coherent all-over rhythms of colour and form. However, it has been South Korea which has been the dominant source of Boag’s vision since her first visit there in 1993. It was, she says, “so different, every day was like an adventure, it was like a reality check”. We need to remember that South Korea only opened up in 1988 and, although its development since then has been phenomenal, it remains culturally highly distinctive. It is this differentness which feeds Boag’s work now. The work is a response to the everyday reality of South Korea, embodying a sense of ‘being there’. Hence, there is an emblematic quality to these prints and paintings where the colours express the emotions felt in response to the landscape, to the city. But they are also responses to other visual features, such as the orthography and sounds of the Korean language. In short, they are visual analogues to the experience of being in a strange place. Sociology has term for the anonymous people we see every day, say commuting to work: familiar strangers. For Yvonne Boag familiar strangeness has become the crucible of her work, recalling those famous lines of A.E. Housman: “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” Paul McGillickNovember 2014 A detailed CV and her digital archive can be accessed at http://www.yvonneboag.com.au Writers: Staff Writer bobjcultconv Date written: 1996 Last updated: 2015

Born

b. 1954

Summary

Scottish-born printmaker, painter and sculptor, Yvonne Boag, arrived in South Australia in 1964. In 1977 she graduated from the South Australian School of Art with a Diploma of Fine Art (Printmaking). Her detailed CV and a digital archive of her works can be accessed at http://www.yvonneboag.com.au

Gender

Female

Died

None listed

Age at death

None listed