Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/helen-s-tiernan

Birth Place

Gippsland, Vic., Australia

Biography

Helen S. Tiernan was born in Gippsland, Victoria, in 1952. Her mother is Indigenous, a dressmaker from the southeast Gippsland area, while her father is an electrician of Irish descent. Tiernan regards herself as an artist of Aboriginal and European heritage. As a child, the family home was awash with colours and fabrics; she remembers the textures of antique furniture collected by her mother from rural estates, and the smells and sounds from her father’s work shed – the source of many of his creative projects[1]. Tiernan has three siblings, Neville, Margo and Lorraine. Her early schooling was in Sale, Victoria. As a child, time out was spent in a relaxed rural environment. She enjoyed exploring the district’s old farmhouses and landscapes, having picnics with the large extended family and going on holiday at the family beach shack. In 1969 Tiernan moved to Melbourne where she enrolled for her final year at the Brighton Technical College from where she graduated with a Diploma of Art. In 1971 she worked in a fashion house in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak and then in 1972 travelled to New Zealand where she lived with Indigenous and Islander people. On her return that year, Tiernan moved to Geelong where she started her own business in illustration graphics and ticketing writing while continuing to work in the clothing industry. She married Peter Williams, a jeweller, in 1981. From 1983 to 1985 Tiernan joined her sister Lorraine, working in the bridal industry in Geelong, doing fashion, design and manufacture. Her trip to Kakadu in 1985 was profoundly important, reminding her that 'I always knew this was my country (and that) without country there is nothing’ [2] Her first child, Esther, was born in 1986, her second, Erica, in 1989. Tiernan separated from her husband in 1991 and with young children ran drawing classes from home. In 1992 she enrolled in the Geelong Gordon Institute of Technology in Communication Art and Design and graduated with an Associate Diploma in Computer Aided Art and Design. Late 1996 was a turning point for Tiernan. She moved to Canberra and lived upstairs in her sister Margo Neale’s house in Chapman, her other sister Lorraine living below. She says: 'Compared to Geelong, everything about Canberra was just so different, the arts, the university, the lifestyle… it was then that I really focused and got started on my career as an artist.’[3] In 1997 Tiernan enrolled at the Open Art evening classes at the Australian National University (ANU) where she put a portfolio of works together. In 1998 she commenced a four-year Honours degree at the ANU School of Art, studying under Robert Boynes, Mandy Martin, Vivienne Binns, Wendy Teagle and visiting artists, including Guan Wei, Tim Johnson, Richard Larter, Helen Wright and Craig Easton. Over the next few years Tiernan moved house in Canberra several times, first to Stirling, next to Duffy, then finally to Chapman where she purchased a home next door to her sister Margo. Throughout this period she made and sold art from home, worked in her sister Lorraine’s bridal business in Kingston and ran drawing classes from home as well as with the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT). In 2000 Tiernan exhibited in the group show 'A Thousand Colours’ at the ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra, where she also held her solo graduating exhibition, 'Femmage’, in 2001. In addition to this solo show, she exhibited in the group graduate show, 'Lift Off’. Tiernan graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with First Class Honours, majoring in painting. In 2001 she also exhibited in 'Dark Side of the Moon’ as part of the Capital Arts Patron Organisation (CAPO) Fundraiser at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, and at the School of Art Drawing Prize held in the ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery. Tiernan also won the ANU Emerging Artist Support Scheme Acquisitive Award. In 2001 she became a project director at M16 Art Space, an artists’ run gallery and studio space initiative at Fyshwick in Canberra. Over the next four years in this position she worked closely with a community of over thirty artists. While Tiernan had shown her work in a number of galleries during her student days, 'Femmage’ was her first major solo show, an exhibition drawing on elements of interior architecture and floral textile design to investigate personal and feminist issues. It was an exhibition inspired by the American artist Miriam Schapiro, and proved seminal in the development of Tiernan’s aesthetic language. Like Shapiro, her work celebrates beauty, adopting the use of decoration and pattern to give credence to the role that women’s hand-sewn work has played in the history of art. Instead of 'high-art’ collage, she chooses a lexicon inspired by craft and locates the work in the setting of the domestic interior. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Tiernan also cites history painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth century as an influence, including Giuseppe Arcimboldo, William Hogarth, Juan Sanchez Cotan, Diego Velasquez, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Thomas Gainsborough and Jean-Antoine Watteau. International artists cited include Renee Magritte, Georgie O’Keeffe, Robert Zakanitch, Joyce Kozloff, Louise Bourgeois. Australian Artists included James Guppy, David Salle, James McGrath, Tim McGuire, Kristin Headlam, Anne Judell, Helen Wright, Adrianne Strump, Pat Hoffe, Julie Dowling, Wilma Tabacco, Jodie Cunningham and Susan Norrie. [4] Tiernan continued her exploration of the personal with a focus on her Aboriginal identity in 'Silent Generations’ held at the Alliance Françoise Gallery, Canberra, in 2002. In this exhibition she reinterpreted personal and family photographic records using subtle irony and pictorial means to make some of the hidden histories of her Aboriginal identity more visible. This subject was also the concern of her 2002 exhibition 'Species – Introduced and Native’ shown at the the Hive Gallery in Canberra and her 2003 exhibition 'Temporal Fold’, exhibited at M16 Artspace and Gallery, Canberra. Tiernan received an Arts ACT Project Grant in 2003 that funded her research into the lives of the women from the Lakes Tyres mission in East Gippsland, a location close to where she grew up as a child, and the exhibition, 'Songlines-Journeys Through Country’, which was staged at East Gippsland Regional Gallery in 2004 and then in 2005 at the ANU School of Art, Canberra. This exhibition took her exploration of Aboriginal identity to the place she saw at a distance as a child, where, as she recounts, 'Only Aboriginal people collected and taken from their traditional land were corralled into missions there. No white fellas were allowed to enter without authorisation,.I could not understand this.’[5] As project the aim of which was to promote cultural revival in the area by connecting the present with the colonial past, the exhibition was inspired by early photographs of the local Gunai/Kurnai women and contemporary oral histories recorded by Tiernan. Her work embraced the marginalisation of Indigenous women, the impact of Christianity and mission life on their belief systems, their displacement from tribal lands, European management of disease in the mission and the splitting of families when men were sent away to work on farms, in industry or to fight wars[6] In 2003 Tiernan also undertook a commission of Window Art for the 'Reconciliation Exhibition’ at Reconciliation Place in Canberra. For the same exhibition the following year she undertook a commission of Window Art for the 'Pathways for Reconciliation Exhibition’, receiving the 2004 Aboriginal Artist of the Year, Canberra & District NAIDOC Award. In 2005 Tiernan received the Tuggeranong Regional Art Prize and was commissioned by the ATSI Cultural Centre in Canberra to undertake the design and construction of pole art for a public art project. The exhibition 'Shared Histories’, which continued Tiernan’s interest in the cross-cultural dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal culture, was held at Tuggeranong Regional Gallery in 2006. In this series, however, she examined the human impact on country, in particular the erasure of Aboriginal culture and the destruction of natural landscape by non-Aboriginal people in her resident city, Canberra, and its environs. Tiernan extended the concepts developed in 'Shared Histories’ in 'Unearthed – Stories Written in the Land’, held in 2008 at the Coo-ee Aboriginal art gallery, Sydney, using early colonial paintings to open up new historic, cultural and social perspectives for the interpretation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cross-cultural interaction. In this exhibition Tiernan quotes directly from colonial imagery to give the viewer imagined Aboriginal perspectives of cultural contact. Inspired by the approach taken by Christopher Pease, she refers to works by Conrad Martins, Petrus Van Der Velden and the Port Jackson Painter in ways that highlight how Aboriginal identity was constructed in the past and used to shaped contemporary perceptions of it. Commenting on her work Tiernan states, 'My work is about memory and wanting to share it. It is a visceral process for me but when it is finished it is finished. I learnt that from Emily Kame Kngwarreye. The process of doing is the important thing. It absorbs me like ceremony and after I have exhausted it, it is over and I am happy to see it go’[7] The trajectory of Tiernan’s career reveals an expressive journey exploring issues of concern from the personal and feminine to Aboriginal-Irish identity to those of wider concern arising from the interpretations of the visual colonial records of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cross cultural relations. Helen S. Tiernan’s art is ultimately informed by European and Indigenous perspectives that embrace a commitment to exploring the artistic potential of pattern and the decorative. Central to her artistic practice is the re-interpretation and redressing of an Aboriginal cultural past of erasure and oppression. Tiernan’s work is held in a number of private collections in the UK, New York, Australia as well as in the ANU School of Art Emerging Artists Support Scheme (EASS) Loans Collection and the National Museum of Australia. ^ Doyle 2007 ^ Geissler, Interview with the artist ^ Geissler, Interview with the artist ^ Helen Tiernan, Femmage, Graduate Exhibition Catalogue, Canberra School of Art, 2001 ^ Geissler, Interview with the artist ^ Tiernan 2004. ^ Geissler, Interview with the artist Writers: Geissler, Marie geissm Date written: 2009 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 1952

Summary

Helen S. Tiernan is an Aboriginal/European contemporary painter who explores the interpretation of Aboriginal identity and history, drawing on personal photographic documentation and oral material as well as material from wider historical sources.

Gender

Female

Died

None listed

Age at death

None listed