Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:02
Welcome to season seven of the Prima Donna Podcast, Sonic
0:06
Portraits of Australian Artists. This audio was recorded and produced on Wurundjeri Country.
0:12
I pay respects to elders past and present.
0:16
The third episode in this series features visual artist Wilma Tabacco.
0:21
To find out more about this project and to hear more episodes like this
0:24
one, visit prima donna podcast.com.
0:35
I've titled this piece, the Interweaving of Images and Words.
0:39
Prelude. . Primadonna is Italian, meaning First Lady, and refers to
0:44
the lead soprano in an opera. Their roles written by men usually portray Temptresses courtesans.
0:53
Power seekers, romantics, duped by lascivious men.
0:58
These women mostly died dramatically on stage, stabbed, shot, poisoned,
1:06
brokenhearted, or by their own hand.
1:10
Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto contains an aria, sung by a
1:15
tenor who plays the character of the Duke of Mantova . It
1:19
is titled La Donna e Mobile.
1:22
The libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave and is
1:27
based on a play by Victor Hugo. The tune is very upbeat and catchy.
1:35
La Donna e Mobile translates as, Woman is Fickle.
1:40
. It continues: Qual piuma al vento – like a feather in the wind
1:47
Muta d’accento – e di pensier She changes her voice and mind.
1:52
All translations inevitably lack the essence of the original language
1:56
in this case, a more accurate translation is yes, woman is
2:01
fickle like a feather in the wind. She has no voice and no mind, meaning she is dumb and silly.
2:09
It gets worse. Sisters of the Revolution, add the Duke of Mantova, Signor Verdi, Signor Piave
2:18
and Messieur Hugo to your burning list!
2:29
Introducing myself, should I say I am Wilma Tabacco, or
2:35
my name is Wilma Tabacco..
2:39
I am first person. Singular of the present tense.
2:41
Indicative of the verb to be conjugates as follows.
2:46
I am. You are she. He is.
2:48
We are. You are. They are. This is the first verb One learns when studying a foreign language.
2:55
The next thing one learns to say is. What is your name, in Italian, ‘come ti chiami’?
3:02
Answer: my name is Wilma Tabacco, in Italian, mi ciamo Wilma Tabacco.
3:08
hear the difference in the voice modulation, tonality, and pronunciation
3:13
When I use Italian to say my name. I remember a boy from my childhood who lived across the road from my family.
3:22
His name was Prospero.
3:25
In the Abruzzese dialect, my parents spoke.
3:28
Prospero means a match.
3:31
You know that thing once used for lighting fires?
3:34
The Italian word for match is fiammifero.
3:38
Prosper actually means prosperous, affluent of good fortune.
3:44
I didn't know that at the time, so I thought, what a
3:47
strange name to give someone. I did not then realize that my name was even stranger than his.
4:09
Last week, a telephone recorded female robot-like voice instructed
4:14
me to repeat a phrase three times so that my voice could be recorded for
4:20
identification purposes in a government authorities voice recognition program.
4:26
I could have refused, but then my problem would never
4:29
be resolved, so I complied.
4:33
Yes, I confess I did put on a very posh accent and disguised my voice,
4:38
not deliberately, I just don't respond well to being told what to do, but
4:44
the robotic voice did not complain.
4:47
So now my disembodied voice officially identifies me and I don't like it.
4:54
I felt affronted by the process. I wanted to inform that robot that I'm an artist and that some artists
5:02
are identified by their artworks, Edvard Munch’s painting the scream.
5:09
A picture of a woman's screaming popped into my head as I
5:12
recorded my voice identity. That screaming woman is mute, but I felt her scream and
5:20
wanted to add mine to her.
5:23
Then I remembered Cy Twombly’s painted words echoing as moans, groans,
5:29
and whales scribbled, scrawled, smudged, erased, and repeated.
5:34
Yes, some artists are identified by their artworks.
5:43
What impetus propels someone to become an artist, a
5:46
musician, a dancer, a writer. Professions where potential failure stares you in the
5:51
face at every step you take. There is no satisfactory answer.
5:57
Perhaps clues can be found, captured within one's memory,
6:02
fragmented and disconnected that might provide some insights.
6:07
I remember an episode in primary school, grade one, I think the teacher gave
6:12
each pupil a sheet of unlined paper and asked us to draw a tree in pencil.
6:19
She then gave it a little demonstration of how we might go about this.
6:23
For me, this experience was magical, mesmerizing.
6:34
My tree didn't really look like a tree compared to some that the others
6:38
had drawn, but I was happy, so happy.
6:44
When I first attended primary school, I could not speak English.
6:48
I was born in Italy and arrived here at the age of four.
6:52
I have no memory of learning English.
6:54
But I do remember that in the first week of prep grade, the teacher
6:59
asked each pupil in turn to come onto her platform and, in chalk, copy a
7:06
letter of the alphabet that she had listed previously sequentially, A to
7:11
Z horizontally across the blackboard in her beautiful handwritten script.
7:18
Our letter was to be written beneath hers.
7:21
I got the letter B.. I made a downward vertical line turned right.
7:27
I made an upward loop that joined the vertical in the correct position.
7:33
Wrong Wilma. You make the downward vertical shaft, go back our pathway, make
7:40
a right hand turn, create the loop downwards, and join it.
7:47
Mine was missing that little sticking out bit of vertical line
7:50
that allows the B to sit neatly on the horizontal line of a page.
7:59
As soon as I was able to read and speak English, I became my
8:03
parents' interpreter and translator.
8:06
It was harder for them to learn a strange language as quickly as I had.
8:11
This was such a big responsibility for a young child, one that caused
8:16
me considerable embarrassment.
8:20
Did these seemingly disconnected experiences from long ago plant some
8:26
slow germinating seed in my psyche.
8:30
One that fused the making of images with the formation of words, English,
8:36
Italian and Abruzzese dialect?
8:40
Abstract images, words in the alphabet, chopped up and reconfigured
8:44
to look like maps of actual places are often the subject or sometimes
8:49
the content of my paintings. I like to think of my abstractions as studied signs of illegibility.
8:58
I write random words in unlined books, scrawled haphazardly over pages.
9:05
They appear to have drifted down from the air and landed on a page
9:10
in a sort of topography of thoughts.
9:13
I've done this since the late eighties. I have books and books of interesting words that I
9:19
sometimes refer to when I struggle
9:21
to title works or exhibitions, words and images together.
9:29
Lately, I've been collecting Latin words with the neuter suffix ‘ium’:
9:35
premium Consortium, palladium Symposium, compendium, podium, and
9:41
proscenium, just to name a few.
9:44
There are hundreds of them used in the English language.
9:50
In grade four, I was told that I would never be an artist.
9:56
It was just before Christmas. I was asked to find a cardboard box that would be used to house the
10:03
nativity scene we would later make.
10:06
I did, and it was therefore my task to paint the outside of the
10:10
box in a most glorious, dark blue.
10:13
I now know it was ultramarine blue.
10:16
It was meant to represent the night sky, I suppose.
10:21
I commenced. No, that is not the way you paint.
10:25
You don't paint smudgy marks with a loaded brush any old which way.
10:29
You start at the top left corner of the box and paint in a straight
10:34
horizontal line to the other corner.
10:37
Then you repeat the same process under the first stroke and continue
10:42
until you reach the bottom of the box.
10:46
Wilma will never be an artist.
10:53
Well, Mrs. So-and-So whose name and face I've forgotten, but whose words I've always
10:58
remembered, I have now been a successful professional artist for nearly 40 years.
11:04
What you didn't understand was that your formula lacked the
11:10
personal, any residue, emotion, and it lacked my hand, hence, me.
11:18
My first solo exhibition was in 1988 at Niagara Galleries in Richmond.
11:25
Hard work, great ideas and superior technical painting skills can go
11:30
unnoticed without an unexpected event that changes the course of one's life.
11:37
The director of Niagara Galleries came to visit an artist colleague
11:42
whose studio was located in the same complex as mine.
11:45
To enter her studio. He had to pass through mine.
11:49
He saw my paintings, liked them, and ask my colleague
11:53
to tell me to telephone him. After having shown folios of my works to various gallery directors,
12:00
that's what one did before digital images, the internet and social
12:05
media, and being told, oh, we're booked up for the next three years.
12:10
Come back some other time, meaning don't come back at all.
12:14
I wasted no time. The rest is history.
12:19
Thank you, Mr. William Nuttall. I exhibited with Niagara Galleries for 21 years, from 1988 until
12:27
2010, with works sold to major national and state museums and
12:33
galleries, and to private collectors.
12:36
I can't go through my CV here.
12:39
It runs to 13 pages of dense text.
12:43
Suffice it to say that I've mounted 45 solo exhibitions in a variety
12:48
of commercial and public spaces.
12:51
Participated in 250 or more group exhibitions, co-directed an art
12:57
gallery, Langford120 for eight years.
13:00
Curated exhibitions, written essays, and more.
13:04
My work has been reviewed in newspapers magazine.
13:08
Books, catalogs have been published.
13:17
Should I be so inclined I could add the following to my name: bachelor
13:22
of Commerce, diploma in Education, diploma in Fine Arts, master in Arts
13:27
and Doctorate in Philosophy, I've taught painting, drawing, and printmaking
13:33
at university level for 32 years.
13:35
Part-time, of course, and my teaching style is nothing like
13:40
that of my fourth grade teacher. At the end of 2010, I resigned from my permanent part-time position at R M I T.
13:50
I needed some fresh air.
13:53
Earlier that same year. I parted ways with Niagara galleries.
13:58
I needed new experiences.
14:01
Folly, yes, risky , yes, but sometimes one needs a sea change
14:09
irrespective of one's age. Independence called .In mid 2011, my R M I T and artist colleague
14:20
Irene Barberis and I, neither of us lacking in initiative, opened our own
14:25
independent commercial gallery space, langford120 in a beautiful, refurbished
14:31
industrial warehouse in North Melbourne.
14:35
This at a time when many commercial galleries were closing more folly.
14:41
We had already initiated several collaborative projects
14:45
in the past, so we're familiar with our particular skills.
14:50
Over nearly 8 years running Langford 120
14:53
we curated and mounted countless individual and group exhibitions
14:58
with works by hundreds of emerging and established artists, local
15:03
and international, that as it happened, were mostly women artists.
15:10
We also exhibited our own works, including experimental installations.
15:15
Ones that no commercial gallery would've wanted to show.
15:19
Running a gallery was a wonderful experience for both
15:27
of us, but being artists.
15:30
We had little appetite for commerce. At the end of 2018 we relinquished the gallery space, which by the way
15:39
is now a gymnasium deciding that we needed to focus instead on our
15:47
own studio practices and careers.
15:50
Then the next year, COVID arrived.
15:59
During our time at Langford120, Marita smith from Gallerysmith
16:03
visited us many times.
16:06
She was encouraging and supportive, provided advice, even though
16:11
technically we could have been considered working in competition.
16:15
She liked my work and offered me a solo exhibition for 2019.
16:21
I was delighted to accept. I've been fortunate to have the support of several reputable gallery
16:30
directors over the years, including Helen Maxwell and Nancy Sever, both
16:35
in Canberra, and now Marita smith.
16:40
Verbal or written descriptions of visual images can be tedious, but I'll
16:47
try and do a short summary for you. My paintings, especially those made in the last 20 years, appear simple,
16:56
paired back to a few finely tuned colors and a bunch of crisscrossed
17:01
or broken or continuous lines that act to enclose spaces or not.
17:08
But there is more to my abstraction than meets the eye.
17:12
Think poetry. Few words very carefully distilled to evoke ideas and emotions that
17:19
are not described or explained.
17:24
. After completing my doctoral thesis titled Reading Between the Lines that
17:29
contextualized my striped works within modernist and contemporary abstract
17:35
practices, I decided to focus less on optical perception and cultural
17:42
color usage and more on ideas of change, destruction, and renewal.
17:50
Aspects of my Italian cultural heritage with all its idiosyncrasies
17:56
are in my formation, and this inevitably directs my work.
18:01
But it's difficult to define the echoes and sentiments of
18:06
foreignness or historical events.
18:12
Certainly my work's content is not personal.
18:16
It's not about my identity.
18:18
Rather artifices of language displacement.
18:23
Misplacement replacement plays out in what I make.
18:28
Languages retain their own visual resonance as recorded
18:31
in memories in histories.
18:34
Cultural taste preferences, particular sensibilities, dreams,
18:39
ruined monuments and architecture. Civilizations that speak to us through their buried, broken, and
18:47
sometimes retrieved artifacts, shards of past endeavors,
18:52
buried beneath layers of time.
18:55
All of this lies under my seemingly cheery colors and razor sharp forms.
19:07
For Walter Benjamin, digging becomes a synonym for self-discovery.
19:12
A means for making art where the detritus of the past underlies
19:17
the construction of sight of both modernity and memory.
19:23
The images of the past "reside as treasures in the sober
19:29
rooms of our later insights".
19:34
I often wonder whether having been born in the high peaks of the
19:38
central Apennine mountains in Italy, where to look down into troughs and
19:42
valleys, and in winter even clouds has influenced my paintings in subtle
19:48
ways that even I can't comprehend.
19:52
Many of my paintings look like aerial views something to fly over
19:57
rather than view from solid ground.
19:59
This has the effect of drawing a viewer closer to the artwork
20:04
and then propelling them backwards to safer ground.
20:11
To move from place to place to be displaced for whatever reason is
20:16
the history of human civilization.
20:19
Through my paintings over the years, I have reconstructed Roman
20:24
ruins, referenced seismic events, reimagined historical stories, and
20:30
rebuilt, so to speak, in pure gold.
20:33
The structures of L’Aquila where I was born, destroyed by that
20:38
catastrophic earthquake in 2009.
20:41
I have shattered glass, mapped the Campus Martius, depicted formations
20:48
of Roman soldiers, divided the ancient Palatine hill into real estate plots,
20:56
pieced together parts of Pompeii and Herculaneum and much more.
21:02
All in the ambiguous visual language of hard-edge abstraction.
21:09
If you wish to see some of my recent paintings, they are on
21:12
display at Gallerysmith in.
21:15
Abbotsford Street in North Melbourne in April, may of this year.
21:19
I've titled this exhibition Proscenium.
21:23
Proscenium: Latinised from Greek and meaning ‘a stage’.
21:28
More specifically, the front part of the stage: the curtains and its framework.
21:34
It is the metaphorical, vertical, frontal plane of space in a theater
21:39
that can also be considered a social construct, separating the actors and
21:45
their stage world from the audience.
21:48
But because both are in the same auditorium, reciprocal
21:52
responses are encouraged.
21:55
This Proscenium suite of paintings has been carefully staged within
22:00
a designated gallery space.
22:02
The gallery becomes a staged setting for artworks that
22:07
represent me in my absence. The sequential placement of individual works on the walls and
22:14
the intervals between them provide an overarching narrative constructed
22:20
through rhythm while each work retains its unique character.
22:30
Unlike that body of work exhibited in 2019 under the title of Fosse,
22:36
a Latin, French and Italian word.
22:39
This time I've made linear configurations dominant.
22:43
However, like most of my work over many years, in some way or another,
22:48
the oscillation between form, shape and line creates a perpetual fluttering
22:55
that tends to confound most viewers.
22:58
Empty space can become shape, and then with the blinking of an
23:03
eye slip back into nothingness.
23:09
The frontality of these new works, the linearity that confounds spatial
23:14
readings, the painted strokes that identify the hand, the finely tuned
23:20
color, all aimed to express ideas, emotions and other influences
23:25
embedded in their long gestation.
23:29
While references to culture, language, ground, space and fragmented
23:36
archeological artifacts are present in all my works, I think it's safe to
23:41
say that unlike their predecessors, that dug into the archeology of the
23:46
past, I prefer to consider these works as ‘inverted archaeology’,
23:52
imagined remnants mapped for future archeologists to tunnel into and to
23:59
speculate on the dystrophic ‘now’.
24:07
Words are not substitutes for images, nor can they adequately elucidate
24:14
their scope or describe their full range of potential meaning.
24:18
This is the domain of the viewer.
24:22
If you look into and between the lines of my works, through the colors
24:27
inside and outside of bordering edges.
24:31
You'll find what I have placed there.
24:35
Artists in whatever field are restless creatures, never satisfied.
24:39
There's always more to do. More to say, I could have done this, I should have done
24:42
that are common refrains. I have some exciting new projects planned for the future.
24:49
Also, I have not entirely given up on teaching art.
24:53
For the last few years. I've conducted workshops at the art room in Footscray.
24:59
A community arts hub run by two courageous and wonderful women where
25:04
I'm able to share my specialized knowledge in challenging ways.
25:09
I know that many young and now not so young artists have been
25:13
grateful for my support and advice over the years, even long after
25:16
they've graduated from university. It makes me proud to have had the opportunities to
25:21
share my insights with them. If you've managed to listen to me up to this point.
25:31
I, sincerely, thank you. You can see most of my works along with various essays, some written by
25:38
me and others by more distinguished writers reproduced on my website.
25:45
They are not the actual works. They are reproductions.
25:50
Works or reproductions of works can be seen at Gallerysmith website
25:58
also, you've been listening to the Prima Donna Podcast.
26:07
To find out more about this project and to hear more episodes like this
26:10
one, visit prima donna podcast.com.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More