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As an impressionable 17-year-old wandering through Civic from the bus to the Australian National University campus in the early 1980s, it was impossible not to notice what seemed like a visual rash of posters plastered haphazardly on walls and poles. They would change overnight, their sticky paste leaving a tacky residue that built up to read like a layered contemporary archaeology of the latest concerns and ideas. One day it might be calling to march for women raped in war, then for youth unemployment or extolling the powers of an improbable superhero called Super Doreen. Little did I know then that it was Mandy Martin's influence as an artist-activist printmaker with Adelaide's Progressive Art Movement (PAM) that had helped to bring this sensibility to the otherwise manicured and controlled streets of Canberra.
Coming back to this point has helped me develop the curatorial framework for 'Mandy Martin: From Queanbeyan to New York 1978-1984 / Art & Life', presented at Canberra Museum and Gallery. Martin's passing during the dark year of 2021, from the return of cancer, was acknowledged widely and with great sadness,1 but this exhibition is intended as more than a visual obituary. In bringing together little-known key works from the foundational years of the artist's practice, it proposes a fresh reassessment of a complex and at times conflicted period, where Martin changed her subject matter and materiality every few months, and finally came to a confident understanding of the type of art that she wanted to make.2 It begins in January 1978 when, aged 25, she moved to Queanbeyan from Adelaide, and concludes in September 1984 when she was selected to present new work in Australian Visions' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The ideals, spirited collectivism but also the internal conflicts of PAM that Martin had been so deeply engaged in as a young artist-activist with Ann Newmarch in Adelaide were not forgotten, but they could be distanced when her new husband, artist Robert Boynes, was offered a senior role at what is now known as the ANU School of Art & Design. Martin recalled that leaving Adelaide and arriving in the national capital 'felt like a breath of fresh air'.3 One of the triggers for her growing disaffection...