Amendments comprises an ongoing series of large watercolour works on paper made up of numerous concentric coloured rings. From each ring paint drips and spills, ‘amending’ those rings it traverses as it gravitates down the paper’s surface – colour drips and spills from the edge of the page, staining the balsa wood tray beneath. Creek’s drawings take an extended period to complete. As the rings gradually accrue and colour harmonies develop, time and change accumulate. The materiality of the drawing and sense of performance is heightened by the play of gravity and drip trails. There is both a pure optical beauty and a strong material presence in these works. Part object, part process and part exercise in repetition, the works might also be read metaphorically: the titles, First Amendment, Second Amendment and so on suggest a political reference to the subtle alteration or decay of an ideal. In their serial formulation, titling and temporality Creek’s Amendments indicate an interest in minimalist and other 60s and 70s process driven drawing practices. For this series he revisits and expands upon the target motif used in previous drawing projects.
Installation view - 11-20th Amendments - Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne - 2017
11th Amendment, watercolour on paper, balsa drip tray, 204 x 145 cm
11th Amendment - detail
12th Amendment, watercolour on paper, balsa drip tray, 204x145 cm
Dog Whistlers, 126 transfer prints, mixed media on cut paper, contributed text, each approx. 28 x 9cm; desiccated dog, wax, newspapers, thread, steel - Installation view, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, 2014
Allegories of Opposition, mixed media on paper, cut paper paper, 4 sections 160 x 300cm. Installation view ‘Basil Sellers Prize’, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2012.
1st Allegory of Opposition (Zinedine Zidane - Nelson Mandela), mixed media on paper, cut paper 160 x 300cm
1st Allegory of Opposition (detail)
2nd Allegory of Opposition (Vladimir Putin and Ian Thorpe), mixed media on paper, cut paper paper,160 x 300cm
3rd Allegory of Opposition (Keli Lane and Julia Gillard), mixed media on paper, cut paper paper,160 x 300cm
4th Allegory of Opposition (John Howard and Sally Pearson), mixed media on paper, cut paper paper,160 x 300cm
‘Bodies Politic’ is a series of eight desktop drawings. A senior lecturer at RMIT University, Creek regularly takes art students to wet specimen laboratories for anatomical studies. Equally pragmatic and macabre, the labor laboratories showcase human body parts, enabling close study and research. The eight tables in Bodies Politics refer to the experience of these visits and the eight continents of the body as it is divided in classical anatomy. These are the head, neck, thorax, back, upper limb, abdomen, pelvis and lower limb. The anatomy laboratory lays out the dissected body for study onto eight tables representative of these ‘continents’. In addition to the observational training these visits provide, the experience of studying human remains also offers a sobering reminder of our ontological state and has naturally led Creek to consider his own corporeal self.
In this work Creek has inked his own body and made physical body prints on the paper, which forms a ground or landscape from which the drawing emerges. The prints are not always obvious as markings made with the artist’s body although the inference of skin, edges of limbs, hair is clearly visible. In this way Creek makes the inherently private, public and opens the body up to political actions, protestations, observation and defacement. There is a playful use of scale in the attachment of small ink-jet transfer prints of 20th century international political leaders, each related to one of the various ‘continents’ of the world. The play on geographic and bodily land masses, and the absurd scale of the little pinned on heads against their power-ranger-esque bodies is comic and also slightly abject, reminiscent of the political caricature of cartoonists such as James Gillray (1757-1815).
The eight tables sit in their space akin to geographic land masses, which the viewer can move between, connecting one drawing to the other. There are cross-references to read across the tables with parts of drawings having been removed and repasted into others. Synergies emerge with the markings of gestures and physical actions visible in rips, tears and losses. The remains of these attacks on the paper, tear at the body prints leaving us to wonder in Creek’s words “Who would do that to a body? But then whose body is it anyway?” - Kirsten Paisley
Bodies Politic , 8 tables, acrylic sheet, mixed media on paper, each 80 x 75 x 108cm. Installation view Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, Australia, 2015.
Bodies Politic I, acrylic, graphite, transfer print on paper
Bodies Politic II, acrylic, water-colour, transfer print, sewn thread on torn paper
Bodies Politic III, acrylic, graphite, transfer print, paper tape, sewn thread on torn and cut paper
Bodies Politic IV, acrylic, graphite, water-colour, transfer print on torn paper
Bodies Politic V, acrylic, graphite, water-colour, transfer print on torn paper
Bodies Politic VI, acrylic, graphite, water-colour, transfer print on paper
Bodies Politic VII, acrylic, transfer print, tissue paper, glue on torn paper
Bodies Politic VIII, acrylic, water-colour, transfer print, toilet paper on cut paper
Violence of Appearances. Oil on canvas, each 122 x 122cm
Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2003
Sir Garfield Barwick in the Penal Colony
Sleep (Dick Smith as President)
Supplication of Carmen Lawrence
Don Dunstan and the Elders
Clinton binding up John Gorton’s wounds
Natasha Stott Despoja Delivers Peter Costello
Interior with Suffrage (Keatings in the Lodge)
Susan Peacock danced, Kooyong 1966
oil on linen, 254x127cm, 254x254cm, 254x127cm
oil on linen, 213 x 305cm
oil on linen, 275 x 275cm
Slow Homecoming, 5 panels, oil on linen, each 170 x 170cm. Install view St.Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne
oil on linen, 162.5 x 208.5cm
Picture of Jonathan Mills, oil on linen, 200 x 200cm
Picture of Jason Smith, oil on linen, 198 x122cm
Seeing Carolyn Eskdale, oil on linen, 135 x 135cm
Picture of Carolyn Eskdale, oil on linen, 59 x 183cm
Ecce Home (Picture of Michael Johnson), oil on cotton, 183 x122cm
Canephora (Picture of Tom Alberts), oil on linen, 213 x 132cm
Painting of My Father, oil on cotton, 85 x170cm
Two Women (The Sisters), oil on linen, 126 x 147cm
Picture of Robert Cripps, oil on linen, 155 x100cm
Mute Picture of David Simpkin, oil on linen 100.0 x 88.0cm
Picture of Sun, oil on cotton, 183 x122cm
Picture of Carol, (or Actaeon), oil on canvas, 183 x 92cm