Artist Statement
My ongoing practice is about charting my relationship
between the inner and the outer realities. I have always
cultivated an interest in investigating both, the struggles that
exist within the psyche, and those that we play out with each
other. The darkness and the light. The results being very much
influenced by what I see in our world, and the feelings that
they evoke. This has of course been put under a microscope
during this past mad, & very tough time.
When the bushfires hit I would often joke, “So it’s locusts
next”. Not mentioning the core cause…yeah also ‘c’ words.
Little did I know, that it would be the pandemic next, then the
floods…and the beginnings of WWIII!
Small works on paper, are a big part of my life as an artist.
During these past two years, you could rightly say that they
were my personal savior.
Ian Paradine, March 2022.
Émigré II - The Folds/ Statement
Human collective memory is a powerful way to understand our past, it can be our conscience. Yet, we often shy away from facing the shadow, our history’s lessons.
The Bible is a prime example of cherry picked memories often edited and told by those hungry for power, who weren’t actually there at the time with the incarnation. While these vagaries can lead to enchanting and powerful stories. It’s really a spinning of reality. It can even be further re-edited, four hundred years after the fact, and passed off as truth. It goes to show fake news isn’t a new phenomena.
Personally I see memories, both good and the bad, as a way to emotional & spiritual growth. They are our super powers. Walter Benjamin says it best and also so beautifully, when he is talking about storytelling.
“All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual’s experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier.”
A main character in the current Émigré show is Gertrude/Trudy/Tina who was born in Donawitz, Austria. Hers is like all emigrant stories…unique. She was born to a family of steelworkers. A child of the second world war. Raised by her grandparents, with her one real connection being with her grandmother, who was the only other female in the home.
In those days, a child was seen and not heard. After school & her chores, her nights would be largely spent alone under the kitchen table, lit by a single hanging globe, listening to the uncles argue and debate the politics of the day, with the steelworks streams of molten metal regularly giving their facial expressions an orange flash and glow.
As an eighteen year old she then left the hard life of a post-war Austria for England, a bold move, as she didn’t speak a word of English. “This was never going to be the place for me. The men had all the power. I needed and wanted a different world, something better. So I seized the chance to go to London”
It was in England where she learned and spoke English for the first time. There were no courses, it was the total immersion method of simply being in the society, along with working as a nanny for an American General’s young family. Absorbing a new language by being in the world. A year later, she met and married a Rolls Royce engineer who preferred a more English sounding name. So he re-named her Tina, after a popular actress of the time.
A few years ago Tina made a journey back to Donawitz. It had been 50 years since she had left. That day was fascinating for us as artists and filmmakers to hear her detailed stories of her family history. A friend and I made a documentary film of that bitter sweet journey back, and used her words to end it:
“As you get older, you put everything together…and understand!”.
The story of her new life of course followed, but it’s the raw experiential elements of a persons life that continue to raise questions, inform & inspire this ongoing series of photographic works:
New beginnings and what they mean.
How do they resonate in the heart of an émigré, an emigrant?
The outward journey, does it mirror or contradict the inner life of a soul?
And what is this inner life? Which her children, often felt as subtext when they demanded and re-heard, eyes wide, the old stories. In these journeys of both body & mind there is a longing for home. The German word is Heimat and it’s meaning is complex, for us the closest we have is ~ homeland.
Is it an unconscious search for oneness, for love?
Can the pain of abandonment be ever truly healed?
My hope is that these words are just a starting point before the work, and that they can dissolve – leaving the wide space for the individual’s own reflection and contemplation.
Ian Paradine
Vienna. August 2019
Artist Statement
‘Our shabby or immaculately crafted personas.’
My ongoing drawing practice, is about charting my relationship between the inner and the outer realities. I have always cultivated an interest interest in investigating both, the struggles that exist within the psyche, and those that we play out with each other. The darkness and the light. I often choose drawing, it’s inherently immediate and spontaneous, which suits me. And there is paper, with it’s charmed and sacred history. It’s like a veil, covering forms, that seem to throb & seeth beneath its surface. For me, paper has a conduit-like power. On the drawing board, I see a piece of Arches as something potent, ready to talk: a thin skin between the smiling surface of reality and everything that is hidden. It’s those secret, darker psychological states that interest me and fill up the work.
Ian Paradine, March 2018.
The myriad characters that populate the drawing works of Melbourne-based artist Ian Paradine are perhaps best characterised as eidola of sensuality.
They are figures that embody the motivations, emotions and psychologies of recorded human history, but are nevertheless oscillating between physical and ethereal states of being. These restless individuals come and go in the compositions of Paradine’s oeuvre, at times blending with air and landscape. They are not constrained by set series of works, but instead are liberated in an ongoing program of pastels, pen and inks, and mixed-media collages.
In his most recent work, Paradine employs vivid, carefully layered shades of colour to breathe fresh life into these capricious creatures. In one image we find a figure comprised of pure, blazing red gesturing to the viewer, while in another, entitled Die Verwandlung, we see a lithe and featureless human-like individual leaning into a fiery chasm, seemingly ensnared by the potent force below them. The prevalence of spectral tones in these images – comprising lascivious shades of turquoise, green, red and pink – evoke an exhilarating sense of hallucination or fantasticalness.
A related line of enquiry is presented in Paradine’s monochrome drawings, comprising ink and watercolour on paper, which most closely suggest a reverie on the works of the English poet and artist, William Blake (1757-1827). Like Blake, who mused on love and lust in his mock-prophetic book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Paradine explores primal feelings and psychological states in his black-and-white images. Again, these works feature the humans and archetypes that continually prowl his imagination, but here they appear more sombre on account of the alternative medium.
Drawing on reference to contemporary sociopolitics and the prospect of future events and inventions in his works, the artist refutes stagnation and pure historicism. Instead the figures, landscapes and ideas presented in his drawings are offered as immediately relevant in the twenty-first century. These depicted scenes exist in the here-and-now and, by displaying a propensity for metamorphosis, they assume an animation that allows them to live on in the future also.
Trained in Melbourne and, later, at the Camberwell College of Arts in London, Paradine has exhibited extensively both in Australia and Europe, refining his approach to art-marking across his career. He is a multidisciplinary artist also working with photography, filmmaking and video – and even a technique of miniaturisation in his drawings reminiscent of the visual curiosities of the Renaissance wunderkammer – the artist continues to break new ground in his solo exhibitions. His upcoming show in November at Anna Pappas Gallery in Melbourne will comprise new, small to large-scale pastel drawings.
Dr. Suzanne Fraser
May 2017
Ian Paradine’s practice spans across many disciplines: painting, drawing, photography and video. Though despite their differing modes of presentation, each work by Paradine is permeated with a sense of powerful emotion.
Paradine challenges traditional notions of space and time and transforms them into dreamlike hybrids, between a reality we know and understand and something completely unfamiliar.
Paradine’s latest exhibition of drawings, Morphing the Idol presented at the Anna Pappas Gallery continues this exploration, employing a multitude of spectral figures to portray a deep introspection into both light and dark inner states. The figures that populate each work can be archetypal and dark, mythic and sometimes fantastical.
Numerous heads with a single body in ‘The Churning Of The Milk Ocean’ raises questions addressing a conflicted identity or existence within this abstract space. Perhaps these are numerous iterations of what is or could be, being carefully considered by the figure in the foreground. Faces and beings seemingly float around this character, vying for its attention, much like trying to recall a dream after waking. The memory splits, dissipates and rises to the surface in additional conflicting iterations. Who am I? Who could I be? The choice is yours.
‘Bollocked’ is a work of pensive musing. Possessing a fragmented body held together by what appears to be no more than threads, the figure is in a state of disarray, limbs are disconnected from the traditional source of sentience, the head. This is presented on a utilitarian type bed, lending itself to common depictions of psychoanalysis and modes of addressing the multifaceted layers of human consciousness.
The mind is a key theme in Paradine’s work, how it helps us perceive and experience the world, but also how it can confuse and seduce us in its varying or altered states. Morphing the Idol is a narrative examination of thought, dreaming and the in-between, presented through the guise of whimsical characters borne straight from the depths of Paradine’s imagination.
These characters ponder their own cosmic existence while referencing the world we currently reside in. Using colour and form to collapse the conscious and subconscious mind, Morphing the Idol is a unique portrayal of the intricacies within our collective psyche.
Alex Walker
October 2017
Ian Paradine is a London born, Australian multi-disciplinary artist, who migrated with his Austrian mother, English father and two younger sisters, to Australia as a seven year old.
He studied painting, drawing, photography & moving image at P.I.T. Melbourne 1980-81, then left for Europe on an Australia Council – Artist travel grant. Finishing his Joint Hon/ Visual Arts degree at The Camberwell College of Art – UAL, in London, 1998.
2001-12 he lived, worked and exhibited in Vienna, holding 14 solo & group exhibitions. He has been widely collected, with work in private collections throughout Europe, the U.K. and Australia.
Next to his studio practice 2004-11, he co-launched, ran and curated a commercial gallery in the second district of Vienna with Olivia Paradine. Holding six exhibitions a year (total 30), which focused on contemporary painting, photography and new media, representing, exhibiting and supporting established, as well as emerging visual artists.
He returned to Australia mid 2012, where
he now lives and regularly exhibits:
Paintings and Drawings on canvas, wood and paper.
Photography – Producing limited edition C-prints, Duratrans
works of photographic collage and handmade Lightboxes.
Moving Image & Video Installation work.
My ongoing practice is about charting my relationship
between the inner and the outer realities. I have always
cultivated an interest in investigating both, the struggles that
exist within the psyche, and those that we play out with each
other. The darkness and the light. The results being very much
influenced by what I see in our world, and the feelings that
they evoke. This has of course been put under a microscope
during this past mad, & very tough time.
When the bushfires hit I would often joke, “So it’s locusts
next”. Not mentioning the core cause…yeah also ‘c’ words.
Little did I know, that it would be the pandemic next, then the
floods…and the beginnings of WWIII!
Small works on paper, are a big part of my life as an artist.
During these past two years, you could rightly say that they
were my personal savior.
Ian Paradine, March 2022.
Émigré II - The Folds/ Statement
Human collective memory is a powerful way to understand our past, it can be our conscience. Yet, we often shy away from facing the shadow, our history’s lessons.
The Bible is a prime example of cherry picked memories often edited and told by those hungry for power, who weren’t actually there at the time with the incarnation. While these vagaries can lead to enchanting and powerful stories. It’s really a spinning of reality. It can even be further re-edited, four hundred years after the fact, and passed off as truth. It goes to show fake news isn’t a new phenomena.
Personally I see memories, both good and the bad, as a way to emotional & spiritual growth. They are our super powers. Walter Benjamin says it best and also so beautifully, when he is talking about storytelling.
“All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual’s experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier.”
A main character in the current Émigré show is Gertrude/Trudy/Tina who was born in Donawitz, Austria. Hers is like all emigrant stories…unique. She was born to a family of steelworkers. A child of the second world war. Raised by her grandparents, with her one real connection being with her grandmother, who was the only other female in the home.
In those days, a child was seen and not heard. After school & her chores, her nights would be largely spent alone under the kitchen table, lit by a single hanging globe, listening to the uncles argue and debate the politics of the day, with the steelworks streams of molten metal regularly giving their facial expressions an orange flash and glow.
As an eighteen year old she then left the hard life of a post-war Austria for England, a bold move, as she didn’t speak a word of English. “This was never going to be the place for me. The men had all the power. I needed and wanted a different world, something better. So I seized the chance to go to London”
It was in England where she learned and spoke English for the first time. There were no courses, it was the total immersion method of simply being in the society, along with working as a nanny for an American General’s young family. Absorbing a new language by being in the world. A year later, she met and married a Rolls Royce engineer who preferred a more English sounding name. So he re-named her Tina, after a popular actress of the time.
A few years ago Tina made a journey back to Donawitz. It had been 50 years since she had left. That day was fascinating for us as artists and filmmakers to hear her detailed stories of her family history. A friend and I made a documentary film of that bitter sweet journey back, and used her words to end it:
“As you get older, you put everything together…and understand!”.
The story of her new life of course followed, but it’s the raw experiential elements of a persons life that continue to raise questions, inform & inspire this ongoing series of photographic works:
New beginnings and what they mean.
How do they resonate in the heart of an émigré, an emigrant?
The outward journey, does it mirror or contradict the inner life of a soul?
And what is this inner life? Which her children, often felt as subtext when they demanded and re-heard, eyes wide, the old stories. In these journeys of both body & mind there is a longing for home. The German word is Heimat and it’s meaning is complex, for us the closest we have is ~ homeland.
Is it an unconscious search for oneness, for love?
Can the pain of abandonment be ever truly healed?
My hope is that these words are just a starting point before the work, and that they can dissolve – leaving the wide space for the individual’s own reflection and contemplation.
Ian Paradine
Vienna. August 2019
Artist Statement
‘Our shabby or immaculately crafted personas.’
My ongoing drawing practice, is about charting my relationship between the inner and the outer realities. I have always cultivated an interest interest in investigating both, the struggles that exist within the psyche, and those that we play out with each other. The darkness and the light. I often choose drawing, it’s inherently immediate and spontaneous, which suits me. And there is paper, with it’s charmed and sacred history. It’s like a veil, covering forms, that seem to throb & seeth beneath its surface. For me, paper has a conduit-like power. On the drawing board, I see a piece of Arches as something potent, ready to talk: a thin skin between the smiling surface of reality and everything that is hidden. It’s those secret, darker psychological states that interest me and fill up the work.
Ian Paradine, March 2018.
The myriad characters that populate the drawing works of Melbourne-based artist Ian Paradine are perhaps best characterised as eidola of sensuality.
They are figures that embody the motivations, emotions and psychologies of recorded human history, but are nevertheless oscillating between physical and ethereal states of being. These restless individuals come and go in the compositions of Paradine’s oeuvre, at times blending with air and landscape. They are not constrained by set series of works, but instead are liberated in an ongoing program of pastels, pen and inks, and mixed-media collages.
In his most recent work, Paradine employs vivid, carefully layered shades of colour to breathe fresh life into these capricious creatures. In one image we find a figure comprised of pure, blazing red gesturing to the viewer, while in another, entitled Die Verwandlung, we see a lithe and featureless human-like individual leaning into a fiery chasm, seemingly ensnared by the potent force below them. The prevalence of spectral tones in these images – comprising lascivious shades of turquoise, green, red and pink – evoke an exhilarating sense of hallucination or fantasticalness.
A related line of enquiry is presented in Paradine’s monochrome drawings, comprising ink and watercolour on paper, which most closely suggest a reverie on the works of the English poet and artist, William Blake (1757-1827). Like Blake, who mused on love and lust in his mock-prophetic book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Paradine explores primal feelings and psychological states in his black-and-white images. Again, these works feature the humans and archetypes that continually prowl his imagination, but here they appear more sombre on account of the alternative medium.
Drawing on reference to contemporary sociopolitics and the prospect of future events and inventions in his works, the artist refutes stagnation and pure historicism. Instead the figures, landscapes and ideas presented in his drawings are offered as immediately relevant in the twenty-first century. These depicted scenes exist in the here-and-now and, by displaying a propensity for metamorphosis, they assume an animation that allows them to live on in the future also.
Trained in Melbourne and, later, at the Camberwell College of Arts in London, Paradine has exhibited extensively both in Australia and Europe, refining his approach to art-marking across his career. He is a multidisciplinary artist also working with photography, filmmaking and video – and even a technique of miniaturisation in his drawings reminiscent of the visual curiosities of the Renaissance wunderkammer – the artist continues to break new ground in his solo exhibitions. His upcoming show in November at Anna Pappas Gallery in Melbourne will comprise new, small to large-scale pastel drawings.
Dr. Suzanne Fraser
May 2017
Ian Paradine’s practice spans across many disciplines: painting, drawing, photography and video. Though despite their differing modes of presentation, each work by Paradine is permeated with a sense of powerful emotion.
Paradine challenges traditional notions of space and time and transforms them into dreamlike hybrids, between a reality we know and understand and something completely unfamiliar.
Paradine’s latest exhibition of drawings, Morphing the Idol presented at the Anna Pappas Gallery continues this exploration, employing a multitude of spectral figures to portray a deep introspection into both light and dark inner states. The figures that populate each work can be archetypal and dark, mythic and sometimes fantastical.
Numerous heads with a single body in ‘The Churning Of The Milk Ocean’ raises questions addressing a conflicted identity or existence within this abstract space. Perhaps these are numerous iterations of what is or could be, being carefully considered by the figure in the foreground. Faces and beings seemingly float around this character, vying for its attention, much like trying to recall a dream after waking. The memory splits, dissipates and rises to the surface in additional conflicting iterations. Who am I? Who could I be? The choice is yours.
‘Bollocked’ is a work of pensive musing. Possessing a fragmented body held together by what appears to be no more than threads, the figure is in a state of disarray, limbs are disconnected from the traditional source of sentience, the head. This is presented on a utilitarian type bed, lending itself to common depictions of psychoanalysis and modes of addressing the multifaceted layers of human consciousness.
The mind is a key theme in Paradine’s work, how it helps us perceive and experience the world, but also how it can confuse and seduce us in its varying or altered states. Morphing the Idol is a narrative examination of thought, dreaming and the in-between, presented through the guise of whimsical characters borne straight from the depths of Paradine’s imagination.
These characters ponder their own cosmic existence while referencing the world we currently reside in. Using colour and form to collapse the conscious and subconscious mind, Morphing the Idol is a unique portrayal of the intricacies within our collective psyche.
Alex Walker
October 2017
Ian Paradine is a London born, Australian multi-disciplinary artist, who migrated with his Austrian mother, English father and two younger sisters, to Australia as a seven year old.
He studied painting, drawing, photography & moving image at P.I.T. Melbourne 1980-81, then left for Europe on an Australia Council – Artist travel grant. Finishing his Joint Hon/ Visual Arts degree at The Camberwell College of Art – UAL, in London, 1998.
2001-12 he lived, worked and exhibited in Vienna, holding 14 solo & group exhibitions. He has been widely collected, with work in private collections throughout Europe, the U.K. and Australia.
Next to his studio practice 2004-11, he co-launched, ran and curated a commercial gallery in the second district of Vienna with Olivia Paradine. Holding six exhibitions a year (total 30), which focused on contemporary painting, photography and new media, representing, exhibiting and supporting established, as well as emerging visual artists.
He returned to Australia mid 2012, where
he now lives and regularly exhibits:
Paintings and Drawings on canvas, wood and paper.
Photography – Producing limited edition C-prints, Duratrans
works of photographic collage and handmade Lightboxes.
Moving Image & Video Installation work.