Michelle Cawthorn, a piece from the Anni’s Birds collection (2025) (all photos courtesy the artists)
BETHANY, Connecticut — Shortly after I met Peter Sharp and Michelle Cawthorn, Australian artists who had been awarded a two-month residency on the Josef and Anni Albers Basis, they invited me to go to, saying they’d ensure I may come to the “Vault” and see little recognized Albers works. A number of days later, I wrote to Peter to plan the journey. I additionally invited myself to the studio he and Michelle had been sharing, as I had completed some on-line sleuthing and was inquisitive about studying extra about them and their artwork.
Each Sharp and Cawthorn work primarily in drawing (though Cawthorn’s follow intersects extra with portray and set up). Sharp defined to me that residency initiatives are conceived to work together with Josef Albers’s improvements with colour or Anni Albers’s pioneering work in textile design and weaving. Throughout their residency, Cawthorn and Sharp had gone to many galleries and museums in New York and made some extent of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the biggest artwork museum in america and fourth largest on the earth, as there’s nothing prefer it in Australia. This made me take into consideration what info is transmitted and the way it travels.
Sharp had made appreciable progress on three separate initiatives on this brief time period. For one, lower strips of printed paper are evenly crammed in with coloured pencils and woven collectively, a nod to the Albers couple. The second challenge consists of overlaying and altering pages that he has excised from Josef Albers’s widespread guide Interplay of Shade (1963). Within the 70 pages Sharp had accomplished after I visited, some authentic content material peered by way of his modifications. His aim, he stated, is to create a very altered guide, with the pages in the identical sequence, and his {photograph} within the place of Albers’s on the finish of the guide.
Peter Sharp, set up view of the Albers Drawings collection (2025) 
Peter Sharp, a piece from the Albers Drawings collection (2025)
The third group of works, collectively titled Albers Drawings, is comprised of charcoal drawings depicting mushrooms, leaves, and different wildlife Sharp witnessed on his walks across the basis’s property. Every drawing reveals a single object from reminiscence, a document of observations. One exception is group of summary works, for which the artist coated a sheet of paper with a layer of charcoal earlier than bringing it out into the rain; the drops dissolved the charcoal, leaving a collection of uneven spots. I may guess the supply of some photos, whereas others eluded me.
Whereas Sharp and I spoke, he introduced up the bark work of John Mawurndjul, an Indigenous artist from Australia with whom I used to be unfamiliar. His legendary figures and his effective crosshatching completed on bark, a way known as rarrk, jogged my memory that there are separate traditions in america and Australia which have nearly nothing in widespread.
Greater than 9,000 miles of ocean separate our two international locations. Australia, which has its personal distinctive wildlife, is residence to 850 chicken species, with round 45 which are native to the nation. Over the last 15 years, researchers have proposed that Australia is the evolutionary residence of the music chicken or oscine passerine birds, which make up half of the world’s birds.
Michelle Cawthorn, set up view of the Anni’s Birds collection (2025)
Cawthorn’s collages, collectively titled Anni’s Birds, characteristic photos of birds pulled from a wide range of sources, together with John Gould’s seven-volume information The Birds of Australia (1840–48), with illustrations by his spouse, Elizabeth Gould, and others, primarily based on specimens collected from Australia and its islands.
Cawthorn creates fantastical hybrids of birds from Australia and different elements of the world, which jogged my memory of Australia’s actual and mythic hybrids, such because the duck-billed platypus and the Bunyip of Australian First Nations mythology. In some collages, after eradicating the unique chicken from the web page, Cawthorn crammed within the detrimental house with completely different anatomical elements. When she combines a chicken native to Australia with one from the Japanese seaboard of america, she reenacts the migration of the songbirds from their fatherland to different continents.
In these works, Sharp and Cawthorn are panorama artists who don’t present you the panorama. Whereas neither artist has made some extent of emphasizing Australia’s distinct ecological id, I felt that it performed a robust function in how they interacted with nature, which is the supply of their artwork. They each residence in on one thing present in nature, corresponding to a pine cone or a chicken. Cawthorn’s consideration to the historical past of Australia, from its songbirds by way of Gould’s encyclopedic information and Sharp’s consideration to widespread gadgets discovered within the panorama, has resulted in distinct our bodies of labor worthy of extended consideration.
Michelle Cawthorn, a piece from the Anni’s Birds collection (2025)
