“My life has been saturated by art,” says Anna Couani – so much so in fact that her favourite number is five because it is the number of creativity. A visit to her studio, which takes up the entire top floor of the C19th building in Glebe that houses The Shop Gallery, will give you an insight to the magnitude of her creative world.
Inside the studio
Each of the three rooms that comprise it has an assigned function, with the painting room benefitting from the best light at the back, the print room near the top of the stairs, and a large space at the front.
This is by far the biggest and busiest area. Not even the dining table she uses as a desk, can dominate it. Objects—music equipment, computers, files, books, crocheted doilies in ivory cotton perle—clutter every horizontal plane, crowd the tops of cabinets, jostle the shelves, while paintings hang wherever there is available space: it should feel chaotic, instead it feels purposeful.
There is nothing chaotic about her career though, where her multiple artistic ventures work in concert with each other, as can be seen in Iris 4, which reveals the constant self-editing of creation as each stage is defined and decided by the results of the preceding one.
Words as dissent
The struggle is shown through the use of percussive, even violent verbs to create an image that is essentially peaceful.
purple is the sixth colour
on my iris print
soaking into the background
stabbing at the blueness in the petals
the ink with too much red
and not enough white
as the rain smashes the summer
helping to create the wet transition
to something the Europeans call
autumn
Map of the World is primal, evocative. As you read the following lines your fingers may tingle with the sharpness of the bristles, the discomfort of a world that was never made for ease:
“…Warm and moist through the rivers which lead outside to the forests like long hair then sparser like shorter more bristly hair to the touch…”
Her prints and paintings have a structural immediacy, as if she never quite left her initial architectural training behind. A monochrome of a wooden boardwalk disappearing into the bush conveys the smell and texture of raw wood and encroaching branches. An oil painting reveals itself to be the built horizon of the tops of tall structures defining the shape of the sky.
Championing others
Couani is the third-generation Australian daughter of a Greek father and Polish mother, both of whom were doctors and Communists. The cornerstone of her writing is political. It is her medium of dissent; disdaining an unequal status quo, she uses writing to reach into our collective psyche to where our meaner instincts reside.
“The relationships of social power are embedded in the syntax the grammar. I am the ideal reader. Their brutal language inscribed on my body forever. The scars.”
Names such as John Tranter and John Forbes, luminaries of Sydney alternative poetry, rise to the surface of her conversation as she describes the exhilarating days of the 1970’s underground literary scene.
“I saw myself as a painter.” She had studied with John Ogburn but when her Fine Arts tutor, Ken Bolton, told her that painting was dead, she took up writing instead. Becoming fascinated by the political potential of non-mainstream magazines as a means of democratizing publishing— a function she points out, that is now met by the Internet—she took on the role of co-editor of Bolton’s Magic Sam magazine, and she had her own imprint called Sea Cruise Books, which published six authors.
Always looking to promote the work of those who were excluded by the mainstream, she became a founding member and officer of the Sydney Branch of the Poet’s Union in 1977, where she campaigned to add a clause in the constitution to positively discriminate in favour of women and people of non-English speaking background. She was also instrumental in the establishment of the No Regrets women’s writers’ group.
Her serial novel, The Western Horizon, published by Heat from 1996-2000, unfolds episode by episode as it would in life. Punctuated by dreams of a darker reality, it is centred on a group of activists fighting racism and the growing fascism during the abominable rise of Pauline Hanson. Her heroes are those most vulnerable to Hanson’s noxious rhetoric, which ultimately becomes the amorphous subtext of toxic fascism. Plunged in this dangerous world, her readers, like her protagonists, experience the formless misgivings of half-facts, bad guesses and misinformation in real time.
Twenty-five years after it was first published, in the context of what threatens to be the galloping rise of Fascism in the West, she plans to write a mirror version.
“I had taught art, made visual art, now I have a gallery.”
The Shop Gallery, which has exhibited the likes of Yannis Dramitinos, Effy Alexakis, George Alexander, Dina Tourvas, Barbara Aroney, Eirini Alligianis, Peter Lyssiotis, and Tom Psomotragos, as well as her own work, and that of artists of all other backgrounds, is another way for Couani to advance the work of others. Over the years it has evolved its own model, eschewing the interference of a curator (unless expressly requested by the artist).
“If a curator starts selecting and arranging they are inputting into the show”. The artist is able to connect directly with the public, thus meeting “an unmet need”.
This hands-off approach, sans manifesto, has given the gallery its own position within the art world, one where the artists seek the gallery out, not the other way around.
“I haunt these pages like a ghost…Day in, day out feeding on words. Absorbing, grazing, ruminating through masses of text. Saturated, swimming in print.”
Through her writing, her art, and those she chooses to promote, Couani has avoided the mainstream and her work is the more interesting for that.
*Kiriaki Orfanos is a writer and researcher who regularly contributes to Neos Kosmos on art and travel.
