QAGOMA’s campaign to ‘Unlock the Collection’ publicly launched in early 2021, with the goal of raising $5 million to increase digital access to the Collection and position the Gallery as leader in digital content creation. In late 2022, the QAGOMA Foundation successfully achieved this fundraising target, thanks to the generous support of more than 660 donors who have helped the Gallery open the doors to our storerooms and accomplish significant progress in making the entire Collection available to audiences.
The transformative ‘Unlock the Collection’ project encompasses several activities, with digitising the Collection to contemporary standards being the largest undertaking, including the goal of exceeding 95% digitisation in 2024. Philanthropic support from QAGOMA’s giving community has made a significant impact in this area, enabling over 5200 artworks to be digitised to date. With work continuing, the project is on track to exceed this digitisation target next year.
A new Collection Online platform launched in November 2021 after extensive development and beta-testing by the Gallery community, has also been realised to make artworks, images and content more easily discoverable and accessible to audiences everywhere. QAGOMA’s Collection Online now consists of over 100 000 pages, including more than 20 000 object pages, with weekly releases of new content and monthly releases of additional features, including digital stories, behind-the-scenes content, artist videos and high-resolution imagery. Since its launch, visitor access to the Collection has increased fivefold.
Since August 2022, eight Digital Stories have been published on the Collection Online platform, capturing everything from exhibitions, with a focus on the Gallery’s flagship series, ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT) to intensive conservation activities, with many more in development.
Donors to the ‘Unlock the Collection’ campaign have also supported the employment of 12 staff positions across key project areas, with a focus on providing paid internships and fostering graduate and early-career opportunities in a major arts institution. The campaign has also supported three Digital Residencies. 2021 Digital Resident, Queensland University of Technology’s Associate Professor of Digital Pedagogies Dr Kate Thompson’s research revealed how digital experiences can best engage virtual and onsite visitors. 2022 Digital Resident, prominent creative technologist and artist Jessie Hughes, researched the role of emerging technologies, including Web3, NFTs and the Metaverse, to determine their potential to impact major collecting institutions like QAGOMA. The 2023 Digital Residency will commence later this year.
The campaign also funded two significant First Nations research programs: one focused on the untitled ceremonial figure attributed to Fred Embrey (Kabi Kabi people) and its contribution and role to culture, which, with deep consultation with Fred Embrey’s family, will digitally capture the full presence of this rare and remarkable work, and share personal community-based stories that link the significance of the object to its place, its maker and its people; and the other to enable the digitisation of QAGOMA’s Hermannsburg collection and associated research material, including production of video interviews with community and descendants. QAGOMA holds one of Australia’s strongest collections of works from the Hermannsburg School, including some 230 items comprised of watercolour paintings, synthetic polymer paintings and pottery objects. Through this project, photogrammetry techniques will be utilised to represent the pottery in 3D and make them viewable from 360 degrees. These works will be captured and digitised, sharing this significant holding of contemporary Indigenous Australian pottery with the world through a dedicated digital story.
Thanks to the ‘Unlock the Collection’ campaign, QAGOMA is setting the industry standard for Collection accessibility and digital development through these digitisation projects. By collaborating with Queensland Government agencies to push mixed-reality and extended reality art projects and move QAGOMA’s key digital content into other Queensland spaces, and by establishing its Digital Reference Group, QAGOMA is engaging key members of Queensland’s digital and tech community to advise on future projects, advocate for the Gallery’s digital programs and help foster new digital partnerships.
This work has resulted in members of the Digital Transformation team being invited to speak at industry conferences and events, including DrupalSouth 2022, Networx and Fotoware and being appointed to mentoring roles within the sector and in wider industry through initiatives such as the Australia Council and ACMI’s CEO Digital Mentoring Program.
In June 2022, the QAGOMA Foundation hosted a panel discussion ‘A New Frontier for AI and the Arts’, engaging representatives from Brisbane’s technology in a discussion exploring the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and cultural practice, and shared research and outcomes of the ‘Unlock the Collection’ project.
In just over three years the ‘Unlock the Collection’ campaign raised more than $5 million and engaged audiences, donors and industry professionals with the Gallery’s digital transformation project. QAGOMA warmly acknowledges Trustee and Foundation Committee member Paul Taylor for his leadership as Chair of the project’s fundraising reference group and thanks all members of this group for their outstanding efforts to realise this major initiative.
While the ‘Unlock the Collection’ campaign has concluded, the project continues, with funds supporting the resources required to achieve the goal of making the entirety of the QAGOMA Collection available to audiences and to creating even more engaging digital resources that bring to life the extraordinary stories within it. We sincerely appreciate the Gallery’s giving community’s support of this vital project and will continue to publish updates on milestones and achievements, which are transforming the way visitors experience our galleries and exhibitions on-site and online.
On 18 September 1894 local artist and president of the Queensland Art Society, R Godfrey Rivers, sent to the Queensland Government a full proposal for a State Art Gallery, Rivers noted that the Government was already in possession of a number of fine engravings. He suggested in his proposal that about fifty be mounted and framed, and together with the painting The Guards leaving the Graveyard Feb 19 1885 1885 (illustrated) by the contemporary British marine painter Charles William Wyllie (1853-1923), and a so-called work by 16th Century Italian artist Titian, both owned by the Government, including a loan collection, the Gallery could be started with the necessity of a well-lit central room.
Charles William Wyllie ‘The Guards leaving the Graveyard Feb 19 1885’
The Government informed Rivers that a room would be set apart as a temporary Art Gallery, thus Brisbane’s first official art gallery was a committee room in the new wing of Parliament House (illustrated). When the selection of works were ready for permanent display as the collection of the National Gallery, they were transferred to Brisbane’s Town Hall (illustrated). For the opening day the walls of the Town Hall were especially repainted in neutral tints and movable screens were supplied to minimize the size of the room.
Parliament House, Brisbane
Lagging well behind Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, Queensland’s National Art Gallery opened more or less permanently to the public for the first time on Friday afternoon, 29 March 1895. Hung not in a purpose-built building but given temporary quarters in the upstairs room of the Town Hall, the Collection consisted of a mixture of Old Masters and contemporary works and included both copies and originals. Culled from the town’s meager artistic resources the display was largely a reflection of the disparate taste of local art collectors.
Town Hall, Brisbane
Out of a total of twenty-five oils, thirteen which were originally owned by the Government, the core of the collection was formed. From those, a Bequest of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and Netherlandish works, finalized in 1894, on behalf of the well-known pastoralist and politician, the Honourable Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior who had died two years before, were added to the selection. The Bequest included a Madonna and Child encircled by flowers and fruit c.1615 (illustrated) by Andries Danielsz, An archery match mid-late 19th century (illustrated) by Teniers the Younger, after David, and a Flemish fruit piece Still life c.1650 (illustrated) by Alexander Coosemans — these three-establishment works were exhibited together again when the Queensland Art Gallery opened at South Bank in 1982.
The contribution of the Government was made up with two other oils, the painting by Charles William Wyllie, and an Australian subject piece Woolshed, New South Wales 1890 (illustrated) by R Godfrey Rivers. There were, in addition, seventy engravings, many ‘after the antique’, a number of loan watercolours and a single item of sculpture, a portrait (copy) of Queen Victoria, also belonging to the Government.
Andries Danielsz ‘Madonna and Child encircled by flowers and fruit’ 1615
Teniers the Younger ‘An archery match’ mid-late 19th century
Alexander Coosemans ‘Still life’ 1650
R Godfrey Rivers ‘Woolshed, New South Wales’ 1890
The public of the 1890s were now able to boast a State Art Collection on permanent display, however contemporary opinion about the opening day was far from enthusiastic. Instead of praise for what was really the culmination of a decade of Brisbane’s artistic hopes, The Queenslander‘s illustrator felt that the odds were against the whole thing. The cartoon (illustrated) shows Art as an ‘aesthetic’ Greek lady standing stalwart at the empty portal of some imagined gallery. Her proud gaze is concentrated well above the Philistine masses rushing to buy lottery tickets.
‘The Queenslander’ 1895
An editorial in the same edition of The Queenslander 13 April 1895 ‘New Pictures at the National Gallery’ reviews two works on display that were gifted to the Collection — Isaac Walter Jenner’s Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador 1893, reworked 1895 (illustrated) and Oscar Friström’s Duramboi 1893 (illustrated).
The pictures presented last week to the Queensland National Gallery are now on view with the remainder of the Collection at the Town Hall, which already, it is interesting to note; bids fair to become a favourite Saturday afternoon resort of our citizens.
The picture presented by our well-known marine artist, Mr. Jenner, entitled “Cape Chudley, Labrador,” is an oil-painting representing the burning of a ship belonging to one of the Arctic expeditions in an inlet of the. Polar seas. The glow of the flames and its reflections from beyond the icy promontory which hides the vessel tell the tale of disaster. The artist has enjoyed the rather uncommon advantage of being able to study Arctic scenery from Nature, as he visited the Arctic regions a number of years ago, when he was in the navy. The picture was shown at the Art Society’s exhibition in 1893, and found many admirers. It will always have a double interest, in the first place as the work and gift of an esteemed artist who was one of the earliest devotees of Art here, one of the first to kindle and most earnest to keep alive. her “sacred flame.” In the second place because of the undying interest men of English race must for ever feel in the tragic romance of the North-west Passage, and in the realm of perpetual frost.
“Durrumboi” Mr Oscar Friström’s gift, is a portrait by the donor of an old Brisbane identity, some years ago deceased, whose face and figure were familiar to most of us, and is, affirmed by those best able to judge to be a most excellent likeness. The painting has besides this merit undoubted artistic quality. The modelling is good, the texture of the weather-beaten wrinkled skin is faithfully rendered.
Isaac Walter Jenner ‘Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador’ 1993
Oscar Friström ‘Duramboi’ 1893
The notion of...
Win Schubert was one of this Gallery’s greatest friends and most ardent and involved donors, gifting and supporting work that always encouraged and lifted our ambition. Win truly believed in the potential of art to touch lives, to open minds and excite the imagination. And, at its best, to bring people together in shared curiosity and wonder. I genuinely think Win understood the mystery of art, but she also knew her way around the art world.
These three works honour and continue that spirit, even if they could hardly be more different in their scale and the method of their making. Yet there are three things that bind them closely, three things that hint at the direction we hope to take as this Trust Collection grows from this beginning.
The first is that Olafur Eliasson, Fiona Hall and Tacita Dean are all mid-late career artists who have remained consistently inventive for decades. Each has represented their country at the Venice Biennale, and each is represented in some of the world’s most significant public and private collections. Their inclusion in major solo and group exhibitions is similarly deep and wide — they have built substantial and enduring reputations at home and abroad. We chose their work to form the foundation of the Trust Collection because they are singular artists of great distinction and deserved acclaim in the global art world.
Olafur Eliasson ‘Riverbed’ 2014
Fiona Hall Australian set’ 1998–99
Tacita Dean ‘Chalk Fall’ 2018
Second, they are artists who all have a thorough command of scale, one of art’s least well understood attributes. It shifts register from the jewellery-like intimacy of Hall’s sardine tins; to the reach of Dean’s wall-based chalk mural; to the gallery-scaled drama of Eliasson’s installation.
Looking at Fiona Hall’s work from any distance is entirely unhelpful. It’s impossible to absorb the humour with which she has defined dual zones to counterpoint erogenous body parts and botanical species, or to read the coded languages of their titles. Using a repoussé technique to work her aluminium — engraving, chasing and burnishing in the tradition of the colonial silversmith — she has cut and hammered out two astonishing series of works. Taken together with their companion series, held in the National Gallery of Victoria and National Gallery of Australia, they confirm her place in the story of contemporary art.
Watch | Fiona Hall ‘Australian set’ 1998–99 and ‘Sri Lankan set’ 1999 (from ‘Paradisus Terrestris’ series)
Fiona Hall Australian set’ 1998–99
Tacita Dean holds a similar place, a British artist who in 2018 had her work shown simultaneously at the London National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Her commanding, mural-scaled chalk drawings reach across time to summon up the sublime landscapes of JMW Turner, but expand even his imposing scale to cinematic proportions. For all their majestic grandeur, these monumental chalk drawings are intensely personal, diaristic palimpsests, of which this is perhaps the most personal of them all. Looking at Tacita Dean’s work will take distance and closeness when it debuts in ‘Air’ this coming summer.
Olafur Eliasson’s work, moreover, has already featured in ‘Water’, which we presented over the 2019-20 summer. Like Dean’s and Cai Guo-Qiang’s Heritage before it, it is a meditation on the impact of climate change, as it has affected the artist’s home in Iceland and as it continues to affect the world. By staging a reimagined landscape at 1:1 scale in the museum, Eliasson asks us to reconsider how we think about both nature and culture, precisely as Hall has done. This time, looking requires walking into and through the work itself.
Thirdly, the thing common to each of these works is the beautiful and surprising way in which they reveal their mystery through the most basic of materials. As Hall lifts sardine tins and drink cans to new aesthetic and iconographic heights; Dean pushes white chalk far beyond its mundane purpose; and Eliasson recasts the natural world. There is for each, expressed in their conceptual approach and revealed through the humble materiality of their work, a belief in the power of artistic alchemy.
For this announcement, we were delighted to receive video messages from Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean, and to be joined in person at the Gallery by Fiona Hall, and to hear each artist speak about the ideas and processes behind these important works of art.
This is an edited excerpt of a speech given by QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM for the announcement of the inaugural acquisitions for The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust Collection at the Queensland Art Gallery on Friday 27 May 2022.
Watch | Tacita Dean ‘Chalk Fall’ 2018
Tacita Dean, United Kingdom b.1965 / Chalk Fall 2018 / Chalk on blackboard / Nine panels: 121.9 x 243.8cm (each); 365.8 x 731.5cm (overall) / Purchased 2021. The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust / Collection: The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Tacita Dean
Watch | Olafur Eliasson ‘Riverbed’ 2014
Olafur Eliasson, Denmark b.1967 / Riverbed 2014 / Water, rock (volcanic stones (blue basalt, basalt, lava, other stones, gravel, sand), wood, steel, plastic sheeting, hose, pumps / Purchased 2021. The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust / Collection: The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Olafur Eliasson
In May 2022, the QAGOMA Trustees announced the first artworks to be acquired through The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, established in 2018 with the extraordinary $35 million bequest of the late Win Schubert AO (1937–2017). Here, we introduce these landmark acquisitions.
Win Schubert AO was one of the Gallery’s greatest supporters during her lifetime, enabling the acquisition of over 100 works of art. A carefully planned gift in her Will — and the most substantial philanthropic gift in the Gallery’s history — established The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust to enable the acquisition of major Australian and international artworks, created in or after 1880, for the advancement of art education in Australia. Thanks to Mrs Schubert’s inspiring generosity, two ambitious large-scale works by internationally renowned artists Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean CBE, and two series of intricate and enthralling low-relief sculptures by senior Australian artist Fiona Hall AO, have now found a permanent home at QAGOMA.
Watch | Olafur Eliasson ‘Riverbed’ 2014
Visitors to the Gallery’s 2019 exhibition ‘Water’ will recall Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular indoor landscape of rock and flowing water. Riverbed 2014 welcomes us to a space of play and imagination. Within this Icelandic-inspired terrain, we become conscious of how we walk, of the path we choose, the sound of our footsteps, the musical resonance of stone upon stone, and the pace of our journey.
Eliasson gives no instructions to the visitors to his work. Rather, we are invited to cross the landscape on our own terms. Some will follow other people in the space, others might climb straight to the water source, and many will find their own path across the rocks. Riverbed quietly reveals these small, individual decisions, while also reflecting how well we navigate communal space within a group.
Eliasson asks: ‘When is the work contemplative and when is it disturbing?’Is Riverbed a primordial landscape, anticipating life on Earth, or might it be the last precious water source in a barren, post-apocalyptic future? Either way, the trickling stream reminds us of water’s vital importance to all ecologies, now and into the future.
Olafur Eliasson ‘Riverbed’ 2014
Watch | Tacita Dean ‘Chalk Fall’ 2018
A precipice between land, sea and air is the subject of Tacita Dean’s Chalk Fall 2018. In this monumental chalkboard drawing, Dean details the iconic White Cliffs of Dover on England’s southern coastline, themselves largely composed of chalk.
At first glance, the rock face seems solid, a natural fortress. Looking closely, however, we see the ocean waves churning at its base, the central portion of which is giving way to the force of the waves and falling into the water. The white of the foaming waves intermingles with the white dust of the fragmenting cliff.
Chalk Fall considers other types of fragility. The famous cliffs are increasingly affected by climate change and rising sea levels, and their natural pace of erosion has multiplied tenfold over the last 150 years. Created in 2018, two years after the Brexit referendum, the work also reflects on the dissolving connections between the United Kingdom and Europe. The cliffs face the northern coast of France, which lies only 34 kilometres away. In Chalk Fall, we see this outward-facing edge crumble.
For Dean, the creation of this chalkboard drawing was intensely personal. Made over a period of months, she worked from top to bottom using a cherry picker. At the beginning of the process, her close friend Keith Collins was diagnosed with a tumour: ‘Every day, I wrote the date on the board, chalking chalk with chalk in a sedimentation of time and emotion that had a terrible constructive intensity’. Chalk Fall is a landscape, a history painting, a journal, and a record of a friendship.
Tacita Dean ‘Chalk Fall’ 2018
Fiona Hall ‘Australian set’ 1998–99 and ‘Sri Lankan set’ 1999 (from ‘Paradisus Terrestris’ series)
Leading Australian artist Fiona Hall uses a range of mediums to explore the nexus between nature and culture, creating complex artworks that tackle compelling contemporary concerns. In these interrelated works, she asks us to consider ourselves in relation to others across both human and natural domains.
Diminutive and intellectually ambitious, these artworks epitomise Hall’s dedication to expanding the capacity of her materials. In this case, she has repurposed aluminium from soft-drink cans, pressing the metal into shape with a repoussé technique to create low-relief sculptures of human body parts and sexual organs, and encasing them in sardine tins crowned with culturally significant flora. The unexpected couplings suggest connections between the reproductive systems of humans and plants, acknowledging the botanical classification system developed by Carolus Linnaeus around 1735.
The series title ‘Paradisus Terrestris’ (‘Paradise of the Earth’) is the collective name for a body of work that occupied Hall for ten years from 1989. The sculptures acquired through the Trust are the third and fourth iterations in the series: the Australian set addresses debates around native title; while the Sri Lankan set alludes to the civil war that afflicted Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009.
Referencing the postcolonial histories of these two countries, the title of each sculpture includes the respective Indigenous Australian or Sri Lankan (Tamil and Sinhala) names for the species depicted, its corresponding Linnean classification, and its common English name. Hall has commented on this multilingual methodology in relation to her earlier work Paradisus Terrestris Entitled 1996–97 (National Gallery of Victoria), explaining:
this land [Australia] and the plants that grow in it and the people whose land that it originally was, have together a very long history of co-existence that must be acknowledged and respected. The multiple parallel systems of names seems to eloquently indicate widely different outlooks and levels of awareness.
Exploring the fragility of the natural world and our relationship to it, these significant acquisitions are a fitting testament to Mrs Schubert’s tremendous generosity and desire for art to inspire curiosity, prompt contemplation and enrich the...
