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A tale of two Gentle men
Wombarra’s David Roach is an artist and a musician, but mainly a filmmaker. Quite how this award-winning director/screenwriter came to pour all his energy into Clifton School of Arts, leading a small band of volunteers through years of fundraisers, events and a DA application, is a mystery the Gentle Project finally explains.
It began about eight years ago, with a photograph.
David and his wife, journalist Caroline Baum, had held an exhibition at the School of Arts. Inspired by the CSA’s history, David did something uncharacteristic – he joined the community organisation and soon after found himself on the committee. One day an old picture caught his eye.
“Downstairs in one of the store rooms, there was a photograph on the wall of this fellow, who looks a little bit like a hobbit, with a long beard, sitting in this extraordinary space filled with sticks,” David says. “Then I realised – because the School of Arts now is this pristine gallery space – that it was the same room. And I wondered who this fellow was.”
The stick collector turned out to be the late sculptor Ian Gentle, a character from an era when ‘artist in residence’ meant exactly that.
“In 1986, two artists came knocking on the door; this place was a complete wreck,” says David. “One was Ian Gentle, the other was Brett Whiteley.”
The committee at the time thought Brett looked like trouble so picked Ian, “the country bloke”, who moved into the crumbling School of Arts, slept in the storeroom and made his studio upstairs.
“This whole area was a mining community. The Coalcliff Mine was at the time the biggest underground coal mine in Australia. So, this was a pretty rough industrial area. For young people at that time, he was the first artist they’d ever met and this was the first studio they’d ever stepped foot in.”
David learned that Ian had inspired the current generation of artists, including Thirroul’s Paul Ryan, and taught at the University of Wollongong.
“He was the most successful art lecturer in their 40-year history of the creative arts. The CEO of Powerhouse was one of his students. The head curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery, one of his students. So he had a huge influence.
“People just came out of the woodwork and they wanted to tell me stories about Ian and what he meant to them.
“I think that an artist living in a community like this has ripple effects over generations. And that’s what the project celebrates.”
Silica Bronze 82 x 40 x 10 cm
UOW Collection
Gentle Project to run all through summer
What started as an idea for “a little show” has become a celebration of many parts, some of them moving. The Gentle Project includes a book, a film, talks, workshops, merchandise and three exhibitions. At Wollongong Art Gallery from December 2, Horny Sticks and Whispering Lines is a collection of Gentle’s art while A Gentle Response shows works by artists he influenced.
The CSA exhibition is called Gentle at Clifton.
“It’s an exhibition about process, because this was his studio,” David says. “A lot of these works were actually made in that room, and that’s sort of magical.”
For the teenagers of the 1980s, the artist’s studio was an eye opener. “People describe it as like walking into a forest. He would have these huge quivers of sticks, either hanging from the rafters or in huge bins, and then he’d have big workbenches.
“Your first impression of it is just chaos. But if you stay for a while, you realise actually it’s like an installation. He would know where to get the exact stick with the exact curve that he wanted and where he’d put it … So there is that sense of, if not chaos, at least serendipity.”
Gentle was known for using whatever materials came to hand. “In the early 70s, in Woolloomooloo, he used to work with old bits of metal and old exhaust pipes,” David says.
“When he moved down here, he looked around and he found sticks and he called them ‘Found Line’. He would go off into the forest and he’d find these lines, which are really just eucalypt sticks, and he would create these beautiful wall sculptures.
“He had a method of shaping them and joining them and making them permanent and charring. They were half animals and half abstract.”
Ian Gentle lived at the slowly crumbling School of Arts for about 10 years.
“The only reason he moved out is that they condemned the building. He was one of the drivers of getting people organised to raise money to save it … they had lamington drives and all that stuff. They raised $200,000 and they saved the building.”
An unconventional artist
Ian Gentle’s work is in the NSW Art Gallery and the UOW Gallery, as well as overseas collections, but he never became hugely popular.
“That’s sort of how he liked it,” David says. “He didn’t play the game, he didn’t network.”
When Ian died, suddenly of a heart condition in 2009, he was working in Nowra, with a studio full of sticks, unfinished art presumed lost – until David travelled to Queensland to meet his niece, who turned out to have it stored safely in a crate.
“Our philosophy was if Ian loved it, we kept it,” she told him.
David has made a film including two rare interviews in which Gentle talks about his love for the environment. “He wasn’t an environmentalist in the contemporary sense. He was just a bloke who was brought up in the bush, in country Victoria.”
Ian would famously wander solo along escarpment tracks, picking up sticks, then head home and make stuff.
“He was really lazy about titles and so about 50% of his titles contained the word Lowlife. He liked that term because he considered himself, ironically, lowlife, that he wasn’t part of the Sydney network. It drove him a bit nuts the way that people wrote about him, because they would call him ‘the artist from the bush’ and stuff.
Eucalyptus wood, 6 x 61cm. Photo: Stella Downer Fine Art
“He loved things like echidnas and lizards and snakes; he loved cockatoos. A lot of his works are about using these eucalypts and this timber to create wall works, almost three-dimensional works, referencing Australian animals. But in an abstract way. It’s almost like the personality of an animal rather than the animal itself.
“Ian was a maker. He was really grounded in the bush and the earth and timber. That’s where his ideas came from. I think that’s what gave him comfort as well.”
How two creators connect
David owns an Ian Gentle work called Startled Skink and, as an artist himself, feels a strong connection to the medium. “I love working with timber. Timber has that sense of malleability, you can turn it into anything. You can burn it, you can scrape it, you can make it smooth, you can make it rough. I’ve always loved that feeling.”
David grew up in Moruya; like Ian, he loved the sense of unlimited space of growing up in a country town. After school he left to go surfing, funding North Coast travels by sketching country houses, then selling them to their owners. He studied art at Newcastle University – “it was so extraordinary I almost gave up surfing” – but ended up specialising in film.
Over the next 10 years, in between working as a percussionist, he made a film with a friend. Released in 1988, this was the award-winning comedy Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious.
From then on, David was a filmmaker. His screenwriting credits have included Beneath Hill 60, the story of a platoon of Australian tunnellers working behind enemy lines in World War 1, and Red Obsession, narrated by Russell Crowe.
“But I never really fully gave up my studio practice,” David says.
“Though it’s claimed that art is this elitist thing, there’s something wonderful and elemental about it and I’ve always loved it. There’s something about working alone in your studio, just on an idea that you have yourself, that I also really love.”
It’s a contrast to the film world.
“Film is very high tech. I’m a director and producer, and screenwriting is the core of what I do. It’s very much a collaborative process. Film is collaborative and, if you can’t collaborate, you’re not going to get very far.”
And this is how an artist, musician and filmmaker came to be Clifton School of Arts president, artistic director of the Gentle Project, and give up his own creative work for two years. For in community organisations, as in film, collaboration is the key to success.
“I’m treating it like public artwork,” David says of The Gentle Project.
“We’ve got a fabulous committee. People laugh at me for saying this – but I call it this unbroken chain of love, this chain of committees that stretch right back to 1911. They’re the volunteers who’ve kept the lights on and the building standing. When you think about that, it’s quite an extraordinary history.
“So I’m really proud to be on a community committee, I’m proud to be a part of that tradition.”
The Gentle Project is by the CSA in partnership with Wollongong Art Gallery. It has produced a range of great gifts, including the book Ian Gentle: The Found Line, tea towels, notebooks, caps and art cards. Funds go to the CSA, a registered charity. Gentle at Clifton opens on Dec 3.
The series of free talks starts this Wednesday, December 6 at Wollongong Art Gallery with "Ian Gentle: Artist, Teacher and Influencer". From 11am until noon, WAG program director John Monteleone and artists will discuss how the sculptor influenced their thinking and practice.
Visit The Gentle Project's website for more information.
The Gentle Project Credits
- Artistic director and editor: David Roach
- Contributing editor and curatorial producer Sheona White
- Contributing editor and creative producer Guy Freer
- Design and production director: Louise Lavarack
- Additional photography and post production: David Corbett
- Project designer: Luisa Laino
- Business and financial: Sarah Gardner
- Media: Caroline Baum
The Gentle Project is a production of Clifton School of Arts in partnership with Wollongong Art Gallery. The project is supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation and private donors.
