Kylie Banyard’s work investigates the generative possibilities of utopian communal ways of living. She examines experimental historical models, like Black Mountain College, with its holistic learning, collectivism and creative play, and considers how these might offer an alternative to contemporary society. Her work repositions underrepresented historical figures, particularly women, whose collective and creative contribution can lead us into an alternative future.

The history and organisation of Black Mountain College (BMC) is of keen interest to Banyard and features in her recent work. Founded in 1933 in North Carolina, BMC was a liberal arts college with a progressive approach to education, emphasising learning by doing, and balancing education with art and cooperative labour. However, while the male artists of BMC are widely known and celebrated, the contribution of female members remains lesser known. These include the abstract expressionist painter Elaine de Kooning, sculptor Ruth Asawa and textile artist Anni Albers, whose teaching at BMC reflected her own Bauhaus training which sought to erase the hierarchical distinctions between art and craft.

It is these utopian experiments, and the possibilities they present in rupturing the historical narrative, which are of continuing interest to Banyard. In 2018, the opportunity to visit BMC marked a distinct shift within her practice. Using both archival material from BMC and her own photographic documentation, Banyard created a new body of work of fictional scenarios in which the contribution of women is the focal point. Such a strategy embodies the inquisitive ethos of BMC and a feminist methodology.

The library 2019 is part of this new body of work. It depicts two young women, one engrossed in her reading, the other searching for a book. The scene is intimate and familiar, and the figures are rendered in a realist aesthetic. Yet despite the conventional representation of this scene, there are subtle cues inviting the viewer to question its historical specificity. The room’s furniture and architectural features are depicted with hard lines and flat colours that emphasise their angular geometry and they oscillate in space with perspectival ambiguity. There is dense blackness through the windows, the bookshelf is depicted in fluorescent blue and orange and there are splatters of paint in the foreground. Banyard’s pictorial disruptions serve to detach the image from its historical origins and instead ask for it to be interrogated within a contemporary framework of female opportunity and access to learning.

Banyard studied at UNSW Art & Design, completing a PhD in 2014. She has held several solo exhibitions including Blue Ridge Moon, Galerie pompom, Sydney (2019), The Improbable Outside, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne (2018), Imagining Alternatives, Broken Hill Regional Gallery (2014). Her work has been included in survey exhibitions including The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, (2019); Art from Down Under: Australia to New Zealand, Turchin Centre for the Visual Arts, Boone, North Carolina (2018); and The Mnemonic Mirror, Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane, and UTS Gallery, Sydney (2016—17). Banyard received a New South Wales Artists' Grant in 2013 and was awarded a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France in 2012. Her work is held in several public and private collections across Australia including Artbank, and the University of Wollongong.

RESOURCES 

Kylie Banyard: Imagining utopia | The Art Show interview