Kate Dorrough

Julie Ewington

Heather Dorrough and Kate Dorrough - mother and daughter - shared family ties, love, art, ideas, laughter. They were, as Kate says today, great friends. And a crucial part of true friendship is the mutual recognition of what makes each person distinctive. Here we have two artists, mother and daughter, and two different life trajectories that intersected, and productively so. This exhibition recognises those links and lineages, and those differences, over six decades.
 
Heather Dorrough (born 193 3) and Kate Dorrough (born 1964) are, as an early commentator remarked of Heather, 'born artists'. The difference was that Heather escaped small-town England to dive into the wider world of art and design, while Kate grew up within the creative pool of the Dorrough family's Sydney home: her architect father Terry worked together with interior designer Heather on many commissions. For Kate, the home was a hub of constant activity: Heather and Terry's energy and commitment set the pattern of her life long before she embarked on formal art training. This was a rhythm of making, thinking, reflecting, learning.
 
In this exhibition, with her selection of Heather's work and her own recent ones, Kate recognises and honours her mother's role as her first and longest-lasting mentor. Heather's sumptuous 1965 wall­ hanging, and playful wearable stitched works from 1979, suggest the lively textures of 1960s/1970s modernist Sydney; Kate was just a child when the rich colours of Heather's hangings enlivened the restraint of Terry's modernist spaces. Her development as a painter led her to share interests with her mother-working with fabrics and patterns, thinking through feminist imagery­ bracketed by a longstanding interest in landscape: her graduation piece, Abstracted Landscape (1994), is Kate's earliest work in the exhibition. Whatever the interests of the moment, however, the enduring pattern is the indissoluble interweaving of life, art, making, design: all came together in the Dorrough family homes, where cloth, paper, canvas, clay, wood, were put to the service of so many creative projects over the years.

Importantly, there was a constant desire with both artists to find new ways of working, and a willingness to explore a wide variety of genres and materials: fibre, painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, video.  During her long productive career Heather Dorrough undertook a remarkable variety of projects, commissions and exhibitions; she collaborated with Terry Dorrough as an interior designer for architectural settings, creating a number of major works for public buildings, including the New South Wales Parliament House (1980) and the Hyde Park Barracks (1991). Heather's exhibitions in the mid-1980s were equally notable: her two major series of feminist-inspired works exploring the representation of the female body, the Self Portrait series (1982) and Covert Covers, The Lie of the Land (1987 ), were both important contributions to the development of feminist art at the time. Forty years later, Kate's recent Recollections series (2023) is a direct response to the legacy of Heather's inquiring and self-reflective 'Self Portraits'.
 
Always there was drawing, a fundamental discipline of inquiry for the entire family: the cabinets included in the exhibition testify to the constant use of drawing in all its varieties by both artists. Originally trained in the exquisite sketchy ink-drawing style of 1950s London, Heather remained an indefatigable student; she was constantly looking to understand new techniques or materials with great thoroughness, taking many art courses, including a Master's degree, to update her ideas and skills over the years. In her sixties, Heather returned to a thorough study of European oil painting, so she could satisfy her desire to capture the days and nights of Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury River, flowing in front of her Dangar Island home; these quiet intense loving paintings, and associated prints, are seen together for the first time in this exhibition.
 
The commitment to experiment that marks the work of both Heather and Kate Dorrough continues to the present day, with Kate now painting on clay as well as on linen-she has learned over the last two decades how to make ceramic vessels, so she could transfer her painting onto clay surfaces, such as River Icon and Tidal marks, River Landscape (both 2023); since around 2012, the expansive paintings such as Reflections on a River (2012), together with the painted ceramic vessels, show the Iongevity of Kate's preoccupation with this subject. There is, similarly, great clarity with the distinctive purpose of Kate's explorations, while the eventual outcomes are so entirely different from her mother's works about a similar subject: Heather's paintings and prints focusing on Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury are contained, still, reflective, while Kate's larger works inspired by the rivers of the Sydney Basin are all fluid energy and open gestures.

Now Kate has taken that exploration into video: River Theatre (2023) brings together painting, ceramics and moving image to evoke the constant restless passage of the river waters that she knows and loves. She has long been familiar with Dyarubbin at Dangar Island, where her parents lived from the 1980s, and which enters the ocean some few kilometres north of Manly Art Gallery and Museum; she has undertaken residencies on the Murray and Manning Rivers, the Shoalhaven at Bundanon, and now lives very close to the Cooks River in southeastern Sydney. We sense in the broad washes of colour and large gestures in her paintings that a myriad of overlapping associations and memories are provoked by this long connection with these rivers.

The ways that Heather and Kate, in their turn and their own times, have tackled the Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury River, and the broad metaphorical theme of the river, could not be more different: Heather's rather modest studies are just that, close evocations of specific different times of days, and various plays of weather and light on the water's surface close to her home; her very last work, in 2013, is the painting Across the river. With Kate, the large watery gestural paintings suggest energy, the waters of life, even the flows of fertility. Yet despite the differences in their approaches, over recent decades daughter and mother shared concerns about the pressing environmental issues that affect the region's waterways, and a commitment to activism on its behalf, expressed through punctilious looking at the life of the country; Heather's 1995 The Hawkesbury sandstone garden detailed the flora of the region, and her lovely 2012 'Lunar' series of mono prints gestures to connections between women's bodily cycles and the River.

Indeed, Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury River, along with the image of a river as a symbolic emblem, remains the connecting link between Heather and Kate Dorrough, between mother and daughter: a fluent always-present site, a set of images, and a metaphor for the Dorrough family's life and work. For the River - all rivers - is the source of life, and of continuing fertility. Without its waters the country around it would wither, and so would the families that have loved it for millennia and continue to do so. 

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Notes.

1.    Barbara Campbell Allen, teaching at Willoughby Arts Centre, taught Kate Dorrough how to coil ceramic forms; she fires her works at Sydney Clay Studio at St. Peters.

2.    See Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2020, for a wonderful history of Dyarubbin/ the Hawkesbury ­Nepean.