OPENING EVENTS ON SATURDAY 28 SEPTEMBER
3-4PM ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION WTIH BRUCE HEISER
4-6PM OPENING
Presented in collaboration between Bruce Heiser Projects, Brisbane and Lone Goat Gallery, Byron Bay, now + then brings together an eclectic group of works produced by established Australian artists Stephen Bird, Joe Furlonger, and Bill Yaxley.
Weaving between recent and past works, now + then allows audiences to view all three artist’s current preoccupations, while examining and experiencing earlier works upon which their current practices are based. The artworks exhibited span a diverse range of scale and mediums including works on paper, ceramics, and oil paintings, revealing the maker’s assorted aesthetics and approaches to image making.
now + then celebrates the artistic journeys and careers of three senior practitioners, each with careers spanning over 40 years and whose sustained creative drive and impulses have been honed and refined over many years.
STEPHEN BIRD BIO
Stephen Bird was born in England in 1964 and has lived in Australia since 1999. He trained at The Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland, and majored in painting. He works with both paint and clay and has undertaken a number of site-specific sculpture commissions. Bird’s work is exhibited both nationally and internationally including The 9th Gyeonggi Biennale, South Korea, 2017, More Love Hours, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2015, Horizon – Landscapes, Ceramics and Print, The National Museum of Norway, Oslo, 2013 and Peripheral Visions: Contemporary Art from Australia, Garis+Hahn, New York, 2013. His works are held in the many public collections including the National Museum of Scotland, The National Gallery of Australia, the National Museums of Northern Ireland and The Art Gallery of South Australia.
Stephen has been awarded many prizes and was the winner of The Gold Coast International Ceramic Award, 2016 and the Deacon University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, 2011. He has received professional development award from both the Australia Council for the Arts and the Scottish Art Council. He currently teaches at the Byron School of Art, Mullumbimby.
www.stephenbird.net @stephen_bird_artist
BILL YAXLEY BIO
Born in Melbourne in 1943, Bill Yaxley spent his late childhood and teenage years in country Victoria. Self-taught as an artist, Yaxley was drawn to art as a young man, admiring the work of a diverse and distinguished group of Australian artists including Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, and Max Meldrum. During his late teens he spent time travelling and painting in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and France, the artist made his way to New Zealand where he held his first solo exhibition in New Plymouth in 1969.
In 1989, he reloated with his family to Copping in southern Tasmania where they began producing wines under the label Yaxley Estate, and where the artist based his studio. From the late 80's to 90's he exhibited at Galleria San Vidal, Venice, Italy and in 1993 Yaxley was curated in the exhibition Dame Edna Regrets held at the Museum of Modern Art, Heidi. Since that time he has been included in major exhibitions and retrospectives of his work.
Bill Yaxley’s work is represented in public collections throughout the country including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, UQAM, University of Queensland, Griffith University Art Museum, HOTA Gold Coast, Rockhampton Museum of Art, University of Tasmania, Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra, and the Hamilton Art Gallery, New Zealand.
JOE FURLONGER BIO
Born in Cairns in the early 1950s, Joe Furlonger graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 1976 before travelling to Sydney to continue his studies at the Alexander Mackie CAE, graduating with a Diploma of Art in 1978.
A figurative painter whose practice oscillates between representation and abstraction, Furlonger is especially regarded for his landscapes. Based in South-East Queensland, the artist continues to make frequent painting trips to regional districts, returning to favoured sites including country surrounding Moree, New South Wales, the Bunya Mountains, and areas of Central Queensland and the Capricorn Coast. These working trips have stimulated an extraordinary body of work within the artist’s oeuvre, with paintings such as Hills, Carnarvon, Central Queensland awarded the 2002 Fleurieu Art Prize, and Wet Summer, Darling Downs, winning the Tattersalls Club Landscape Art Prize in 2011.
A seasoned deckhand from working on fishing trawlers in his youth, the experience of forever gazing at the earth’s horizon while at sea has played a discrete, yet profound influence on the artist’s practice, with Furlonger once commenting on his interest and practice of examining the expansive qualities of the Australian landscape in his compositions as finding ‘parallels with the sea. I feel comfortable in big, flat areas.’
Joe Furlonger’s work has been curated in significant institutional group exhibitions both in Australia and abroad including Bonheurs des Antipodes, Amiens, Musee de Picasso (2000) and Three Australian Painters, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (2007). Furlonger’s practice has been the subject of several survey exhibitions including the Gold Coast Art Gallery’s 1999 exhibition Joe Furlonger Survey 1982-1999; Land, Sea, City, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (2002); and Circus, Maitland Regional Gallery, NSW (2007).
More recently, between August 2022 and January 2023, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art presented a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s practice, Joe Furlonger: Horizons.
Furlonger’s work is represented in major institutional collections in Australia and overseas including The British Museum, London; National Gallery of Australia; QAGOMA, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, University of Queensland Art Museum; QUT Art Museum, Griffith University Art Museum, HOTA, Gold Coast; University of New South Wales; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and The Australian Club, Sydney.