Never Open is not my first gallery exhibition experience. I was involved in the founding of the “Irving Sculpture Gallery” in Sydney in 1981.
The Irving Sculpture Gallery was created by Celia Winter-Irving and her husband Philip Thompson at 144a St Johns Road in the suburb of Glebe. The Glebe, originally church land, or its Glebe, had been purchased by Australia’s first Labor Government in 23 years, a time of hope. The gallery existed as part of the government plan to rehabilitate the area. The gallery was rented to Celia and Philip at its original nominal derelict value in exchange for the understanding that over a period of three years, they would renovate the property, the cost of the renovation being deducted from the rent. It was a grand Victorian house. It was also almost derelict having been subdivided into apartments. I remember painting the walls of the front downstairs gallery, Phil having already removed the partitions that subdivided this room. If you pressed too hard, the plaster would fall from the wall. All that had prevented it from falling was the many prior layers of white paint, now yellowed by age and neglect.
The Irving Sculpture Gallery closed in 1987, Philip Thompson having died in 1985, and Celia ‘flitting’ off to Zimbabwe on her next adventure, the gallery building never having been restored as required, and Celia supposedly leaving a trail of debts behind her.
At the front of the gallery was that one large room that I had painted, into which the light streamed endlessly all day, an exhibition in itself. Behind it and to the back of the building were two smaller exhibition rooms. Phil and Celia lived above the gallery. At the back of the gallery and down a couple of steps, in what once must have been servant quarters, was Celia’s office.
I still remember Celia sitting at the typewriter in the gallery office, energetically smoking her Virginia Slims (almost a euphemism for Celia), and flicking ashes into the air, as she typed gallery announcements and the explanatory text for Opera playbills. There was this sort of passive atmosphere of cigarette smoke about Celia, reflecting the ash which covered the keyboard of her typewriter above which she hovered matronly, her presence marked by an ashen complexion and white-yellow hair, black mascara running down her cheeks.
The room was colorless, Celia fitting well into this setting. The only color present was a golden glowing circle on the table beside the typewriter, a glass of Scotch Whiskey which seemed to be Celia’s constant companion. She was like the ghost that she would later become.
I also shared a sculpture studio one block away on Derwent Street with Celia. So, I knew her well. I can still remember her rushing into the studio in her high heeled leather boots and haut couture clothing, cigarette in hand, ash flying everywhere, clamping together two pieces of steel and then running off to another ‘important’ appointment.
Whereas a lot of my fellow artists saw Celia as a parody, I saw her and Phil as something really sad; people who deluded themselves into seeing themselves as something that they wanted to be but were not. Celia saw herself as artistically significant and used the gallery to achieve the personal contact and attention she so desperately craved, but still failed to gain; Phil as a failed salesman who used the gallery to create the personality of a marketing genius, promoting a gallery which failed.
Our sculpture studio is now two modern pseudo-Victorian townhouses, another consequence of the gentrification of Glebe. This is not surprising considering that the view from the back door of our Derwent Street Studio was an unobstructed vista of the City of Sydney, only 2 miles away.
After closing, the gallery was transformed into a restaurant. The gallery is now a private house, its, like the studio’s, demise signifying the final saga of the unintended conversion of low cost housing into bouquet inner-city housing, the final remnant of Australia’s great Labor Government’s failed socialist experiment.
Although the Irving Sculpture Gallery is no more, the ambiance of Never Open’s front room strives for the same feeling as that gallery. A place of light with an artistic presence projecting into the street and neighborhood beyond its doors.
The Irving Sculpture Gallery was open, now closed. My plan to resurrect its body will start where the Irving Gallery ended. It will be Never Open.
Part of the concept for the Never Open is that it recreates something from the past, a past that can never be accurately recreated or changed. We can look back at our past but only as observers, no longer as participants. It cannot be entered. It cannot be changed.
My recollections of the Irving Sculpture Gallery are real, but the space no longer exists, a place that can never be open, an unchangeable memory.
Never Open 