Dirty Paper: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Dirty Paper features five Tasmanian artists who have created and curated new works in response to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) collection. In addition, it includes works produced by two Tasmanian artists in the 1980s.

Matt Coyle, Joel Crosswell, Tom O’Hern and Lucienne Rickard are well known for their innovative approaches to drawing. After extensive tours of TMAG’s collection and meeting curators from various disciplines, they have each chosen to respond to objects such as dioramas, moths, megafauna models and sculpted busts.

For nearly 30 years, artist and writer Andrew Harper has collected drawings by local artists in the form of zines, photocopied flyers and posters, which he has recently donated to the TMAG collection. For Dirty Paper, he has chosen to focus on two extraordinary yet little known Tasmanian artists from this collection: Rodney Febey and Andrew Clifford.

Drawing is at the heart of Dirty Paper and the title stems from a quote by the 19th Century critic John Ruskin who once provocatively claimed that 'all good drawing consists merely of dirtying the paper delicately’.

Dirty Paper is the eighth collaborative exhibition curated by Contemporary Art Tasmania and TMAG