Nora Heysen was the first Australian female war artist, appointed in 1943 to depict the women’s war effort. On ANZAC day, NGV curator Angela Hesson leads a discussion about the role of artists on these missions and their experience in war time.

Moderator

Dr Angela Hesson, Curator, Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts to 1980, NGV

Speakers

Dr Lyndell Brown and Professor Charles Green have worked as a collaborative artist team since 1989. They have held more than 40 solo exhibitions and have been included in more than 50 curated exhibitions. In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Between 2011 and 2014 they worked on a collaboration with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014).

Dr Catherine Speck is Professor of Art History at the University of Adelaide. Her publications on Nora Heysen are numerous and include Heysen to Heysen: Selected Letters of Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen (2019, 2011); ‘Nora Heysen’s Views from the Pacific Region’ in Painting Ghosts (2004), and ‘Nora Heysen: a tale of a daughter and her father’, Australian Feminist Studies, (2004). She is a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research into Gender, and the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.