Artists statement

Of Maryanne Coutts' exhibition at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery Maryanne Coutts wrote:

'The same old story' is a curious phrase. As usual I can't tell you exactly in words what the story is,simply that I hope that this body of work evokes characters and implies the actions and interactions that engender a story. For me the story if seeking itself, trying to understand what about itself is repeatable yet malleable, rememberable yet changeable.

The Triumph of Gutenberg' celebrates the seemingly ordinary by manifold ways that information is transferred and transformed. It arises from a fascination with the way a thought evolves from one idea to the next, often repeating itself, but sometime making leaps and in the dark mutating.

Famed for introducing movable type and the printing press to Europe in 1450, Gutenberg enabled the mass production of books. He has consequently become a symbol for the power of the dissemination of knowledge. Vehicles for repeatability, like printing, are myriad and range from specific codes, such as DNA, to more ephemeral language systems like visual and narrative.

Stories are my favourite vessels of memory, of recording. It seems that a story can have certain characteristics that allow it to be recognised as a particular story, indeed, that allow it to be repeated withing different narrations, different readings. As a visual storyteller, I have been curious about how much can change while the story remains the same, Within this visual exploration of what I consider to be a consistent story, conveyed through different media, scales, shapes, and styles, I have allowed mutations, which I hope will illuminate the repetition.

In some ways this work is a direct response to Poussin's 'The Triumph of Pan', whose arrangement of figures approaches a kind of formal abstraction. As I worked through the drawing, painting and print that are in this exhibition, I have looked increasingly to more recent interpreters of that tradition like Beckmann, Layered, then, withing this story are other stories, other histories.

In a metaphoric sense repeatability and mutability characterize both how the work came into being and how, being something more than paper, canvas and pigment, it can travel audiences' neural pathways as both memories of sights seen, as new thoughts ans/or as old thoughts and memories now mutated.

Maryanne Coutts, January 2003.

Historical information

Maryanne COUTTS (1960- )
Born Australia

Maryanne Coutts studied at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), The University of Melbourne, 1979 -1981, the University of NSW (UNSW),1984 and achieved a PhD at Federation University Australia in 1999. She has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally including UK, Spain and Thailand and is currently Head of Drawing at the National Art School, Sydney.

This item is part of the Federation University Art Collection. The Art Collection features over 2000 works and was listed as a 'Ballarat Treasure' in 2007.

Physical description

This work is presented on four linen canvases. It is a very large work showing a person working in an office.

Donated under the Australian Government's Philanthropic Programme, 2005