Greeks and Romans

Barbara Campbell is exhibiting her ROMAN VOWELS series of screenprints, 2024, alongside a selection of small works from Neil Roberts’ (1954–2002) Untitled (from THE RING series), works on glass from 1999 to mark Roberts’ 70th birthday year. Neither series has previously been exhibited in Sydney and it’s the first time the artists have shown together.

Barbara Campbell’s screenprints come from imagery she collected in Rome during her 2022 residency at the American Academy in Rome (AAR). The AAR holds many specialised collections from ancient Rome, most of it stored away from public view and accessible to scholars with special permissions. However, the AAR’s collection of Roman epigraphy (Latin inscriptions incised into marble, often commemorating the heroic lives of Roman soldiers), is displayed openly, embedded into the walls surrounding the central courtyard. Without knowledge of Latin, Campbell chose to extract only the vowels (the building blocks of English) from the collection, using a simple graphite rubbing technique, thereby creating a sub-collection from the collection. The Latin V form of the later English U is a reminder of, and disturbance caused by, the source material. Each print is uniquely misregistered and shimmers with aluminium particles.

Neil Roberts had a long fascination—he was both critical and enthralled—with what he called “arenas of masculinity”. In The Ring series, two such arenas overlap to create these remnants of a lost aesthetics: the figurative fragments from boxers in action and the glass supports that provide the readymade constraint to their actions. The glass pieces began their lives as car windows found in used car yards around the artist’s former studio in Queanbeyan, NSW while the imagery is gleaned from cheaply printed boxing magazines. Like fragments from the Parthenon frieze, Roberts’ athletes and their movements are forever incomplete and thwarted.