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I determine what gets into
the history books, what is
remembered,” exclaims artist
Jane Bennett.
Discarding her regular
uniform of steel-capped boots, a
hard hat and a metal cage, Jane
Bennett stands dwarfed by the
high walls of Sydney’s National
Heritage Centre where her
exhibition, Sydney’s Disappearing
Industrial Treasures, has
been a tremendous success.
A resident of West Pymble
and formally trained at Sydney’s
City Art Institution, the artist
is fulfilling her quest to paint
Sydney’s vanishing industrial
sites.
To date such disappearing
sites have included industrial
areas at Pyrmont, Cockatoo
Island, the Woolloomooloo
Finger Wharf, BHP Steel Works
in Newcastle and the Balmain
Power Station. “My artworks
are a visual history, a map of
the disappeared,” Jane Bennett
says.
“It’s a physically demanding
job and at first I was swamped
by it as I was testing myself
against the epic scale of the
landscape itself.”
Such strain is not surprising
due to the open-air nature of her
work. The artist has climbed
chimneys, to get a good
painting angle and hitched a
ride to the top of the ANZAC
Bridge during an electrical
storm to capture an industrial
landscape below.
The most dangerous incident
of all was when she and her
60kg easel fell out a second
floor window, rendering her
desolate and unconscious, in an
abandoned factory in Pyrmont.
Perhaps Jane Bennett’s
risk - taking stems from her
belief that the harder you work
the luckier you get.
“Hard work has meant I
have created a genre for myself
in the art world as an urban
landscape painter,” she says.
It has also led to Ms Bennett’s
many major awards including
her most recent, the Inaugural
Sydney Harbour Week Award
for Artistic Achievement.
Most influential was however
the Marten Bequest Traveling
Scholarship awarded in 1996
which enabled her to paint in
England, Scotland, Germany,
the Netherlands, France, Italy
and Belgium.
Jane Bennett’s works can
be “very moody and quite
dark” says Anni Turnbull
curator of ‘Paradise, Purgatory
and Hellhole: A history of
Pyrmont and Ultimo’, an
exhibition in which a selection
of Jane Bennett’s artworks
can currently be seen at the
Powerhouse Museum.
The artist aims to impose
order on chaos within her works
and she achieves this through
depth rather than flatness in
her artworks. “Shadow can be
used to physically eat away at
all form, creating anxiety and
doubt,” she says.
Although Ms Bennett incorporates
the styles of classicism,
romanticism and realism,
she claims to draw greatest
influence from the “cult of the
romantic ruin and the Claudian
landscape”. Like the classical
artist Pironesi, whom she much
admires, her works are focused
on balance, harmony and
composition.
Jane Bennett is convinced
she is painting the
end of Sydney’s industrial
revolution.
“People argue these old
buildings are junk,” but Sydney
is “getting to be a city that
doesn’t produce anything”.
Always a realist, she
“acknowledges that capturing
the vision of Pyrmont and
Sydney’s other industrial areas,
before they change forever, is a
race against time”.
Jane Bennett’s most current
exhibition is on display at the
Taylor Galleries. Talking fondly
of gallery owner Max Taylor,
the artist says he “is the closest
to a mentor, he never tried to
talk me out of anything.”
Ms Taylor,who has exhibited
Jane Bennett for 10 years,
says she is “intense about her
unique works and posses a lot
of integrity.
“I am a commentator, the
repository of memory, good,
bad and indifferent,” says the
artist “It’s my empire. If I paint
it, I own it, I own Sydney!” she
says with a grin.
Reporter: Harriet Gollan
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