The sky she brought inside

Six ANU School of Art & Design graduates have made new prints for the accommodation suites at University House. Each work carries a private history into one of the University’s most public buildings. 

Article by Yun Hu 

Emma Beer can tell you what a Canberra sunset smells like. Not describe it – reproduce it, in five colours layered across three copper plates, in a print that reads at first glance as pure abstraction.

She describes Canberra’s sky as a place where “every colour of the rainbow is seen in the sky, shifting fast and slow all at the same time”. Her print is not a record of a single sunset, but an attempt to hold onto its colour, light and scent, and the shift of the seasons.

The print, The mind is wider than the sky, takes its cue from Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Brain is wider than the Sky”. The sky is where the colour comes from. The mind is the other half – a university full of minds, and the strange fact that, for all we know about the brain, how the mind actually thinks remains largely a mystery.

“As is the sky,” Beer says. “When you see a really vivid sunset, it’s mind-blowing.”

The print is one of six commissioned for the accommodation suites at the newly refurbished University House, which will officially reopen on 14 August as part of the University’s 80th anniversary celebrations. Produced at Megalo Print Studio and brought together by the Drill Hall Gallery, the six prints will join more than 150 works from the ANU Art Collection returning to the building’s walls. All six artists are graduates of the ANU School of Art & Design.

Beer knows University House better than most – it belonged to her student years long before it held her work. She has spent 20 years at ANU, first as a student and now as a staff member at the School of Art & Design. Her parents stayed at University House when they visited, and she still remembers the bar, the garden and the jazz that played there some evenings.

For years, Beer’s relationship with printmaking ran in one direction. “In the past I’ve used printmaking processes to inform the painting process,” she says. “And now this project has given me the opportunity to go in reverse – to have the painting inform the printmaking.” The work is an aquatint etching, made over roughly a year with master printer Maximilian Gosling – a painting she had already finished, translated plate by plate, colour building over colour, into something that carries the same light by different means.

Emma Beer and Maximilian Gosling at Megalo. The six editions were made with Megalo printmakers including Gosling, Bronte Bell, Francis Kenna, Clare Jackson and Alex Lundy. Photo: Megalo Print Studio

What stayed with her was where the work was going. Not a gallery, but a bedroom – a work guests would wake up to and fall asleep beneath, seen “without really realising”. It is, as she puts it, “a very public but private interaction”.

Across generations

Of the six artists, Beer has been at the School the longest – the thread that runs between them all. Some she knew as fellow students; others she watched come through years later.

Ham Darroch graduated in 1997, making him the earliest graduate in the group. When Beer was still a student, he returned to the School to give an art forum.

His etching, Channel (for University House), grows out of an ongoing series first shown at the Drill Hall Gallery. He describes the work as a dialogue between history, architecture and colour.

Darroch sees the commission as part of a connection “with artists and designers from different eras, situated in an environment of learning and academic tradition”.

Darroch describes the work through “the ticking of a clock, the dissection of space, the intersection of time, the sound of colour”. Photo: Megalo Print Studio

What they brought into the room

The prints will hang in the accommodation suites of a public building, seen by guests who might never know the artists. Yet each carries something private from the artist’s own life.

Naomi Zouwer’s O’Connor c. 1960 began with a photograph her grandparents had almost thrown away: a slide taken after they migrated from the Netherlands to Australia, a move prompted by the health needs of two of their children with cystic fibrosis. Zouwer found it among the slides they were discarding as they prepared to move into care. Her practice examines what families keep and what they let go.

“How do images that once held hope and future become expendable?”

The question came to apply to her own work. Sometime after making the print, Zouwer misplaced the slide. The print is what survives.

For Lani Shea-An, it was a window. Her lithograph lost on Mt Hiei reworks a 2024 collage from a series she titled to be at the same time in place and out of place – a window, and through it, a tree.

“Windows represent a few things for me, some of them being distance, detachment, dissociation, and being both invited in and kept out.”

James Lieutenant started with a blanket: a photograph of one scrunched up in his studio, layered over a monotype he made during a 2020 Megalo residency. “A blanket is a domestic functional object that indicates an internal comfort and safety,” he says, “while a gestural mark can be seen as a defiant act of human expression, a risk taken.”

Kate Vassallo worked the other way, from process toward image – what she carried in was not an image but a way of working: her lithograph drawn a layer at a time and printed in transparent colours over a light magenta ground she painted by hand, so that no two impressions are quite alike. Making it, she found that “my own layered painting process has a lot in common with constructing a print.”

Not all six artists knew one another before the commission. But they had the School in common, and now they have University House: six paths out of the same place, meeting again on its walls.

When University House opened in 1954, it was described as “something of a museum of Australian contemporary art” – art of its own moment, made by people who were still making it. 72 years on, it is doing the same.

Beer has not seen her print on the wall yet. She often thinks about the guest who will wake beneath it, passing through Canberra for only a few days. On grey mornings, she hopes the print gives some of the city’s colour back.