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 for ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

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.

You don’t have to have a painting of a tree to feel like it’s a tree. To me, when I look at those colours, I can smell the eucalypt.

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 officially reopened 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.

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