Biography
Brian Barrie lives in Lakes Entrance, East Gippsland. He was born, grew up in Nhill where his father ran an orchard, and lived and worked in the Riverina until 1997, when he moved to “Lakes” as part of Ron and Cheryl Jonkers’ extended family.
Until his mother died in 1996, Brian had lived at Jerilderie, in southern New South Wales. Afterwards, he moved into a caravan in Balranald, and for a while things did not go too well for him. Luckily, at this time he met up with the Jonkers family, who knew of his local reputation as a country and western singer. The family “adopted” him – their son Chris calls him “uncle” – and they looked after him in the Riverina, and subsequently for a year and a half when they lived at Broadmeadows in Melbourne. Eventually the whole family decided to move to Lakes Entrance. Cheryl’s family is Kurrni-Gunni, and she has relatives in both the Riverina and East Gippsland region.
Brian and his mother Neta were a well known duo on the Riverina Country sand Western circuit. They wrote and recorded their own songs and Slim (his professional name) still sings sometimes at the pensioners’ clubs in Lakes Entrance. Chris tells how Slim taught him to play the guitar.
Neta was also a visual artist with a local reputation in the Riverina, and from newspaper clippings of his mother’s quilts and applique embroidery we can see that her works depict her idealisation of local life and the landscape. Slim still keeps these memorabilia, and is proud of the value they attracted in her lifetime.
The earlier phase of his work shown in these exhibitions was made when he was living with the Jonkers in Lakes Entrance in the mid-nineties. These sculptures are made of highly varnished wood from pieces of timber given to him by council workers. While he says he would never cut down a tree himself, he tells how this wood was “too good to chuck away”, so he kept it, and the sculptures evolved from the forms themselves. The figurative works have autobiographical references, depicting the musicians and band members of his singing career. This is a theme he returns to in his pokerwork and carved ostrich egg works.
While Slim has always worked in a range of media and themes, the early wooden works are more sculptural in a traditional sense – sometimes figurative, and yet sometimes a non-figurative response to the material itself. Their form is totemic in Slim’s piled-up assemblage technique, clearly testimony to his pleasure and excitement at the transformation of their natural forms.
Assemblage is the consistent feature of all his works. Even the ostrich eggs – carved and painted in figurative or abstract forms – are not complete until the addition of the support structures which give them their proper orientation. Moulded coat hangers, plastic lids, and glass jars are the pedestals which complete their hybrid identity. Lately he has begun to make paintings on cardboard and dioramas in cardboard boxes which are themselves encrusted with decorations – shells, gumnuts, tools, cottonbuds, photographs, the caps of his superglue tubes, and even alarmclocks to disrupt the painted surface.
There is no end to the possibilities of assemblage. In the last few years Slim has concentrated on his “masterworks” which began with the painted cardboard boats which are fantastically painted – more recently with glow-in-the-dark pigments. The boats are then decorated with scores of figures, trinkets, jewelry and memorabilia. The chromed kangaroo from his mother’s FJ Holden sits in pride of place on the foredeck of the first “masterwork”, now in the NSW Maritime Museum. (We know it was Mum’s car by the text written on the back of the snapshot which has been secreted inside the boat’s structure.)
Slim’s mother is poignantly present in these early boats in many other elements glued to their painted surfaces – her jewelry, earrings, pearls, beads, her marcasite watch and other odds and ends carefully preserved as an emotionally charged link to his early life. These include eyeglasses, salt and pepper shakers, old pens, a razor, nail clippers, a digital watch, a plastic cover from a smoke alarm, a knife, a one cent coin, a key-ring, a catholic medal, several different kinds of scissors, ashtrays, and two teddy bears dressed in nautical outfits, one at the helm, one sitting on a poop deck made from plastic coathangers.
The “decoration” of these works is, for Slim, the way in which he tells the story of his creativity, and transforms the forms and structures of the painted boats into his own autobiography, as the celebration of his own journey of survival. Whether collected from the seashore or the footpath, from tourist outlets or Clint’s Crazy bargains, this paraphenalia marks the passage of Slim’s life in Lakes Entrance.
Perhaps once the boats were just toys, a grown man’s response to the excitement of moving from the inland to the coast, of seeing the sea for the first time in his life. Or perhaps it was the excitement of Lakes Entrance – the only town in Australia where the main street is also the parking lot for fishing boats, yachts, and the pleasure cruisers of the rich and famous. Slim’s early boats were made to float, but subsequently, under the weight of their decorations, they have become something else.
This text was written for the catalogue of Slim’s first solo exhibition, at Helen Maxwell Gallery, in October 2001. Since then Slim has had numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at Gitte Weise Gallery, culminating in a survey show: “Slim Barrie: Wayfarer” at the Latrobe Valley Regional Gallery, in July 2005.