Madonna Staunton

1938 — Murwillumbah, Australia | 2019 — Brisbane, Australia

Information

Madonna Staunton — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Madonna Staunton, 2016 © Courtesy of the Estate of Madonna Staunton and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Australian artist and poet.

For more than five decades, Madonna Pearl Staunton sustained a prolific art practice spanning collage, assemblage, painting and printmaking. Over this time, M. Staunton’s output forged a unique contribution to Australian Modernism.
The self-proclaimed introvert grew up the only child of bookstore owner father Albert Errol Staunton and librarian-artist mother Madge Staunton nee Jones (1917-1985), who had formal training as a painter. From a young age M. Staunton was introduced to her mother’s colour theory texts and attentive painting tuition. At the age of 21 M. Staunton sought to extend her education further afield, commencing studies in painting and life drawing at the Royal Queensland Art Society and later, in 1964, attending Brisbane’s Central Technical College.
The large-scale, gestural paintings definitive of M. Staunton’s practice in the 1960s demonstrate relentless experimentation and a striving to give form to a rich inner world – traits that persist across her practice and media. M. Staunton’s early paintings refer to recent breakthroughs in American Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, as well as to the canons of Dadaism, Constructivism and Fluxus. Although emboldened by aspects of these international movements, M. Staunton was foremost beholden to what she called her own “inner impulse” and established a unique formalist approach.
In the late 1960s M. Staunton’s physical health declined, prohibiting her from continuing to work with paint at ambitious scales. Coinciding with this, M. Staunton joined the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in Queensland, which spurred the compilation of her first collage in 1968 made from torn CAS newsletters. What followed was years of intense collage-making that positioned Staunton as one of Australia’s most prominent collage artists.

Echoing the muted tones of her paintings, M. Staunton scoured for found materials in her immediate environment: urban waste, paper scraps, old books, photographs, letters and faded cloth – discarded fragments weathered with time and imbued with memory. The irregular, layered squares and patterned, organic staining found in paper collage on canvas Untitled (1973) exemplifies a preoccupation with form and colour consistent with the artist’s painting style. In Assemblage with Plank (1988) these same principles are applied to three-dimensional objects. Two wooden chairs, a plank decorated with incidental splatters of paint, a wooden frame and a record cover make for an ambiguous and playful configuration that reframes and invites a fresh look at everyday elements. Etching, solvent transfer, collotype and monotype furthered Staunton’s aesthetic inquiries.

The late 1990s marked a return to figurative painting, with later works, such as the painting Hospital Ward (2013) bearing increasingly intimate and piercing insights into mortality, morality and mental health. Throughout her long career, M. Staunton’s art remarked on the transcendence, whimsy, austerity and brutality that may be sourced within the mundane matter all around us.

In 1996 M. Staunton was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to the visual arts and in 1988 she received a Selected National Women’s Art Award, Centre Gallery, Gold Coast. In 2014-2015, Out of a Clear Blue Sky, a retrospective was held at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

Kate Alida Mullen

A notice produced as part of the TEAM international academic network: Teaching, E-learning, Agency and Mentoring