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Tilt, installation view, 2017 Manly Art Gallery & Museum, NSW

and the little things, installation view, 2024 Arthouse Gallery, NSW

The light crept in, installation view, 2024 Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC

Counterweight, installation view, 2023

FOREWORD A DECADE OF STORIES BELINDA FOX: EVERYTHING FLOWS

DANNY LACY SOPHIE TRAVERS JOHN MCDONALD

Balancing Act Witness

Growth

Transitions

Finding Traction Gratitude

15 16 20

121

143

The Bigger Picture

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DRAWING BREATH: BELINDA FOX IN CONVERSATION WITH KATHERINE ROBERTS

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LIST OF WORKS BELINDA FOX CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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FOREWORD

DANNY LACY Artistic Director at Shepparton Art Museum

Over the past decade, Belinda Fox has forged a distinctive path through the contemporary art landscape – one that is both intimate and expansive, delicate and unflinching. Her work occupies a unique space where technical mastery meets quiet rebellion, where vulnerability is met with strength and where every line and layer carries the weight of reflection. Belinda is a master collaborator, someone who understands how to unlock the power in working together towards a shared vision. Her printmaking roots have instilled in her a collaborative approach and a technical proficiency that continues to flow through her creative practice today. I remember having a studio visit with Belinda in Singapore when I was undertaking an Asialink Arts residency in 2015. A world away from home, I connected to her practice, feeling the optimism, familiarity and the ability of her work to transgress geographical boundaries. Her workspace was alive with process, fragments of works in progress, and an intense energy that spoke of focus and discipline. Even then, it was clear that Belinda was an artist deeply attuned to the world around her, responding to complexity with precision and thoughtful mark-making. A decade on, in 2025, it was a privilege to work with Belinda at Shepparton Art Museum to present her solo exhibition More than this. This exhibition captured the breadth and depth of her recent collaborative practice, revealing an artist who continues to adapt and evolve, layering meaning through and within print, paint, paper, glass and clay, with a visual language that is at once poetic and potent. From her early printmaking to her most recent sculptural and painterly forms, Belinda’s work continues to explore the fragility and resilience of both nature and humanity. Living and working across Australia, Singapore and the Netherlands during this past decade, and investing in her practice with residencies across the world, her art reflects a world in flux, bearing witness to personal transitions, environmental concerns and global unrest with quiet urgency. This monograph traces the trajectory of an extraordinary Australian artist over a defining 10 years of her career, offering a record of resilience, reflection and hope. Through the consolidation of creative ideas and collaborative energy, Belinda invites us to pause for a moment, to look and explore what lies on and beneath the surface of her work.

A Decade of Stories SOPHIE TRAVERS Co-director/CEO of the Australian Tapestry Workshop

Thread the needle 2024

Over the last decade, Belinda Fox’s artworks have spoken with a distinctive voice. They have things they need to tell us, but they are patient, even kind, requesting that we slow down, look around and notice. What may come as a surprise is that this quietude was born of a restless journey through continents and media. From her hometown of Melbourne, Australia, Fox has relocated many times, taking up artist residencies across Asia and Europe and exhibiting widely in cities around the world. She is a tireless collaborator, following her intuition to explore new media, extend her creative capacity and open dialogue with fellow artists. Fox is articulate and intentional about her drive to tell stories through her work. Yet words are secondary. The works themselves communicate through their presence and their interplay when exhibited together. Fox is a committed maker, finding meaning through the materials she engages with, always listening for what each medium might reveal. Fox began her career as a printmaker, honing her technical skills at Port Jackson Press in Melbourne and collaborating with leading Australian artists. Printmaking’s precision and discipline prepared Fox well for a lifetime career in the arts, but it was the incidental and unexpected qualities of the medium that captivated her. She began to develop a vocabulary of lines and voids, tensions and gaps, extending her designs across multiple plates. This enabled her to explore how designs aligned or misaligned across the edges of the plates and what this delivered to the artwork. She has carried many of the discoveries of this productive period into her engagement with other media, each time adjusting to incorporate the new possibilities of the form. The birth of Fox’s daughter prompted a shift away from the toxic fumes of the print studio and into painting. Fox was initially uneasy in this new medium but found her stride when introduced to Claybord.1 This surface allowed for slow, layered mark-making that echoed her printmaking roots. Fox’s paintings incorporate inks, stains, collage and encaustic wax to articulate form and space. The lines are bold, but also delicate, colours washed out or vibrant. ‘I paint like a printmaker,’ she has said, affirming that painting, for her, is not a departure but an extension. In 2010, a printmaking residency in Greece serendipitously opened the door to ceramics. In what was to become a prominent aspect of her practice, Fox followed her interest in the new medium and its collaborative opportunities. Attuned to the different qualities of the material and its potential to add new capacity to her interest in storytelling, Fox intuitively responded to this chance opportunity to expand her range of collaborative relationships. She introduced herself to Australian ceramicist Neville French and an enduring collaboration began. Between 2011–2013 they produced a series of wheel-formed and thrown porcelain vessels, which they altered through experimentation with glazes, inlaying slips and oxides to build up layers and create evocative surfaces. Their partnership thrived on mutual provocation and inspiration, resulting in forms that were new to both artists. In 2017, after relocating to The Hague, where she was able to rent a large studio, Fox received an invitation to exhibit at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum in Sydney. She embraced the challenge, enlisting French to help realise an ambitious, immersive installation they titled Tilt (see pages 2–3). This marked the first iteration of her Gesamtkunstwerk (encompassing multiple art forms into a single work) approach of bringing together a range of two- and three-dimensional works into a single installation. For this exhibition, Fox was compelled to tell stories about her experience of living in Europe during the mass migration of refugees from war-torn Syria. The flow of refugees and the precarity of their plight was well documented in the media at that time. Fox began to paint from the images in her news feeds, focusing on one particularly vivid image of a boat on a tipping point. In the image, it was unclear whether the vessel was about to capsize or to right itself on the stormy sea. Staying with the image, rather than flicking away, she began to see the many stories of the protagonists – humans like herself, making choices, acting consciously and unconsciously to survive. She took time to honour these lives by creating an unusually large work on paper that she then scanned and doubled in size to command an entire wall of a gallery. The work was to speak so directly to the audience that they could not look away. They would be obliged to feel the image in their bodies and hear the way it spoke to and through the other works in the space.

In these confrontations, Fox was inspired by the Australian author Richard Flanagan’s frank writing about refugees and by the epic depiction of catastrophe at sea in Théodore Géricault’s historic painting The Raft of the Medusa. For their collaboration, French would need to find a form sufficiently powerful to speak to these ideas. He threw three large porcelain vessels on the wheel to create forms with fluidity that he then stretched unevenly. Some pieces were made with small bases so that they appear to float, while others tilted precariously or suffered fractures to their surfaces. As in their previous collaborations, Fox then engraved and worked upon the surface of the pots, adding her distinctive lines and textures. Together, Fox and French arrived at the powerful positioning of several vessels on a dark glass table to merge with the image of the sea and suggest the precarity of the tipping raft. The vibrant orange colour incorporated into smaller vessels, held (as if protected) within the larger forms, and repeated in the plinths and elements of the print, referred to the life vests used by the refugees, jarring against the muted monochrome of the glazes. The successful combination of the whole room installation of the Tilt exhibition and the way the diverse materials expanded Fox’s scope for storytelling gave her confidence to pursue her interest in the emotional and intellectual. For the group show, All we can’t see, at Yellow House Sydney in 2018, Fox was invited to respond to the release in the Guardian newspaper of redacted files about refugees in detention. The project inspired Fox to engage with another new material: glass. In the Hague, Fox was a frequent visitor to the extraordinary collections of the Kunstmuseum and to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The glass collections were of particular interest, as Fox discovered delicate historic pieces that told stories on their engraved surfaces. In 6 Letters and 3 Days (see pages 54–57), Fox created three works, two that were exhibited at the Kunstmuseum and one in Sydney. She invited glassblowers Gert Bullée and Geir Nustad from the Glaslab at the Nationaal Glasmuseum (National Glass Museum) in Leerdam, the Netherlands, to help her tell the stories of the refugees reported in the Guardian’s article on the redacted case files. The three large transparent forms made would represent a portrait, speaking in the semiredacted voice of the detainee. Each vessel would gesture towards an abstracted body and contain approximate human organs, precariously balanced inside, in hand-blown coloured glass. Fox was characteristically energised by the making process and the skill and responsiveness of her collaborators, stating, ‘Glass is so spontaneous. I do not work that way.’ While the glassblowers responded to the brief quickly, through their use of molten glass, her engraving of the surfaces was as careful and layered as her work on French’s ceramics. Fox’s surface engravings immortalised the detainee’s words, demonstrating her close attention to these painful stories. Fox has gone on to create assemblages in other materials that extend collaborative relationships and add new voices to her installations. In 2019, she embarked on another long-term collaboration with Dutch designer Wilfred Kalf on Beacon (see page 77), an object crafted from hand-blown glass in a walnut wooden frame with laser cut aluminium, LED light and glass engraving. The delicate surface marking of this small and intriguing object speaks to the surface-marking of Fox’s prints, paintings, ceramics and glass. The viewer is encouraged to consider the three-dimensional object closely, seeing into the lit interior and experiencing the shadows cast outwards. The new medium of the small sculpture as a kind of Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) led to the collaborative creation of three more objects with Kalf. They incorporated glass in Bask and Eviscerate your memory II (see pages 72–75) in 2019. During Covid restrictions in 2020, Fox and Kalf added two more artists to their conversation, collaborating with animator Todd Fuller and dance choreographer Remi Wörtmeyer to create Resilience (see page 105), a cabinet that incorporated video, animation, artist books and painting. Each object speaks to its predecessor, picking up ideas and adding or removing media, such as collage and painted board. Fox had returned to Eltham, Melbourne, during the pandemic, and entered a period of intense production, creating new work for the exhibition Fall at Sydney Contemporary art fair. The disorientation she sought and found in her expatriate experiences was magnified upon her homecoming by the global turbulence of the pandemic and the strange dissociation of being at home in a place made almost unrecognisable through social distancing and unease. Fox created a series of paintings that reflected a single day at the turn of the seasons in the Netherlands. She broke the golden beauty of the landscapes

SOPHIE TRAVERS

with surface texture created by the application of encaustic wax, the roughness of the painted snow creating an awareness of the impacts of climate change on this fragile beauty. To immerse the viewer in an installation environment, Fox returned to her collaborator French with new challenges. Fox proposed the traditional Korean moon jar, constructed in two halves, as a symbol of unity and rupture. Rising to the technical challenges of this form, French was both reverent of tradition and inspired to innovate. Together, Fox and French corrupted the surface of the jars with experimental glazing, colour and engraving. Five large jars were placed in a serene row in the centre of the exhibition, speaking to and against the paintings. On separate plinths, other jars were shattered, their pieces arranged in an exhalation of collapse. The two halves of Fox and French’s collaboration, so perfectly imperfect in this exhibition, were revisited in 2024. Fox curated her work across media into a major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, entitled The light crept in (see page 6–9), and in 2025 at Shepparton Art Museum, entitled More than this. In Ballarat, Fox created a two-room installation reflecting on comfort and vulnerability in the wake of global upheaval. Fox made the work at the conclusion of the pandemic and with the bruised sense of the planet’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The exhibition included a series of small sculptural pieces made in a new collaboration with Canberra Glassworks, as well as painting, prints and porcelain vessels created with French. The pink walls, wallpaper made from woodcuts and plinths of one of the rooms set a soothing stage for the new glass forms, assembled in modestly scaled groups that twinkled in the gallery lights. A richly coloured and layered painting of two moon jars held the installation together, encouraging the viewer to flow through the space from item to item, picking up motifs and ideas. A dove-grey-walled room, with its charcoal woodcutprinted wallpaper, was anchored by a broken moon jar, which spoke to a painting whose surface was split, like the jar, by a jagged painted tear across its surface filigree lines. Birds, which were represented in every medium, held their forms as if resistant to the dissolution of nature and form that surrounded them; humbly offering the hope of the exhibition’s title. Shepparton Art Museum has hosted the most recent iteration of Fox’s immersive installations, offering a new opportunity for exploring her work’s impact upon its viewers. In a series of large-scale cabinets, vessels were exhibited as if removed from space and time in a clinical setting or a time capsule. Fox was intrigued by the distance this created in the viewer, hinting at the alienation experienced during the pandemic and the sense that the experiences of these years were somehow unreal. Creating art in times of upheaval has been a solace for Fox throughout the decades. From her first non-commercial show at Fremantle Art Centre in 2007, she has pursued a commitment to storytelling without words, in a language felt through the body, the eye and the emotions. Incorporating new materials and the collaborators who master them, her refined response to material has added expressive possibilities to her work and enabled Fox to enjoy a forward momentum that retains an enormous energy and commitment. The interplay of making and exploring, navigating compassion and seeking meaning, has kept the work vital and full of complexity. Fox is always seeking new ways to make, through which to explore universal human concerns, connect with new forms of expertise, and tell stories that move beyond language, resonating deeply across time and place.

A commercial product: hardboard with a smooth kaolin coating.

A Decade of Stories

Balance/act I 32

2015

Grounded Balancing act

2015

Tapestry X (group at sea – after Guston) witness

2017

3 Days witness

2018

Break it down growth

2018

A few moments I growth

2018

With Wilfred Kalf

Bask growth

2019

You need the light to cast a shadow growth

2019

The news pounded II (up and down) transitions

2020

With Wilfred Kalf

Rising Tide 104

2020

With Wilfred Kalf, Remi Wörtmeyer and Todd Fuller,

Resilience transitions

2020

105

Coming & Going III 124

2022

Coming & Going IV finding traction

2022

125

164

A warm embrace gratitude

2024

165

182

The Wait the bigger picture

2025

183

BELINDA FOX Born 1975, Melbourne, Australia

Drawing from her skills as a former master printer and fusing together personal and global concerns, Belinda Fox’s work lays bare the paradoxes endemic to contemporary human experience. Working in painting, drawing, glass, sculpture, printmaking and in collaboration, Fox examines the volatility of our era, excavating the iridescent beauty that flickers below the shadowy surface of conflict and despair. Fox grew up in regional Victoria and lived in Singapore and the Netherlands, and is currently based in Melbourne. Fox presents us with artworks in which beauty is a gateway into dense conceptual terrain patchworked with blackness and light, an ‘antidote’ to our polarised epoch; a bridge connecting us through a shared – albeit almost forgotten – humanity. Forging an international career showing in over 35 solo exhibitions to date in Australia, USA, Europe, Hong Kong China, Singapore, Korea and Jakarta, Fox has received several notable awards including the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize (2022), Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2010), Burnie Print Prize (2007), Silk

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Cut Award for linocut printmaking (2004), and has been a finalist in many more. Fox has taken up national and international residencies in Shanghai, France, Thailand, Greece, Perth, Darwin, Canberra, Melbourne and Tasmania. Her work is also held in major collections including the Kunstmuseum (the Netherlands), Janet Turner Museum (USA), Art Gallery of New South Wales (NSW), National Gallery of Victoria (VIC), National Gallery of Australia (ACT), Art Gallery of Western Australia (WA), Manly Art Gallery & Museum (NSW), HOTA (QLD), Queensland University of Technology Art Museum (QLD), Artbank (VIC), Art Gallery of Ballarat (VIC), and Bendigo Art Gallery (VIC). In 2016 a monograph of Fox’s practice was published by Goff Books, USA, titled Back to the Start. In 2022, Fox was awarded the Australian Print Workshop Collie Trust Printmaking Fellowship, (VIC).

www.belindafox.com.au

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE TRAVERS Sophie was appointed Co-director/CEO of the Australian Tapestry Workshop in 2023, bringing to the role extensive international experience in the arts and cultural sector. Previously CEO of Collingwood Yards, she also held senior roles at the City of Melbourne, Australia Council for the Arts and various UK arts organisations. Sophie has worked across Berlin, Brussels and London and fosters strong global arts networks. She sits on the boards of TarraWarra Museum of Art and Chunky Move, and was formerly a director of Res Artis, an international artist-in-residency network. She holds a first-class Honours degree from Cambridge and has lived in many countries worldwide. She currently resides in Melbourne, Australia. DANNY LACY Danny is currently Artistic Director at Shepparton Art Museum. Over the past 25 years, Danny has had an active curatorial practice within a range of Victorian-based public galleries, most recently as Director at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. He has held previous roles at West Space, Monash University Museum of Art, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Gertrude Contemporary. In 2025, Danny was appointed President of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria (PGAV), the main advocacy group for public art galleries in Victoria. He completed a Master of Art degree (Visual Culture) at Monash University. KATHERINE ROBERTS Katherine Roberts is Senior Curator, Exhibitions & Collections, at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum where she works with contemporary artists from diverse disciplines to curate exhibitions and partnership projects. Her recent curatorial focus has been on the intersection of art and science through large scale, cross-disciplinary projects. She has also developed strong relationships across the field of ceramics, inspired by MAG&M’s collection focus. Previously, Katherine worked at S.H. Ervin Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. She has also been a board member of the Regional and Public Galleries of NSW, Eramboo Artist Environment and Pittwater Community Arts, and an advisor to The Women’s Club Sydney’s Art Project. She holds a Master of Arts (Admin) from University of New South Wales Art & Design. JOHN MCDONALD John McDonald has been long-term art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, and Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia. His major publication is the book The Art of Australia: Exploration to Federation. His contemporary writings on art, cinema and politics are published on the site ‘Everything the art world doesn’t want you to know’ (Everythingthe.com).

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