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Welcome to Helen Eager's Colourful World

Helen Eager’s large wall painting is set to dance along the smart new entrance foyer of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art at the end of March. Plus, a retrospective of her work is on show at Utopia Art Sydney. It’s time to take a fresh look at this mid-career artist, writes Susie Burge

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Above: Helen Eager in her studio (photo: Susie Burge)


Artist Helen Eager has spent the last three decades quietly drawing, painting and printmaking. Yes, she achieved recognition young, being picked up by Sydney’s respected Watters Gallery for her first solo show in 1977, awarded a Visual Arts Board travel grant in 1980, and a residency in the Australia Council studio in NYC with her partner (artist & gallerist) Christopher Hodges in 1988, but over the years there’s been scant mainstream media coverage given to her work. Apart from the occasional blip, on the whole she’s flown under the radar. Read More...

Christian Marclay’s The Clock: In Anticipation

On Thursday 29th March, Christian Marclay’s The Clock chimes a new era for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Susie Burge counts down.

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Above: Stills from The Clock (see credits below) and portrait of Christian Marclay (image by Dr. J Caldwell)


Christian Marclay’s magnum opus The Clock, a 24-hour video mash-up of film and tv clips referencing time that runs in real time, thus telling the time, makes good copy. It’s impossible, really, to properly illustrate with a selection of images (the work being made up of literally thousands of tiny segments from famous and not so famous scenes that are connected in clever, disparate literal and/or metaphoric ways, including creative sound editing), and hence words rather than visuals have come to the fore. Since The Clock’s debut at White Cube in London in 2010, writers have made inspired attempts to convey the essence of the thing. After seeing The Clock at Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC, British novelist Zadie Smith wrote a brilliant essay for the New York Review of Books titled “Killing Orson Welles at Midnight”. Her evocative prose makes one simply ache to experience the work itself. Read More...