Pictures 1988
Catalogue / Memoir
Introduction
Pictures
Objects
Animations
PICTURES are both finished and ephemeral works made for animations.
1949---- 1950---- 1951---- 1952---- 1953---- 1954---- 1955---- 1956---- 1957---- 1958---- 1959---- 1960---- 1961---- 1962---- 1963---- 1964---- 1965---- 1966---- 1967---- 1968---- 1969---- 1970---- 1971---- 1972---- 1973---- 1974---- 1975---- 1976---- 1977---- 1978---- 1979---- 1980---- 1981---- 1982---- 1983---- 1984---- 1985---- 1986---- 1987---- 1988---- 1989---- 1990---- 1991---- 1992---- 1993---- 1994---- 1995---- 1996---- 1997---- 1998---- 1999---- 2000---- 2001---- 2002---- 2003---- 2004---- 2005---- 2006---- 2007---- 2008---- 2009---- 2010---- 2011---- 2012---- 2013---- 2014---- 2015---- 2016---- 2017---- 2018---- 2019---- 2020---- 2021---- 2022---- 2023---- 2024---- 2025---- 2026----
Family
Diversity
John Bird selects eight people only for the Animation course he set up and directs, at the Swinburne Film and TV School, in Glenferrie Road Hawthorn, Melbourne. The same building where my father studied art.
We are John Bird's "brew". He tells us we are selected for our differences, to inspire and assist each other with our projects, and so expand our own perspectives and the perspectives of our audiences. John was a visionary. He saw animation and interactive media as the new publication form to bring together all the senses, as in ancient times, to pass on knowledge.
It's very intense close work, in cramped spaces day and night, the air warm with body heat and smells of coffee and takeaway food. Some of us sleep all night in the studios, curled between equipment on couches or on the floor. By the end of the year we are a crazy close-knit family.
I am the only female in this brew of eight: Bill Hodge, Robert Fitzclarence, Anthony Lucas, Andrew Nelson, Jeffrey Noonan, Robert Stephenson, Julian Wriggley.
John Bird sets us tasks that demand us to make animations in small groups, then in pairs, and individually. In that order. He demands us to be our selves, to work well together and accept our differences. It's not all about us.
One day my daughter comes home from school with a poster that reads "A family is a group of people who share values." I reflect on that, and ask myself "Whose values?"
We watch Home and Away on TV. We read together.
I delight in her critical thinking and creativity. She introduces me to The Lion,The Witch and the Wardrobe, and other stories I never knew as a child. She reads voraciously and writes with a powerful mix of logic and imagination. One of her teachers tells me, admiringly, "She has a mind like a steel trap."
1988 Daughter Katherine. Pastel on paper. Artist's collection, Sydney
The Swinburne animation course was in the same building where my father studied art before the war, before he moved to the Marconi School of Wireless to train for wartime work as a radio operator and technician. I feel like I retrace my father's steps in many ways.
1988 Upton Road garden. Oil on canvas. Artist's collection, Sydney
The south side of the house was damp and cold, in the shadow of next door's two-story flats. The garden briefly suited a duck who I later released into a park with a lake.
1988 Seasons. Celluloid. Frames from my first digital animation. Artist's collection, Sydney
EVENTS
1988: 17 January - The TV soap Home and Away is launched by Seven Network.
1988: 19 January - Federal Sport and Tourism Minister John Brown steps down for apparently misleading Parliament over his role in the tendering process for Brisbane's Expo contracts on 10 December 1987.
1988: 26 January - Australia Day, Australia celebrates its bicentennial day with the arrival of the First Fleet Re-enactment Voyage and a tall ships parade in Sydney Harbour.
1988: 26 January - First Peoples' protest over the 'celebration of a nation' instigated public debate concerning white and indigenous Australian history, the position of First Peoples in contemporary society and the possibilities of land rights and reconciliation in the future.
February 23 - Start of Anfal campaign, a genocidal counterinsurgency operation within the Iran - Iraq War carried out by Ba'athist Iraqi forces led by Ali Hassan al-Majid on the orders of President Saddam Hussein that will kill between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Written by me, Lisa Roberts/Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill), on
25/08/2026
