| By Lauren Mitchell - Bendigo Life
Diedre Outhred’s studio is buzzing with activity... and it’s not only the bees
By LAUREN MITCHELL
You know what it is like when a room full of women get together. There’s usually a fog of noise, voices, laughter. The words unspoken even ring out loud.
In Deirdre Outhred’s Maiden Gully studio right now, the noise is deafening. She’s surrounded by 15 women she knows and loves and the portraits are causing quite a buzz.
Then I realise the actual noise is quite literally, a buzz.
For Deidre is also working in a shed full of bees. They arrived when she started working on the paintings, lured by the wax she is using to extend the pigments and add texture to the canvases.
But they could very well be lured by the honey trap that is wise women, in all their colour and glory.
The temptation to go there was too strong for Deidre, herself a “woman of a specific age”.
She’s 57 to be exact and for her latest exhibition, to be launched next week, Deidre has chosen to show the portraits of women her age and older.
“They’re all women who have influenced me, some of them are my family, some I know quite well and others not terribly well but they’re people who’ve had some impact on me,” she said.
“Surprisingly I didn’t have to talk any of them in to it. They were all flattered, but that made me nervous.”
Deirdre met with each of the women individually, photographing them at a table.
But the sense of unity in the art works is engaging. The portraits look as though they’re having a conversation with one another.
While some agree wholeheartedly, others glance out the window as they muse on what is being said.
For the exhibition itself, the works will be hung around the walls of Dudley House, with a table in the centre and a soundscape filling the void in between.
When each of the women meet for a dinner this weekend, they will see themselves in paint for the first time.
Their chatter will be recorded and looped with music to create a soundtrack of the experience, which will form an audio part of the exhibition.
Deirdre said she has learnt much about herself while painting for this exhibition.
“I’ve admitted all along that this is more about me than them,” she said.
“People who I feel I know the best I’ve found the hardest to paint.
“This is a close friend from my youth, we have been such mates from when we were young, and I’m surprised at how tricky I’ve found her.”
She said perhaps this is because she has had the pressure of reproducing her sense of that person, rather than just their physical form.
When asked whether she chose to feature older women for a particular reason, Deidre paused, “not wanting to sound cliched”.
“It’s probably in defiance of most media, where women of this age are not used to being represented, unless it’s someone who’s significant in society somehow,” she said.
“We are not usually made the subject of portraits.”
One of the subjects painted for the Portia Geach show in Sydney this year spurred Deidre on to represent older women in a bigger way than what perhaps they were used to.
“The woman I painted set me thinking. She was in her 80s and went to art school in the 20s, where she was taught by William Dobell,” Deidre said.
The woman studied with other famous artists and composers and harboured memories from an important time in Australia’s cultural history.
“I thought, here is a piece of white Australian history sitting in my kitchen,” Deidre said.
“She saw herself primarily as wife and mother but she had so much history that was relevant to me within herself.”
This exhibition is one all people could enjoy, regardless of their interest in art, because it’s about people, with not a hint of pretension.
And it’s about what counts ... the birds and the bees, so to speak.
“Sometimes we’ll be going for the same piece of wax but they’ve never got cross with me. We’ve learnt to live amongst each other,” Deirdre said of the bees that are working as hard as she is.
The exhibition, titled Larger Than Life, In Praise of Older Women, will be opened this Sunday, May 4 from 4.30 to 6.30 at Dudley House, View Street.
It will then be open from Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm until May 18.
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