Pen Pals: The Peter Tyndall and Robert MacPherson Correspondence Archive

Presentation

About: Jacklyn Young is a fine arts librarian who has worked mainly with special collections. She is currently the Librarian, Collections at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Research Library.

Jacklyn Young (QAGOMA)

Abstract: Donated by Peter Tyndall to the QAGOMA Research Library at the end of 2014, The Peter Tyndall and Robert MacPherson Correspondence Archive is the result of 35 years of exchange between these celebrated artists and consists of nearly 13 000 items of correspondence including postcards, artists’ books, objects and envelopes containing newspaper and magazine pages related to MacPherson’s thematic interest, or the artists’ shared interests.

The two artists began corresponding after their first meeting at Ray Hughes Gallery in Brisbane in 1979 when the artworks for Tyndall’s exhibition at the gallery were stuck in transit due to a national trucking protest. In lieu of the artworks, as he waited for the strike to end, Tyndall put a few other things he had to hand in the gallery space including the aviator’s leather helmet with a winged emblem of his ideogram of dependent arising that he’d worn on his flight to Brisbane (his flight to Brisbane for the exhibition was his first).

Within an hour of their meeting, MacPherson responded with a gift of a masonic box decorated with a similar winged motif; he strung feathers inside the box and instructed that it should be viewed at eye level when opening. Since then, this exchange has continued, almost daily.

Artists MacPherson and Tyndall both have an encyclopaedic knowledge of their many interests and can be described as obsessively-creative, seeing art everywhere and in everything. This presentation aims to give an insight into their Archive and how the contents of this fascinating collection reflect their constant re-imagining of what surrounds them.