“Still Life with Oranges” an exhibition by Katy Woodroffe, Colville Gallery, March 18 2016

Opening speech written by Caitlin Sutton, the Curator of the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts Thank you Katy for inviting me tonight, I am honoured to be here. I want to speak a little about the Allport collection, about Geoffrey Stilwell and then Katy’s work.

  I am always interested to understand the way artists construct their work, the way they discover an essence, an era, or motif that appeals to them and inspires the creation of a series. In working at the Allport, I often observe the themes and techniques that influenced the artists in the family. For those of you who have visited the Allport collection, you might recall a feeling of wealth and privilege, a stillness, an insight into sumptuous past lives. Though these elements exist on the surface, below it there are four generations of charismatic, flawed people who not only excelled in recording their own lives, but influenced Tasmanian culture in many ways.

  When they arrived in 1831, they survived two Van Demonian winters in makeshift huts at Broadmarsh, attempting unsuccessfully to be farmers. They left a mansion in England under mysterious circumstances, but probably plagued by debt.  

Mary Morton, the grand long living matriarch, is credited as the first professional female artist in the Australian colonies. There is an underlying humour, strength of character and wit that permeates her writing, and unlike so many emigrants who complained bitterly about their new surroundings and longed for their beloved England, Mary embraced Van Diemen’s Land as her own and painted the native flora and fauna and landscapes in the colony with great fervour. Despite the devastating loss of four sons, one aged 6, Mary remained a steadfast, positive influence and teacher of the arts to her surviving children and grandchildren.  

Mary’s husband, son and grandsons were lawyers at the firm Dobson, Mitchell & Allport. Her son Morton was the first wilderness photographer in Tasmania and introduced salmon to the colony, mainly because he was a mad keen fisherman. Her granddaughter Lily was a hugely successful professional artist, being the first Tasmanian to have her works hung in the Royal Academy, though her profile remains low.

  Her great grandson Henry was a lawyer and collector who had a lot of money and no children. He and his father Cecil were the Allports most obsessed by wealth and belongings, both recognising the value of their family’s heritage. On his death in 1965 Henry bequeathed the entire collection and his house at Cedar Court to the people of Tasmania. Thousands of colonial paintings, prints, rare books, decorative arts and furniture.  

The majority of Mary Morton Allport’s sketchbooks, miniatures and watercolours, including her well known Glover portrait, were not part of the original bequest and were purchased by the curator after 1965. Ironically, what we now consider to be some of the greatest treasures of the Allport collection were not as highly valued by later generations of the family themselves.  

Geoffrey Which is where Geoffrey comes in. In some ways I feel an inadequacy in speaking about Geoffrey Stilwell, since I often meet people who knew him, and knew him very well (as they love to point out). Sometimes after coming across his handwriting on a photograph or document I am struck with an overwhelming sense of longing (he’s like my England). It’s a little strange. Geoffrey was the curator appointed to manage the Allport collection while it was still at Cedar Court in Sandy Bay. He oversaw the collection on that site until the government decided it would be a fantastic idea to move it into the brutalist building that is the State Library.
Geoffrey went on to manage it for 30 years and made thousands of acquisitions using the bequest funds set up by Henry. He possessed and unnervingly detailed knowledge of Tasmanian history and an eye for what was so unique and important to the collection: the original Tasmanian colonial paintings and prints, rare books and  objects belonging to the family. He discovered colonial artists such as Costantini who were previously unknown but are now considered important, and assisted authors such as Joan Kerr, Clifford Craig and hundreds of others. Tell him your family name and he could tell you who you are and where you came from and whether you had dirty convict stains all over your nice colonial history (of course he did not). And yet like all of us he had another side to him, treating people differently according to whether they were deemed worthy of his attention.
In many ways he is seen as an honorary Allport. He lived for the collection. It was his lifelong passion. It was his life. It became clearer at the recent Mossgreen auction, where his surroundings reflected his almost complete embodiment, essence and feeling of a nineteenth century existence.  Yet as I sat in his drawing room in Liverpool street poring over his belongings I was surprised that he didn’t keep the best for himself. He didn’t compromise his integrity by collecting the same material as the Allports. His possessions were personal, meaningful to him, family heirlooms and papers. He kept numerous thank you letters from researchers, writers and historians, all slipped into the covers of the first edition books they had written with his help.
In many ways he understood the Allports better than they did themselves.

Contemporary artists
A contemporary artist drawing inspiration from a historical collection can be a powerful form of communication. In the last few years at the Allport we have encouraged local artists to draw on themes from our archival and heritage collections and the results are always surprising and unexpected. They have the means to appeal to such a varied audience. It’s not always easy to interest lazy younger generations in the significance of a novel by Henry Savory or the scale and tragedy of Banks Florilegium, or the way we no longer use nipple shields made of ivory or remove gall stones with no anaesthetic.  

By drawing from past collections we continue to learn from them, extract pleasure from them, and to give them life, meaning and context.  

Katy’s work
Katy’s lavish though restrained palette evokes the dark elegance of Geoffrey’s colonial cottage The still lives with fish and flowers are reminiscent of paintings by colonial artist William Buelow Gould, whose work in turn was inspired by the 17th century Dutch artists.
The symmetry, perspectives and attention to design and wallpaper also remind me of the works by Costantini, the artist discovered by Geoffrey Stilwell. Butterflies rest on symbols of a former world, objects tangible now and then. Internal frames and arched windows draw the viewer into a Victorian meditation. Her inspiration from the house and surroundings of Geoffrey Stilwell is a testament to his identity and role as a portal to another era. We are extremely fortunate to have Katy Woodroffe scheduled on our upcoming exhibition program in Allport for 2018. I greatly look forward to seeing what she does with the Allport collection.