Design and Art Australia Online

This exhibition explores the abundant beauty of the botanical world and the threats that assail it. The Botanical: Beauty and Peril draws from the renowned Janet Holmes à Court Collection and the State Art Collection to present a vivid, involving and sometimes disturbing journey through the diverse representation by Australian artists of the glorious kingdom of plants.

Group exhibition with one work each by Cathy Blanchflower, Marie Hobbs, and Sine MacPherson (Shark colours 2011)

This solo exhibition Finding Colour by local artist Sine MacPherson, is a selection of paintings from the past twenty years developed from a range of unique and systematic frames of reference, each revealing inherent structures from their underlying sources, explored through the materiality of paint.
MacPherson’s interests lie in colour, the descriptions of natural phenomena and visual systems. All of her sources are everyday 'already mades’, such as painted objects, books, dictionaries, field guides, newspapers, photographs '- systems, images, and objects in her environment that generally have some relationship to colour. For example, several years ago MacPherson started circling the colour words in her old Pocket Oxford Dictionary [POD], but at the time there was no gold or silver paint available, and she was unsure how to create a painting from words. Then two things happened around the same time, the paint became available and she replaced her POD with a newer, much fatter, Australian version. She went on to read six PODs, and devised a system to paint all the colour words she found. She mused,
“The sources of my paintings aren’t meant to be obscure and usually the source is in the title or at least the title alludes to the source. Lexical Spectrum POD is the first of a series of six paintings. The series was poetically titled by a friend. I probably would have titled it All the Colour Words in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary”.
From dictionaries MacPherson went on to explore other reference books in her library, and has since made paintings from colour descriptions found in a number of different field guides. The painting Shark Colours was created from information found in a Department of Fisheries publication, resulting in an abstract painting of shimmering blocks of grey shades.
Allison Archer, Perth 2018

The subjects for Siné MacPherson’s meticulously coloured canvases rarely stray far from home. This has included field guides for plants and birds, and dictionaries from her bookshelves, newspapers and even her painting apron. As she noted, her “interests lie in colour, the descriptive languages of visual phenomena, and visual systems.” These interests can be solidly traced in her work as far back as the 1970s, such as Pear Box 1978, in which three painted canvas covered plastic pears are framed with a painting of the same pears. She questions how we visualise objects, what is real, what has greater visual authority? Her fascination with the ‘already made’ has a strong tradition in art history, becoming popular in the 1960s, it describes a way for artists to look at and engage with the stuff of everyday life.
This new body of work, Still Lifes, is almost an exception to her rules. Some distance from home, MacPherson found an already made subject with which she could tackle the tradition of floral still life painting. These striking white crosses, with their cacophony of coloured plastic flowers, carved names and assorted tributes, resonated with her, lingering in her memory. She had made note of them as interesting possibilities but rumours that roadside shrines might be removed was the impetus to begin. All were different, but generally contained the same four ingredients: white cross, text, flowers, tributes. Unlike her previous themes, this one came loaded with other’s emotions, with their losses, grief and memories. The shrines were very personal and extremely public displays. They were also warning signs to motorists. MacPherson had chosen a difficult subject, but it was an ‘already made’ that deserved attention, because like no other floral still life of our time, they were a significant part of our local history. These were beautiful ready made, already made, floral still life arrangements.
MacPherson began documenting them in 2010. She recalled, “I found the subjects for Still Lifes on the Albany Highway. I had looked at them in passing, for years, but in 2010 I had a driver willing to slow down, turn around and wait while I took photos. It was hot, there were bugs, there were cars passing just meters away at 110, but great flowers – great artificial flowers already arranged.” Over several years she has created a series of exquisite paintings. Time had faded the artificial flowers to soft hues, and MacPherson’s palette reciprocated. The paintings hone in on the flowers, eliminating much of the background landscape, becoming essentially still life floral paintings.
It is important at this point to return to MacPherson’s starting point of using “descriptive languages of visual phenomena and visual systems”. As she states, “the Still Lifes are found subjects, ready mades, already mades – I never make things up.” She is not setting out to document local history, to paint a story or create a narrative, she paints subjects that interest her. These are not real flowers, they are not real shrines. These paintings consist of oil paint carefully applied to canvas, according to a strictly limited palette, yet one cannot help but be moved when viewing them.
Allison Archer 2016

Abstracting the Collection explores a variety of approaches to abstraction in contemporary painting, from the optical to the conceptual. Linked by an emphasis on the grid or repeated pattern and a lyrical, textural approach to colour and form, works take inspiration from a variety of sources including nature, textile design and from data collected from books and texts.
Featuring works from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art – including artists Cathy Blanchflower, Elizabeth Coats, Debra Dawes, Eveline Kotai and Lisa Wolfgramm; new work from artist Siné MacPherson and key paintings by renowned Western Australian artists Michele Theunissen and Helen Smith.

An exhibition of contemporary Australian art organised by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and toured in 2013-2016 by Wesfarmer Arts to Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Darwin; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; the University of Tasmania, Hobart; Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne.

Exhibition showcasing highlights from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA), which was gifted to the University of Western Australia in 2007. A companion publication titled 'Into the Light’ that documented the history and key works of the CCWA was released to coincide with the exhibition, which also featured a symposium – 'Are we there yet?’ – discussing women’s participation in art and art history and the future of feminism in the arts.

remix is an exhibition that showcases the creativity of twenty contemporary Western Australian artists.
remix brings together a diverse group of works that offer an opportunity to experience what some of Western Australia’s artists are doing in their practice. The works selected are not limited by a single theme but instead are orchestrated around approaches to making art, materiality or the experience of place.
The artists in this group exhibition are: Daniel Argyle, Lydia Balbal, Jacqueline Ball, Helena Bogucki, Helen Britton, Paul Caporn, Jane Donlin, Tarryn Gill /Pilar Mata Dupont, Adam Goodrum, Jon Goulder, Thomas Jeppe, Laura Johnson, Siné MacPherson, Carlier Makigawa, Claire Martin, Graham Miller, Clare Peake, Justin Spiers, Juha Tolonen and Brendan Van Hek.
A catalogue with commissioned texts accompanies the exhibition.

Group exhibition with works by Rodney Glick, John Nixon, Chris Pease, Carol Rudyard, Richard Woldendorp, Sine MacPherson and others

Ideas about the system of nature lie at the core of this exhibition which looks at: how names and texts enter nature; the institutions in which nature is organised; the products of plants and their uses; the impact of colonisation on Australian flora; the effects on our perceptions of nature of a world in which boundaries are shifting as new technologies displace older, visually based taxonomies.
The artists in this group exhibition are Simryn Gill, Fiona Hall, Janet Laurence, Sine MacPherson, Perdita Phillips, Gregory Pryor, Robyn Stacey, and Holly Story.

Solo exhibition

This group exhibition Picturing the Sea considers contrasting ways that artists approach human interaction with the sea.
It brings together seascapes and early maps, Indigenous art, works that address social and political concerns, as well as the lyrical and unexpected.
In legend, early maps and art, the sea is often unpredictable, its depths and edges mysterious and unfathomable. Today the seas are well-charted political entities, shipping lanes, sites of industry, and sometimes contested zones.
The artists in the exhibition are: Narelle Autio, Audrey Greenhalgh, Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, Sine MacPherson, Max Pam,
Polixeni Papapetrou, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Pushman, Paul Uhlmann, and Fred Williams.

Solo exhibition

Solo exhibition

Group exhibition with works by John Barbour, Janet Burchill, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Judith Elliston, Clinton Garofano, Robert Macpherson, Sine MacPherson, and Katherine Moline

Solo Exhibition

A group exhibition curated by Katie Major with a catalogue essay by John Stringer.The artists in the exhibition are: Emma Langridge, Sine MacPherson (Lexical Spectrum SAPOD 2000); Jon Tarry, Paul Uhlmann, Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, and Lisa Wolfgramm