Admired for her distinctive ethereal paintings of incidental scenes The present moment: The art of Clarice Beckett sheds new light on the artist's spiritual impulses. It provides the reader with an outline of the international cultural trends that inspired her practice and shaped her visions of nature. Now regarded as one of Australia's most important and influential modernist painters, its richly detailed analysis and lavish colour reproductions reveal to the reader previously hidden dimensions of her life and art. Associated with a legendary story of neglect and rediscovery this book celebrates Clarice Beckett as a visionary mystic.

This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Art Gallery of South Australia, August 15-October 19, 2008.

“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.

Lispector’s most shocking novel. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature… Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

This book examines the work of several modern artists, including Fortunato Depero, Scipione, and Mario Radice, who were working in Italy during the time of Benito Mussolini’s rise and fall. It provides a new history of the relationship between modern art and fascism. The study begins from the premise that Italian artists belonging to avant-garde art movements, such as futurism, expressionism, and abstraction, could produce works that were perfectly amenable to the ideologies of Mussolini’s regime. A particular focus of the book is the precise relationship between ideas of history and modernity encountered in the art and politics of the time and how compatible these truly were.

This publication encourages educators to prioritise artists and their stories, make connections to the lives of students at all levels and expose them to the diversity of art made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Peppered with suggested activities for students during special times of the year (such as Reconciliation Week, Anzac Day, Science Week, Book Week and International Women's Day) and combining examples of best teaching practice, this book guides you through meaningful ways to integrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures into the daily life of any teaching and learning environment.Produced by the AGSA Education team and Tarnanthi.