Searchers. This is the National Art School’s current exhibition. I wondered about the name. How does it capture such eclectic, challenging art?
Talking about the exhibition, it’s easy to call it the Graffiti show, and yes, that’s well represented here by incredible, large-scale commissions sprayed directly onto its walls. Alongside them, paintings, sculptures and video works, spanning the last fifty years, speak to that outside edge, that dangerously unsanctified liminal space driven by the desire to leave a mark. But Searchers? Yes of course, all artists search for meaning, for newness; even the art luminaries included such as Sydney Nolan, Ben Quilty, Howard Arkley and Fiona Lowry. Being famous is not an arrival. The search will always push through.
There is also a subtle thread running through these works. It is air and the propulsion through it by sprays of colour. The aerosol just makes it easier to get in and get out before the right of self-expression is challenged. There are also trains. Videos featuring trains; as places to hang from, be transported by and of course as canvases for the scripts and tags of the graffiti writers. These ‘writers’ seem to echo the spirit of John Cage’s great existential call, ‘I’ve got nothing to say, and I’m saying it!’
This defiance and assertion of self is not newly arrived. It’s fundamental to creation. Back in the dusty eons of time, deep in some dark place away from the prying eyes of danger, a mouth full of water and pigment was pushed through the air onto a rock wall. It left the silhouette of the artist’s hand, saying nothing and yet somehow completing that search for the unknowable; I am here, for now and for always.
The search requires the need to journey, whether by foot through dark woods or by night-time trains through urban jungles. The search will never end, the train will never arrive. Wherever you get off, well that’s a place and point in time that you can own by saying ‘Here I am!’.
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The Searchers is on at NAS Gallery until 11 April 2026
11am-5pm, Monday-Saturday. More info here
