Four pieces of silver 
Helen Eager

1988
oilstick on paper on canvas
1220 x 1680 cm
Gift of John and Juliet Lockhart

Description
Large oilstick drawing on paper on canvas of four pieces of silverware. Written on the reverse is the production date: ‘1988’. A thin wooden frame is painted a pale colour.

Significance statement  
Helen Eager’s early career shows a preoccupation with domestic interiors and objects in their everyday setting such as tables and chairs, teapots and teacups. In 1988 she created a major body of drawings on a grand scale. Four pieces of silver was one of these drawings. This work marks the artist on the brink of a significant change as it dates just prior to a major shift in her work from the representational. Eager’s depiction of four pieces of silver from the Tamworth City Gallery collection resonates with the Historic Houses Trust (HHT) tradition of working with artists to interpret its own collections. Given the HHT’s interpretation of its own cultural heritage properties, the still life of silverware laid out as if for use is an appropriate subject matter.

History
The drawing was made in 1988 and exhibited at the Bicentennial Exhibition Tamworth City Gallery from 8 June to 17 July 1988. John and Juliet Lockhart donated the work to the HHT in 2005.

Maker biography
Helen Eager has been exhibiting prints, drawings and paintings since her first exhibition in 1977. A love of lithographs and woodblock prints formed the basis of her early career but gradually drawings and paintings began to dominate her exhibitions. Eager’s early work was filled with domestic objects in interior spaces. In 1988 she took up residency in the Australia Council’s Greene Street studio in New York where a major shift occurred in her practice as forms and objects began to dissolve into their compositional components. This development has filled the next era of her work, which continues to this day. Her work is included in many public and private collections and she contributed to numerous group exhibitions. Her most recent exhibition New directions (2005) featured over 100 drawings hung in blocks as an installation that signalled, as the title suggests, an artist on the move.

Museum number
HHT2006/4

Image credit
Jenni Carter

Bibliography  
‘Artists to watch’, Art and Australia, Vol 20, No 3, Sydney, 1983, p328
Allens Arthur Robinson, ‘Art Collection: Helen Eager’ [online], 2005. Available from: http://www.aar.com.au/art/heleneager.htm [4 January 2006]
Catalano, Gary, ‘About the house: the domestic scene in Australian art’, Art and Australia, Vol 21, No 1, Sydney, 1984, p86
Frost, Andrew G, ‘Paper Economy’, Australian Art Collector, July–September 1997
McKenzie, Janet, Drawing in Australia: contemporary images and ideas, Macmillan, Sydney, 1986