Savanhdary Vongpoothorn facts for kids

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, born in Laos in 1971, is an Australian artist. She moved to Australia when she was seven years old. Her art mixes ideas from Laos, Vietnam, and Australia. It shows how different cultures come together in modern Australia. She combines her own life, her two cultures, and abstract painting styles. Her artworks have been shown in many places in Australia and Singapore. Major art galleries across Australia own her pieces. She was a finalist for important art awards like the Sir John Sulman Prize in 2016. Savanhdary Vongpoothorn lives and works in Canberra, Australia.

Early Life and Learning

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn was born in Champasak, Laos, in 1971. She came to Australia in 1978 when she was seven. Her father had to leave Laos because of political reasons. Her mother then took the children and crossed the Mekong River to Thailand. After nine months in a refugee camp, an aunt in Australia helped them move there. Her art today often shows her Buddhist background.

Vongpoothorn is a strong follower of Buddhism. She grew up in a community that practiced Theravada Buddhism. This type of Buddhism is common in South and Southeast Asia. Sometimes, lessons from her childhood appear in the titles of her artworks.

At school, she was very good at English and Art. She got into the Nepean College of the Arts, part of the University of Western Sydney. This was based on her art portfolio, not her school grades. At Nepean, she was encouraged to be creative and see her cultural background in new ways. She started to focus on her family's history with textiles (fabrics). People first noticed her student work in an exhibition in 1992.

She finished her visual arts degree in 1992. Then, she earned a master's degree in visual arts in 1993.

During her last year of art school, she lived with the painter Roy Jackson. He was part of the Wedderburn artistic community near Sydney. Vongpoothorn loved the Australian bushland there. She often visited Wedderburn and later lived there for eight years. She learned a lot about the Australian bush and joined the art community. This was also her first time living away from her family. She collected things from the bush and used them in her floor-based artworks.

She first returned to Laos after art school. She has gone back often to Laos and the communities along the Mekong River. She says these visits influence her art.

She is married to an anthropologist named Ashley Carruthers. They have two children. In 2004, she moved to Canberra, Australia. Today, she and her family spend time in Vietnam every year in the town of Hoi An. Savanhdary says Vietnam also influences her art.

Artworks

After art school, her works combined parts of the Australian landscape with symbols from Laotian textiles. Her early pieces (1992-1994) were three-dimensional artworks placed on the floor. But by the mid-1990s, Vongpoothorn started making textured works on paper and canvas.

Over time, and as a mother, she felt more settled in Australia. She has said that feeling at home in Australia gives her the freedom to explore her birthplace. This helps her research for her current art.

Her paintings are said to remind people of the chanting and music of Laos. They also connect to the Laotian community in Australia, which her father, a Buddhist monk, serves. Her art also shows traditional crafts from Laos and Vietnam. She feels a strong need to learn about her origins when living away from her home country. She wants to continue her family's cultural and religious traditions.

Her time living in different countries changed how she approached art. In Vietnam, she learned to weave with bamboo. From India, she brought back delicate paper works with colors like traditional Indian paintings. In Japan, she worked with a poet named Noriko Tanaka. In 2019, she made a piece called Footsteps to the Nigatsu-do. It used rubbings from sacred patterns on the steps of the Nigatsu-do temple in Nara. She added Tanaka’s calligraphy and her own characters to it.

The overall patterns in her art are like mandalas, which are used for meditation in Buddhism. They also look similar to Southeast Asian textiles. She has also used language in her art, including Pali Script and Vietnamese braille. Savanhdary often makes small holes in her canvases. Sometimes her father drills them for her. In some works, you can see through the holes. In others, she pushes paint through the holes to create patterns. These works remind people of weaving. These small details are hard to see in photos; you need to see the artworks in person.

Her art is shown by Martin Browne Contemporary in Sydney.

Exhibitions

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn has had many solo art shows. Here are some of them:

• 2016 Ramayana on the Mekong, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
• 2014 All is Burning, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
• 2013 The Beautiful as Force, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
• 2011 Stone down a Well, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 2008 Re-enchantment, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
• 2005 Incantation, Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney
• 2004 A Certain Distance, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 2003 Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney
• 2002 bindi dot tartan zen, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 2000 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 2000 King Street Gallery, Sydney
• 1998 King Street Gallery, Sydney
• 1998 Holy Threads – Lao Tradition and Inspiration, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, Sydney (shown with old Lao textiles)
• 1997 Tradition and Interpretation, King Street Gallery, Sydney

Other exhibitions she has been part of include:

• 2020 GG | ABHK 2020, Gajah Gallery, Singapore
• 2020 Broken Sutra, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 2019 Shaping Geographies: Art. Woman. Southeast Asia, Gajah Gallery, Singapore
• 2019 All that arises, Drill Hall Gallery, ANU
• 2019 Abstract 19, King Street Gallery, Sydney

Collections

Her artworks are held in the collections of several important galleries:

• The National Gallery of Australia (Moonlight 1, 2001)
• The National Gallery of Victoria (Of water and of clouds I-VIII)
• The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Lifting words, 2011)
• QAGOMA (with Mungsamai Vongpoothorn, a painting on perforated canvas)

Her works are also in the collections of the Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Wollongong University art collection, and the University of Western Sydney art collection.