Catherine Hunter Productions

The documentary films made by Catherine Hunter are characterised by a respect for and love of the process of making art and a belief that art and artists are not somehow apart from the world. On the contrary, artists are deeply and crucially engaged in shaping our sense of place, identity and of what it is to be human.

Catherine Hunter has worked in the arts as a writer, producer and director for over thirty years. After two decades of documenting the full range of the arts with the Nine network's acclaimed "Sunday" program, she left to work as a freelance documentary maker in collaboration with a small group of like-minded professionals. Her passions are for the arts and architecture. Her most recent film, Quilty - Painting the Shadows, went to air on the ABC, November 2019. Film projects have included architect Glenn Murcutt and painters, John Russell, Sidney Nolan, Margaret Olley, Wendy Sharpe, Jenny Sages, Roger Law (the co-creator of the UK's Spitting Image), Anselm Kiefer, William Robinson, Jeffrey Smart and photographers Trent Parke and Jeff Carter. Almost all films have been broadcast nationally on ABC1.

A fascinating exploration of the creative process, Quilty - Painting the Shadows, follows one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists as he completes one of his most challenging art works. The film documents the most recent shift in Quilty’s art which is a growing interest in our national history and the dark corners of our past. With the permission of the Gamilaraay Elders, he travels to Myall Creek in Northern NSW. On the afternoon of Sunday 10 June, 1838, 12 stockmen brutally slaughtered a group of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children who were camped peacefully at the station of Myall Creek.

This massacre had special significance because it marked the only time in the colonial period that white men were, arrested, charged and hung for the massacre. The film follows Quilty’s exploration of the subject over many months.

“I am looking for symbols of the beauty of the place, the sadness of the place, the incredible violence of this place.” – Ben Quilty

An artist with a profound commitment to social activism fuelled by a boundless curiosity about the human condition, Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 and his remarkable portrait of Margaret Olley won the 2011 Archibald Portrait Prize. In March 2019, a survey exhibition of Quilty’s work opened at the Art Gallery of South Australia (later touring to Brisbane and Sydney). Using the assembly and hanging of the exhibition as a fluid framework for her film, Hunter explores the journey of the artist from that of a young man obsessed with Holden Toranas to the one who brought, through his art, the full spectrum of the Afghanistan tragedy to public consciousness. Quilty – Painting the Shadows follows the making of a major work about the Myall Creek massacre over a number of months from its beginnings as a series of drawings to the creation of one of his signature Rorschach paintings (where an original painted image is both damaged and duplicated by pressing one panel onto another while the paint is still wet).

I’m interested in the fact that it’s the landscape that he submits to the process of Rorschaching, if that’s a word. It’s actually the landscape that he paints and then destroys and in doing so, he moves landscapes as a genre into history painting. He invites us to think about how we are positioned within that story. Just as Hermann Rorschach would invite his interviewees to look at the ink blot test, Ben Quilty invites us into his paintings to find ourselves to intuit what’s going on, to make meaning with what’s happening in the painting. - Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Art Gallery of South Australia.

As Sally Scales, Chairperson, APY Executive Board Council says in the film, There's a way to learn history through art, there's a way to have conversations about devastation through art and that's what Ben does so beautifully.

The documentary is directed by Catherine Hunter and produced by Shelley Maine and Catherine Hunter with cinematography by Bruce Inglis.

The Soundtrack

Quilty – Painting the Shadows features the music of composers Amanda Brown and Damien Lane with performances by Chris Abrahams, Hamish Stuart and Jonathan Zwartz. The soundtrack will be released through Lillipilli on all streaming platforms to coincide with the broadcast on ABC and Quilty exhibition at AGNSW in November. The Exhibition Quilty, a major survey exhibition, concludes its national tour at the Art Gallery of NSW from 9 November to 2 February.

The filmmakers would like to acknowledge the people of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in remote South Australia and the Gamilaraay people of Northern NSW. We pay respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging leaders of the future.

QUILTY – PAINTING THE SHADOWS was produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and financed with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.

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