Ripe

Dimmick has participated in and stood apart from the major art movements of the day. She persists in a figurative, yet lyrical, approach to art that eschewed pure abstraction but revelled in the possibilities of colour in the Cross – Kings Cross.

In 1989 Dimmick started working as Director of TAP Gallery (Taylor at Palmer – Palmer Street, Darlinghurst or more commonly referred to as Theatre, Art, Performance). She worked as a restauranteur at a nearby eatery before turning art facilitator at a three floor premises in Taylor Square, which acted as a pasta factory for many years prior. Four years later she shifted TAP into the Palmer Street locale somewhat ironically above a now recently vacated showroom for taps and other bathroom fittings.

With her signature red wild hair Dimmick steers her artisan boat with dogmatic passion. Her “open policy, artist-run collective provides a forum for emerging artists to exhibit and promote their work,” without any predetermined judgement of their artistic ability.

Artists everywhere have much to grapple with. Over the past two decades, preoccupations with experimentation, resistance, critique, subversion and utopian desire have communicated inner worlds rich in angst and debate. In more recent times the expansion fo the specifically visual into the realm of ideas and the need to interact with communities, together with the virtual colonisation of art practice through cross mediums and the moving image, have taken contemporary art from the margins to the centre, with all the losses and gains that this entails.

A new society requires a new art, and Dimmick saw the opportunity to forge a positive new link between culture and state. At the TAP Gallery Dimmick has fostered a thriving community that includes poets and artists from all persuasions. The artists in this colony are bound by their art under this common appellation except for their enthusiasm for new possibilities.

I met some of the stalwarts of club TAP including 78 year old jazz sensation Edwin Duff. Duff whose career spans fro the tender age of 14, has been singing with some of the finest jazz artistes from all points of the globe. His open homosexuality and strong sense of self has potted him in controversy and entrenched him in Sydney’s cultural history. Like many of Dimmick’s friends Duff holds an irresistible inimitability that would be hard to capture in the covers of a book or held dimensionally within a frame and he is quick to share his respect for Dimmick, “I love this woman and what she stands for.”

“It’s commonly understood now, that product is not the point. That it isn’t a question of doing art, it’s a question of making art of what you do and dimmick embraces this belief. Duff is also of that philosophy now on the cusp of launching a new album that incorporates anecdotal experiences in between songs. Energy is something both Duff and Dimmick have been able to sustain.