Longtime activist and artist Chips Mackinolty, seen here in the 2013 catalogue for the Togart Contemporary Art Award , received a special mention in Unfettered and Alive , the interesting memoir of Anne Summers, a copy of which Santa slipped into my stocking , along with Kerry O'Brien's bumper media book , in Darwin . Early in the book, P7, Summers ( Damned Whores and God's Police , Ducks on the Pond ,The Lost Mother and The Misogyny Factor ) tells how soon after she started working at the National Times, in the Sydney Fairfax building , she was asked in 1976 by editor , Max Suich, to take down a large poster she had pinned to the wall beside her desk .
It portrayed a stylised photo of a NSW police officer , branded tomorrow's bacon , designed by " the renowned graphic artist Chips Mackinolty" , for the Earthworks Collective , a group at the Tin Sheds, Sydney University , which produced powerful political posters. With great reluctance, Summers removed the poster. Examples of posters from that period below include the mild one for an entertaining evening in the Tin Sheds which names Chips.
Chips has been mentioned previously in this blog in connection with his poster making in Sydney, his involvement in Townsville and Pacific art, his extensive connection with posters , activism and art in the Northern Territory .
The photograph of him at the head of this post was taken by Therese Ritchie who stated in the catalogue , a copy of which was found in a Darwin op shop in the week before Christmas , she loved the study because it was one of the first she took with a new digital M9 camera and he sat still so she could get the focus right. It can be deduced from the following photograph that the Chips profile inspires all kinds of artists
At a gathering of the Friday Club, in Darwin's Noodle House , this writer was informed that Chips , who I had last heard of as residing in Italy , is now married , back in town . It would have been nice to have met up with him and kicked around ideas for election posters in Queensland and the Northern Territory , but had to catch a plane out of town .
