Margaret Dredge

Dredge was born in Murrumbeena in 1928, daughter of a war veteran, the accountant William Arthur Vickery who brought her up after her mother Annie (née Ashby) and her second child died in 1930 during childbirth.

[1] They moved frequently, boarding mainly in Albert Park and South Yarra, then settled in bayside Sandringham where she attended the State School.

Favourable reviews of her 1965 one-person exhibition at the Argus Gallery by Alan McCulloch and Bernard Smith enhanced her reputation, and when she showed at Pinacotheca in 1967 Ken Bandman set her amongst the 'post-painterly' abstractionists.

They tended to be rather bold abstracts, like Margaret Dredge's two paintings with strong shapes and bold colors..."[8] Ann Galbally was impressed with Dredge's Nuns at Dawn, commended in the Inez Hutchinson Award at the Beaumaris Art Group Studio in May 1970, "as a taut spatial structure firmly controlled by a sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of line and plane.

[10] She became politically active, joining Jean McLean's and Joan Coxsedge's Save Our Sons to actively oppose the Vietnam War[11] and through her letter-writing to newspapers protested censorship,[12] conscription, artists' treatment by critics[13] particularly Patrick McCaughey's,[14] and supported feminist issues, delivered a lengthy retort to Thelma Forshaw's criticism of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch,[15] and pressed for abortion law reform.

[18][19] She held a last solo exhibition at Gryphon Gallery in 1979, of which Graeme Sturgeon commented; "with this exhibition, Margaret Dredge has assumed a place among the top dozen women working in Melbourne"[20] Earlier that year, she was interviewed on the topic of women artists by Harry Martin on ABC radio's Saturday Review series on the arts,[21] and in June 1980 presented on her work at the Council of Adult Education series 'Meet the Artist'.

The paint is gathered into simple, yet inexplicably moving structures of sombre form that act upon the sensitive viewer as a psychological medium, a melancholy transport.

Technically, it would be incorrect to describe the broad strokes in black and white acrylic as calligraphic; and yet these late works by the artist are, indeed, true to the intention of Chinese calligraphy.

Margaret Dredge at the opening of her solo show at Three Sisters Gallery