Thinking Business is Barbara Cleveland’s first solo exhibition at a public gallery, and a great milestone for Goulburn to be launching before it embarks on a national tour. A succinct survey, it presents five works from Barbara Cleveland’s incredible archive of performances and video works from the last decade. Consider the last decade of your life and everything you went through. This may help as you watch each performance in Thinking Business and read the collection of personal essays in this catalogue. Each work is a vital inclusion and a marker of commitment from each member of Barbara Cleveland, directed by four strong and intellectual artists: Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, and Kelly Doley.

In 2018, Frances reached out to me after we had a deep conversation about what I was hoping for as Director of Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. The result of us speaking, though, was an email to me asking about the possibility of Goulburn exhibiting Barbara Cleveland’s work—just what I had hoped for. I had "grown up" in the art world watching Diana, Frances, Kate, and Kelly collaborate, striding along a critical and prolific path of artmaking and exhibiting for a decade. Over that time, I have made friends, lost them, succeeded and suffered, and celebrated my own life and work. In this art world, we do not always have the luxury of failing (or succeeding, for that matter) in private.

In watching the works in Thinking Business, we continually discover Barbara Cleveland’s commitment to making work as a collective, to the idea and reality of artists creating together. Consider the word "watching." To me, it implies movement rather than stasis—a good thing. Watching these performances offers hope: hope that the coexistence of friendship and work has a momentum in making that is too powerful to halt.

It is clever, the manner in which the performances presented in Thinking Business connect the running threads of the artists’ ideas. It is powerful, the manner in which the performances as a grouping begin to reveal the struggle and complexity of committing to a quartet to make work. The following essays by Amelia Wallin, José Da Silva, Verónica Tello, and Tara McDowell speak to these ideas and to friendship, memory, and pain—four wonderfully personal considerations of how to place Barbara Cleveland in this tricky Australian art world.

Barbara Cleveland is a fascinating proposition from the get-go. Its moniker is a mythic individual, founded on the edges of the history of Australian art. She is a vital source for its work, and for those of us who want to be challenged by the potential of what this collective has created since 2010—"potential" because a work of art does not end in its making. Its work continues when it is released to be watched, considered, and critiqued. Verónica Tello says that "friendships can support alternative structures through which to work," and I am grateful to her for this statement. I am grateful too that Barbara Cleveland represents powerful artists who I have watched build up an extraordinary resilience.

In that first conversation, Frances and I discussed our work as women leaving the emerging stages of our careers. We spoke of the urgent need for feminist practice in making art, but also in working in the arts. In her essay, Amelia Wallin beautifully proposes this as "the feminist practice of care"—a practice of looking around the edges to build a full picture of a piece of work, and to understand what it took to make that work.

Thinking Business, a careful selection of works from Barbara Cleveland, does just that. Thank you, Diana, Frances, Kate, and Kelly.