Jane BURTON

born 1966, Brisbane, Quuensland
lives and works Melbourne, Victoria

Motherland # 8 is inspired by Burton’s childhood isolation of growing up in the Australian countryside. Visitors were few and far between at her family’s farm, so she and her brothers and sisters spent their days exploring the hills and dams around their house.

These memories resurfaced more vividly during a trip to the Tasmanian country side. Traveling with her young nieces reminded Burton of the magical way she viewed the landscape as a child – the rolling hills and jagged trees. The isolation enhanced their imaginations, and Burton remembers playing out the fantastical tales in the books they read:

When you are in the middle of nowhere and you just have your family around you, you have limited resources and you kind of make up your own stories and games,” she says. “They are often based on what we were reading; a bit of Grimm’s fairytales, a bit of Viking adventures and mythology. I found this beautiful landscape that really reminded me of kind of a perceived fairyland. It is an unusual landscape with rolling hills and dams, dead trees and dramatic skies and an old house. It’s kind of spooky and magical and pretty amazing.

With the Motherland series, Burton endeavors to capture the feelings of a child who still half-believes in fairytales, but was on the verge of losing that belief to the dawning of reality. Photographing her nine-year-old niece, she also aimed to depict the beauty of that time. Some of the images are soft, whimsical portraits while others, such as Motherland # 8 depict dark; almost threatening skies, under which Burton’s niece appears dwarfed by the landscape. In fitting with the feeling of the work, the images have been double exposed to remove them slightly from bare reality. Although fantastical, these images have an element of sadness, which reflects the artist’s feelings at the time:

My childhood is gone and it’s finished and there was a little bit of melancholy there for me. It’s also about the feeling I had as a child that, even though I was in that very wonderful place, there was a feeling of isolation and being alone. The space is so wide and you are very aware that you are far away from everything.

Jane Burton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, and in 1993, was awarded an Honorary Research Associate, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart.

Particularly acclaimed for her solo exhibitions, Burton has also participated in several important group exhibitions including Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Good Looking: Narrative Photos Past and Present, The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Melbourne (2004); Anxious Bodies, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); The Australian Photographic Portrait Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Moral Hallucination: Channeling Hitchcock, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2000).

Her work is held in private collections throughout Australia, as well as major public collections such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Monash University, Melbourne; Artbank; Australia Post; and Monash Gallery of Art.

Other selected artwork acquisitions