Looking at Landscape

Looking at Landscape – a selection of artworks from the Murdoch University Art Collection Murdoch University Art Gallery Level 4, North Wing Library Building, South Street Campus 8 August to 31 October 2009

Motherland # 8 Jane Burton 2008 | Type C photograph | edition 3 of 5 | accession numbers 814 purchased by the Art Board 2008 - Murdoch University Art Collection © the artist

Looking at Landscape is a diverse collection of artworks from the Murdoch University Art Collection that examine Australian landscape, but not entirely within the literal geographical context.

This third exhibition in the 2009 Art Collection calendar, Looking at Landscape highlights historical, contemporary and Indigenous artworks that share a diverse range of responses to landscape including traditional depictions, ancient storytelling, emotive responses, and topical issues relating to themes of urbanisation and the environment.

The earliest known examples of Australian artwork which record and examine the landscape are by Indigenous artists. Western Australian’s northern Kimberly region is an area rich in Indigenous art and culture. One of the many artist communities in this area is Warmun situated near Turkey Creek.

Warmun Art is unique for its stylistic approach and use of materials. The artists draw upon traditional Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming) stories of country as well as contemporary events and life experiences. All Warmun paintings incorporate the use of traditional ochres found in the surrounding landscape. The ochres are finely grounded, mixed with pigment and used as a paint medium. The resulting painted surface has an earthy, chalk-like texture.
In recent times a new generation of leading Warmun artists, including Patrick Mung Mung, Beerbee Mungnari and Shirley Purdie have emerged. These practitioners demonstrate originality and design prowess that transcends cultural boundaries and places many Warmun artists at the forefront of contemporary art in Australia.

Depictions of the Western Australian landscape by Anglo-Saxon artists from colonization up to the earlier part of the twentieth century were greatly influenced by the European tradition of representational landscape painting. This is evident in the work of Henri Van Raatle, Portia Bennett, Harald Vike and Jack Carrington Smith.

Considered to be one of the best printmakers of his time, Van Raalte’s principal subjects were bush landscapes with poetic qualities and romantic overtones. His chiaroscuro techniques of contrasting light and shade are skillfully rendered for dramatic effect.

Portia Bennett was active as an artist and teacher in Queensland and Perth during the 1920s and 1930s. She predominately painted in watercolour, creating detailed studies of urban architecture which featured local landmarks.
Another of Bennett’s Western Australian contemporaries was Harald Vike. Unlike Bennett, Vike experimented with a variety of mediums and styles including, impressionism; post-impressionism; modernism; abstraction and realism. However, his subject matter always bared a strong connection to landscape. Common narratives included the Australian landscape and its cities; people at work and people at play; nature from desert to rainforest; children concentrating on the job at hand; blossom falling from trees in a manicured parkland and even a protestor battling the elements at the Frankland River blockade.

Jack Carrington Smith regarded the process of composing a picture, with colours, tones, lines and forms, as being akin to musical composition. The verve and spontaneity of his technique as a water-colourist gave full expression to the medium’s unique character, and made him the chief inspiration in the postwar development of a distinctive Tasmanian ‘school’ of water-colourists.

The subjects of his oil paintings were diverse. In the 1940s he produced a number of small, simplified compositions, depicting figures on the shores of the Derwent River near his home at Sandy Bay; with their qualities of light and apparent stillness, these works evoke a timeless character. Over the following decade Carington Smith painted haunting nocturnal landscape scenes of a moonlit Derwent, seen through the window of the artist’s studio, with vague reflections from its gloomy interior fusing with what could barely be seen in the dark outside. His 1960s work was more overtly abstract, but he continued to derive his ideas from visual experience, particularly of the natural environment.

The namesake of Jill Kempson’s painting, Waychinicup – Place of Emu Dreaming is an area located in the south west of Western Australia. For Kempson, Waychinicup represents a place that is virtually untouched by human intervention. It is a landscape that has been beautifully shaped by time and the elements. Waychinicup in its own particular way also possesses the subtle tonalities and elusive moods of many of the landscapes Kempson painted while studying historical Old Masters painting techniques in Europe.

Two photographic artists in the exhibition explore the image of the ‘child lost in the bush’. This is a potent theme that recurs throughout Australian art, film and literature. Examples can be seen in the paintings of Frederick McCubbin and in films such as Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout.

In her photographic work titled Hanging Rock 1900 # 3, Polixeni Papapetrou reflects upon the early European settlers’ experience of the Australian landscape. This image suggests that the colonists felt immense unease within this ancient landscape of unfamiliar flora, fauna and people.

Papapetrou uses the image of the lost child as a metaphor to explore some of the moral and emotional dilemmas encountered on the land by the early settlers. The land is regarded as sacred to Indigenous Australian, but in white Australian consciousness, the land and especially the ‘bush’, has evolved to become a place of danger where people can easily become lost.  Papapetrou draws the viewer into the emotional space of the photograph, to experience the undercurrent of the psychological drama unfolding and makes connections between past and present consciousness about land and country.

Jane Burton’s photograph titled Motherland # 8 is inspired by the artist’s memory of childhood isolation while 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.

Burton reminds us of the magical way in which children view the landscape and how isolation enhanced their imaginations to play out the fantastical tales in the books they read. The artist’s comments: 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.

The abstract paintings of Galliano Fardin are a consequence of memories and impressions of the Western Australian landscape. Fardin’s essential concern is to find a physical experience and understanding of the land, rather than the traditional need to characterize landscape in a literal sense. Fardin’s memories and notions of the land are translated onto canvas as marks, textures and colour, which echo a subjective observation rather than an analytical study of the environment. The inspiration for Fardin’s paintings comes from Coastal South West, Western Australia and the Pilbara Region where the artist has spent much of his time in recent years.

Western Australian painters Robert Juniper and Raymond Lefroy share a poetic and spontaneous vision of the Australian landscape. Juniper has established himself as one of Australia’s celebrated contemporary landscape painters while Lefroy is now better known as an architect. Both artists are known for their expressive and evocative depictions that celebrate the character and uniqueness of the West Australian landscape.

Katie Thamo is a printmaker who lives and works in Albany, in the south west region of Western Australia. Her work is inspired to a great extent by the natural beauty of the south west landscape. In the print series titled Reconstructing Old Growth Forests, Thamo voices concern, contempt and wry humour over man’s affect on the landscape and his futile attempt to regenerate a butchered landscape which had previously been created over thousands of years.

Mike Singe also shares Thamo’s concern about modern society’s interference with the landscape. Singe’s work titled Man About Town recreates everyday objects made solely from the pages of Perth street directories. While these objects represent a pair of men’s trousers, a belt, a shirt and a tie, their function has been denied by the nature of the paper construction. This new function allows for a more humorous view to be taken on a subject, in this case the Perth landscape. Do the paper clothes in Man about Town, represent a suburban property tycoon?

Mike Singe hints that this is perhaps a metaphor for a city’s endless desire to move further out into the vast landscape, even though it may not have the appropriate means to do so.
Singe also comments that we may not know how far down the development highway we have travelled, but more importantly he questions where would be the best place for us to stop. Maybe this explains why the artwork is sealed within a museum style box-frame as though Singe wishes the development of Perth’s endless urban sprawl were a thing of the past we could look back at and learn from.