18 GLOVER PRIZE
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2018
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The Glover defines landscape painting in its broadest sense. The aim is to stimulate conversations about the meaning and possibilities expressed in the words landscape, painting and Tasmania. The Glover is open to artists from anywhere in the world.
Glover Prize 2018 Falls Pavilion Evandale Tasmania johnglover.com.au
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Contents Acknowledgements The Board of The John Glover Society wishes to commend the artists, and thanks the judges and all those involved with presenting the exhibition for their enthusiasm and commitment. Patron Kenneth von Bibra AM
Message from the Chairman
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Message from the Principal Partner
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Curators Introduction 6 2018 Judges 10 2018 Finalists Nicholas Blowers
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Jacob Leary
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Meg Walch
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Heidi Yardley
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Secretary Irina Petrovsky
James Drinkwater
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Joanna Pinkiewicz
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Treasurer James Abbott
Neil Haddon
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Chairman Andrew Heap Vice Chairman Peter Woof
Halinka Orszulok
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David Beaumont
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Robert O’Connor
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Craig Handley
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Matthew Armstrong
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Rodney Pople
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Peter Gouldthorpe
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Design & Marketing at+m integrated marketing
Diane Allison
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Monica Rohan
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For information on past exhibitions and winners visit johnglover.com.au
Bill Handbury
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Luke Wagner
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Members Stuart Hogarth, Blake Shepherd, Andrea Bartholomew, Sebastian Woof, Ross Bebbington Curator Megan Dick Media Mark Wells
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Elizabeth Beaumont
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Michael Muruste
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Anthony White
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Leoni Duff
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Tim Burns
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Craig Waddell
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Robert Habel
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Grant Nimmo
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Erin Rachelle Smith
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Alex Davern
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Dore Stockhausen
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Paul Snell
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Shannon Field
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Chee Yong
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Liz Sullivan
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Kylie Elkington
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Dr Wayne Brookes
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David Marsden
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Josh Foley
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Meg Collidge
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Richard Noel Dunlop
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Ashley D Bird
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Paul Becker
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Eva Beltran
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From the Chairman
Now in its 15th year, the Glover Prize is well established as Australia’s most prestigious landscape art prize™; an international landscape art prize, respected nationally and exhibited locally. The Glover Prize is the culmination of the commitment to an idea and an unwavering dedication to art by a number of people and organisations that would, under normal circumstances, share a passion for the enjoyment of art, without the opportunity to realise their dreams of being directly involved on a primary and influential level. The 10,000 visitors, who make the annual pilgrimage to Evandale to enjoy the creativity of 42 fine artists, depart the Glover Prize richer for the experience. The economy of an
important and historic regional town benefits from the influx of visitors from overseas, interstate, and around Tasmania. Finally, the many students from our education institutions, from primary school to tertiary centres of excellence, view the Glover Prize as an opportunity to appreciate landscape art in all its eclectic diversity. Untrammelled by the usual criteria that serve to limit the scope of the artist, the mediums they choose to use, and the subject matter that inspires them. A Glover Prize finalists’ landscape can be peaceful, political, engaging, intriguing – sometimes challenging – but always beautiful to behold. We, the custodians of the Glover Prize, who work together to bring the event to life each year, have much to enjoy and much of which we can be proud. Therefore, it is with a personal sense of pride and my honour to thank all of our corporate partners; and in particular, Ms Julia Farrell, the Farrell family, and the Federal Group for their unwavering support for Tasmania and the arts, including the Glover Prize. It also gives me great pleasure to recognising the wonderful work
of every artist who has entered a Glover Prize over the past 15 years – almost 4500 artworks to date – and to thank them for their creativity and commitment to landscape art as a genre. Finally, my appreciation and thanks go to the John Glover Society Inc. committee, who work tirelessly to present the Glover Prize each year. They are all volunteers and give generously of their time to create an event that is the equal of many well-respected art prizes throughout the world. As you read this final paragraph, please reflect for a few minutes on the hundreds of people like yourself who appreciate landscape art – our corporate partners, the many artists from around the world, and the organisers – who, through their commitment to the arts, enrich our lives and make your visit to and enjoyment of the 2018 Glover Prize possible. Andrew Heap Chairman The John Glover Society Inc.
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From the Principal Partner Much like the Federal Group, the Glover Prize has grown over the past 15 years; and it is precisely because such events have blossomed across Tasmania that tourism in our glorious state continues to attract so many visitors.
The 15th anniversary within any organisation is a great milestone; and one that should be celebrated by all those associated with its success. As the Glover Prize – Australia’s most prestigious landscape art prize™ - celebrates its 15th anniversary, it gives us the opportunity to reflect on its success and to talk about the commitment needed to reach such a milestone.
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The magnificent natural landscapes that inspire the hundreds of artists who enter the Glover Prize each year are the same unspoilt natural wonders that draw so many visitors to our shores. The retained heritage of Evandale – a fitting home to the Glover Prize – and many other hamlets and colonial towns are another reason visitors from around the world enjoy their time with us. Now, as John Glover’s home at Patterdale moves towards a completed renovation, yet another aspect of his legacy will draw admirers to our island state on a pilgrimage
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to experience first-hand how and where he lived, as well as Glover’s art, the landscapes that inspired him, and the renderings of those artists Glover himself inspired. Without major events such as the Glover Prize, our natural heritage, and a commitment to restoring our colonial homesteads, the very personal and friendly experience of spending time in Tasmania would be diminished. Of course, it is difficult for any business or a major arts event to reach its 15th anniversary without a commitment to improvement and excellence. This is as true in business as it is for the Glover Prize. Over the years, as the needs of our customers have changed, the Federal Group has expanded its offering experience to include award-winning properties in some of the most breath-taking
locations in Tasmania. So too, as the Glover Prize has grown in stature, it continues to attract more artists from more locations each one expressing their own pictorial interpretation and personal relationship with Tasmania. This year, the Glover Prize has attracted entries from 405 artists across Australia and around the world. This represents another record year and another milestone for the organisers. John Glover had a very personal relationship with colonial Tasmania and his interpretation of the light, colours, and landscape have formed a lasting legacy for all to enjoy. In another 10 years, when the Glover Prize is celebrating its silver jubilee, the Federal Group will be celebrating over 70 years since Wrest Point became the
first of many properties the group has purchased or developed in Tasmania. The many businesses that make up the group employ 2,100 staff and contribute $343 million to our economy each year. As the Glover Prize continues to grow in strength, so too will its benefits and contribution to Tasmania in the form of awareness, growth in our regional economy, and most importantly for the promotion and celebration of landscape art in all its diversity. The Federal Group is proud of its 15-year partnership with the Glover Prize because, as Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.� Julia Farrell Director, Federal Group
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Curators Introduction has developed into an institution of great cultural and community importance and has become established as Australia’s most prestigious landscape art prize.
I am delighted to have been appointed as curator of the Glover Prize and to join the team, which passionately presents this renowned prize and exhibition. Over the past year, I have further learnt about the history of the Glover Prize and its connection to place, which highlights our unique and significant artistic heritage. In 2003, a dedicated group decided to commission a sculpture of
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John Glover for Falls Park, where the Evandale Show was held; and is now the proud home to the Glover Prize. The funds secured for the sculpture stipulated an “on-going project that benefits the local community”. The John Glover Society was subsequently established and in 2004 The Glover Prize was born. The natural evolution of the annual Glover Prize has been significant. Now in its 15th year, it
That this accolade can be attributed to a prize held in Evandale, a small village outside Launceston is embolic of the communities’ connection with place and understanding of the significant cultural history of the area. When John Glover made the journey from London aged 64 and settled at Patterdale, Deddington in 1832, he successfully adapted his picturesque style and luminous technique to his new surrounds. He was the first painter of the Australian landscape sensitive to its visual and spatial qualities and its latent expressive potential. Subsequently, John Glover became
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the most celebrated colonial artist of his time; and is now widely acknowledged as “the father of Australian landscape painting”. Glover is buried at Nile and 20km away a key member of the Heidelberg School, and one of the fathers of Australian Impressionism, Tom Roberts, also found his resting place in the Northern Midlands. It is this cultural legacy and historical connections, which are celebrated through the prize and resonate through the community. The Prize is inclusive and open to all artists. As in past years, I am thrilled to see entries from a growing number and a wide range of Tasmanian, national and international artists. Subsequently, each year presents a
different collection of paintings. In 2018, we are once again presented with a new and fresh selection of artworks illustrating the manifold interpretations of the Tasmanian landscape. Whereas John Glover and his contemporaries painted in a realistic manner, the Glover Prize celebrates contemporary landscape painting of Tasmania, defining landscape painting in its broadest sense. As a place where events occur, memories are made, and stories are told, the Tasmanian landscape has inspired many artists to express a personal narrative and to explore the ways in which we relate to the places we live and to record the impact we have on the land and our environment. Map making is a visual way of
understanding and recording a landscape, especially one with largess. There are a number of paintings in this year’s Glover Prize, which utilise this technique to interpret the landscape as well as tell the story of their own, intimate presence within it. The defined mark-making of Meg Collidge’s painting, “The Farm Bike”, represent aerial tracks on the earth made by farm-equipment; Dianne Allison’s “Body of Water” is also a view from above, an abstract aerial map of Tasmanian waterways; Robert O’Connor’s painting, “Map of Hobart (for a Tourist)” is a symbolic map of his personal traverses through the urban landscape of Hobart; Tim Burns painting is a map of a rabbits “Warren”, (also the paintings title); and Heidi Yardley’s painting “Without your love” is a
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psychological map of a fractured relationship represented by a divergent river. Expressionism appears to be another strong theme in this year’s collection of finalists as they depict their emotive response to the Tasmanian landscape. James Drinkwater’s painting “View to The Mystery Forest (Central Highlands, TAS)” responds to the conditions experienced and the forceful unpredictability of nature. The realistic image is subverted and the sensory feeling of being ‘in’ the landscape is brought to life through expressive gestures of paint and collage. Anthony White’s painting “The Landscape is never Innocent – (After Mannalargenna)” re-examines a contested history in early Tasmanian settlement using bold
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red and black gestures to reflect upon and portray the confrontations between Aboriginal Tasmanians and early European settlers.
passage of ephemeral traditions, places, and cultures is revealed through the symbolic veil of a pillowslip.
Meg Walch’s painting, “Metamorphique: Frenchman’s Cap. Vera, and Tahune”, uses fluid paint to flow across a panel in an expressive representation of a place of remembered family history.
Painting in a realist manner, Nicholas Blower’s painting, “Savage Entropy”, shows the landscape to have its own life-force and vulnerabilities. The physical matter, of which a landscape consists, lives, morphs, and perishes, through the passing of time. There is an impermanence and fragility to natures minutia. Time is present here, as is the ebb and flow of time and memory.
There is also an awareness that the landscape is greater than our own existence. Paul Becker’s painting, “In the realm of perennial darkness, last light Campbell Town”, of headstones at Campbell Town illustrates that our life ends and the land remains; although we can still belong to place – from dust to dust. Leoni Duff in her painting “Horizon Line – Falmouth”, senses the presence of those who have walked the landscape previously as the
As John Glover told the story of the Tasmanian landscape in his time, the early 19th Century, this year’s artists are reflective of the Tasmanian landscape in the present day and with present experiences. The diversity of paintings presented
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must be a great challenge for the judges. Their independent contributions are significant as the three judges are the sole viewers of all the entrants, from which they choose the 42 finalists. The judges then travel to Falls Park Pavilion to view these paintings hanging in situ; from which they select the winning painting. For this and previous years, national arts industry leaders are selected and greatly contribute to the credibility of the Glover Prize. I thank Tony Stephens, Natalia Ottolenghi-Bradshaw, and Dr Jane Deeth for accepting the challenge
of judging and extend my sincere appreciation for their contributions and expertise. From the perspective of the audience, the Glover Prize offers patrons and students an excellent environment to learn about contemporary art and artists. The 42 finalists represented are a high calibre, cross-section of current visual art practitioners. It is a wonderful opportunity to view an exceptional art exhibition and participate in the contemporary cultural landscape.
invest in an artwork, which is both aesthetically pleasing and carries the added prestige of being a Glover Prize finalist. It is a privilege to be involved with the Glover Prize and I look forward to participating in its continued evolution and contributing to its growth and success.
Megan Dick Curator
As the artworks are available for sale, it is also an opportunity to
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2018 Judges
Dr Jane Deeth
Natalia Ottolenghi Bradshaw
Director, New Audiences for Art
Art Curator, Advisor and Advocate
Dr Jane Deeth has over twenty years experience in the visual arts as a curator, educator and writer. Her work revolves around engaging new audiences with contemporary art through her consultancy New Audiences for Art; and the life and art of colonial landscape painter John Glover, in her capacity as Director of Glover Country Experiences, at Patterdale, Glover’s land grant of the northern plains, as well as in her past role as Curator of the Glover Prize.
Natalia is a Trustee of the Australian Museum Foundation; Member of UNSW Art & Design Advisory Council; Named as one of ‘The Most Powerful People in the Australian Art World’ in 2016; Immediate past Chair and Director of the Australian Art Events Foundation (Art Month); 2015 Venice Biennale Champion; Australia Council Peer sitting on the first six year funding review; past Director Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park (GASP!); 350. org Steering Committee; Advisory
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Board member of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize for five years; Member AGNSW CCB Committee for 13 years. Natalia has also chaired a major arts festival, been on the boards of several leading arts and cultural bodies, was Curatorial Manager of Australia’s first ever group exhibition in Latin America in 2016, maintained private and corporate client relationships over many years, and deals with VIPs for Australia’s leading art fair, Sydney Contemporary.
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Tony Stephens Director, ArtBank Tony joined Artbank as Director in 2012. Tony has been an active part of Australia’s contemporary art community for over ten years. Working as a curator, administrator, writer and facilitator, he began his arts career in Brisbane working for a small not-for-profit publisher. From there he went on to be the Chief Executive Officer of Artworkers Alliance – working concurrently as the Festival Director of the Arc Biennial. In 2007 he moved south
to take up the role of Director, Grantpirrie Gallery in Sydney where he led the development of exhibitions and projects nationally and internationally. Tony has also provided consultancies for governments and institutions internationally – providing technical advice on the development of collection management, business development and audience engagement strategies.
Looking at landscape, Realism Surrealism Narrative Expressionism Formalism Conversational
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1 Nicholas Blowers Savage Entropy oil on canvas 155 x 190 cm $25,000 Often the places I am drawn to are in a state of collapse. Damaged or vulnerable, there is a feeling of impermanence. Being in these
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places evokes personal revelation. There can be something difficult or complicated going on as in the case of the mine tailing ponds at Savage River which is both a physically and metaphysically unstable place. There is degree of disorder and chaos within this landscape that is a gift for a painter. Each thing - branch, twig, clod of mud - has its own
distinct presence, relying upon a contingency with its fellow ‘things.’ This multitude of events and relationships in nature overwhelms me. I also wish to make observers of my work aware of time - experienced through the subject, in shades and textures, felt through the painterly marks and the slow process of the hand. Concentration, scrutiny, slow-time.
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2 Jacob Leary New topographies of nature (diptych) acrylic paint, artificial moss, and other mixed media on aluminum and polyurethane foam 70 x 120 cm $4,500
This work explores a new form of landscape, a new synthesis of what nature is, where it’s found and how humans and non-humans may relate to it. My painting is interested in a new form of surface depth and a different sense of immediacy to the ‘real/unreal’ through the use of topographic devices and the creation of miniecosystems. These approaches play with notions of the natural which increasingly seems to be just as definable by its relation to the artificial.
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3 Meg Walch Metamorphique: Frenchman’s Cap, Vera and Tahune enamel, oil, glitter and acrylic on composite panel 150 x 150 cm $9,500
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Fluid paint morphs and marbles, folding inside out from macro to micro… as above, so below. I deploy paint to mimic the topography of Frenchman’s Cap, a Jurassic beacon of sparkling white quartzite gouged by glacial lakes in the heart of the West Coast. I manipulate the medium to embody metamorphic processes: geological flows and ice floes.
Paint’s sinew becomes Huon, King Billy and Fagus. Painted in honour of my Great Grandfather John Ernest Philp (bushman, explorer and sailor 1869-1937). John Ernest cut the first track to Frenchman’s cap in 1910. He named Lake Vera as a love letter to his wife and Lake Tahune after his pen name.
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4 Heidi Yardley Without your love oil on board 38 x 50 cm $4,500
This painting represents a two-way journey. A fracture, a split and the end of a relationship nearly two decades long. Each person must find their own path. There are obstacles in the way. The person I considered to be my ‘other half’ takes a nightly journey like this amongst the darkness
and the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape. This painting of Huon River is symbolic of his journey and how I have interpreted it. The sky is mirrored in the river. Can one exist without the other? We don’t know what’s around the corner. It is both frightening and beautiful to travel alone.
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5 James Drinkwater View to The Mystery Forest (Central Highlands, TAS) oil and collage on hardboard 180 x 122 cm $16,500 From the pioneers hut window I viewed the mystery forest with its grey saplings an army of youth. Immense mist, black soil and moss. The arctic winds howl and rattle against my window, the view finder towards the endless.
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6 Joanna Pinkiewicz The Deeds Registry mixed media on paper 102 x 82 cm $2,200 The way I try to respond to landscape is not merely to represent beautiful vistas, but to tell a story about a place and how we relate to a place.
colonists as a right to take and own land in Tasmania. Amongst the records are working maps and field notes, which were of my particular interest while investigating the subject matter. Recent digitisation of early colonial records provides easier accessibility and gave me an
opportunity to work on an artistic response. Aesthetically with this work, I reference many of my mentors and role models, Polish modernist artists of the post war area, who worked with assemblages, happenings and installation.
The Deeds Registry is about the concept of OWNERSHIP of land, which is not common to all cultures. Some cultures find the concept of owning individual parcels of land completely alien or morally unacceptable. Each parcel, bundle and package represents a physical place of land that was mapped, surveyed, divided, fenced off and sold off. In the case of Tasmania, it also involved removal and genocide of previous occupants of the land. The Deeds Registry in Tasmania was established in 1827 and recorded general land grants, dating from the early 1800s. Prior to this, royal charters were given to
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7 Neil Haddon A Rocky Shore oil, enamel and digital print on aluminium 130 x 120 cm $9,500
to consider the lived experience of migration. It is an intermediate, intertidal zone, neither fully land nor fully ocean, characterised by diversity and adaptability. It is two places at once. It can be difficult terrain to traverse. I find a correlation between these
characteristics and a sense of dwelling in an intermediate zone which is neither fully the place where I once was nor fully the place where I am now. The simultaneous pull of belonging and of connection to both homes is as strong as the tide and just as ceaseless.
Last year I joined my partner in her project to walk the shoreline of Tasmania. I can measure this journey in months, weeks, days and hours. I can measure it in kilometres walked and in footsteps. I have geotagged photographs that show a precise location and the exact time of day. It is a highly quantifiable project. I am learning to navigate Tasmania by walking it. The painting A Rocky Shore (2017) is very different to the photographs from this walking project. It has no locatable ground, no mapped coordinates or Google Earth image that can be zoomed in on to the point of walking it. Its coordinates refuse to be fixed. The painting draws on my experience of being a migrant to Tasmania; of relocation and the feeling of belonging to two homes at once. In the painting, you can see a rocky shore as if standing with your back to the ocean looking inland to a strange mix of Glover trees and reimagined old engravings of ruined English buildings. The references point to the two domains of my migrant story. The rocky shore is an apt location
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8 Halinka Orszulok Ponies oil on canvas 100 x 150 cm $4,800 My paintings represent nighttime environments that are contradictory, ambiguous and often unacknowledged, like the unhomely home or landscape that belongs to neither nature nor culture. As much psychological spaces as physical ones, my aim is to activate this fluid link between self, space and meaning.
The photograph from which I made this painting was taken at a playground in the Cataract Gorge, Launceston. It is a landscape with strong, moody, artificial-light causing the world to fall into stark contrast. This leads to a cinematic quality, containing complex, interwoven layers of signification. Right on the edge of Launceston, the Gorge exists at the intersection of nature, culture and history. A natural playground, it echoes Romantic ideas about the role of nature and the sublime. I found the pretty plastic ponies
riding through the verdant Tasmanian forest a particularly evocative image – an introduced species recalling the invasion of this island. They are also symbols with a strong pull on the subconscious. There is a dream-like quality to this image. I have dreamt of riding horses through both familiar and unexpected environments. To me they represent power, freedom and escape. There is always room in my work for the personal. This painting is a moment in an open-ended story where the viewer must arrive at their own meaning. 19
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9 David Beaumont Nightfall - Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania mixed media on linen 122 x 183 cm $9,500
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Palimpsest tracks etched on the landscape surface meander, shift and disappear. Sunset, dusts, ochres and clay, nestled amongst the ancient slabs of rock – towering, foreboding and silently observing. The mist rolls eternally as darkness falls, still and full of breath. This is the beauty of Jerusalem Walls – the harsh, honest beauty.
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10 Robert O’Connor Map of Hobart [for a Tourist] oil on canvas 123 x 148 cm $6,000
If I had to draw a map of greater Hobart for someone – an alien or whatever – it would look like this. It’s painted from living, not life, from navigating and traversing urban spaces. There’s the river, mountain, several types of drizzle and layer upon layer of scrambled allusions. Streets, things and places are named after far away
cities, foreign colonisers, even an Italian Baroque painter. This map shows my daily routes, memories and folklore in a personal and coded language. However, it’s not a rebus where you follow the clues, leading to something; more like a harmless enigma, made strange by our attempts to decode it.
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11 Craig Handley An unmistakable geology oil on linen 41 x 51 cm $3,300 The endless drift and shift but the trickery remains.
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12 Matthew Armstrong
The everyday experience of viewing the landscape from a car:
Quotidian Drive Oil x Linen 81 x 87 cm $4,000
As an artist I am constantly distracted by the landscape as I drive. I sit in my car and contemplate how the landscape has changed and painting has changed. How do I capture a moment out of thousands of fleeting visions? I view this ever moving picture of Hobart and the
hills beyond through plastic and glass. My car, whether moving or parked, has become a personal picture theatre. Modern life and the built environment challenges my ideas of painting composition; constructions constantly frame my vision of the landscape, I find it hard to ignore them and it rankles me when I do.
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13 Rodney Pople Early morning north west Tasmania oil and archival ink on linen 80 x 120 cm $12,500 This painting is based on an early morning view captured by the artist near Marrawah in north west Tasmania. Southern Elephant Seals have 24
lived around in southern regions of the world for thousands of years. Though hunted to the brink of extinction a century ago, populations have since recovered and the seals are no longer considered endangered. In this painting, the Southern Elephant Seal reasserts its presence by parking itself centre stage before a herd of cattle, a comparatively recently introduced species to the
Tasmanian landscape. Elephant seals do appear occasionally in Tasmania, so the image does not represent an entirely impossible scenario. The painting continues, however, the artist’s interest in creating unexpected juxtapositions of forms and characters to comment on ideas around colonisation, contested histories and the primacy of the natural over the human world.
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14 Peter Gouldthorpe Blue Day Walking oil on Linen 92 x 183 cm $9,000 A blue day in South-West Tasmania is something to be savoured along with the view from the top of Mt. Wedge after an arduous, uphill-all-the-way walk.
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15 Diane Allison Body of Water cut paper, steel pins on paper 104 x 84 cm $5,200 Body of Water extracts numerous rivers, lakes and inlets from the Tasmanian landscape and transforms them into paper form creating a complex, abstract network suggestive of a living circulatory system. These bodies of water approximately follow their locations within the island. However the certainty, factuality and permanence of cartography has been subverted. Scale has been manipulated, rivers redirected and interlinked and lakes relocated in fictional ways. This transformation illustrates the organic nature of what lies behind the meticulous static lines documented over centuries of Western map making. These forms are changeable and adaptable. They are fluid and malleable. Temperatures rise and fall, levels ebb and flow, directions change. They swell, flow, pulse, retract and have the power to erode. But teamed with that power is a fragility. We live in an interconnected and interdependent network, a living system where our actions have ramifications.
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16 Monica Rohan Cold hands oil on board 61 x 92 cm $10,000
We’d not long been on our walk to Lobster Falls in Central Northern Tasmania when I was drawn to a network of fallen trees on the track. The searching way their great limbs reached sideways into the undergrowth momentarily disrupted my sense of space and depth. I was struck by the elegance and sorrow of their demise. The figure is perched awkwardly in the foreground, cold hands tightly clasped, disconnected from the landscape. 27
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17 Bill Handbury Takayna oil on canvas and galvanised iron 109 x 136 cm $5,000
Takayna (the indigenous name for Tarkine). Takayna is a wildly diverse landscape, comprising a rugged coastline with a rich diversity of vegetation from buttongrass moorlands to majestic rainforests. The 447,000 hectare Tarkine Wilderness Area is Australia’s
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largest tract of unprotected temperate rainforest. For me, the rainforest is the heart of Takayna. It is where the weight and influence of Mother Nature is palpable. It has strong indigenous connections which have been given scant respect.
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18 Luke Wagner On Tasman Island, The Haulage oil and wax on linen (three Stretchers framed) 77 x 183 cm $7,500
In October of 2017 I joined a group of volunteers to perform maintenance to the lighthouse on Tasman Island. I spent nearly a week on the Island, walking, drawing and photographing; mornings and evenings. Keeping an accurate journal from which to later produce studio based oil paintings. This work is a composite view from the top of the Haulage (a cable trolley system once used to bring supplies up vertical cliffs 300mt from sea level) at a spot
called “The Whim�. The landforms in the painting are looking across to Tasmania from Tasman Island and are based on The Blade and The Chasm, parts of the Three Capes Walk. Spending time on the island was incredibly enriching and nourishing for my art practice. The drama of land and sea exceptionally powerful. I intend to pursue and explore this series of work for the remainder of this year with a resultant solo show at Colville Gallery.
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19 Elizabeth Beaumont
Greek gods. As we descended into Lake Oberon on the third day, the weather was sublime and there was Descending into Lake Oberon a sense of relief that we would be oil on canvas spending the afternoon resting by 91.5 x 182.9 cm a beautiful lake and enjoying the $3,000 sun. We felt like the treacherous mountain weather had abated, if The inspiration for Descending only for a short while and we knew into Lake Oberon came from the driving rain and wind would undertaking the multi-day, return shortly. But for the time Western Arthurs Traverse in being, we were happy to dry our Tasmania’s Southwest National clothes, wash in the lake and eat Park early January this year. The walk is famous for its deep, glacial food. One of the most captivating lakes and mercurial, unforgiving weather. When you’re at the top of features of the alpine landscape was the strong contrast between these peaks, you get a sense that you’re not meant to be there. That’s the granite rocks, gilded with lichen, and the heathy, windwhy the lakes are named after
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battered mosses, forbs and shrubs. This became especially noticeable when there was a bit of cloud cover and light rain (which was most of the time). I have tried to capture this contrast with the thick, grey brushstrokes for the blocks of granite and the choppier, more intense, green brushstrokes for the vegetation. Occasionally, the mottled greys and greens during our walk would be delightfully punctuated by pale-yellows of paper daises and the rich reds of the blandfordias. ‘Lake Oberon’ tries to capture the rambling nature of this mystical Tasmanian mountain range.
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20 Michael Muruste Neo Agria-Mills Plain acrylic on canvas stretcher 152 x 122 cm $6,500 The history of Australian landscape painting is one of changing perceptions. Neo AgriaMills Plain is, I hope, a challenging contribution to that evolution.
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21 Anthony White The Landscape is never Innocent - (After Mannalargenna) oil and ripolin on linen 150.5 x 121 cm $15,000 Motivated by revisionist histories currently at play in the global media, I made this painting to reexamine a dark period of Australia’s history, the so called Black War in Tasmania between 1829 and 1833. The painting recognises the fight of Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Palawa Nation, the traditional owners of the land, and the genocide suffered by their people during that time. This painting is a homage to Mannalargenna, an elder of the Palawa Nation and leader of the Aboriginal resistance during the Black War. Explorer and grazier John Batman set out on expeditions throughout Tasmania tracking and killing Aboriginal people in exchange for government land grants. Mannalargenna lead the Palawa resistance but was later betrayed by George Augustus Robinson “protector of Aboriginals” and exiled to Flinder’s Island. Since moving from Sydney to France, I have discovered the extent to which the history of Australia’s First Nations People post European settlement has been erased from the collective memory and replaced by a European vision of fecund pastoral landscapes. 32
To me, there is a painfully clear disparity between the written history of Aboriginal Australia and actual events. Looking back at Australia from my adopted home in Europe, I see no meaningful reconciliation.
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22 Leoni Duff
near Falmouth, we long to push them aside and see the horizon beyond.
Horizon Line - Falmouth oil on canvas 122 x 160 cm $15,000
They lift in the breeze to reveal the Victorian Mansion of Enstone Park and beyond. A trail of smoke tells of the time prior to European settlement when the Falmouth area was inhabited by the Pyemmairrener Aboriginal people who had lived there for thousands of years. I sense their presence. A river of life and history has always trickled across these grass plains. The translucent sheets glow with the same afternoon sun that has always burnished these plains and textures of life continue their generational song.
I have always been fascinated with the Baroque themes of the Vanitas; the relationship of the temporal to the eternal. This painting explores our sense of identity and our place in this landscape. As the light filled forms of the washing on the line hinder our view of the East Coast hinterland
We feel so permanent, so important and gouge our mark on this landscape to be sure of our stake forever, but this is the greatest illusion of them all. We are not here long, and the wounds we make on the land are soon healed and grown over. How long and how far do we extend? The vision of the horizon soon becomes finessed and clear as we push aside the textures of the mundane and the silly, the futile and the necessary, the work and the sleep, the obscuring veils that hide the view. A meditation on horizon lines. 33
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23 Tim Burns Warren oil paint on linen 70 x 150 cm $8,000 Each day as I walk with my dog, I watch her chase rabbits across the paddock and into their lair where she dives down after them, deep into the earth, into a dark and warm world. This painting is an imaginary map of their invisible subterranean world.
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24 Craig Waddell On The Shore Of Silence oil on linen 170 x 190 cm $16,500 “On the Shore of Silence� is part of an ongoing body of work that explores landscapes which reference sites of historical significance. I try to place myself in areas both physically and spiritually that
ask questions around identity, isolation and mortality. It is in this compromising state that I am drawn to start responding to the natural world. I have been exploring areas along the Australian coastline for many years. Cape Grim in Tasmania is a site that I have returned to many times. The dark beauty that surrounds this area has a disturbing and magnetic energy to it. Reading about the history to this area and
drawing from it has been the platform for the emotive response within my painting. Opposed to a pictorial likeness I vigorously apply paint, pushing, pulling and scraping it around the surface to find a deeper meaning within the painting. I love the physical act of wrestling with paint and canvas, applying paint in an explosive way to try and capture the physical qualities of the landscape. 35
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25 Robert Habel
Whilst exploring a Romanesque Abbey in Chancelade, South-West France in 2017, I discovered a large A Large Oil Painting of a Tasmanian Landcape Discovered oil painting abandoned in a rickety in the Attic of an Abbey in South- Augustinian attic. A biblical scene, it seemed to never West France have been hung safely on the wall oil on canvas where it rested. It was incredible 130 x 160 cm that such an artwork had been $4,000 deemed of such little importance and left to moulder and decay. As the discarded painting’s mood, tones and darkening varnishes 36
were reminiscent of the Tasmanian colonial landscapes I’d studied as a student in Launceston, I found myself envisaging a familiar Tasmanian landscape composition sitting afresh within its European historical frame. A Deddington scene sprang to mind, with a much humbler ‘House of God’ – one of many scenes from my home state that ‘travels’ with me, shaping my view of unfamiliar environments and vistas, and framing my personal vision in unexpected places and ways.
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26 Grant Nimmo Franklin Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, Forest between Lake Vera and Barron oil on Framed board 60 x 40 cm $2,300 In 2017 I made a trip to South Western Tasmania to walk to the top of Frenchman’s Cap in the Franklin Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. Travelling with a group of friends, some of whom shared stories of their adventures rafting on the Franklin River in the late 1970s. And although the Franklin River was big and beautiful, and the views at the top of Frenchman’s Cap were very vast and impressive. It was a small patch of dense forest along the trail, below Barron Pass, where the Vera Creek and others ran through the damp forest floor, that I chose to make this painting from.
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27 Erin Rachelle Smith Mount Anne oil on paper 21 x 29.7 cm $600 Interpretation of Mt Anne.
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28 Alex Davern My Fantasy Book Collection: Twelve overcast days acrylic, ink and pencil on paper 110 x 145 cm $4,900
This Fantasy Book Collection floats upon twelve overcast skyscapes. Prior to European settlement, Tasmanians developed an intimate knowledge of their landscape, despite no known documentation through conventional mapping. The sky gave meaning to the land. It’s
patterns could be read for the purpose of predictions and stories. European history imposed itself on this culture and in doing so, stripped these layers of knowledge aside. This work is a meditation on the stories that have been formed and lost over the past four-hundred years.
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29 Dore Stockhausen Hobart, 3rd sighting acrylic paint on canvas and dibond 70 x 110 cm $4,000
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My painting practice is process driven, starting with an under-layer painting created using handmade tools to scrape, drag, push and comb paint over the canvas. This gives an ‘understory’ of paint which I later draw on and reveal in whole or in parts. Layers and layers of washes are then painted, often completely covering the underlying ‘first’ painting. This process continues with working back through the layers and painting further washes. In this way the painting goes through
many transformations and so develops it’s own history. In the winter of 2016 my younger son Jasper moved to Hobart and I took him there. This painting derived from our second night spend at our accommodation situated slightly above the city. Rather than depicting reality, forms and colours are abstracted to evoke the essence of places and the end result is open to interpretation. I’ve been successfully enamelling and making jewellery for the past 30 years but now I feel painting has a hold of me!
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30 Paul Snell Mute # 201701 lambda print on paper facemounted to 4.5mm plexiglass 60 x 190 cm $5,300
The pause, the gap and the omission are increasingly significant in our saturated image driven society. Through this work the daily saturation is replaced by selective sensitisation. The absence of signs or objects invites the viewer to drift among primal and tonal aesthetic matter, creating a sensory experience of inner contemplation and transcendence. In its stillness the work transcends the mere mimetic vista, stripping away the irrelevant, revealing the fundamental meditative qualities that the Tasmanian landscape
provides. The reductive aesthetic in my work is an overlapping of decidedly contrary visual elements, a play of many dualities, and is inspired by nature, time, space, colour, sound, and movement. By rhythmically repeating, pairing, overlapping, reversing and sequencing and through the investigations of specific colour relationships, I seek a sensory understanding of the physical object and invite the viewer into the space for a contemplative experience with the work.
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31 Shannon Field Michael Howe: Bushranger, Outlaw, and Motocross champion (1814-1817) enamel and spray-paint on canvas 91.5 x 122 cm $3,500 In late October 1818 on the banks of the Shannon river, the Tasmanian bushranger Michael Howe was apprehended, clubbed to death and then beheaded. This violent event is the starting point for the painting Michael Howe: Bushranger, Outlaw, and Motocross Champion (1814-1817). In the painting the decapitated body of Michael Howe sits against a tree, his head resting on the ground and his motor bike in the river. Of course Howe was never a motocross champion and certainly never owned a motor bike, rather their presence in the painting reflects the continued impact of Australia’s colonial past. As with my broader practice Michael Howe: Bushranger, Outlaw, and Motocross Champion (1814-1817), addresses the manner in which, representation of convict masculinity as monstrous and
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deviant, resonates within the performance of contemporary European Australian masculinity. The absurd incongruity of the painting foregrounds the violent and dislocating effects of a male gaze directed upon itself. Like the decapitated form of Michael Howe, contemporary heterosexual masculinity remains haunted by the spectral presence of patriarchy. This patriarchal spectre ties Australian masculinity to
a colonial past it refuses to acknowledge but is unable to forget; a refusal that has, in turn been projected onto landscapes such as the Shannon River. Both real and imagined, these spaces and habitats have become a theatre of discontent, across which, an array of cultural uncertainties play out. An endlessly repeating loop that some call history and others call fiction.
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32 Chee Yong Journey to the West: Camping Stories oil on wood 90 x 180 cm $9,500 The West is an enigma. For years, it was seen as a hostile place, resistant to change. Yet, in spite of its remoteness and wildness, it is an area embedded with
historical aboriginal settlements, convict history and environmental protests. Journey to the West: Camping Stories reframes contemporary landscape painting via story telling and myth making. Despite its playfulness, it is a cautionary tale of the difficult relationship we have with nature and landscape. The painting seeks to reassess our ideological baggage of the Tasmanian landscape, long held and fought
over by various interest groups as we flutter between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. Amidst its discordant background of ancient forest and moss-covered grounds, Journey to the West: Camping Stories presents a need for re-enchantment and silliness in the face of ecological kitsch and romantic delusions about the Tasmanian landscape. And so we drink and be merry in the forest in the West, telling jokes and stories around the campfire.
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33 Liz Sullivan TAS 1948 Xing FRANKLIN oil on board 50 x 50 cm $3,000 “I was still living a funny old life after Margot died….I decided to ‘to go down the Franklin’’ This was not Dad’s first visit to Tasmania as I was to discover. “My first contact with anything Tasmania was in 1944 in the army”. In 1948 Dad ventured across to Tasmania and it “lived up to its reputation as the place to find a difference.” Dad wrote the story of his life as a gift to his family. I’ve chosen to present a series of paintings interpreting Tasmania through the photographs and eyes of my father who first visited after the war in 1948 with the Catholic Youth Group. Again, approaching seventy after his wife (my mother) died, he found solace and meaning white water rafting down the Franklin River. His stories were written with his pedantic attention to detail and humour, and respect for life. Of importance is his eccentric manner of phrase which are an integral part of the paintings, sometimes randomly chosen suggesting a greater life than a few words can give.
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34 Kylie Elkington Correa Alba (White Correa) oil paint on linen 135 x 107 cm $6,250 Correa Alba (White Correa), is part of a long series of works which I have undertaken to focus on the minutiae of landscape, but also to exercise liberties which shift the focus from scientific documentation to a more poetic and nuanced depiction of a small section of earth and what it sustains. Employing a range of transparent oils in the manner of pre-Raphaelite painters, my aim is to draw close attention to the light and detail and understated beauty which can be witnessed while hiking in the Australian landscape. Australian native plants have been an overlooked subject in recent Australian art, dispatched previously to the endeavours of scientific expeditions. Correa Alba is a hardy coastal plant which thrives in Tasmania, and was named after Portuguese botanist, Jose Correia da Serra, revealing the many complexities which make up Australia’s multi-cultural history, and prompt us to reflect on the wisdom of the changes which have been made to the ‘native’ landscape since a European presence.
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35 Dr Wayne Brookes Clarendon Catharsis acrylic on canvas 90 x 120 cm $12,000
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In order to understand who we are, it is critical to acknowledge the echo of what has gone before. History speaks to me in many ways and, regardless of the space, I listen for its voices. Clarendon House spoke to my passions through objects of ostentation and the mauve savanna of the dining room. But
the loudest voice was the landscape that dominated the mantel. It grounded me in the iconic vision of Glover, which accentuates the noble whispers of place and time, and how the land anchors us perpetually. Inside or outside, the landscape casts a giant shadow, and Glover’s is the biggest of all.
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36 David Marsden Tip Trip mixed media, copper and plywood 80 x 91.5 cm $5,000 No matter how pristine the view, how manicured the property, how glorious the beach and the
sparkling water, there is always a tip somewhere, close by. It may be a gully or a dip in the land or maybe a hole has been purpose dug but so long as it is not too close to the house or the water supply and the trailer can get there without falling apart, it serves. There sits the old car, rusting gently amid the bracken with old tyres and oil drums for
companions, there rolls the old fence amid the blackberries with droppers still attached, and the bones of animals past turn green and grey. And there is the hum of flies and the whiff of something more recent, and underneath all are the layers from past tip trips to the Black Hole. This painting has something of the tip about it I think. 47
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37 Josh Foley Blackwood Creek oil & acrylic on canvas 76 x 101.5 cm $6,500 Blackwood Creek is an area that nestles itself under the Western Tiers in northern Tasmania. I spent my childhood tearing around the parched, cracked and rocky ground around Musk Valley Rd on 48
my BMX; my grandparents had a property there and my grandfather still resides there. This image conjures the presence of the space, the bracken fern, the occasional gum tree, acacia, the dry Bullock Holes creek bed, broken machinery, chickens, pigs, old trucks and the odd sheep or two. This was never a working farm and the sprawling ramshackle quality of the property serves an unknown purpose‌ maybe to afford
eccentricities breathing room. The surface of this painting plays with depth and the trompe l’oeil (trick of the eye) representation of relief space. I have intended to describe something of the topography of the subject matter through texture and the push and pull of haptic expectation. The work is an evocation, of time and energy spent, of movement and matter and the specifics of this location.
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38 Meg Collidge The Farm Bike acrylic on board 90 x 90 cm $3,600 I have the privilege of living and painting on a beautiful farm in the heart of agricultural lands on the North-West Coast of Tasmania. During my early morning walks with my dog, I am constantly fascinated with tracks left in the dirt and mud by the activities of the farm equipment from the day before. Seeing the pattern laid out from the circular objects, it soon became clear that the tyres were actually a drawing tool themselves. Ben the farmhand and I began to play with ideas, using the tractor, the bike and our feet to leave a faint impression of prints on boards. With a rough plan in mind, we left the rest to chance. I quickly traced around the patterns with a soluble pencil before the dust disappeared again. To honour the marks without romanticising them, I chose to paint using the orange colours of the dirt against stark, dark backgrounds. It is difficult to see the resulting image until the act of painting is complete and the pencil is washed away.
In the making of The Farm Bike I asked Ben to make arcs that would separate the back tyre from the front tyre, so that passing over the board would leave two distinct sets of prints, repeated three times. By removing the marks from the rough terrain and applying them to the sterile environment of a blank
board they became clear, direct and resolute. I was presented with something I had never seen before – the lean of the bike under the shifting weight of it’s rider, brought to life by the physical presence of the painting. It is not ruminative or contemplative, but still charged with feeling and purpose.
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39 Richard Noel Dunlop Ghost Nets (Time After Time) acrylic and oil on linen 61 x 61 cm $6,000 This painting depicts the watery flow of what are colloquially called ‘ghost nets’ - carelessly abandoned fishing nets which continue a journey which imperils marine life, and will cause inter-generational problems. As a unique subject for a landscape painting, ghost nets offered so many metaphorical opportunities in relation to Australia’s past. I wanted to make a modest-scaled and understated painting, also about creating visual depth and trying to capture the rhythmic essence of nets dancing in the ocean.
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40 Ashley D Bird New Shapes ink and relief resin castings of Arnotts BBQ Shapes on paper 77 x 116 cm $3,500
John Glover viewed and interpreted the landscape of Tasmania in a way that tweaked and twisted the shapes of his present reality to create his version of an exotic and distinctive location. This depiction of the landscape was the Glover filtered
lens unique to him, and now in contemporary times it is wise to not let the imaginative and fanciful musings and inspiring methods of seeing this landscape be gradually blotted out by the banal, stale and tasteless tokens of a future where Glovers trees have lost their magic.
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41 Paul Becker In the realm of perennial darkness, last light Campbell Town acrylic on canvas 105 x 135 cm $8,500
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Campbell Town has always held an endearing sense of space for me, as it’s the origin of my ancestors. The painting depicts a tribute to those departed, and headstones now aged and weathered, contrast against the background of nature’s timeless beauty, whilst
life continues for those remaining relatives. Actual ancestral history is sometimes lost over time, and the permanence of death is strongly reflected by the juxtaposition of the endangered swift parrots, in the now present place and time.
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42 Eva Beltran Wondering at Bay of Fires mixed media on board 101 x 101 cm $1,200 Eva Beltran has an expressionist approach to subjects, aiming to depict an emotional experience more than a physical reality. The nature of her paintings is semiabstract. Multiple juxtaposed planes interact with each other through layers of lines and colours, allowing a certain movement and dialogue between objects and figures.
Wondering at Bay of Fires was inspired by the colours, sensations, thoughts and feelings that this unique part of the world triggered in me.
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Glover Prize 2018
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Glover Prize supported by the following partners Principal Partner
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Falls Pavilion Evandale Tasmania johnglover.com.au
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