LIST OF WORKS JANET PARKER-SMITH We are all just earthly creatures, no. 2 2011 wooden box, copper, digital print on copper, 40.5 x 65 x 21 cm Happiness is a slippery customer 2016 screenprint, 76 x 56 cm Return the Trees 2016 screenprint, 76 x 56 cm The Pendulum Swings 2016 altered sculptural book, 33 x 40 x 15 cm The Vanishing Point 2016 digital print on archival paper, 76 x 56 cm JULIE PATERSON Blackheath on Ironbark 2016 unique state screen & stencil print on linen with acrylic screen printing ink 80 x 153 cm
Lost 2016 pigment print on archival paper 89 x 113 cm Lounging 2016 pigment print on archival paper 89 x 113 cm CHRIS TOBIN Australian Landscape 2016 open-bite etching, 37 x 49 cm Keepers of our Stories 2016 etching & aquatint, 26.5 x 16 cm Spirit Baby 2016 etching & aquatint, 25 x 23 cm
Waratah Story 2016 etching & aquatint, 34 x 24 cm
All works courtesy the artists unless otherwise stated.
Chris Tobin’s works were produced in collaboration with Michael Kempson & the students at Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, specifically for this exhibition.
ANTONIA AITKEN Re-cut: Queenstown, Tasmania 2013 drawn & carved Huon Pine off cuts on trestle table, dimensions variable RAYMOND ARNOLD Elsewhere World (10th state) 2015 etching, 80 x 330 cm courtesy the artist & Bett Gallery, Hobart
JUDY WATSON heron island suite #1–#20 2009-2010 etching & screenprint, 50 x 35.5 cm each, courtesy the artist & grahame galleries + editions, Brisbane
G. W. BOT Australglyphs 2005 linocut on Magnani paper, 92 x 52 cm courtesy the artist & Australian Galleries, Sydney
FREEDOM WILSON Mountain Plateau Triptych 2016 screen printed linen, 87.5 x 254 cm
Australglyphs I 2006 linocut on Magnani paper, 92 x 52 cm courtesy the artist & Australian Galleries, Sydney
Gardens of Stone on Boardwalk 2016 unique state screen & stencil print on hemp with acrylic screen printing acrylic ink, 80 x 119 cm
Glyphs – The Universe 2013 linocut on Magnani paper, 70.5 x 100 cm courtesy the artist & Australian Galleries, Sydney
Jamison Valley on Ironbark 2016 unique state screen & stencil print on linen union with acrylic screen printing ink, 72 x 140 cm
SUSANNA CASTLEDEN Bitumen Landscape (Indian Ocean Drive) 2016 frottage & screen print on gesso on paper maps, 210 x 360 cm
Mind Mountain on Boardwalk 2016 unique state screen & stencil print on linen with acrylic screen printing ink 70 x 130 cm
JAN DAVIS Incident at Jemmy’s Point 2011 digital print, 82 x 103 cm
Skye and Water on Stoney 2016 unique state screen & stencil print on linen with acrylic screen printing ink 80 x 137 cm
Copyright © Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, the author and the artists 2016. All rights reserved.
OLGA SANKEY Bloom: Blush 2016 digital & intaglio, 23 x 40.5 cm
Published in conjunction with the exhibition As far as the eye can see 12 November 2016 – 15 January 2017
Bloom: Bruise 2016 digital, intaglio & relief, 23 x 40.5 cm
A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre exhibition curated by Rilka Oakley in association with the Print Council of Australia’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
Bloom: Burn 2016 digital & relief, 23 x 40.5 cm
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Blue Mountains Cultural Centre acknowledges that the City of the Blue Mountains is located on the traditional lands of the Darug and Gundungurra peoples. Many thanks to the exhibiting artists and their galleries for their wholehearted participation in this project. Thank you to Akky van Ogtrop, President of the Print Council of Australia for her advice. A special thanks to Michael Kempson, Director of Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, and his students, for their expertise, dedication and time.
Print Council of Australia Celebrating 50 Years in 2016
ROCHELLE SUMMERFIELD Wild Abandon (The Race) 2015 pigment print on archival paper 89 x 113 cm
Front: JULIE PATERSON Mountain Landscape (in process) 2016 screenprint on linen, 35 x 44 cm
BLUE MOUNTAINS CULTURAL CENTRE 30 Parke Street, Katoomba • 02 4780 5410 Open 10am – 5pm Mon – Fri • 10am – 4pm Sat & Sun 10am – 2pm public holidays (Closed Good Friday & Xmas Day)
bluemountainsculturalcentre.com.au JANET PARKER-SMITH The Vanishing Point 2016, digital print on archival paper, 76 x 56 cm
BLUE MOUNTAINS CITY ART GALLERY
MARTIN KING flow IV 2013 etching & watercolour, 17.5 x 91 cm
Tali Tali – Sandhills 2006 screenprint, 56 x 76 cm courtesy the artist & Ikuntji Artists, Haasts Bluff
flow VI 2015 etching & watercolour, 17.5 x 134 cm JUDITH MARTINEZ The Crossing 2016 multi-plate etching, 37.5 x 49 cm Day over Kedumba 2016 multi-plate etching, 22 x 25.5 cm Night over Kedumba 2016 multi-plate etching, 22 x 25.5 cm Nocturne for Mt Solitary 2016 multi-plate etching, 17.5 x 21 cm Night swimming 2016 multi-plate etching, 18 x 20.5 cm Judith Martinez’s works were produced in collaboration with Michael Kempson & the students at Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, specifically for this exhibition. CLYDE MCGILL Further than we thought 2009-2016 etching & mono print on BFK paper (4 pieces), 28 x 37.5 cm each We walked across, listening to the frogs 2009 etching & mono print, 75 x 105 cm
Moleskin trousers from McMillan’s inventory 2011 digital print, 103 x 84 cm
I don’t remember the name of the river, she said 2010 etching on BFK paper, 75 x 105 cm
One German frock from McMillan’s inventory 2011 digital print, 108 x 88 cm
Moonrise, creek and recalling our plans 2010 etching & aquatint on BFK paper 75 x 105 cm
Two pea-jackets from McMillan’s inventory 2011 digital print, 108 x 88 cm
Back: FREEDOM WILSON Mountain Plateau Triptych (detail) 2016 screen printed linen, 87.5 x 254 cm
ALICE NAMPITJINPA Tali at Talaalpi 1998 etching, 79 x 106 cm private collection
McMillan’s waistcoat 2011 digital print, 104 x 84 cm
Southbound 2011 digital print, 84 x 100 cm
IMAGES
GARY SHINFIELD River, bridge and coal train 2013 unique state woodcut print with staining on six sheets of Thai hand made paper, 300 x 378 cm
LOCUST JONES The Bird Agents 2016 16 steel plate etchings & steel plates 118 x 82 cm each
GARY JOLLEY Knews and Whether: Changing Climate #2 2016 collagraph, intaglio printed lino, digital print & transfer drawing, 76 x 173 cm
We travelled through the broken memories 2010 etching on BFK paper, 75 x 105 cm HELEN MUELLER earthen wear 2015 79 bowls cast from intaglio printed paper & wax, dimensions variable earth works 2016 10 intaglio prints from seawater etched plates, 23.5 x 29.5 cm each
Porcupine Tjukurrpa 2011 etching, 80 x 50 cm courtesy the artist & Ikuntji Artists, Haasts Bluff Waterhole 2011 screenprint, 32.5 x 49 cm courtesy the artist & Ikuntji Artists, Haasts Bluff DOROTHY NAPANGARDI Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa 2002 etching, 56.5 x 79 cm courtesy Tali Gallery, Sydney & Gondwana Gallery, Alice Springs Spinifex 2002 etching, 39.5 x 35.5 cm courtesy Tali Gallery, Sydney & Gondwana Gallery, Alice Springs Karntakurlangu 2006 etching, 37.5 x 35.5 cm courtesy Tali Gallery, Sydney & Gondwana Gallery, Alice Springs Salt on Mina Mina 2006 etching, 53.5 x 58 x 5 cm courtesy Tali Gallery, Sydney & Gondwana Gallery, Alice Springs Mina Mina 2008 etching, 62 x 79 cm private collection Salt 2008 etching, 39.5 x 35.5 cm courtesy Tali Gallery, Sydney & Gondwana Gallery, Alice Springs DANIEL O’SHANE Aib, Ene, Zogo Ni Pat (Aib and the Sacred Waterhole) 2015 lino cut, hand wiped & hand coloured 120 x 220 cm courtesy the artist & Canopy Art Centre, Cairns Meuram and Zogo Ni Pat 2015 vinyl cut, hand wiped & hand coloured, 213 x 115 cm courtesy the artist & Canopy Art Centre, Cairns
AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE ‘As far as the eye can see’ is a metaphor for limitlessness. It implies distance and space, the blue black vastness of the sky, the breadth of deserts and the depths of oceans. In landscape’s terms, the distance which the eye may travel is more measurable, impeded by the physical as it moves outward. An expansive vision is often linked with exploration and discovery, the hope of something beyond. However, the metaphorical gaze also travels inwards through an internal landscape, or a sensory experience of a place realised in more abstract terms. Should we also consider how far the mind’s eye can see? What terrain is revealed to the artist when their eyes are closed to the visual forms of the landscape but open wide to the imagination? Eighty years ago in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) Walter Benjamin wrote about the loss of presence in the work of art through its infinite mechanical reproduction. He used the experiential sensation of landscape as a descriptive analogy: We define the aura … as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer
afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. In Australia landscape has been subject to many interrogations. The landscape’s historical arc from the cartography of colonisation to the narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing Country has, in the 21st century, opened up myriad possibilities to artists. The same is true within the canon of printmaking, where new technologies are continually embraced into the printmaker’s repertoire creating unlimited options for the print artist.
American artist Jim Dine says it all when he refers to the intricacies and wonder of printmaking in A Printmakers document:
Sydney based Helen Mueller creates work that is a contemplation of our environment and its exploitation. She etches her plates by submerging them in sea water. In Canberra, G. W. Bot has devised a type of alphabet she calls ‘glyphs’, a system of marks made in the landscape to tell stories about place.
JUDITH MARTINEZ The Crossing 2016, multi-plate etching, 37.5 x 49 cm, produced in collaboration with Michael Kempson & the students at Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, specifically for this exhibition.
INTRODUCTION
The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre has joined the Print Council of Australia in its celebrations by curating a suite of print related exhibitions. As far as the eye can see includes Australian printmakers looking at their local landscapes. It highlights again that Australian printmaking is flourishing as can be seen by the quality and diversity of the prints in this exhibition, which brings together a small sample of what is currently being produced.
From the hinterland of the Northern Rivers, Gary Jolley recalls the visual, political and spiritual aspects of the site and expresses his concern for water security in the face of CSG mining. Further down the coast Rochelle Summerfield collages frolicking female figures into the landscape of the Clarence River, while Gary Shinfield’s muted woodblocks comment on the international impact of coal mining on the Hunter River region.
As far as the eye can see celebrates the contemporary topography of both landscape and printmaking. The exhibition challenges these doubly conventional themes through the work of twenty-two Australian artists whose approaches can be mapped conceptually, aesthetically or geographically. This latter approach is perhaps the most rewarding as it traces great variations of expression that in turn reflect the diversity of this country.
ROCHELLE SUMMERFIELD Lost 2016, pigment print on archival paper, 89 x 113 cm
To mark its 50th anniversary the Print Council of Australia coordinated a nationwide program of exhibitions, workshops and discussions on contemporary practices, signifying that Printmaking in Australia has moved on, is extraordinarily diverse, absorbs every new technology that comes along, while continuing to utilise the full gamut of old ones.
Aboriginal ancestral stories deeply rooted in the traditions of the sea and fishing. Judy Watson explores Heron Island from her Aboriginal perspective using drawings of found natural objects overlayed with scientific graphs of ocean acidification and coral bleaching.
With the insight of so many eyes and minds, the Australian landscape has never looked more dynamic.
Since I have been making prints, and looking at them for sixty years, I know what I am looking at, but I often wonder what I would think if I weren’t a printmaker. A print is not always easy to grasp at first glance. It takes some visual education to see the intricacies, and also to understand the layers and different techniques. This knowledge does not take away the joy of the first meeting. Even when you look at the simplest lithograph by Matisse, you wonder how its beauty was made, …. It is rewarding to know the complexities and various combinations of techniques. It can brighten your eyes (so to speak).
The Blue Mountains’ relationship to the plateau, the escarpment and the valley is recognised by its listing as a World Heritage National Park. For local Darug artist Chris Tobin Country is bound up with its Aboriginal significance as a place of belonging. Through his etchings he seeks to share some of the essential teachings from his ancestors. Other artists who have made the mountains home are also connected to the landscape in very tangible and lived ways. On steel plates, etched from being buried in the dirt, Locust Jones combines oily birds, trees, environmental pollution and land development with a barely decipherable stream of consciousness about the impacts of climate change. Judith Martinez has etched abstractions of the topography of the Blue Mountains. The valleys and hills have been dissected and layered
As far as the eye can see is certainly celebrating the Year of Print. Akky van Ogtrop President, Print Council of Australia
CHRIS TOBIN Australian Landscape (detail) 2016, open-bite etching, 37 x 49 cm, produced in collaboration with Michael Kempson & the students at Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, specifically for this exhibition.
over each other to offer a new interpretation of her immediate environment. Freedom Wilson immerses herself in the bush high above the Jamison Valley to draw Mt Solitary, Castle Head, the Ruined Castle and distant walls of the Kanangra Boyd. Julie Paterson connects her Scottish heritage with her life in the Blue Mountains through the act of looking at and recording the landscape around her. Janet Parker-Smith’s work is an extension of her fascination with humans; their connection with nature and their boundless capacity for reinvention. She explores the mingling of human and non-human species, serving as a reminder of how vulnerable we are to the destructive impact of our own actions. The artists from other parts of Australia have an equally deep connection to, and concern for, their unique landscapes. In Far North Queensland Daniel O’Shane shares his Torres Strait Island and
Jan Davis explores a story that underpins the early occupation of East Gippsland in Victoria in which a white woman was said to have been held captive by local Aboriginal people leading to fruitless searches and many Aboriginal deaths. Melbourne based Martin King describes the flight of the Murray-Darling black cormorant through multi-plate etchings. This simple motif refers to the essential fragility of our relationship with water, and the most ephemeral element of landscape – the air we breathe. Tasmanian artists Antonia Aitken and Raymond Arnold both explore the dramatic landscape of the World Heritage classified area that brushes up against the mining-scarred landscape surrounding Queenstown. Aitken’s work is constructed of drawn, carved and inked reclaimed Huon Pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii), sourced from the local sawmill, mimicking the profiles of the mountains and mounded tailings. Arnold’s etchings look at the terrain around Mt Lyell which was heavily impacted by late 19th and early 20th century mining. There is now evidence of plants re-colonising the area giving a sense of possibility and hope. In her series Bloom, Adelaide artist Olga Sankey references the natural world where ‘bloom’ is a literal flowering, particularly spectacular in
Australia’s desert regions following rain. Her works also refer to changes in the landscape of the human body after a significant physical or emotional event. In Western Australia Susanna Castleden records eighteen pauses on a tourist route north of Perth by taking rubbings of the road markings found at rest stops. Clyde McGill looks at narratives within the landscape – the events and stories from a given place that have been nurtured into being by the natural surroundings. From the Western Desert region Alice Nampitjinpa depicts her local stories, the rain running off the sand into the waterhole to sustain the traveller, the story of the porcupine hunting for food while being hunted itself. Dorothy Napangardi’s work depicts a major women’s ceremonial site known as Mina Mina, west of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory. The works recreate the rippling effect of the wind’s tracks in the sand hills where the ceremonies are performed. Napangardi emphasises the journey to Country through which a renewed rapport with the land takes place. From Aboriginal desert story-tellers and knowledge keepers, through the regional experience of World Heritage sites and journeys from city to country (or simply from place to place), to the urban printmaker’s challenge of speaking up in the face of climate change and mining – all the while staying in touch with the land they describe – the artists’ continued efforts to create a sense of “aura” are never far from sight. The common thread running through the exhibition is a deep respect for the land and a desire to continue sharing a meaningful relationship with it. To return to Benjamin, the twenty-two artists in As far as the eye can see reflect the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly. In an age now virtual, digital and mechanical, the need to remain connected to the natural world has never been more urgent. Rilka Oakley Curator, Blue Mountains City Art Gallery