LOUISE TASKER

Our culture of farming is often in conflict with native birdlife. Past practices of large scale clearing for agriculture threatens the survival of several black cockatoo species: Habitat loss resulting in fewer feeding trees, and competition for rare nesting hollows. We watch the flocks of calling birds, flying low over paddocks and fences, becoming smaller and fewer every year.

Many parrots and native birds peck and eat crops. Emus push through fences, their feathers caught in the barbs, spreading blackberry seeds. Gas guns, to scare, and damage mitigation licences, to shoot, have been a farmer’s option.

If we are to have any hope of maintaining a stable climate, there are hard limits to destroying the ecosystems that sustain us. We are trying to save the planet’s species, but we are also trying to save ourselves and the generations after by preserving the ecosystems that sustain us.

It’s hard changing the system when you’re still practising it. But this is one of our difficult tasks while living in the lag: Giving birth to a more sustainable farming culture.

Selecting horsehair (fibre from an introduced animal), fencing wire, and bullet casings, to represent farming practices since colonization, and juxtaposing them with emu and white tail black cockatoo feathers (sourced from an ethical licenced collection service), I seek to highlight this culture lag and its unsustainable practices.

Louise Tasker’s art is about relationships, with family, with work, with our environments, and the infinite cycles by which we live. These patterns, translated through technique or material, become rhythms that echo a perception, a feeling, an experience.

There are two facets to her practice, the casting and fabrication of recycled metals, and the use of natural found objects. Some of the works are evocative, some can be political…. yet all seek an alchemy between material, process and meaning.

After graduating from Curtin University with BA (Arts) Honours (First Class), Louise’s career highlights include: recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Studio Residency to Barcelona, winner of the Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group of Australia Concept Award, and Ozgold Award finalist. Louise has exhibited in Australia, England, Italy and Poland, and her work is included in the National Contemporary Wearables Collection.

Louise works from her studio in Smithbrook, Western Australia.

Borrowing from Sanskrit, sutra holds within its meaning the idea of a ‘sacred thread’. Central to the six-framed “sutra” is the idea of interconnectedness of all living entities and the importance of balance and harmony in the natural world. Visual threads formed by patterned motifs comprising of a myriad hand cuts and folds with sequences of colourwaves where gradated tones of gouache are rendered, move lyrically, connecting frame to frame. These directional foldouts pull the viewer into an intimate moment, vacillating side to side to experience the shimmering change of colours. These mellifluous motifs thread across visually organic indentations and stark monoprinted thallus-lichen shapes to evoke an intimately visceral landscape which celebrates and portrays the interconnectedness we have with our environment and how like lichens, we are symbiotic partners in this world. Each step in the process of making this work gave me a chance to recenter and find balance as each process from the monoprinting, cutting, folding and painting all stemmed from repetitive processes that brought in a sense of contemplation and meditation to the work. sutra is a work which quietly observes the terrestrial passing of time and how as agents of change, we can each play a part to enable a brighter future for us, and our children.

My foster grandfather was a line fisherman and fished only what he needed for the day’s meals. Spending summer vacation days with him as a young child, he would tell us kids stories and customs we needed to adhere to. Respect for the ecology and environment we live in was foremost in his teachings and stories and I carry these through into my adult life.

Arriving from Singapore in her early teens, Sarah was struck by the quality of the light here in Perth which contrasted with her formative experience of light bound by tropical lushness. Sarah’s work with gouache on paper is delicate and often ephemeral. Driven by observation, ensuing playful intuitive processes, and seduced by the infinite attributes of light and colour to the compositions, the resulting work can bring the idea of intimacy by slowing the eye, ephemerality in the gift of the moment and connection with the beauty of forms. Being raised in a Malay Chinese household and crossed between the Eastern and Western cultures, the experience has contributed unwittingly to an ongoing enquiry of connections.

Her work can be found in private and public collections such as the Kerry Stokes Art Collection, St John of God Art Collection and various shires or cities.

2023