I’m not surprised I’ve left the Earth door till last. The creation of this artwork meant a lot to me personally – it is the one that links to my adolescence in the Australian outback where the desire to understand more about our ancient continent began.

 

 

 

 

 

Australia has a proud tradition of landscape artists. From the paintings of indigenous people whose unique art was and still is inspired by a visceral connection to the place of their birth … to the famous and amateur artists of the last 200+ years. All endeavour to express visually something about the impact of the land upon humans.

Because of the very nature of this country – its colours, its harshness, its contours and landforms, its history and its 85 million-year-old memory, the usual Euro-British landscape formats of painting background, middle ground and foreground seems inadequate to express what it there. This is why many artists in Australia strive to understand and paint the landscape beyond what is visible to the human eye – like the work of British-born, now Australian artist John Wolseley.

John WOLSELEY, ‘Botanist’s camp’ lithograph

Wolseley’s work over the last twenty years has been “a search to discover how we dwell and move within landscape – a kind of meditation on how land is a dynamic system of which we are all a part”.

His work is compelling, intriguing and insightful – his draughtsmanship is superb. Go check out his art in books – especially works like A search for rare plants in the George Gill Ranges, NT 1982. It’s a large piece in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

In my Earth painting, you’ll find earth colours and fossils – yes, it was in the outback where, as a kid, I found my first, small, fossil pieces. It’s where I set my first children’s novel, Secrets of Eromanga, an adventure set on a dinosaur fossil dig.

Across the top section of Earth, are several layers of contour lines. They’re not actually drawn lines – they’re the tiny, written, line of words land is memory memory is land land is memory memory is land – like a mantra, I guess.

Layered into the glazed paint is a piece of rice-paper printed with musician, Paul Kelly‘s song, This Land is Mine / This Land is Me from the tragic, brilliant movie, One Night the Moon. It expresses lyrically and harmonically, the root of racial misunderstanding in Australia with regard to ‘ownership’ of land – the white settler who buys and owns his block of land and the Indigenous tracker who is connected to that land by birth. In the movie, set in the early 1900s, the white outback settler, played by Paul Kelly refuses to allow the local Aboriginal people back on his block. When his young daughter ‘follows’ the moon into the desert, the settler spurns the offered help of the black tracker who could have found his daughter easily.

I won’t tell you the whole story in case you see it – every Australian who cares about our country should see it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and seeing the past four days of my art work. If you’re ever in Brisbane, ring The Gap High School Library and ask if you can see the Element Doors – no longer in their original places as real, everyday doors but at least they’re still there.

All images are copyrighted. If you would like to use them for educational purposes, please acknowledge them and contact me first for permission.
(c) Sheryl Gwyther 2011