Landscape of Shards - artist Rosalie Gascoigne

Veteran artist Rosalie Gascoigne, now in her 80 summons the worn terrain of her native Australia from one side visually expansive assemblages of everyday materials.

Australia's predominant impact upon 20th-century international art has occurr in the last decade, with the global promotion and consumption of Aboriginal painting, which is nearly always a metaphor for landscape, for the ancestral earth. at the same time the landscape has also been a central and ongoing regard for Australia's nonindigenous painters, and it is the landscape which provides the central premise for the art of assemblagist Rosalie Gascoigne. granting it invokes elements of the sublime, Gascoigne's landscape does not perpetuate the romantic, outback mythologizing base in the antipodean paintings of Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd She studies what is shut up at hand rather than speculating upon the less familiar desert interior: "My country" she says, "is the eastern seaboard, Lake George and the Highlands. Land that is clean scoured by means of the sun and frost.... I regard with affection to roam around, to gaze and hear." Gascoigne does not depict landscape--she summon forths it abstractly with weathered materials, the couple natural and man-made, set forth in broad, orderly, lay open configurations. While her connection to the land is frequently articulated in terms which repercussion of sound those used by indigenous artists, her rapport with the landscape is meditative and emotional rather than cultural or historical.

Like the sweeping, expressionist interpretations of the land by dint of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who could be regarded as Gascoigne's Aboriginal counterpart in limits of age and standing in the Australian art world, Gascoigne's works alert her viewers to the infinite potential of the landscape as a source of spiritual inspiration. Together with artists similar as Louise Bourgeois and Kngwarreye, Gascoigne belongs to a small band of senior women artists who, late in their lives and without patent reference to the politics of race or sex have attracted major acclaim for mature work which brings to bear a lifetime's knowledge and personal experience.

Rosalie Gascoigne was born in novel Zealand in 1917, moved to Australia in the 1940 as a war bride and wearied the following couple of decades raising three children in the surrounding countryside and later in the ordered dullnes of suburban Canberra. She at no time attended art school, but at university studied and later taught Classical languages. Her art combines a sharp intuition and sensitivity to place with the intellectual and structural discipline of her academic studies. During the '60 she ground a creative outlet in the application of mind of Japanese flower arranging, becoming a highly acclaimed national ready in ikebana, but it was not until the early '70 that she began to use rest objects--mostly refuse from industrialized society--to create the evocative assemblages that have since established her as single of Australia's leading contemporary artists. She was almost 60 when she was discovered through the art world. To mark her 80th birthday, an exhibition of her work since the mid-1970s was organized by dint of the Art Gallery of fresh South Wales in Sydney. It was the largest overview to date of her work.

Gascoigne combines the conceptual rigor of a formalist author of poems with a vernacular minimalism that is distinctly her have a title to Straight parallel lines and gridded ultimate parts the form and arrangement dictated through spatial balance and the nature of her materials, are the focus of her practice. The lay the foundation of objects which are the primary constitutings of her work are typically make an incision in or broken into smaller pieces, on the contrary beyond that they are rarely altered. They range from used made of wood planks or slats, reflective road signs, sheets of corrugated iron and linoleum floor tiles to thistle stalks and wild swan feathers.

The nine-paneled wall piece titled cleanse Country is constructed from made of wood soft-drink crates sawn into narrow slats high hilled horizontally on plywood to form orderly vertical lines Over 13 feet wide, it dominated the novel exhibition and was also the centerpiece of the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1982 the same year the work was made. The weathered gray of the bare timber is interrupted by the agency of patches of faded sky ceruleans and golden yellows--colors that one time adorned the crates. The repetitive arrangement of roughly equal, horizontal uncompounded bodys not unlike a bank of Venetian blinds, summon forths the glimpses of sky and dappled sunlight which single sees in the Australian bush, while the vestiges of brand names and logo allude to the inextricable links between the pastoral and the industrial.

More directly suggestive of landscape are Gascoigne's many floor pieces, simple grid combination of parts to form a wholes that seem to offer the possibility of infinite extension. In an early work, The harvest I (1976), stalks of salsify are tightly massed upon a squarish rectangle of galvanized iron and held in a standing position through a length of chicken wire. Organic material of a different sort figures in the large-scale Pale Landscape (1977) an extensive grid of newspaper sheets, unrolled and laid edge to cutting side on the floor, each page methodically pierced through a row of long, slightly bowed white swan feathers. Inland Sea (1986) makes striking use of roughly square panels of painted, corrugated iron, irregularly bent, that have the appearance to undulate on their depressed wire pedestals.