Terrain: crossing landscape and country
FROM 3 DECEMBER 2011 TO 11 June 2012
Gallery 6
Free Admission
This display focuses on the significance of place for both Indigenous and
non-Indigenous artists. The word ‘terrain’ refers to both a physical place and a body of knowledge,
with this selection of works exploring the connections between European ideas of landscape and
Indigenous notions of country.
The crossings between these connections first became apparent in the mid-twentieth century.
While the pioneer Arrernte watercolourist Albert Namatjira was applying a Western landscape
tradition to depict his cultural connections to his ancestral country, the modern artist Margaret
Preston was borrowing designs from Aboriginal art and artefacts to create what she believed to be a
truly Australian form of art. Today, it is this heavy cultural quoting that Gordon Bennett
references in his series Home Décor (after M Preston) on display nearby. Bennett’s markings in turn
are formally echoed in Rosalie Gascoigne’s assemblage Tally I-IV, which presents as a poetic
terrain of found forms.
Even within Aboriginal art, expressions of country vary considerably. Rover Thomas’s
expansive and minimal Punmu – The Universe strikes a powerful contrast with Queenie McKenzie’s
confronting European frontier subject in Horso Creek Massacre (1880s).
The monumental drawing by Danie Mellor titled Postcards from the edge – In search of living
curiosities introduces a fresh perspective on landscape and country. This new acquisition showcases
the artist’s blending of influences drawn from different visual and cultural traditions. In a
single work he cross-references British willow ware ceramics and colonial landscape engraving with
his own Aboriginal country, as a comment on the complexity of our colonial history. This work finds
a formal companion in Fiona Hall’s finely sculpted Paradisus terrestris series, which touches on a
European sense of connection with the botanical aspects of our landscape.
detail: Danie Mellor, Australia, born 1971, Mamu, Ngagen, Ngajan peoples Atherton Tablelands,
Queensland, Postcards from the edge (in search of living curiosities) from the series Multiple
Histories, 2011, Canberra, mixed media on paper, 152.5 x 221.5 cm; d'Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund
2011, Courtesy of the artist. Represented by Caruana & Reid Fine Art, Sydney and Jan
Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
