Mandy Martin. Painting 1981 – 2009

Mandy Martin Painting 1981–2009

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Mandy Martin. Painting 1981 – 2009 Mandy Martin’s art has always been thematically concerned with commenting on the environment and those issues which impacted on it. She rose to prominence in the late 1970s in Adelaide through her graphic work which was concerned with a range of socio-political themes and with issues related to the views and platform of the Progressive Art Movement (centred round Flinders University) and the Women’s Art Movement (1). The strength of her commitment to the causes she championed was given pictorial equivalent in the incisive imagery and technical accomplishment she brought to the images she made. Indeed, the power of Martin’s work was such that a poster by her depicting Viet Cong women parading past a giant Coke bottle was used in the first issue (January 1977) of the landmark New York-based feminist magazine Heresies (2).

In 1978 Martin moved to Canberra and the overtly political messages of the Adelaide work were softened (although the political remained present). Her explorations of suburban Queanbeyan and the isolation of migrant women living there were more personal but still retained strong messages about these women’s marginalization in their new country. Related to these Martin began looking at buildings (houses, warehouses, factories) and the accompanying sense of alienation and isolation that these unpeopled structures symbolised. Her imagery was particularly informed by the industrial buildings of Fyshwick in Canberra and nearby Queanbeyan, but also by the larger and more topographically obtrusive structures on the outskirts of Goulburn, viewed regularly on the artist’s frequent visits to Sydney. Humans are absent from the places depicted and a sense of alienation is clearly

conveyed. It is with this series of works, first exhibited in 1981, that this discussion of Mandy Martin’s painted oeuvre begins (3).

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw an international resurgence in painting as the dominant mode of visual arts practice. The 1970s had been a period in which multiple art forms existed in parallel.

Artists in the 1970s saw no need to conform to the old hierarchies which saw painting, sculpture and graphic art as the most widely practiced (and exhibited and purchased) art forms. Artists used film, video, performance, documentation, photography, texts and any other alternative strategies they wished in their attempts to find new definitions for art (4). Painting was not dead but its vitality and relevance were in question.

Whilst the above multiplicity of expressions characterised the majority of the 1970s, the end of that decade saw the emergence of a broad and encompassing pictorial phenomenon which reasserted the primacy of painting. This phenomenon manifested itself more or less across the Western world but with particular enthusiasm in Italy, France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom (5). Artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Rainer Fetting, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, Susan Rothenberg, Alan Charlton and Ken Kiff are just a few of the many who soared into the international forefront of the New Painting”. Australia was able to view works by many of the artists associated with painting’s revived status through the Biennales of Sydney which from 1982 became one of the many contemporary extravaganzas that sprang up all over the world to exhort and push the

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Factory 2 (Sawtooth), 1981 acrylic, oil/canvas 120 x 165 cm Collection: The Artist

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power of the new painting. It is difficult to characterise or put a single stylistic language on the latter but it would be fair to say that there was a general reclamation of the central position for vigorous painterly execution, highly evocative imagery and aggressive, confident physical form; all characteristics of an Expressionist mode of painting.

The Expressionist impulse seemed to strike a chord with a number of young Australian artists including along with Martin, Peter Booth, Davida Allen, David Larwill, Jan Murray, and Jenny Watson. Australian art curators very quickly embraced the works of the former and others and included them in major survey exhibitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1983 (6).

Factory 2 (Sawtooth) and Co-op 1 (both 1981) were exhibited at the Powell Street Gallery in Melbourne in 1981.These works clearly evince Martin’s embracing of an expressionist aesthetic. The stark formal geometries of the early Canberra works are continued. In Factory 2 (Sawtooth) the zigzags of the roofs of the serried rank of buildings act as a metaphor for the ineffable intrusion of industry into our lives, a constant and continuing process. The zigzags cut into and through the space creating a dynamic pictorial construct. The diagonal thrust of the buildings from middle left to upper right of the canvas, allied to the incremental increase in size of the individual units, impart a relentless repetition which signals the inexorability of industry’s intrusion into the environment. The strict geometries of this motif are strengthened by the diagonal of the road which pushes into the viewer’s space in an aggressive and forceful flow.

The greys and blacks of the buildings and the deserted road are contrasted against the yellow ochre of the sky. The latter plays an important thematic role in this painting and will continue to do so in the artist’s subsequent work. The warm yellow tones intimate possibilities for renewal but also in its stark tonal contrast with the built elements in the picture, the sky acts as a metaphor for the natural world. The conflict between nature (the sky) and culture (the built environment) establishes a theme that continues to inform Martin’s art. The artist’s formal use of contrasts is visually extremely effective. The surfaces are activated by the energetic brushmarks which move viewers across and through the surface but which are also constrained within the clearly marked boundaries of the (essentially) four structural areas of the painting. This creates a beautifully modulated visual tension which is a pictorial equivalent of the artist’s thematic interests.

In Co-op 1 Martin softens the use of the diagonal and offers a more rectalinear structural matrix. The buildings which comprise the cooperative are minimal geometric structures, the blank façade a mute reminder of industrial intrusion. Repetition of forms is again present, and again effectively conveys notions of the inexorable profusion of industry in the natural world. As in Factory 2 (Sawtooth) this painting is characterised by complex spatial and formal relationships. Space simultaneously recedes, drops, lunges, surrounds forms and opens the picture to the viewers’ space. This structural vitality is underscored by the agitated brushwork - paint collides with paint both laterally and through the layered surface. These works can truly be called

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ABOVE: Co-op 1, 1981 oil/canvas 120 x 180 cm Collection: Newcastle Region Art Gallery

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painterly in the manner which the expressive power of the oil medium is powerfully exhibited. Despite their richness and complexity, aesthetic unity is never lost, nor the realisation of the artist’s thematic concerns. The hard realities of the industrial world are given sombre beauty where the combination of the didactic and the pictorial is particularly effective.

Martin continued to work with the industrial building motif through the early 1980s. This culminated in the Powerhouse series (1983), of which Powerhouse 3 is exemplary. The (relatively) subdued and narrow palette of the earliest 1980s work (as above) is now expanded to embrace strong and highly declarative colours. Bright blues and high oranges are combined with the familiar, sombre tones of grey to produce an incredibly vital and compelling field of tonal oppositions and contradictions. The built forms subsume two-thirds of the picture plane and dominate with their threatening and obtrusive presence.

The geometry of the simple forms is modulated by references, not only to shapes used in, for example, the paintings from 1981 discussed above, but also to the architecture of imperialism and the building as enclosure, a place for control not accessible to anyone but the initiated.

The surfaces are once again covered with a mass of lively marks and continue the juxtaposition of strong structural forms with highly energised surfaces.

The brushstrokes in this work are celebratory of the activity of painting in their exuberance, number and contrasts with the hard

and ungiving presence of the buildings. The sky is threatening in its blackness but also pushes the pack of buildings forward, that thrust adroitly controlled by the sharp diagonal of orange pushing into the central mass from the central right-hand edge of the painting. This is a powerful and dramatic work assertive of the artist’s command of her technical skills and her understanding of the efficacy of art as a voice in the real world.

The harsh, unnatural colours of Powerhouse 3 are further exploited in Timeless land (1984). This painting exemplifies Martin’s unique understanding of her theme and its intended message and the means she has to express these. Her visual rhetoric is carefully calculated to reach, embrace and persuade her viewers. This landscape is the product of a number of strategies. It is a synthesis of topographies gathered from the artist’s memories and imagination. It is about place, rather than a place. The place as depicted has an other-worldly quality, a place that does not belong or that perhaps should not be. This is realised pictorially through the high-keyed palette of reds and yellows, with intrusive splashes of bright blue and solid greys of the distant industrial complex interspersed to break the aggressive éclat of the overriding colours.

The spatial structure is rich and complex. We stand in a massive area gouged out of the earth. The back edges of this excavation consist of a wall of diagonally disposed rectangles leaning against one another, their repetition reminiscent of the serried roofs of the paintings from

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Powerhouse 3, 1983 oil/canvas 152.4 x 223.6 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria

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1981 discussed above. These slope into the space and reinforce the flat horizontality of the central plane whilst simultaneously intimating the defiant backward thrust invested in that same plane. Also intimated and visually suggested is the gridded matrix for the ground level. A number of triangular tors acting as spatial pointers and determinants are interspersed across this grid, their shadows falling transversally towards the right-hand edge of the painting in a pattern which is given an exponentially more dramatic interpretation in the overwhelming presence of the formidable sky. The latter pushes up defiantly from behind the walls in a gesture that is at once aggressive and a plaintive cry. The contrasts so eloquently imbued in this painting - optimism/ pessimism, attraction/repulsion - give it a particular philosophical edge that is equalled by the force of the pictorialisation of the spatialising of memory and imagination.

Break holds within itself a foreboding and ominous beauty. Its dark buildings whose chimneys belch out smoke are framed by equally dark and threatening rhomboids at the lateral edges of the painting.

Comparisons arise with the “dark Satanic Mills “ of William Blake’s famous preface to Milton:a Poem (1808) in which the poet apparently refers to the destructive effects of the early Industrial Revolution on the relationship between man and nature. The use of literary sources as well as Romantic culture generally would become cumulatively influential in Martin’s art. The resonance of Blake’s words in Break rings true. This painting also showcases the artist’s shuttling between the domains of the personal (memory) and the public (collective, historical) to forge an imaginative belonging to the land depicted, even to the land depicted as spoiled, as a means to induce a responsiveness to the issues portrayed.

Other works related to the preceding include Pink Break (1984) and Break (1984). The former’s surface is incredibly mobile. The formal motifs occupy almost the whole of the picture plane and appear to surge up against one another in a battle for pictorial supremacy. Martin has imbued a sense of urgency, a feeling of the clash of unbounded forces. The (relative) simplification of the structure and the limitation on the number of motifs concentrates the energy in this work imparting an aesthetic tension that reveals the artist as seeking to depict the gaze that helps us makes sense of the relationship between society and land, between culture and nature, a relationship that she will continue to examine throughout her career.

From c.1985 to 1988 Martin continued to base her work on her observations of the Australian landscape, but her looking was tempered by research into the landscape of the Romantic period (c.1780 - c.1830), particularly as manifested in Great Britain. From 1985 to 1987 she made sustained investigations into that aspect of the Romantic landscape referred to as the Sublime. This had been enunciated most thoroughly by Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Briefly, Burke’s notion stressed the view that man was attracted by what he could not control or comprehend, by what was indefinable. In painting, this manifested itself in an art that was suggestive, rather than definitive.

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Timeless land, 1984 oil/canvas 173 x 244 cm Collection: Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery

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Martin’s research was a process of filtering influences to identify the core of her own art. Her aesthetic and philosophical interests remained the same. The removal, or at least the minimalizing of man-made elements in favour of a more pure landscape was not a negation of her earlier interest in the contrast/conflict between man and nature.

Rather her landscape reflections can be seen as wistful yet incisive parodies of the contrasts implied in the productions of the Romantic Sublime. Economically and technically the Romantic period was a time of enormous and rapid advancement. The correlation between economic and technological progress and sociological improvement was wide. The need for recourse to a place of spiritual repose was seen by the intellectuals of the time to be of paramount importance - hence for example, the Romantic poet’s need for isolation from Blake’s “dark, Satanic mills”.

In the paintings from this period Martin is not interested in imitative landscapes in the style of the Romantic Sublime (ultimately any imitative art becomes an art of estrangement). Her interest lies in adapting her experience of the Australian landscape to a set of limitations based on her understanding of an earlier historical formula, and keeping those limitations open to her aesthetic and thematic concerns. Martin’s parodies are not insubstantial. They are carefully considered critical images involving the complexities that characterize each Australian locale used, and the analysis and synthesis of her (pictorial and other) readings of the Sublime. For her the landscape is always seen holistically, as an amalgamation of disparate parts, rather than as a collection of isolated motifs.

Rapid Bay, limestone mining (1985) and Star-cut (1985) are small pictures which speak of the artist’s ability to observe and record a place.

They speak further of her ability to put into that place her experience of place generally and of earlier manifestations of theorising and depicting place. The landscape used is based on Martin’s observations of the Australian landscape. Both are richly allusive of 19th-Century British landscape art, yet both comment on the contemporary Australian environment. Martin is here also exhorting the value of the artist’s voice, the power of a unique language responding to both her immediate world and her wider cultural traditions.

Following on from the notionally Sublime works Martin moves into a less historically searching mode. She does not however, remove history from her sources. For her, the historical process is a continuous one. She uses historical and accompanying textual references to allow semantic shifts of meaning to be available to the viewer. Like the English Romantics, Martin sees nature as energetic and dynamic - an external equivalent to the human imagination. The artist’s imagination is able to confer unity on phenomena and, in so doing, to exemplify the sympathy and kinship of the human mind with those phenomena.

The reconciliation of opposites which is achieved visually is not totally drawn from the evidence of external reality but derives much of its force from the creative fervour of the artistic imagination.

Beyond Metropolis 3 (1985) is a mysteriously beautiful painting. It testifies to the artist’s use of the private becoming public (a device often encountered with Martin). Here, the strangely fluid surface has a poetic quality, a sort of non-definitive elasticity that captures the artist’s

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Pink break, 1984 oil/canvas 173 x 244 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria

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apprehension of the landscape depicted. For Martin the eye is not a passive lens in the Cartesian sense, but rather a tool to be employed in conjunction with the seeing intellect. Landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising our surroundings. It thus is subject to the vagaries of individual language, to the infiltration of individual style. Martin is comfortably aware of this and aware that a landscape’s meanings as depicted by the artist draw on the cultural codes of the artist who made it. Martin’s language upsets the earlier masculine hegemonies of landscape representation and introduces new iconographies and pictorial strategies to rearticulate the space of landscape as a locus of multiple and layered relationships.

E.Z. Works 1(1986) continues the artist’s analysis of the way the individual artist confronts the environment through the industrialised landscape. A similar fluidity to Beyond Metropolis 3 suffuses the surface with a veil-like layering that does not deny the solidity of the forms it covers. The industrial buildings dominate in an aggressive and even overpowering way. Their presence is obtrusive and dominating yet those characteristics are subverted by the implied enveloping softness of the colours and the manner in which they are applied. The sky, as always, is carefully articulated, maintaining a clear identity but never compositionally separate from the other elements in the painting.

On 1 March 1987 Martin presented her submission for a painting to be housed in the Main Committee Room of the new Parliament House in Canberra. Her submission was awarded the commission and the finished product, Red Ochre Cove (1988), is an important and very public image in Australian art history, a reflexive, and challenging, image of our national landscape (7). It is a very large painting (2.8 x 12.1 metres),

although its importance is not simply because of its size. It is a picture full of associations - making reference to Aboriginal culture, European settlement, the clash of cultures, and the clash of people and nature.

Nature, the only constant, is the key theme in our ability to link the various cultural representations which inhabit it. Life is about flux, but by using nature as a metaphor for the artist’s imagination, Martin could try to overcome the split between the subject and the object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious.

The large ellipse of the cove is bathed in golden light from the shaft cutting across the centre of the image. In the broadest terms, the shaft represents something spiritual, something beyond both man and nature - a force over which there is no control. The shaft is taken from Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia by H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York, May 9,1901 (known as “The Big Picture”) painted between September 1901 and March 1903, a painting that had to be referenced as part of the submission for the painting for the Main Committee Room (8). In Roberts’s Big Picture the great diagonal of light flooding the central axis symbolises the optimistic future to which the newly federated Australia could look. Roberts’s humanistic view of the world, full of hope and trust in the leaders of the new nation, has a salutary echo in Martin’s visionary spiritualism. While both pictures are suggestive of more than a political meaning, they are also clear articulations of the essential and ongoing dialogue between history and the present, the dialogue which informs our notions of identity about ourselves and our nation.

While working on the Parliament House commission, Martin continued to explore many of the ideas which informed Red Ochre Cove in other

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Break, 1984 oil/canvas 173 x 244 cm Collection: Parliament House Art Collection

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Rapid Bay limestone mihihgi, 1985 oil/canvas 61 x 91 cm Collection: Parliament House Art Collection

Star-cut (q.v.), 1985 oil/canvas 61 x 91 cm Collection: Broken Hill Regional

works. Break (1988) exemplifies this period. Landscape provides the impetus for this painting. At this time the artist’s vision of landscape was still one supplied through observation of the land and reading of art historical renderings of the landscape, specifically those of the Romantic Sublime as alluded to above, with the addition of 19th-Century American landscape painting as evinced in the heavily European Academic-influenced Hudson River School and the less traditional Luminists (9). Here this is visualised in a vast landscape of brooding cliffs, rich golden red skies and intrusive industrial buildings, heavily impastoed and punctuated by striking contrasts of light and

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dark. Martin’s landscape is concerned with the complexity of nature and the concomitant complexity of man’s relationship to nature. The presence of the industrial with the natural underscores this. Break is a powerful work that combines the imaginative and the real, the cultural and the natural, history and the present, in a beautiful visual statement whose message remains unerringly relevant.

Port Kembla, Outer Harbour (1989) is one of a series of works in which the presence of industry is the dominating visual motif. The imposition of technology on the landscape is disturbing but it is an imposition that creates haunting images of power and beauty. In Port Kembla, Outer

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Harbour blocks of colour are fused onto the surface in spare and emotive patterns not dissimilar to Hans Hofmann’s paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. The combination of exact geometries with an almost Baroque exuberance in the use of texture marks this picture as Martin’s own.

environmental intrusion. The actual and the metaphorical elide. The attraction of the painterly surface is a device to make viewers realise the subtle and seductive excursions of industry into nature, nature into art, art into nature, art into industry.

The artist’s spatial configurations have undergone radical shifts.

The combination of a markedly lateral organization of the industrial elements with the deeper space of the natural environment creates a formal equivalent to the thematic debate present in the picture. The clean sparseness of the buildings and associated structures cuts into the natural space, and the strident colours make for a nervous anxiety, an intimation of the upsetting of the balance between man and nature. The palette is rich and vibrant. The contrast between the built environment and the swirling forms of the sky is clear, and deliberate.

Realism and abstraction and their often blurred distinctions are raised, perhaps peripherally, but nevertheless apparent. Martin is an artist who questions not only the re-presentations of art history but also the theoretical basis of representation in a postmodern context generally.

Martin is not an artist who could be called idle. The sheer volume of her work attests to this. Another picture from 1991 shows her looking at the natural world and removing any references to human activity.

The pinch is forthrightly and overtly a painting whose subject-matter is nature. This is a tough painting in which the rough almost savage facturing of the surface expresses nature’s ineluctable might. Nature here is not static, it is part of a dynamic series of living processes. The visual restlessness which characterizes The pinch is symbolic of the seemingly infinite variety and breadth of nature. The rise and fall, advance and recession, and convexity and concavity of the rocky crags reinforce this.

In Yallourn Power Station (1991) the presence of nature is an implied one. Thematically the struggle between man and nature persists. The dominating presence of man (through the images of the power station) does not imply that the struggle is over nor that the winner is a fait accompli. This is a technically sophisticated work and revelatory of an artist who has mastered her craft and can concentrate on the business of her art. Visually and sensually this is a very satisfying work. The thick surfaces speak about the act of painting as much as they do about

This is not nature in a state of innocence but rather an example of sublimity in which we are reminded of our vulnerability. It is also exemplary of the artist making visual her readings on the Sublime and other 18th-Century aesthetic theories, and how in the application of these to places visited and known a valid contemporary enunciation of landscape can operate. Martin’s landscapes are the results of an accumulation of layered experiences that began in her childhood when her botanist father took the family on holidays which involved collecting, sketching and identifying floral specimens. This intimacy with the land is integral in her approach to painting the landscape.

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Beyond Metropolis 3, 1985 oil/canvas 173.3 x 220 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria

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Martin has been travelling extensively throughout outback Australia since the mid-1980s and regularly since the mid-1990s. The land has provided the source for some of her most vital and powerful visual statements and continues to provide inspiration to the present. Not that the land was not a fertile source in her earlier work, it was. But from c.1990 onwards the land, the environment and the cultural accretions of Aboriginal and European culture, have given the artist the materials to encode her own vision of the human condition and its relationship to the natural world. Martin’s art is a synthesis of the amalgamated experiences of these journeys of exploration and research of places and the depictions of (other) places made by other artists. An integral element of her exploration is the keeping of a visual diary - annotations at once detailed and general, of sites visited or viewed. This not unusual practice raises the interesting and relevant analogy of the artist as explorer.

Arguably all art involves a serach, an exploration of inner and outer worlds expressed through a multifarious variety of formal languages.

Martin’s art of the early 1990s and the actual physical processes attached to it, reiterates in her own idiom the topographical art of the 18th- and 19th-centuries. The 18th-century in particular (as discussed briefly above) was a period of immense intellectual and geographical growth (the latter the result of the many voyages of discovery carried out by the various imperial powers). The combination of these provided artists with rare opportunities to describe the real world as it was being discovered.

The explorer ventures into a world which is unknown and alien. The 18th-century explorer was often a scientist, somebody seeking truth and someone seeking to discover a tangible, real world teeming with the details and physical idiosyncrasies which individualize a place, which give a place its own recognizable identity.

The artists who accompanied these explorers became themselves explorers into a new aesthetic. For the most part these artists were schooled in the Picturesque philosophy of landscape painting which required a reorganization and synthesis of the basic elements found in nature filtered through the encapsulating imagination of the artist. The new world was a disconcerting confrontation. The scientist’s interest in natural phenomena involved a deliberate, factual study of the external particulars of place. The artistic process of the Picturesque is in a sense predicated against this approach by the artist. The combination of the two approaches resulted in an aesthetic of topography which emulated the habits of observation instilled in the scientist and broke down the barriers between 18th-century ideals of landscape as an imaginary (indeed theoretical) construct and the factual portrayal of an actual place.

The aesthetics of topography force the viewer to make sense of the unknown, to absorb the minutiae of scenery and to reflect on these to make sensible a continuous and continuing experience. The artist’s role is to capture in pictorial form something that is both fugitive and solid - the experience of discovery is a cursory one, the land discovered remains eternal. Martin’s work speaks of this aesthetic. Her wide

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E.Z. Works 1, 1986 oil/canvas 170 x 240 cm Collection: Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

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Red Ochre Cove Collection: Parliament House Art Collection

panoramas are populated with the physical details of place (place is indeed spelt out). Foregrounds act as visual stops before the viewer leaps into the remote landscape and its topographical constituents.

We enter the act of exploration through the artist’s visual disclosure of her own discovery. For Martin the exploring artist begins a voyage into the world encountered in her travels. It is only by entering that world that viewers can see demonstrated that art is concerned with an encounter with the self. The self externalized in an a real Australian landscape acts as our guide. The paintings discussed below may be records of particular places, but they express more than that place. The visualisation of the individual gives rise to notions of universality.

Reconstructed Narrative: Strzelecki Desert No.4 (1992) was first shown at the Ben Grady Gallery in Canberra in April-May of 1992. Martin presents an atmospheric world where order and regularity are not constants. The voyager into this world of shifting perspectives is confronted by new and old phenomena. The new in the form of the intrusive gas field, the old in the land which provides the reason for the introduction of the new. The sense of the layered history of the

landscape also relates to the 19th-century explorer/artist Ludwig Becker (1808-1861) who was part of the Burke and Wills expedition, and whose Eurocentric view of nature adds to the visual, textual and historical impetus. This is tempered by the artist’s experiences of the site depicted and the imperatives of her stylistic expression.

Lake Eyre (1992) is a handsome and engaging painting. The broad swathe of the sky impressed with the names of places encompassed in its sweep, is imbued with a lyrical rhythm accented by a graceful innuendo of swinging movement. The thickly painted ground, low on the horizon, acts as a powerful foil to the lightness and lyricism of the sky. Tonal and textural celestial and terrestrial contrasts become effective metaphors for nature (the sky) and culture (the land). The opposing directional impulses - lateral versus perspectival, advancing versus recessional - impart a tense structural play that is at once captivating and elusive.

O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N (1993) sees Martin as artist-explorer par excellence absorbing those details and minutiae which give a place its

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Break, 1988 oil/linen 280 x 455 cm Collection: Canberra Museum and Gallery

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Pt Kembla, Outer Harbour, 1989 oil/linen 76 x 175 cm Collection: The Artist

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topographical identity while simultaneously articulating her own act of discovery. The use of the low horizon imbues the impact of the immensity of the landscape. The highly evocative and vaporous sky, again redolent with suggestive power, insinuates notions of the eternal nature of the land and the ongoing processes which the artist expresses in pictorial form. The word oblivion so intentionally made plastic as O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N is spelled out as part of the landscape and a possibility for the latter’s future. Its insistent presence allied to the threatening black clouds suggests possibilities for destruction. This is a majestic image, ominous in its message and powerful in the portrayal of that message.

In 1997 Martin made 2 drawing trips to 2 ostensibly very different places – South-West Queensland and Italy. Both trips were related to her ongoing investigations into the relationship between practice and theory – between how one sees the world and articulates that visually, and how one relates that visualisation to readings of art, the history of art and readings of the story of place.

The first trip was an essay in contemplation – a way of dealing with Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Australia…(London,1848), and a way of accommodating that with her

own explorations of some of the territory (intellectual, historical and actual) that Surveyor-General Mitchell deals with in his perambulatory and embracing study.

Mitchell was a complex character. His Journal…reveals this. It is a book full of allusions, revelatory not only of his own learning (Mitchell was widely read in several languages and proficient in several branches of science), but of his self-conscious need to translate that learning into his professional life.

Amongst the most conspicuous references in the Journal…are those to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to those artists whom we now describe as Romantic or, at least, precursors of the Romantic, and in particular Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673).

For Martin, Mitchell’s literary and visual allusions provided not only a new and different way of dealing with the actualities of a harsh and often inhospitable environment, they implied real connections between (art) history and mythology and the deeper cultural connections with which she has continued to deal in her recent practice.

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Yallourn Power Station, 1991 oil/linen 180 x 244 cm Collection: The Artist

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The pinch, 1991 oil/canvas 57 x 157 cm Collection: The Artist

The density of Mitchell’s readings gave her the opportunity to widen the visual vocabulary which gives her work such breadth and force.

The need to explore (some of) Mitchell’s sources and to manifest those sources in her own work resulted in the second of her drawing trips.

Martin decided to physically follow Rosa’s 17 th-century journey from Rome to Ancona through the much pictorialised landscape of Umbria.

The contemporary unorthodoxy and extravagance of Salvator Rosa’s paintings may have pushed him to the cutting-edge of the art of his time. The loosely defined atmospheric melancholies and dark tonalities of this same work made him one of those artists who appealed to 18th-century English aesthetic taste and saw him (perhaps retrospectively) as one of the major precursors of Romanticism. Rosa’s art (either original or reproduced) became a sought-after necessity in

the collections of those that could afford it, or in the minds (like Mitchell’s) of those that considered it.

To add to the allusory network the late work (1652 – 1665) of the great French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665) becomes an important ingredient in Martin’s contemporary recipe. The changing cycles of nature and the concomitant grandeur and awe given to its manifestations, informed Poussin’s late creations. He used a layered mythology (and particularly that articulated by Ovid) to express the living processes ofv the real world.

For Poussin, nature as manifested in reality and in myth tells us about ourselves. For Martin, as for Poussin, the poetry of the personal and the universal are encapsulated in the expression of landscape – the personification of the order, power and (ultimate) balance of nature.

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Reconstructed Narrative Strzelecki Desert No4, 1992 oil/linen 60.5 x 137 cm Collection: The Artist

For Martin, the idea of text and subtext is an essential aspect of the way she views her environment. This does not define, but rather opens dialogues about the relationships between history, contemporaneity, visualisations and illustrations of history and mythology, and the overriding impact of the environment (the land) on how we, as Australians, should view the world.

The above concerns were articulated in Salvator Rosa Series I, shown at the Christine Abrahams Gallery in Melbourne in July/August 1998.

Peripateia (1998) is a densely beautiful painting. The title is a Greek word meaning a sudden change of circumstances or a reversal of fortune. It is used mostly in dramatic literature and signals a move from stability and happiness to destruction and downfall. References to the environment are hence quite appropriate and finds a fitting matrix in

Martin’s painting. The surface is thick and heavily textured and gives pictorial unity to the entire picture plane. The colours are limited to greens, browns and ochres yet within the limitations of this palette the artist has been able to draw on the full expressive potential of each. Despite a certain wildness in the overall image there is a feeling of contemplative calm. An untamed place perhaps but nevertheless a place instilled with possibilities for meditative thought.

This Eldorado of Pure Recognition and Desert of Pure Non-recognition (1998) is a large diptych (135 x 488cm). Martin has created an imaginative tour de force, a blockbuster image which sums up her art historical, historical, mythological and environmental interests.

Mitchell made many references to the fabled land of el Dorado and this work exemplifies Martin’s explorations and investigations.

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Lake Eyre, 1992 oil/linen 100 x 244 cm Collection: The Artist

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O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N, 1993 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 152 x 274 cm Collection: Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

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The marvellously grand and rugged terrains and tempestuous sky depicted in this painting hold reverberations of destructive power.

Man is not overtly present but the artist’s inscription of the work’s title across the whole of the bottom of the picture plane is a clear and assertive note of the creative personality and its almost alchemical role in the natural (and created) world.

Salvator Rosa Series II (Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, July/August 1999) highlights Martin’s continuing aesthetic of the literal and philosophical exploration of (art) history, mythology and the meaning and significance of place to the individual. The places visualised here are taken from further journeys made by the artist. Some are intimately familiar to her, others less so, but all are graced with that shock of recognition which the artist experienced on confrontation with these places. For Martin confrontation is not a simple physical action. It is a subtle and infinitely complex process of accumulative distillation involving the conceptual amalgamation of the cultural baggage which we all carry, the immediacy of emotional response and the appropriateness of the experiencing to the individual artist’s expressive needs.

This is further complicated by the fact that places for the artist do not necessarily exist geographically. A place as visualised by Martin may be predicated on an image produced by an artist two or three centuries earlier.

It is a product of the artist’s imagination despite possible overt visual reminders or clues to places that exist in reality and that have significance for her.

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Winrae at Dusk. 11 July, 1999 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 90 x 165 cm Collection: Guy Fitzhardinge, Manduramah

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In The Dream (1999) the figures are given a spectral, inchoate quality.

Visually they are the same as the environment from which they emerge. The rocky surfaces not only provide the scenic backdrop for the activities of the protagonists, they literally shape and give external appearance to these protagonists. Man is here part of nature and formed in (one of) nature’s images. This is a haunting picture, at once dramatically beautiful and philosophically disturbing.

For Martin the real environment and the depicted environment are in a constant state of dialogue. The artist’s active involvement with both reinforces for her the ability of each to penetrate the other. Her concerns lay (and still remain) with constructing landscapes on canvas (culture), with the land itself (nature) and with celebrating the particular qualities of each whilst simultaneously celebrating the transcendence of their innate dualism in her art.

In 1995 Martin was award a grant to undertake a project to produce an exhibition of paintings and drawings to tour the Murray-Darling Basin.

The resultant exhibition and publication Tracts: Back O’ Bourke (1996) was the first of three projects which combined historical, environmental, art historical and curatorial expertise with that of the artist (10).

The political dimension in her work remains/. Although her work may resonate with the intensity of her private sensibilities in relation to the land depicted, that intensity evokes very public statements about the ongoing degradation of the land. That this is visualised through her coercively seductive images reinforces the subtlety of her politicising and the validity of art as a political tool.

The works resulting from these projects were concerned with the landscape, both in actuality and in (art) history. Since indigenous occupation the natural environment has provided a fecund source for artistic production. In the late 1990s theoretical discussions of contemporary visual arts practice, landscape was somewhat marginalised. In fact, as Martin’s art avers, it remains a vital and viable genre whose variously textured experiences can provide not only aesthetic pleasure but also establish a dialectic between the individual and the wider environment. In viewing the history of our land as pictorialised by artists we place ourselves in a process in which we may begin to understand the character of contemporary subjective and societal identities.

The works discussed below (both from Watersheds) continue Martin’s documentation of ecologically fragile areas of inland Australia. In her earlier work the artist began keeping a visual diary, a programmatic recording of sites visited and an accumulation of empirical facts. These diaries act as aides-mémoire for the later translation onto canvas. They are not preliminary sketches but rather impulses for the imaginative journeys which result in the complex metaphors which are the real subjects of her paintings. The complexity of Martin’s metaphors is an abiding characteristic of her art. Hers is a multi-layered expression analytically drawing on all the elements alluded to above to evoke a final synthesis (or series of syntheses).

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This Eldorado of Pure Recognition a Desert of Pure Non-recognition, 1998 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 135 x 488 cm Collection: The Artist

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Peripateia, 1998 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 135 x 244 cm Collection: National Gallery of Vicotria

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The dream, 1999 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 135 x 244 cm Collection: The Artist

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Deluge over Mount Playfair, 1999 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 90 x 165 cm Private Collection, Canberra

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Winrae at dusk (1999) brilliantly evokes the enormous distances and unforgiving isolation of the Australian landscape in a beautifully nuanced image. The artist juxtaposes earth and sky yet intimates the necessity of their interrelationship and the fragility of that interrelationship. This is achieved pictorially by the extreme subtlety of the contrast and concurrent melding of the washes of yellow and blue which constitute the painting’s background. It is probably incorrect to use background in this particular context since in reality it is the subject of the work. The tree at the left provides the only visual (and topographical) relief in this landscape where the horizon and the sky merge in a shimmering expanse of light redolent of emptiness and despair, but emptiness and despair figured in beauty.

Deluge over Mt Playfair (1999) is a dramatic and forceful painting imbued with immense energy through striking contrasts. The land is being refreshed and replenished by the great curtains of rain and clouds. The individual episodes of nature are part of a continuum just as a work of art is the product of a larger cultural context. Martin has evoked in a stridently beautiful way the contiguities which exist between nature (the land) and culture (the landscape).

Martin’s interest in Salvator Rosa continued into 2000 with Salvator Rosa III (Christine Abraham’s Gallery, Melbourne, September/October 2000). By this time Rosa’s art had become integral to Martin’s practice.

The aesthetic appeal of his work for Martin is partially related to her interest in 18th- and 19th-century English landscape at and in particular notions of the Sublime. Rosa’s proto-Romantic scenery of isolation The Descent, 2000 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 244 x 180 cm Collection: The Artist

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and savage beauty struck a highly sympathetic chord with her. The unheard melodies in his landscapes of mood and the ability of pictorial components to address such abstract concepts were seen by Martin to offer myriad possibilities in her explorations of the relationships between nature and culture. The contemporary relevance for Martin, as an artist working with the Australian landscape was self-evident.

This exhibition investigated the influence of Rosa on the way that some 19th-century Australian artists described their environment. Martin’s process of investigation is complex. Conrad Martens (1801 – 1878) has provided impetus for her work. His deft visualisations of Sydney, for example, appealed, with their broad views offering the possibility of picturesque interpretation.

But it was a series of Martens’s drawings and watercolours of the Abercrombie Caves produced between 1843 and 1848 that were of more interest to Martin than his Sydney work.

It has been postulated that these were the first plein air works made in Australia. Such generalisations often hold a germ of truth. For Martin the possibility of truth was sufficient. The influence of Rosa on English artists was substantial. A professional like Martens would have almost certainly been familiar with Rosa’s work, and almost certainly through engravings rather than originals.

That Martens elected to travel to the (then) relatively isolated Abercrombie Caves fascinated Martin. She believes that this trip to the exotic Caves was prompted by his wishing to be part of an aesthetic which projected inner states onto the external world. The

La Gruta, 2002 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 224 x 180 cm Collection: Canberra Museum and Gallery

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preceding intimates the complexity of thought that characterises Martin’s approach to her art practice. It is not complex for the sake of complexity. It is complex because the artist’s need to understand why she is where she is demands complex thought processes. The landscape has triggered for her an ongoing course of acculturation that demands an interrogative and investigative procedure. The historic precedents of Rosa, Martens, Mitchell, et al, are melded with the actuality of place to produce images in which the persistence of cultural memory is more important than exactitude of topographical citation.

I think also an intimation of the failed relationship between man and nature. As in all the works in the various Salvator Rosa series discussed above, La Gruta (the ladder) draws on a number of art historical precedents all of which have been filtered through the eye and the intellect of the artist. The process of acculturation allied with the process of apprehension of (new) place imbues this work with a range of allusions, at once fugitive and blatant in their availability to viewers. This is an intimate place, strangely quiet and subtly inviting.

Martin’s painterly achievement is impressive in this richly layered and textured work.

The Descent (2000) is a conspicuous example of the above. This is a classic Romantic image – wild, inhospitable, isolated – nature untamed, but nature desired. The impossibility of definitive and unchanging representations of nature and culture is championed here. Martin’s present embraces history in its conscious investigation of the past.

Martin has been living in the central west of New South Wales outside Cowra for some years now. The environment there has prompted a number of projects and resulted in some of her major later works.

Home Ground 3 (2004) is one of these. It is a large painting (183 x 405cm) and a gentle but incisive reminder of the balance between Aboriginal knowledge and ownership of the land and Eurocentric notions of ownership. It is about values and how the interchange of these can result in more considered strategies for dealing with and caring for the land and for acknowledging the views of all communities who inhabit our country. It is also about the power of art to create beautiful and resolved aesthetic statements in ways that embrace us all.

La Gruta (2002) was shown in April/May 2002 in Mandy Martin: Peripecia. The Salvator Rosa Series at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery.

This work resulted from the artist’s trip to Mexico in 2001 and continues the quest for the meaning and significance of place. It is exemplary of the artist’s research that Mexico should be included in her travels and exemplary of her concern for the environment and man’s mistreatment of the environment.

The title of the exhibition – Peripecia – is same word we saw earlier in a Greek incarnation (peripateia) and means vicissitudes or setbacks.

It is a reference to the degradation of the land inflicted by man and

The artist has limited her palette to browns, reds and ochres. She has incorporated real ochres and natural pigments into her colours to more fully realise the connection she feels between the land she is depicting and her art, as well as indicating respect for the original owners of this land. The hills are voluptuous in the sweep of the

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Home Ground 3, 2004 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 183 x 405 cm Collection: The Artist

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Sandhill Camp, Ethabuka, Simpson Desert, 2007 ochre, pigment, acrylic/canvas 100 x100 cm (25 mm spacing) Collection: The Artist

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Ocean Bore, Craven’s Peak Reserve, Simpson Desert, 2008 ochre, pigment, acrylic/canvas 100 x 100 cm (25 mm spacing) Collection: The Artist

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curves, and the lyrical structural rhythms she has invested in them allow for allusions to the female form. This is a landscape loved and respected.

Martin’s art has many layers and she continues to explore her environment in tandem with a range of experts so as to more fully express her concerns and her attachment to the places she paints.

Sandhill Camp, Ethabuka, Simpson Desert (2007) and Ocean Bore, Craven’s Peak Reserve, Simpson Desert (2007) are works produced during her ongoing series of environmental projects (11).

further band of sky, this time a more threatening bruised yellowblack. The sea is dark and menacing, as indeed is the berg with only a small part of its mass visible above the surface. References to global warming are of course overt. References to a range of art historical exemplars are also present but these are subsumed in the force of the artist’s own stylistic language, a language uniquely and absolutely her own. In Iceberg the elision of form and content is exquisitely achieved.

In March 2008 Martin presented Wanderers in the Desert of the Real at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. This was a show of grand painterly paintings, richly textured and conceptually forceful. Many of the paintings are dark and brooding but they are also magnificent in the eloquence of their visual and thematic statements.

Tanami Spinifex fires (2008) is a summation picture in its drawing together of the concerns found in Martin’s landscape studies over the past decades. She depicts a visually and actually dramatic moment – the desert after fire – a time of loss and simultaneous regeneration. She captures the beautiful infinity of the Australian landscape with spare and simple means which are equivalents of the sparseness of the desert terrain. Man’s ongoing despoliation is figured in the termite mounds which are placed through the topography like mute sentinels, blind witnesses to the powers of nature. The land depicted is a land of optimism and resilience.

The terrible beauty that is the aftermath of the desert fire is the precursor to growth.

Iceberg (2008) is an important painting. It is important as a work of art because it shows the artist at her mature best fully in control of the means she needs to best depict the themes and concepts she so passionately espouses. It is an incredibly powerful image.

The iceberg floats in solitary isolation in a deep black sea. The berg is silhouetted against a band of golden-white sky and juts into a

Following this exhibition Martin has continued to explore and expand on the pictorial and thematic issues that were so strongly visualised in Wanderers in the Desert of the Real .The titles of the latest works discussed here is each prefaced by Wanderers in the Desert of the Real. For the most part the palette in these has been reduced to tonal blacks and greys. Size ranges from small

Both these works exemplify the artist as scientist in the way they present us with very real studies of the flora of places visited. They also impress with the artist’s ability to imbue the microcosm into the macrocosm. They are delightful.

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Iceberg, 2007 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 270 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Tanami spinifex fires, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 270 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Powerhouse 3, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Powerhouse 4, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, 2007 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Wallerawang Powerstation, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 410 cm (25 mm spacing) Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: After Friedrich, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: After Stephenson, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Aftermath, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: “Rain-blur”, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Iceberg, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Two Figures, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

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(30 x 40cm) to massive (180 x 410 cm). Scale does not suffer in reduction nor is it lost in immensity. Wallerawang Powerstation (2009) is a physically large and imposing painting. Martin has used a triptych format that resonates with Renaissance altarpieces and in the selection of this format one could read an ironic comment on the place of industry in the contemporary world (the factory becomes the cathedral ?). The lateral panels are filled with the towers of the powerstation belching out smoke into the grim and sickly sky. These are menacing both in their activity and in their pictorial supremacy within the confines of the panel. The central panel has a figure moving away from a wall of falling dust and muck. The figure is tiny and totally overwhelmed by his surroundings. His vulnerability is visualised by his shadowlike presentation and by his physical stature compared to the behemoths of the towers.

Martin’s choice of palette is extremely effective and imparts a sort of documentary-like timbre to the overall image. While this is a dark painting and calls to mind Martin’s 18th- and 19th-century predecessors – J.M.W. Turner and John Martin,for example – it is also a powerful and commanding image that offers no solace but expresses the powerful relevance of art to comment on our world.

After Friedrich (2009) is a small (40 x 30 cm) painting. The central figure is cited from a painting by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840). The figure with his back to us contemplates a boiling surf and stormy sky – man contemplating nature. The pairing of opposites – action versus contemplation – is particularly effective and in a sense sums up the artist’s concerns that have been accumulating since the early 1980s. For Martin the present is always conditioned by history.

Her present examines the real world of our natural environment through the eyes and minds of those who preceded her and through her own highly sensitive faculties. Martin’s work continues her involvement with the environment and man’s continued interpolation into the environment. The overlaying of this with an informed web of cultural history and visual and literary allusion makes a significant pictorial statement. Martin’s researches and the products of that research continue to provoke and seduce in the forthrightness and aesthetic power of the issues raised and their expression in her art.

Peter Haynes Director ACT Museums and Galleries May 2009

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Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Termite mounds, Diamantina Road, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: Termite mounds, Fitzroy Crossing Road, 2007 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne

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Notes:

1. For a concise summary of this period see Carroll, Alison Graven Images in the Promised Land: A History of Printmaking in South Australia Art Gallery of South Australia, 1981; Roger Butler’s survey of Australian Posters, The street as art galleries – walls sometimes speak: Poster Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, 1993, is also useful.

2. Smith, Terry in Smith, B. & Smith, T. Australian Painting 1788 – 1990 Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991, p.490 3. Martin continued her printmaking practice both as a teacher, at the (then) Canberra School of Art (1978 – 2003), and as an artist, alongside her painting career, the latter certainly her dominant practice from the mod-1980s.

4. See Cork, Richard Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003, for an invigorating if subjective account of this period.

5. For the purposes of this discussion it is sufficient to cite the following exhibitions/publications: A New Spirit in Painting (Royal Academy, London, 1981); Zeitgeist (Berlin, 1982); Godfrey, Tony The New Image. Painting in the 1980s (Phaidon, London, 1986)

6. Recent Australian Painting 1970 – 1983 curated by Ron Radford at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Vox Pop. Into the Eighties curated by Robert Lindsay for the National Gallery of Victoria.

7.

op.cit. 2, p.546

8. For a full discussion of the relationship between these 2 paintings see Haynes, P. “Tom Roberts and Mandy Martin: From the Big Picture to Red Ochre Cove” in Headon, David & Williams, John (ed’s) Makers of Miracles. The Cast of the Federation Story, Melbourne University Press, 2000, pp212 – 220.

9.

arbara Novak’s Art and Culture. American Landscape Painting B 1825 to 1875, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, provides an excellent introduction to this field.

10.

he other two were Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego (1999) T and Inflows: The Channel Country (2001). T9

11.

hese landscape studies (and others) are from the series painted T in the artist’s visual chapter in Desert Channels. The Impulse to Conserve (forthcoming 2010).

Readers should note that not all works discussed in this essay will be displayed in the exhitition.

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MANDY MARTIN BIBLIOGRAPHY

1977

Heresies, No.1 Murphy, Bernice Project 18. Some Recent Art in Adelaide, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1979

McIntyre, Arthur “Mandy Martin – An Artist with Something to Say”Aspect, 4/1-2, Sydney

1980

Lindsay, Robert Survey 12. On Paper, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Symonds, M.J., Portley, C. & Phillips, R.E. The Visual Arts, Sydney

1981

Lindsay, Robert in Murphy, Bernice (ed) Australian Perspecta 1981, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Cramer, Sue “Vox Pop”, Art and Text, 12 and 13, Melbourne

Haynes, P. ”Mandy Martin. From the Sublime to the Industrial”, Art and Australia, Vol. 28/2, Summer

Bond, Tony Form-Image-Sign, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

Heller, Nancy G. Women Artists: An illustrated history Abbeville Press, New York

1991

Waldman, D. “Impressions of Australia”, Australian Visions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Smith,B with Smith, T. Australian Painting 1788-1990, Oxford University Press,Melbourne

Germaine, M. Artists and Galleries of Australia, Boolarong Publications, Sydney

Holloway, M “Bleak Romantic”, ibid.

Chanin, E. Australian Painting, Sydney

1985

Ewington, J. Heartland, Wollongong City Art Gallery

Drury,Nevill (ed) New Art Four, Craftsman House, Sydney

Lindsay, Robert Vox Pop: Into the Eighties, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

1984

Radford, Ron Spectres of Our Time, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide

1986

Haynes, P. Mandy Martin, Anima Gallery, Adelaide

1992

Conway, R. Obsession and Civilisation, Sydney

From the Bottom to the Top, Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, Sydney

Ewington, J. Triad, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide

1982

Haynes, Peter “Mandy Martin”, Canberra School of Art Staff Exhibition

1987

Marcon, Marco Invisible Cities, Praxis, Perth

Haynes, P. Artists from Canberra and Districts in the Parliament House Art Collection, Joint House Department, Parliament House, Canberra

Walsh, J. Urban Anxieties: Australian Drawings of the 1980s National Gallery of Australia

1993

Haynes, P. Recent Landscapes, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Sturgeon, Graeme The New Romantics, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney

1993

Contemporary Australian Women Artists, Craftsman House, Sydney

Haynes, P. Mandy Martin, Gallery 52, Perth

Mancun, A. Art Through Australian Eyes, Melbourne

1988

Barbour, J. “Mandy Martin’s Mural”, Art Monthly Australia, 8, Canberra

1994

Haynes, P. Mandy Martin. Recent Landscapes, St Louis and Washington, USA

1989

North, Ian Riding the Tiger, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Williams, D. & Simpson, C. Art Now – Issues in Contemporary Art Post – 1970, Sydney

1990

Holloway, M. “In the Boiler Room of Art: Mandy Martin, Painting and the Industrial Landscape”, Mandy Martin. Latrobe Valley Series, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell

Sullivan, G. Seeing Australia. Views of Artists and Writers, Sydney

1995

Hart, D. (ed) Identities: Art from Australia.

Contemporary Australian Art to Taiwan, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan

Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin”, ibid

Llewellyn, Kate” Mungo Dreaming “, The Australian, March

Buckner, R. Art and Design. Book 2, Sydney

Lindsay, R. The Shell Collection of Australian Art, Melbourne

Lynn, E. “Letter from Australia”, Art International, Vol.XXV/5-6

Carroll, A. Australian Screenprints 1982, Print Council of Australia, Melbourne

Waldmann, A. Project 39: Women’s Imprint, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1983

Sayers, Andrew Structures, Newcastle Region Art Gallery

Buckley, John Commentary: Mandy Martin, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Murphy, B & Parfenovics, J. (ed’s) Australian Perspecta 1983, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Mendelssohn, J. “Jenny Watson and Mandy Martin”, Art Network 10, Sydney

Carroll, A.” The Last Decades”, Graven Images in a Promised Land, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Haynes, P. “Canbrart”, Art Monthly Australia, 33, Canberra

Heathcote, C”Martin and Frank”, Art Monthly Australia, 33, Canberra

Radford, Ron Recent Australian Painting: A Survey 1970-83, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Desmond, M. “Canbrart”, A Selection of Works

by Artists from the ACT and Districts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Cranston, C.A. & Zeller, R. The littoral zone: Australian contexts and their writers, Rodopi Press, Amsterdam – New York, New York

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

2007

Sever, N. The Art of Mandy Martin, Primera Casa de la Imprenta de Los Americas, Mexico City, Mexico

Dickman, C., Lunney, D. & Burgin, S., Animals of Arid Australia. Out on their Own?, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Sydney.

Robin, L. & Smith, M. “Science in place and time: archaeology, ecology and environmental history”, ibid

Regel, W, & Köhler, H (eds.), ...hochgerűhmt, fast vergessen, neu gesehen.. Der italienische Maler und Poet Salvator Rosa, Studien zur Neubewertung, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, Germany

Zeller, R The Littoral Zone. Australian Contexts and their Writers. “Literature in the Arid Zone.”

Pp.70-92 by Lynch, T. Rodopi Press. AmsterdamNew York NY

Waterlow, N. Macquarie Bank Art Collection, Sydney

“Brave New Women”, The Weekend Australian, 5-6 November

Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: From Word to Place”, Salvator Rosa Series III

Haynes, P. “ Mandy Martin: The Continuing Narrative” in Haynes, P. et al, Tracts: Back O’Bourke, Canberra

2001

Voigt, A. & Drury, N. New Visions, New Perspectives, Craftsman House, Sydney Grishin, S. Australian Printmaking in 1990s, Craftsman House, Sydney

Judd, C. & Lawson, A. Auriferous. The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Haynes, Peter. “Mandy Martin: Ongoing Investigations”, Inflows: The Channel Country, Canberra

1996

“A life in service”, Portrait 18, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Curthoys, A. & McGrath, A. (eds). Writing Histories. Imagination and Narration, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne

Cater, M. Out of Line: 25 Years of Women’s Posters, Sydney

2005

McAuliffe, C. Art and Suburbia, Sydney

1997

Williams, D. Eyes on Australia. Talking About Art and Culture, Sydney

Green, E. North, I. & Rowan, M. Orbit, University of South Australia Art Museum,Adelaide

1998

Haynes, Rosslyn. Seeking the Centre: the Australian desert in literature, art and film.

Cambridge University Press, Melbourne

Muddiman, S. Imaging, Identity and Place, Grafton Regional Gallery

Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: Word and Place”, Salvator Rosa Series I

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne St James Guide to Contemporary Women Artists, St James Press, Massachusetts, USA

Tsokhas, K. Making a Nation State: Cultural Identity, Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History, Monash University Press, Melbourne

2007 Reflections. Canberra Museum and Gallery Collection. Canberra Museum and Gallery and the Cultural Facilities Corporation. 2008

Federation! But who makes the nation?, Museums and Galleries Foundation of NSW, Sydney

IMPRINT Summer 2007, Vol. 42, No. 4, p. 6

Allen, Traudi. Cross-Currents in Contemporary Australian Art, Craftsman House, Sydney

2008

Pakula, Karen “Open Gallery: Mandy Martin”, Sydney Morning Herald, 15-16/03/2008

2002

Bonyhady, T. & Griffiths, T Words for Country.

Landscape and Language in Australia, Uni. of NSW Press,Sydney

Cranmer, U. & Pearson, H. Landforms in Contemporary Art , Integrated Education Ltd, Whangaparaoa, New Zealand

Malouf, D. & Sever, N. Mandy Martin: Peripecia.

The Salvator Rosa Series, The ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

2009

Gray, A. Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Aereality. Essays On The World From Above.

Fox William L. Counterpoint Press. Berkeley 2009 Robin, L., Dickman, C., & Martin, M. (ed’s) desert Channels. The Impulse to Conserve (forthcoming 2010)

Sisley, A. & Davidson, D. Alchemy. The Cadia Gold Mine Art Project, Orange Regional Art Gallery

1999

Haynes, P. “Further Explorations”, in Martin, M. et al Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego, Canberra Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: Word and Place II”, Salvator Rosa Series II, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

2000

Griffiths, T. “Meanjin. Essaying the Truth” Haunted, vol. 59, no 1

Haynes, P. “Tom Roberts and Mandy Martin: From the Big Picture to the Red Ochre Cove”, Headon, D. Williams, J. (eds). Makers of Miracles. The Cast of the Federation Story, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Read, P. Belonging. Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne

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Wrtings by the artist 1980

“Artist’s Statement”, Survey 12: On Paper, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

1981

ibid (reprint), Australian Perspecta 1981, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1984

“Different Strokes”, Art and Text 14, Melbourne

1991

“Diary from the Centre”, Art Monthly Australia, November

1992

Reconstructed Narative, Strzelecki Desert: Homage to Ludwig Becker, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

1997

“Letter to Nick Jose” in Niall, B. & Thompson, J. (eds.). The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, Oxford University Press, Melbourne

1999

“An Artist’s Diary”, in Martin, M. et al Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego, Canberra

“ Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego”, in People and Rangelands: Procedings of the VIth International Rangeland Congress, Australia

“This El Dorado of pure recognition and desert of pure non-recognition”, in Hamblin, A. (ed).

Visions of Future Landscapes. Proceedings of 1999 Academy of Science Fenner Conference on the Environment, Bureau of Rural Sciences, Canberra

2001

“Introduction”, in Martin, M. et al

Inflows:The Channel Country, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra

“They Have a Faith to Move Mountains”, in Judd, C. & Lawson, A. Auriferous.The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

2002

“Artist’s Statement”, in Peripecia: The Salvator Rosa Series The ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

2003

Land$cape:Gold and Water, Canberra

2004

Martin, M. & Ryan, S. The Lachlan: Blue-Gold, Canberra

2005

Martin, M., Robin, L. & Smith, M. Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future. An environmental project about a significant cultural place, Canberra

2007

“Absence and Presence” in Potter, E., Mackinnon, A.,Mckenzie, S. & McKay, J.

Fresh Water. New Perspectives on Water in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne

MANDY MARTIN Biography

Mandy Martin, born 1952 in Adelaide, is a practising artist who has held more than 110 solo exhibitions in Australia, Mexico and the USA. She has exhibited widely in curated exhibitions in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, USA and Italy.

Her works are in many public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia and major state galleries and collections. In the USA she is represented in the Guggenheim Museum New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and many private collections.

She studied at the South Australian School of Art, 1972-75. She was a lecturer at the School of Art, Australian National University 1978 – 2003 and a Fellow of ANU 2003-06.

In 2009 Martin was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. She lives in the Cowra region, NSW.

1977 – 96 35 solo shows in Australia and America including: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney – 1983, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995 Anima Gallery, Adelaide: 1986, 1989, 1991 Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra: 1988, 1991, 1992 Christine Abrahams Gallery, Brisbane: 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 Michael Milburn Gallery, Brisbane: 1986, 1988, 1992 Missouri Botanical Garden and Austral Gallery, St Louis, USA: 1990, 1994 1997 – 98 Tracts: Back O’Bourke; Nolan Gallery, Canberra; Moree Regional Gallery; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery; Albury Regional Art Centre.

1999 – 00 Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego; Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery;Mildura Arts Centre; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery;Newcastle Region Art Gallery 2001 – 02 Inflows: the Channel Country; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Wagga Wagga Art Gallery; Albury Regional Art Centre;Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery Salvator Rosa series; Casa de la Primera Imprenta de los Americas, Festival Centro Historico Mexico City; Casa Gene Byron, Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato, Mexico, Perpecia: the Salvator Rosa series; The Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, Canberra;Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005

Strata: Desert of the Mind’s Eye. An exhibition of Ikuniji artists and Mandy Martin. Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs

2008

Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

1976 – 84 Numerous group exhibitions Selected group exhibitions from 1984 1984 Form-Image-Sign, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Aspects of the Landscape, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne Australian Visions, Guggenheim Museum, New York 1985 Heartland, Wollongong City Art Gallery (National tour)

International Triennale der Zeichnung, Kunsthalle, Nürnberg, Germany

1986

Monumental Drawings, Contemporary Art Society, Adelaide

Triad, Adelaide Festival

Painter Prints, 1986 Michelton Print Exhibition (National Tour)

Backlash, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

1987

Chaos, Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney

Urban Anxieties: Australian Drawings of the 1980’s National Gallery of Australia

1988

Drawing in Australia, National Gallery of Australia

1989

Prints in Australia, Pre-Settlement to Present National Gallery of Australia

1990

Canbrart: A selection of Works by Artists from the ACT and Districts, National Gallery of Australia

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1991

aGOG, Canberra Ten-to One Print, Print Project, Canberra (Touring)

Cancer Council – 1990 Collection. A Portfolio of Women Artists (Touring)

Indo Eco, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre (Touring)

The Four Elements – Dissonance, Lake Macquarie City Gallery (Touring)

1991

Transitional Times, The Print Council of Australia, 25th Anniversary Print Commission

1995

Hidden Treasures. Art in Corporate Collections, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

1999

Luoghi Del Corpo e Dello Spirito, Spoleto, Umbria, Italy

Eve-Olution, Newcastle Region Art Gallery

Suddenly the Lake Weereewa: Lake George, Canberra Museum And Gallery

Downland College Collection, Toowoomba Region Gallery

2000

Central Queensland Art Purchase, Rockhampton Art Gallery,

The Australian National University Staff Amenities Fund Donations to the Art Collection 1982-1994, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

Shell Collection of Contemporary Art, Melbourne and Sydney

Prelude: Selections from the Canberra Museum and Gallery Collection A Thousand Colours. Visual Art for Green ANU, ANU School Of Art

2001

Federation. Australian Art and Society 1901 – 2001, National Gallery of Australia;Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville;Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Uni. of WA, Perth;

Decade, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Auriferous. The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Reflecting Canberra, Canberra Museum and Gallery

First Showing, Cowra Regional Art Gallery

Landscape as Metaphor, Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery, Townsville;Rockhampton Art Gallery;Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery; Bond University, Gold Coast

The Best Face Value for Autumn, Wollongong City Gallery

1992

Works for 10 Square Wilderness, Linden Gallery, Melbourne

Women Hold up Half the Sky, National Gallery of Australia

Artists from Canberra and Districts in the Parliament House Art Collection, Parliament House, Canberra

Henri Worland Memorial 20th Anniversary Collection, Warrnambool Art Gallery

Australian Art 1940 – 1990 from the Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu Japan

Through Women’s Eyes: Australian Women Artists and War 1914 to 1990, Australian War Memorial, Canberra

1995

Ironside, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale and Casula, Powerhouse, Sydney

1993

Briefcase Project, Cairns Regional Gallery, Queensland

Poster Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia

Identities: Art from Australia, National Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan And Wollongong City Gallery

1994

Virtuosi, Youth Music Australia Print Portfolio, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Galleries, Sydney Prime Television Painting Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery (Touring)

The Qantas Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Save Albert Park 9 x 5 Invitations Exhibition, Robert Lindsay Gallery, Melbourne

1996

Prime Television Painting Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery (Touring)

ANU Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, (Touring)

Orbit, University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide

Imaging Identity and Place, Grafton Regional Gallery

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Federation! But Who Makes a Nation? Tweed River Regional Gallery; Albury Regional Arts Centre; Gosford Regional Gallery; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery;Broken Hill City Art Gallery; UTS Gallery, Sydney.

Alchemy. Cadia Hill Goldmine Art Project, Orange Regional Gallery

2002

Imaging Identity and Place, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; Goulburn Regional Art Gallery; Manly Art Gallery and Museum; Orange Regional Art Gallery; Bendigo Art Gallery;Albury Regional Art Centre;

Federation. Australian Art and Society 1901-2001, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston;

Landscape as Metaphor, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

20, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Sublime. 25 years of the Wesfarmers Collection. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Geraldton Regional Art Gallery; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Brisbane City Gallery;Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Cairns Regional Art Gallery; Bendigo Art Gallery; New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale.

Factor of Ten. A Future Worth Having.

School of Art Gallery, National Institute of the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra

Landscapes, Cowra Regional Art Gallery

Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Art Gallery

2006

The Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Australian Art in the National Gallery, National Gallery of Australia

Philanthropy Rules!, Orange Regional Art Gallery

Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002 National Gallery of Victoria

The Kilgour Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery,

2003

Land$cape: Gold & Water, Cowra Regional Art Gallery;Foyer Gallery, School of Art, ANU;Orange Regional Gallery

2007

Solander Survey, Solander Gallery, Canberra

Beyond Hill End, Cudgegong Gallery, Gulgong

Imaging Identity and Place, Tweed River Regional Art Gallery;Campbelltown City Art Gallery

Winter Solace: Simply Red, Cowra Regional Art Gallery

2004

National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

2008

The John McCaughey Memorial Prize 50 Years National Gallery of Victoria, Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne

Fleurieu Art Prize, Adelaide

2008

Fleurieu Heritage Art Exhibition, Adelaide

The Ecologies Project, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.

Alice Art Prize, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs

The Kilgour Prize, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery

Landmarks Cowra Regional Art Gallery

2005

Whatever happened to the revolution?

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

Solander Survey, Solander Gallery, Canberra

Beyond Hill End, Cudgegong Gallery, Gulgong, NSW

Watermarks. Reflections on the water history and culture of Orange and district, Orange Regional Art Gallery

Making a Place for herself. Women’s experiences of Landscapes and national parks, Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney; and touring National Park Visitor Centres throughout NSW in 2006 and 2007.

Landscape Now. Thirty-six Artists interpret the landscape. Solander Gallery, Canberra

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GRANTS since 1995

SELECTED MAJOR COLLECTIONS

1995

Art Gallery of New South Wales; Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Art Gallery of South Australia; Parliament House Collection, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Preston Institute; Artbank; Print Council of Australia; National Gallery of Australia; Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston; Banyule Art Collection, Victoria; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; Bendigo Art Gallery; R.M.I.T University Collection, Melbourne; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Riddoch Art Gallery, Mount Gambier; Fremantle Art Gallery; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum; Tamworth City Art Gallery; Griffith University, Brisbane; University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane; University of Melbourne Art Collection; La Trobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell; University of Southern Queensland; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; National Gallery of Victoria; Warrnambool Art Gallery; Wollongong City Gallery, Australian National University Art Collection; University of Canberra; Emerald Shire, Queensland; Central Queensland University; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Cowra Regional Art Gallery.

Environment Education Trust Grant, Minister for the Environment, New South Wales

2000

Main Funding Round ACT Arts Program Grant

2001

Arts ACT Creative Arts Fellowship

2002

Land & Water Australia, Community Fellowship

AWARDS Australian Representative in Paris (1982), New York (1984), Nürnberg (1985) 1983

John McCaughey Prize, National Gallery of Victoria

1985

Hugh Williamson Art Prize, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria

1990

Alice Prize, Alice Springs

MAJOR COMMISSIONS 1988

Parliament House, Canberra, Red Ochre Cove

1990

Australia Post Head Office, Adelaide, Gorge at Sunrise

1991

Santos, Adelaide

1993

BHP, Melbourne

1995

Coopers and Lybrand, Melbourne, Between Nature and Industry Lies Art

1995

Australian Opera Bollinger Dinner Plate Series, The Flying Dutchman

1996

Australian Opera 40th Anniversary Print Folio

1996

Mobil Circle of Excellence Annual Print

SELECTED PRIVATE COLLECTIONS THROUGHOUT AUSTRALIA AND U.S.A. A.G. Edwards and Sons, St Louis, Missouri; I.B.M.; Australia Post; Macquarie Bank; B.H.P.; Mark Twain Bank Shares, St. Louis Missouri: Blake Dawson Waldron; Price Waterhouse; Coopers & Lybrand; Santos; - C.R.A. Limited; Zoltek Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri; Dresdner Australia Limited; Mercantile Bank, St Louis; Smorgon Family Collection MacDonalds Collection; CRA and Rio KMPG.