Pedder Prime Cuts
I represent landscapes which reflect constructed qualities, somehow a product of human fabrication. I approach these landscapes through contemporary views, in this case a combination of digital mapping, photography, and memory. Canoeing on Lake Pedder in 2017 in the expanse of dark water, the almost black glassy depths and mountains held me in their beauty. A feeling of being absent from human clutter and noise settled on me, but the sudden recollection that this lake is a dam, tipped everything I was thinking on its side. This terrain consumed by Lake Pedder reveals its absences and loss, both beneath the lake’s dark depths, and the voids left in the fallible processes of digital mapping. Pedder’s distinctive white quartz beaches and deep submerged hues are made up of red, green and blue reflecting screen RGB colours of the digital world. A slightly downward view and use of a digital mapping view are important markers, offering a slight cool remove from the landscape, while enticing the view into the landscape unfolding into a broadening distance. The voids reveal a constructed concrete infinity, the diagonal checkerboard slices follow a top-down grid, prime cuts of a country cut up and sliced for consumption.
Piers Greville
2019, Glover Prize Winner
Oil and acrylic on board