Road to Other – Western Mountains

My ‘Road to Other – Western Mountains’ painting has been developed over five months and has ‘shape-shifted’ from a small plain air painted fragment of a rocky landscape to a larger swathe of colour and brush marks across a diptych format – from a depiction of random/erratic forms to a symbolic flow of environmental churn! Weather, fire, road infrastructure and mining impacts shaping country and leaving it’s bones i.e. the rock and the tree stumps exposed as symbolic elements within a graphic ossuary. Writers use brackets to add information to a sentence without changing it’s meaning and in the context of this ‘Artist’s Statement’ I see my painting exisiting within brackets in the larger story of Tasmanian (West Coast) art i.e. suspended somewhere between an explorer’s straining view of a dynamic indigenous landscape and an artist’s late work depicting a sovereign, albeit environmentally corrupted, ‘First Nations’ world.