Tasmanie et la Mer

My practice explores the connection between all living things and man’s subliminal relationship to the environment in a world increasingly impacted by climate change.

In 2013 using Tasmanian symbolic and historical themes, newspaper clippings and imagined imagery I created L’Homme et la Mer, a 2D Wunderkammer or ‘cabinet of curiosities’

The work explores the concept of the exotic, loss, power and historical displacement for the indigenous people and the potential marine loss for Tasmanian waters in a time of competing interests for its finite resources.

In 2019 distressed by the lack of action over climate change and the inevitable fate of a future of rising seas and loss to marine life, mainland species and forests due to rising temperatures I returned to the L’Homme et la Mer. Casting it’s symbolic imagery into a sea where past and present are re-imagined, re-naming it Tasmanie et La Mer.

Gabrielle Courtenay

2020

Acrylic, pigmented gesso on canvas panels