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| Star Artist - BRIGID COLE-ADAMS |
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| Artist's
Statement - DESIGNS ON THE LAND
Exhibition at Helen Maxwell Gallery Canberra ACT 18 May- 9 June 2002 When I began using landscape in screenprints in 1973 I did not intend it as a theme, but a backdrop, with interest centred on a human protagonist, absent from the image but engaging with the landscape, whose experience was the nub of the work. The grid format of these prints was intended as a sequence of moments in time describing movement towards a view, or, more correctly, towards open space and an absence of view. I was living in London at the time and missing the wide skyline of Australia. It interests me now that I conceptualised an open panorama as desirable because it lacked a "view". I was not then aware of Bernard Smith's influential book "European Vision and the South Pacific", but did recognise pictorial views as "other" to my own experience and therefore to be "English" and in some way confining. (1) I began undergraduate art studies in 1981 in the U.S.A. and subsequently concentrated on three- dimensional work in sculpture and installation, focussing on a construction technique of stretching a fabric or paper "skin" over cane or wire "bones", that drew, possibly, on remembered youthful anatomy dissections. These objects resembled natural forms and, to me, were Still Life - although I was aware in their display of wanting to evoke the spatial experience of browsing - walking around in circles, peering and examining. (2) In the l990's however, in a number of small installations, landscape became the subject. A large installation in the Drill Hall at Port Fairy, Underlay, combined the conceptual and sculptural, presenting the history of the town as layers of pattern on the floor beneath suspended skeletal forms.(3) During 1993 and 1999, I visited Malaysia on grants from Asialink. Malaysia's colonial landscape was disappearing, or being rearranged to suit that culture. Influenced by this, I began to look at Australia's contemporary colonial landscapes. I documented manicured exotic trees in front gardens in Canberra, more to record the absent, excluded, native plants than to memorialise the exotics, although, to be truthful, I aim attracted by the idiosyncrasy and sculptural presence of formal specimens. (4) Travelling outside Australia sharpens the eye to the visual patterns inherent in, or imposed on, our land. The eucalypt forests contrast with introduced plantings in a way that is distinctive to this continent. The uneasy juxtaposition of the patterns of the new and old landscapes is a ubiquitous visual marker of our colonial past. It is this aspect of the landscape that inspires my recent work. In these paintings I have drawn on formal horticulture and garden design to contrast the dream of the ordered landscape with the anarchic reality of the Australian bush. (5&6) Brigid Cole-Adams 2002 Selected
Biography & Exhibitions
1986
Postgraduate Diploma in Sculpture
Solo Exhibitions 2002
Colonial Dreaming
Group Exhibitions 20000
Vast
Awards
Collections
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[1] Untitled, 1973 Screenprint, 39x43cm
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