worldwide backyard - Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

WORLDWIDE BACKYARD
LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY
3 MAY – 12 JULY 2014
Maud Sherwood, Macquarie Street from the gardens (across the park), 1934, wood engraving, 15.5 x 21.6c, CCWA 150
Susanna Castleden, Scrunched ball (Pacific Ocean), 2013, identical paper maps,
45 x 45 x 45 cm. © artist
WORLDWIDE BACKYARD
Throughout Western history there has been no definitive term to describe that green, natural place outside the city
that has outlasted the time it was defined. It has been variously called nature, the outdoors, the countryside, arcadia,
environment, site, biosphere, the view and landscape. As time grinds on these terms have been picked up, used
energetically, and then gotten snagged on distinct cultural movements like imperialism, tourism, geography or ecoprotest. Worldwide Backyard is a history of the currency of such terms, demonstrating the changing depiction of nature
over a century of Australian art, and how these changes reflect wider modes of appreciation, use and valuation.
The etymology of landscape, the most persistent of such terms, comes from landschaft, a German word emerging
around 14501. It referred to the area surrounding a property; visually, ‘all you see about you’. Though today it also denotes
physical location, landscape is a concept fused with seeing (and from its German origins, owning), with the cultural and
personal perspectives of the seer.
For example, in his 1684 manifesto Sacred Theory of the Earth2, Thomas Burnet declared that “The world is a mighty
ruin”. Its peaks and crevasses were scars incurred during the biblical flood, deforming what had been a smooth,
egg-shaped planet. Reports of British travellers requesting blindfolds to shield their eyes from disharmonious
mountain passes are recorded as late as the 1850s3. The medieval aristocracy also regarded the landscape as unfit for
contemplation, being a place of serfdom, toil, and rampant disease4. The Ancient Greeks held the Platonic view that the
true essence of nature only existed in the lands of the Gods. By keeping slaves, they withdrew from the actual landscape
to pursue a philosophical contemplation of nature5. Though Worldwide Backyard appears to resonate with more familiar
and updated attitudes, it is from this antiquated thread of Western thought that many images of the Australian landscape
are spun. Its contrasting views make clear the malleability of ‘landscape’.
However, that Worldwide Backyard contains no painting creates an alternative forum to the one in which Western
landscape history is generally discussed, circumventing dog-eared plot points about provincial romanticism and the
sublime. Rather, it dwells on the reproducibility and mobility of prints. Postcards, posters, brochures and souvenirs have
been historically dominated by landscape imagery, and their stylistic languages resonate throughout the exhibition.
Potts Point by Adelaide Perry, made in 1929, demonstrates an early 20th century fascination with international decorative
styles. The harbour at Potts Point is glimpsed from the artist’s perspective, perhaps on an evening stroll. The water
is traced in sinewy line and trees burst from the hillside with Beardsley-esque voluptuousness. Perry imagines the
riverbank and shrubbery as a potential image, scaping the “land into landscape”6. This practice echoes the work of
prolific early landscape architect Capability Brown, who sketched first then gardened accordingly. Although the subject is
Australia and the styling ‘modern’, the view is internationally picturesque. That is, a view worthy of becoming a picture,
endowed with quietude, order and charm.
Ethleen Palmer’s Kangaroos and Blackboy Tree also looks outwards, towards Japan. The artist has transformed a mob
of kangaroos and lone Xanthorrhea into a dynamic graphic - one half expects it is a folksy design for a Kangaroo-Brand
mustard. Though her motifs are also Australian, Palmer borrows the flat, pictorial composition of Japanese Ukiyo-e
woodcut printmaking. The Edo-period style characterized natural beauty as fleeting. As evident in Two Finches, this
approach helped Palmer to package Australian imagery into both ‘moments’, emulative of the Japanese masters she so
admired, and decorative ‘designs’, reflective of her background in commercial illustration.
While Palmer’s interests in Asia are aesthetic, Simryn Gill’s Forest depicts actual locations across Malaysia and Singapore
of personal significance, where untamed rainforest encroaches upon the man-made. Strips of text removed from books
are embedded onto the living forest. In this altered nature, written narratives germinate, thrive and decay as plants do. By
1996, the earlier Land Art movement was over. It had become linked with divergent discussions on masculinity, was poorly
documented and infrequently caused ecological damage. In moving on, Gill employs intervention and documentation two prominent hallmarks of post-modern artmaking. Forest is intimate, suggesting the careful temporality of the artist’s
presence and textual additions.
Ethleen Palmer, Palm leaves and shadows, 1959, linocut, 32 x 26.5 cm,
CCWA 133
Julia Church (for Another Planet Posters), Paradise lost and regained, 1987, screenprint, 76 x 102 cm, CCWA 645. © artist
A macro rather than micro perspective, Dorrit Black’s linocut Air Travel Over the Mountains renders a bird’s-eye vision
of undulating mountain ranges, an expensive proposition during the post-war era when commercial aviation was still
developing. Black studied Cubism in Paris and travelled widely in Australia to exhibit. The artist imagines the world below
as a flat, patterned surface: a print rather than a text. Like you or I might feel estranged from the land when using Google
Maps or bom.gov.au, Black omits the heat, smell and sounds of the hillside below. As geographer John Wylie remarks, “to
visualize is to set at a distance.”7
Today the media is flooded with cartographic images of distant places. To digest them, Susanna Castleden spins the
globe, drops her finger over one coordinate, and gets lost in it. Her Scrunched Ball works depict both the Pacific Ocean
and Great Sandy Desert as discreet worlds, monochrome and monoclimactic, as a child might imagine Mars. Map
symbols appear strewn over a potholed mantle (the antithesis of Burnet’s eggshell planet8). Out of order and context, they
become meaningless: on a desert planet, no desert is Greater or Sandier than another; when the whole world is ocean,
why name a sea? Castleden recognizes that a map is not a meta-landscape, uploaded from the real thing, but a language
we use to help us grasp, (or feign understanding of) a vast, complex and unknowable world.
In Dynamic Lifter, Kylie Wilkinson and Nat Thomas eulogise a project that brought nature into the city, as a Marrickville
community garden. The garden is a thumbnail in the print’s bottom corner, secondary to the handwritten aphorisms
of local gardeners. The garden itself, in a literal iteration of ‘worldwide backyard’, is a diorama. It miniaturizes a vast
industry of tending and reaping, and provides a philosophy of gardening and of ‘cultivation’ in which is covertly stored a
guide to living ethically, treading lightly and relishing nature’s delights.
Today, ‘Landscape’ is as adaptable to current cultural narratives as ever. Science appreciates the earth’s extreme age,
scale and improbability. Charles O’Rear’s Bliss, (the standard Windows XP wallpaper), is a reductive backdrop for work.
Pollution, peak oil and climate change have made nature seem finite, unstable. Wilderness is exalted. Travel breeds
longing. The ‘outdoors lifestyle’ is accessorized, and marketed as a salve for stress and obesity. Phobias of BPA, MSG,
and toxins prompt a quest for the natural - whether as ‘paleo’ diet, organic vegetable, makeup look or herbal medicine.
Importantly, an expanded awareness of the difficult history of modern Australia renders images of its land and vistas
similarly difficult, demonstrative always of a dialogue on community, ownership, endemicity and authenticity beyond their
aesthetic.
As local landscapes looking outward, each print in Worldwide Backyard dwells on more than just the land itself. In recent
decades, cultural geographers like John Wylie have all but settled the question of landscape, declaring it to be a cultural
phenomenon, rather than a location. That is, “landscapes are human, cultural and creative domains as well as, or even
rather than, natural or physical phenomena. The ‘world itself’ is thus constituted through images of the world.”9
Sheridan Coleman
Sheridan Coleman is an artist and arts writer based in Fremantle, Western Australia. She is currently undertaking an APA- and CUPSA- funded PhD at Curtin
University of Technology focussing on the implications of a more visible world landscape due to online satellite mapping tools, on the future of landscape art and
the way that we visualise distant locations.
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Wylie, John (2007) Landscape, Routledge, USA & Canada
Burnet, Thomas (1684) Sacred Theory of the Earth, Centaur Press Ltd, 1965, UK
Milne, L. & Milne, M (1963) The Mountains, Time-Life International Inc. Netherlands
Wamberg, Jacob (1999) ‘Abandoning Paradise: The Western Pictorial Paradigm Shift around 1420’, from Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to
Recycling, ed. David E. Nye, University of Massachusetts Press, USA
Wamberg, Jacob (1999) Ibid.
Andrews, Malcolm (1999) Landscape and Western Art, Oxford University Press Inc. USA
Wylie, John (2007) Ibid.
Burnet, Thomas (1684) Ibid.
Wylie, John (2007) Ibid.
Susanna Castleden, Bermuda Sunset Rottnest Sunrise, 2013, gesso on rag paper, 130 x 220 cm. © artist
LIST OF WORKS
Benchpress (Dan Bourke and Clare Wohlnick)
Ethleen Palmer
Avant–Garden, 2011, spiral bound risographed and photocopied publication, 21 x 14.8 cm. Courtesy of the Artists
Two finches, 1951, seriograph, 20.5 x 23.3cm, CCWA 155
Wendy Black (for Red Letter Posters)
Declare Antarctica a World Park, 1983, Screenprint, 51 x 76 cm, CCWA 645a
Dorrit Black
Air Travel: Over the Mountains, 1949, linocut, 18 x 20.6 cm. The University of
Western Australia Art Collection, University Senate Grant, 1984
Susanna Castleden
Bermuda Sunset Rottnest Sunrise, 2013, gesso on rag paper, 130 x 220 cm.
Courtesy of the Artist
Scrunched ball (Pacific Ocean), 2013, identical paper maps, 45 x 45 x 45 cm.
Courtesy of the Artist
Scrunched ball (Great Sandy Desert), 2013, identical paper maps, 45 x 45 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the Artist
Julia Church (for Another Planet Posters)
Paradise lost and regained, 1987, screenprint, 76 x 102 cm, CCWA 645
Simryn Gill
Forest, 1996 -98, silver gelatin photograph. 152 x 120 cm (detail: 3 works from
series of 16), The University of Western Australia Art Collection, University
Senate Grant, 2008
Kangaroos and Blackboy tree, c1950, seriograph, 28.5 x 34.3cm, The
University of Western Australia Art Collection, Anne Mendelson Bequest
Fund, 1990
Palm leaves and shadows, 1959, linocut, 32 x 26.5 cm, CCWA 133
Whilst every effort has been made to trace the Copyright holders, we would be grateful
for any information concerning Copyright of the images and we will withdraw them
immediately on Copyright holder’s request.
Adelaide Perry
Potts Point, 1929, lino cut, 16.5 x 21 cm, The University of Western Australia
Art Collection, Sir Claude Hotchin Bequest Fund, 1982
Maud Sherwood
Macquarie Street from the gardens (across the park), 1934, wood engraving,
15.5 x 21.6c, CCWA 150
Dianna Wells (for Another Planet Posters)
Kanaky, Free & Independent, 1988, screenprint, 76 x 60 cm, CCWA 645
Kylie Wilkinson and Nat Thomas
Dynamic Lifter, 2010, lithograph in yellow and black on acid-free 200gsm
cotton rag paper with deckle edge, 56 x 76 cm, CCWA 941
CURATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Gemma Weston, Curator of the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, would like to thank Susanna Castleden, Dan Bourke and Clare
Wohlnick for the generous loan of their work; Sheridan Coleman for her landscape expertise; Patrick Miller; Curator of the University
of Western Australia Art Collection Sally Quinn and all of the staff at the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Centre and the Lawrence Wilson Art
Gallery. Thanks also to Ted Snell, Director of the Cultural Precinct and John Cruthers, Curatorial Advisor to the Cruthers Collection of
Women’s Art for their continued support.
Cover image: Dorrit Black, Air Travel: Over the Mountains (detail), 1949, linocut, 18 x 20.6 cm. University of Western Australia Art Collection, University Senate Grant, 1984
Published by Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at The University of Western Australia, 2014. All rights reserved.
ISBN - 978 1 876793 50 0
CRUTHERS
COLLECTION
OF WOMEN’S ART
DR HAROLD SCHENBERG ART CENTRE
LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY
OPEN TUES - SAT 11AM - 5PM
THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, Australia 6009
P +61 (0)8 6488 3707 W www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au