Here is the Tasmanian landscape seen in fleeting roadside encounters with the sense of movement and change that can hits upon us in a road trip – through the blur, drag and run of paint.
“The landscapes of Tasmania’s Midlands and North-west glimpsed from the road are part of living and traveling in Tasmania. These paintings document my Tasmanian road trips from 2017 to 2021. In the early morning, in the evening, through storms, through torrential rain and through drought. I took photographs from the car to capture the sense of blur and movement. The landscapes were then created with thin layers of oil paint on smooth gesso board in a process more like watercolour than traditional oil painting. This has provided an unpredictable process for the interaction of the pigments and medium. Paintings have been soaked in paint then wiped back to the white luminous ground of the board.
This is the Tasmanian landscape seen through fleeting moments of roadside encounters. The paintings are about the road trip sense of movement and change that can hit upon us through the blur, drag and run of paint.
Growing up in the country I have always loved the meditative opportunity to enjoy the landscape when we had to drive somewhere. There is a peculiar pleasure in long-distance, cross-country driving through flat or rolling countryside. I am interested in the ‘slipperiness’ of moments that occur on a road trip when you feel you could step through the sky into another time or a parallel place. This is when your mind can unhitch from domesticity and professionalism and you can reflect on what has been here before and what is to come. The moment of the journey displaces the viewer from the day to day and increases the expansiveness of the mind.
In The lost art of daydreaming, Karina Churchill writes: “Often in the car, I would sit, observing mindlessly the passing features of the highway verge blurring into a timeless space of fawns, greys and gum trees. The sweet wonder of those junctures in consciousness came and went with each journey. 20 minute segues into another world. So familiar were the visuals on the outside of the car window that I moved inwards to conjure up something more captivating. Where did I go in those moments?…”
These landscapes invite the contemplation of the daydreamer. The glitches in time and space brought about by blur and movement, provide windows into the sublime of this landscape’s past.
Where were you last time I was here?”
– Phoebe Wood-Ingram
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Saturday 4 December 2021 – Saturday 29 January 2022
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