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"Wanderers in the
Desert of the Real" 2008
To see 2008 Exhibition
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real
4-29 March 2008
please go to
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington, Sydney,
www.roslynoxley9.com.au
This continuing series brings together my cumulative interests from the past
decades, all underpinned by a consuming passion for the future of the landscape
we inhabit.
The industrial images, some re-workings from the 1980’s are taken up again in
recent encounters with Wallerawang Powerhouse and the tailings Dam at Cadia Gold
Mine, virtually on my door step in Central West New South Wales. The pristine
and resilient landscape always in my minds’ eye and the subject of many of my
landscape studies over the past decades is represented here in Tanami, Spinifex
Fires. It is juxtaposed with the industrial landscape and in turn the
inevitable, during this current period of heightened awareness of global
warming, Iceberg painting. These were gleaned in part from helicopter flights on
U-Tube around icebergs marooned off New Zealand and also from photographs taken
on the recent expedition my friend Tom Griffiths, took to Antarctica. I am
indebted to them.
The icebergs and glaciers are a powerful part of contemporary psyche, just as
they were during the Maunder Minimum of Brueghel’s 1550 era. Echoes of the
Chiliastes and then the late 19th century Millenialists’ fear of the industrial
era and the demise of civilisation are found in John Martin’s Macbeth, painted
with glacier as the central motif and also in the towering wave of his The
Deluge. JMW Turner associated lightning with the monuments of dead religions;
Thunderstorm over Paestum and was devoted to depictions of the sublime terror of
landscape; Mer de Glace. His perceptions about the scale and folly of the human
footprint, Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps foreshadow the
folly and impetuous vain glory of many inland Australian explorers. Many of my
paintings since the 1990’s have dwelt on the colonial misreading of our land. In
this series the wanderings of E. C. Warburton, emerging from the Great Sandy
Desert at night, half dead on his camel, blinded by the desert, carry resonances
with Hannibal dwarfed by the snowstorm in the Alps.
Mandy Martin
February 2008
Wanderers in the Desert of the
Real: Wallerawang Powerstation, 2009
Oil/Pigment/Linen 180 x 410 cms. courtesy Australian Galleries Melbourne
www.australiangalleries.com.au
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