2 3
Mandy Martin. Painting 1981 – 2009
Factory 2 (Sawtooth), 1981 acrylic, oil/canvas
120 x 165 cm Collection: The Artist
Mandy Martin’s art has always been thematically concerned with
commenting on the environment and those issues which impacted
on it. She rose to prominence in the late 1970s in Adelaide through
her graphic work which was concerned with a range of socio-political
themes and with issues related to the views and platform of the
Progressive Art Movement (centred round Flinders University) and the
Women’s Art Movement (1). The strength of her commitment to the
causes she championed was given pictorial equivalent in the incisive
imagery and technical accomplishment she brought to the images she
made. Indeed, the power of Martin’s work was such that a poster by
her depicting Viet Cong women parading past a giant Coke bottle was
used in the first issue (January 1977) of the landmark New York-based
feminist magazine Heresies (2).
In 1978 Martin moved to Canberra and the overtly political messages
of the Adelaide work were softened (although the political remained
present). Her explorations of suburban Queanbeyan and the isolation
of migrant women living there were more personal but still retained
strong messages about these women’s marginalization in their new
country. Related to these Martin began looking at buildings (houses,
warehouses, factories) and the accompanying sense of alienation and
isolation that these unpeopled structures symbolised. Her imagery
was particularly informed by the industrial buildings of Fyshwick in
Canberra and nearby Queanbeyan, but also by the larger and more
topographically obtrusive structures on the outskirts of Goulburn,
viewed regularly on the artist’s frequent visits to Sydney. Humans are
absent from the places depicted and a sense of alienation is clearly
conveyed. It is with this series of works, first exhibited in 1981, that
this discussion of Mandy Martin’s painted oeuvre begins (3).
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw an international resurgence in
painting as the dominant mode of visual arts practice. The 1970s
had been a period in which multiple art forms existed in parallel.
Artists in the 1970s saw no need to conform to the old hierarchies
which saw painting, sculpture and graphic art as the most widely
practiced (and exhibited and purchased) art forms. Artists used film,
video, performance, documentation, photography, texts and any
other alternative strategies they wished in their attempts to find
new definitions for art (4). Painting was not dead but its vitality and
relevance were in question.
Whilst the above multiplicity of expressions characterised the majority
of the 1970s, the end of that decade saw the emergence of a broad and
encompassing pictorial phenomenon which reasserted the primacy
of painting. This phenomenon manifested itself more or less across
the Western world but with particular enthusiasm in Italy, France,
Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom (5). Artists such
as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Rainer Fetting, Anselm Kiefer,
Julian Schnabel, Susan Rothenberg, Alan Charlton and Ken Kiff are
just a few of the many who soared into the international forefront of
the New Painting”. Australia was able to view works by many of the
artists associated with painting’s revived status through the Biennales
of Sydney which from 1982 became one of the many contemporary
extravaganzas that sprang up all over the world to exhort and push the
4 5
ABOVE: Co-op 1, 1981 oil/canvas
120 x 180 cm Collection: Newcastle Region Art Gallery
power of the new painting. It is difficult to characterise or put a single
stylistic language on the latter but it would be fair to say that there
was a general reclamation of the central position for vigorous painterly
execution, highly evocative imagery and aggressive, confident physical
form; all characteristics of an Expressionist mode of painting.
The Expressionist impulse seemed to strike a chord with a number
of young Australian artists including along with Martin, Peter Booth,
Davida Allen, David Larwill, Jan Murray, and Jenny Watson. Australian
art curators very quickly embraced the works of the former and others
and included them in major survey exhibitions at the Art Gallery of
South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1983 (6).
Factory 2 (Sawtooth) and Co-op 1 (both 1981) were exhibited at the
Powell Street Gallery in Melbourne in 1981.These works clearly evince
Martin’s embracing of an expressionist aesthetic. The stark formal
geometries of the early Canberra works are continued. In Factory 2
(Sawtooth) the zigzags of the roofs of the serried rank of buildings act
as a metaphor for the ineffable intrusion of industry into our lives, a
constant and continuing process. The zigzags cut into and through
the space creating a dynamic pictorial construct. The diagonal thrust
of the buildings from middle left to upper right of the canvas, allied
to the incremental increase in size of the individual units, impart
a relentless repetition which signals the inexorability of industry’s
intrusion into the environment. The strict geometries of this motif
are strengthened by the diagonal of the road which pushes into the
viewer’s space in an aggressive and forceful flow.
The greys and blacks of the buildings and the deserted road are
contrasted against the yellow ochre of the sky. The latter plays an
important thematic role in this painting and will continue to do so in the
artist’s subsequent work. The warm yellow tones intimate possibilities
for renewal but also in its stark tonal contrast with the built elements
in the picture, the sky acts as a metaphor for the natural world. The
conflict between nature (the sky) and culture (the built environment)
establishes a theme that continues to inform Martin’s art. The artist’s
formal use of contrasts is visually extremely effective. The surfaces are
activated by the energetic brushmarks which move viewers across and
through the surface but which are also constrained within the clearly
marked boundaries of the (essentially) four structural areas of the
painting. This creates a beautifully modulated visual tension which
is a pictorial equivalent of the artist’s thematic interests.
In Co-op 1 Martin softens the use of the diagonal and offers a more
rectalinear structural matrix. The buildings which comprise the
cooperative are minimal geometric structures, the blank façade a mute
reminder of industrial intrusion. Repetition of forms is again present,
and again effectively conveys notions of the inexorable profusion of
industry in the natural world. As in Factory 2 (Sawtooth) this painting
is characterised by complex spatial and formal relationships. Space
simultaneously recedes, drops, lunges, surrounds forms and opens
the picture to the viewers’ space. This structural vitality is underscored
by the agitated brushwork - paint collides with paint both laterally and through the layered surface. These works can truly be called
6 7
Powerhouse 3, 1983 oil/canvas
152.4 x 223.6 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria
painterly in the manner which the expressive power of the oil medium
is powerfully exhibited. Despite their richness and complexity,
aesthetic unity is never lost, nor the realisation of the artist’s thematic
concerns. The hard realities of the industrial world are given sombre
beauty where the combination of the didactic and the pictorial is
particularly effective.
Martin continued to work with the industrial building motif through
the early 1980s. This culminated in the Powerhouse series (1983),
of which Powerhouse 3 is exemplary. The (relatively) subdued and
narrow palette of the earliest 1980s work (as above) is now expanded
to embrace strong and highly declarative colours. Bright blues and
high oranges are combined with the familiar, sombre tones of grey to
produce an incredibly vital and compelling field of tonal oppositions
and contradictions. The built forms subsume two-thirds of the picture
plane and dominate with their threatening and obtrusive presence.
The geometry of the simple forms is modulated by references, not
only to shapes used in, for example, the paintings from 1981 discussed
above, but also to the architecture of imperialism and the building as
enclosure, a place for control not accessible to anyone but the initiated.
The surfaces are once again covered with a mass of lively marks and
continue the juxtaposition of strong structural forms with highly
energised surfaces.
The brushstrokes in this work are celebratory of the activity of
painting in their exuberance, number and contrasts with the hard
and ungiving presence of the buildings. The sky is threatening in its
blackness but also pushes the pack of buildings forward, that thrust
adroitly controlled by the sharp diagonal of orange pushing into the
central mass from the central right-hand edge of the painting. This is a
powerful and dramatic work assertive of the artist’s command of her
technical skills and her understanding of the efficacy of art as a voice in
the real world.
The harsh, unnatural colours of Powerhouse 3 are further exploited
in Timeless land (1984). This painting exemplifies Martin’s unique
understanding of her theme and its intended message and the means
she has to express these. Her visual rhetoric is carefully calculated
to reach, embrace and persuade her viewers. This landscape is the
product of a number of strategies. It is a synthesis of topographies
gathered from the artist’s memories and imagination. It is about place,
rather than a place. The place as depicted has an other-worldly quality,
a place that does not belong or that perhaps should not be. This is
realised pictorially through the high-keyed palette of reds and yellows,
with intrusive splashes of bright blue and solid greys of the distant
industrial complex interspersed to break the aggressive éclat of the
overriding colours.
The spatial structure is rich and complex. We stand in a massive area
gouged out of the earth. The back edges of this excavation consist of
a wall of diagonally disposed rectangles leaning against one another,
their repetition reminiscent of the serried roofs of the paintings from
8 9
Timeless land, 1984oil/canvas
173 x 244 cm Collection: Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery
1981 discussed above. These slope into the space and reinforce the flat
horizontality of the central plane whilst simultaneously intimating the
defiant backward thrust invested in that same plane. Also intimated
and visually suggested is the gridded matrix for the ground level. A
number of triangular tors acting as spatial pointers and determinants
are interspersed across this grid, their shadows falling transversally
towards the right-hand edge of the painting in a pattern which is given
an exponentially more dramatic interpretation in the overwhelming
presence of the formidable sky. The latter pushes up defiantly from
behind the walls in a gesture that is at once aggressive and a plaintive
cry. The contrasts so eloquently imbued in this painting - optimism/
pessimism, attraction/repulsion - give it a particular philosophical edge
that is equalled by the force of the pictorialisation of the spatialising of
memory and imagination.
Other works related to the preceding include Pink Break (1984) and
Break (1984). The former’s surface is incredibly mobile. The formal
motifs occupy almost the whole of the picture plane and appear to
surge up against one another in a battle for pictorial supremacy. Martin
has imbued a sense of urgency, a feeling of the clash of unbounded
forces. The (relative) simplification of the structure and the limitation
on the number of motifs concentrates the energy in this work imparting
an aesthetic tension that reveals the artist as seeking to depict the gaze
that helps us makes sense of the relationship between society and land,
between culture and nature, a relationship that she will continue to
examine throughout her career.
Break holds within itself a foreboding and ominous beauty. Its dark
buildings whose chimneys belch out smoke are framed by equally
dark and threatening rhomboids at the lateral edges of the painting.
Comparisons arise with the “dark Satanic Mills “ of William Blake’s
famous preface to Milton:a Poem (1808) in which the poet apparently
refers to the destructive effects of the early Industrial Revolution on
the relationship between man and nature. The use of literary sources
as well as Romantic culture generally would become cumulatively
influential in Martin’s art. The resonance of Blake’s words in Break rings
true. This painting also showcases the artist’s shuttling between the
domains of the personal (memory) and the public (collective, historical)
to forge an imaginative belonging to the land depicted, even to the land
depicted as spoiled, as a means to induce a responsiveness to the
issues portrayed.
From c.1985 to 1988 Martin continued to base her work on her
observations of the Australian landscape, but her looking was
tempered by research into the landscape of the Romantic period
(c.1780 - c.1830), particularly as manifested in Great Britain. From
1985 to 1987 she made sustained investigations into that aspect of
the Romantic landscape referred to as the Sublime. This had been
enunciated most thoroughly by Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) in his A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757). Briefly, Burke’s notion stressed the view that man
was attracted by what he could not control or comprehend, by what
was indefinable. In painting, this manifested itself in an art that was
suggestive, rather than definitive.
10 11
Pink break, 1984 oil/canvas
173 x 244 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria
Martin’s research was a process of filtering influences to identify the
core of her own art. Her aesthetic and philosophical interests remained
the same. The removal, or at least the minimalizing of man-made
elements in favour of a more pure landscape was not a negation of
her earlier interest in the contrast/conflict between man and nature.
Rather her landscape reflections can be seen as wistful yet incisive
parodies of the contrasts implied in the productions of the Romantic
Sublime. Economically and technically the Romantic period was a
time of enormous and rapid advancement. The correlation between
economic and technological progress and sociological improvement
was wide. The need for recourse to a place of spiritual repose was seen
by the intellectuals of the time to be of paramount importance - hence
for example, the Romantic poet’s need for isolation from Blake’s “dark,
Satanic mills”.
In the paintings from this period Martin is not interested in imitative
landscapes in the style of the Romantic Sublime (ultimately any
imitative art becomes an art of estrangement). Her interest lies
in adapting her experience of the Australian landscape to a set of
limitations based on her understanding of an earlier historical formula,
and keeping those limitations open to her aesthetic and thematic
concerns. Martin’s parodies are not insubstantial. They are carefully
considered critical images involving the complexities that characterize
each Australian locale used, and the analysis and synthesis of her
(pictorial and other) readings of the Sublime. For her the landscape is
always seen holistically, as an amalgamation of disparate parts, rather
than as a collection of isolated motifs.
Rapid Bay, limestone mining (1985) and Star-cut (1985) are small
pictures which speak of the artist’s ability to observe and record a place.
They speak further of her ability to put into that place her experience
of place generally and of earlier manifestations of theorising and
depicting place. The landscape used is based on Martin’s observations
of the Australian landscape. Both are richly allusive of 19th-Century
British landscape art, yet both comment on the contemporary
Australian environment. Martin is here also exhorting the value of the
artist’s voice, the power of a unique language responding to both her
immediate world and her wider cultural traditions.
Following on from the notionally Sublime works Martin moves into
a less historically searching mode. She does not however, remove
history from her sources. For her, the historical process is a continuous
one. She uses historical and accompanying textual references to allow
semantic shifts of meaning to be available to the viewer. Like the
English Romantics, Martin sees nature as energetic and dynamic - an
external equivalent to the human imagination. The artist’s imagination
is able to confer unity on phenomena and, in so doing, to exemplify
the sympathy and kinship of the human mind with those phenomena.
The reconciliation of opposites which is achieved visually is not totally
drawn from the evidence of external reality but derives much of its
force from the creative fervour of the artistic imagination.
Beyond Metropolis 3 (1985) is a mysteriously beautiful painting. It
testifies to the artist’s use of the private becoming public (a device
often encountered with Martin). Here, the strangely fluid surface has a
poetic quality, a sort of non-definitive elasticity that captures the artist’s
12 13
Break, 1984oil/canvas
173 x 244 cm Collection: Parliament House Art Collection
apprehension of the landscape depicted. For Martin the eye is not a
passive lens in the Cartesian sense, but rather a tool to be employed
in conjunction with the seeing intellect. Landscape is a cultural
image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising our
surroundings. It thus is subject to the vagaries of individual language,
to the infiltration of individual style. Martin is comfortably aware of this
and aware that a landscape’s meanings as depicted by the artist draw on
the cultural codes of the artist who made it. Martin’s language upsets
the earlier masculine hegemonies of landscape representation and
introduces new iconographies and pictorial strategies to rearticulate the
space of landscape as a locus of multiple and layered relationships.
E.Z. Works 1(1986) continues the artist’s analysis of the way the
individual artist confronts the environment through the industrialised
landscape. A similar fluidity to Beyond Metropolis 3 suffuses the surface
with a veil-like layering that does not deny the solidity of the forms it
covers. The industrial buildings dominate in an aggressive and even
overpowering way. Their presence is obtrusive and dominating yet
those characteristics are subverted by the implied enveloping softness
of the colours and the manner in which they are applied. The sky, as
always, is carefully articulated, maintaining a clear identity but never
compositionally separate from the other elements in the painting.
On 1 March 1987 Martin presented her submission for a painting to be
housed in the Main Committee Room of the new Parliament House
in Canberra. Her submission was awarded the commission and the
finished product, Red Ochre Cove (1988), is an important and very public
image in Australian art history, a reflexive, and challenging, image of
our national landscape (7). It is a very large painting (2.8 x 12.1 metres),
although its importance is not simply because of its size. It is a picture
full of associations - making reference to Aboriginal culture, European
settlement, the clash of cultures, and the clash of people and nature.
Nature, the only constant, is the key theme in our ability to link the
various cultural representations which inhabit it. Life is about flux, but
by using nature as a metaphor for the artist’s imagination, Martin could
try to overcome the split between the subject and the object, the self
and the world, the conscious and the unconscious.
The large ellipse of the cove is bathed in golden light from the shaft
cutting across the centre of the image. In the broadest terms, the shaft
represents something spiritual, something beyond both man and
nature - a force over which there is no control. The shaft is taken from
Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia by H.R.H.
The Duke of Cornwall and York, May 9,1901 (known as “The Big Picture”)
painted between September 1901 and March 1903, a painting that had
to be referenced as part of the submission for the painting for the Main
Committee Room (8). In Roberts’s Big Picture the great diagonal of
light flooding the central axis symbolises the optimistic future to which
the newly federated Australia could look. Roberts’s humanistic view of
the world, full of hope and trust in the leaders of the new nation, has
a salutary echo in Martin’s visionary spiritualism. While both pictures
are suggestive of more than a political meaning, they are also clear
articulations of the essential and ongoing dialogue between history
and the present, the dialogue which informs our notions of identity
about ourselves and our nation.
While working on the Parliament House commission, Martin continued
to explore many of the ideas which informed Red Ochre Cove in other
14 15Star-cut (q.v.), 1985oil/canvas 61 x 91 cm
Collection: Broken Hill Regional
works. Break (1988) exemplifies this period. Landscape provides the
impetus for this painting. At this time the artist’s vision of landscape
was still one supplied through observation of the land and reading
of art historical renderings of the landscape, specifically those of
the Romantic Sublime as alluded to above, with the addition of
19th-Century American landscape painting as evinced in the heavily
European Academic-influenced Hudson River School and the less
traditional Luminists (9). Here this is visualised in a vast landscape of
brooding cliffs, rich golden red skies and intrusive industrial buildings,
heavily impastoed and punctuated by striking contrasts of light and
dark. Martin’s landscape is concerned with the complexity of nature
and the concomitant complexity of man’s relationship to nature. The
presence of the industrial with the natural underscores this. Break is a
powerful work that combines the imaginative and the real, the cultural
and the natural, history and the present, in a beautiful visual statement
whose message remains unerringly relevant.
Port Kembla, Outer Harbour (1989) is one of a series of works in which
the presence of industry is the dominating visual motif. The imposition
of technology on the landscape is disturbing but it is an imposition that
creates haunting images of power and beauty. In Port Kembla, Outer
rapid Bay limestone mihihgi, 1985 oil/canvas 61 x 91 cm Collection: Parliament House Art Collection
16 17
Harbour blocks of colour are fused onto the surface in spare and emotive
patterns not dissimilar to Hans Hofmann’s paintings of the 1950s and
1960s. The combination of exact geometries with an almost Baroque
exuberance in the use of texture marks this picture as Martin’s own.
The artist’s spatial configurations have undergone radical shifts.
The combination of a markedly lateral organization of the industrial
elements with the deeper space of the natural environment creates a
formal equivalent to the thematic debate present in the picture. The
clean sparseness of the buildings and associated structures cuts into
the natural space, and the strident colours make for a nervous anxiety,
an intimation of the upsetting of the balance between man and
nature. The palette is rich and vibrant. The contrast between the built
environment and the swirling forms of the sky is clear, and deliberate.
Realism and abstraction and their often blurred distinctions are raised,
perhaps peripherally, but nevertheless apparent. Martin is an artist
who questions not only the re-presentations of art history but also the
theoretical basis of representation in a postmodern context generally.
In Yallourn Power Station (1991) the presence of nature is an implied
one. Thematically the struggle between man and nature persists. The
dominating presence of man (through the images of the power station)
does not imply that the struggle is over nor that the winner is a fait
accompli. This is a technically sophisticated work and revelatory of an
artist who has mastered her craft and can concentrate on the business
of her art. Visually and sensually this is a very satisfying work. The thick
surfaces speak about the act of painting as much as they do about
environmental intrusion. The actual and the metaphorical elide. The
attraction of the painterly surface is a device to make viewers realise
the subtle and seductive excursions of industry into nature, nature into
art, art into nature, art into industry.
Martin is not an artist who could be called idle. The sheer volume of
her work attests to this. Another picture from 1991 shows her looking
at the natural world and removing any references to human activity.
The pinch is forthrightly and overtly a painting whose subject-matter
is nature. This is a tough painting in which the rough almost savage
facturing of the surface expresses nature’s ineluctable might. Nature
here is not static, it is part of a dynamic series of living processes. The
visual restlessness which characterizes The pinch is symbolic of the
seemingly infinite variety and breadth of nature. The rise and fall,
advance and recession, and convexity and concavity of the rocky crags
reinforce this.
This is not nature in a state of innocence but rather an example of
sublimity in which we are reminded of our vulnerability. It is also
exemplary of the artist making visual her readings on the Sublime and
other 18th-Century aesthetic theories, and how in the application of
these to places visited and known a valid contemporary enunciation
of landscape can operate. Martin’s landscapes are the results of an
accumulation of layered experiences that began in her childhood
when her botanist father took the family on holidays which involved
collecting, sketching and identifying floral specimens. This intimacy
with the land is integral in her approach to painting the landscape.
Beyond Metropolis 3, 1985 oil/canvas
173.3 x 220 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria
18 19
E.Z. Works 1, 1986oil/canvas
170 x 240 cm Collection: Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
Martin has been travelling extensively throughout outback Australia
since the mid-1980s and regularly since the mid-1990s. The land has
provided the source for some of her most vital and powerful visual
statements and continues to provide inspiration to the present. Not
that the land was not a fertile source in her earlier work, it was. But
from c.1990 onwards the land, the environment and the cultural
accretions of Aboriginal and European culture, have given the artist
the materials to encode her own vision of the human condition and
its relationship to the natural world. Martin’s art is a synthesis of
the amalgamated experiences of these journeys of exploration and
research of places and the depictions of (other) places made by other
artists. An integral element of her exploration is the keeping of a visual
diary - annotations at once detailed and general, of sites visited or
viewed. This not unusual practice raises the interesting and relevant
analogy of the artist as explorer.
Arguably all art involves a serach, an exploration of inner and outer
worlds expressed through a multifarious variety of formal languages.
Martin’s art of the early 1990s and the actual physical processes
attached to it, reiterates in her own idiom the topographical art
of the 18th- and 19th-centuries. The 18th-century in particular
(as discussed briefly above) was a period of immense intellectual and
geographical growth (the latter the result of the many voyages of
discovery carried out by the various imperial powers). The combination
of these provided artists with rare opportunities to describe the real
world as it was being discovered.
The explorer ventures into a world which is unknown and alien. The
18th-century explorer was often a scientist, somebody seeking truth
and someone seeking to discover a tangible, real world teeming with
the details and physical idiosyncrasies which individualize a place, which
give a place its own recognizable identity.
The artists who accompanied these explorers became themselves
explorers into a new aesthetic. For the most part these artists were
schooled in the Picturesque philosophy of landscape painting which
required a reorganization and synthesis of the basic elements found in
nature filtered through the encapsulating imagination of the artist. The
new world was a disconcerting confrontation. The scientist’s interest in
natural phenomena involved a deliberate, factual study of the external
particulars of place. The artistic process of the Picturesque is in a
sense predicated against this approach by the artist. The combination
of the two approaches resulted in an aesthetic of topography which
emulated the habits of observation instilled in the scientist and broke
down the barriers between 18th-century ideals of landscape as an
imaginary (indeed theoretical) construct and the factual portrayal of
an actual place.
The aesthetics of topography force the viewer to make sense of the
unknown, to absorb the minutiae of scenery and to reflect on these
to make sensible a continuous and continuing experience. The artist’s
role is to capture in pictorial form something that is both fugitive and
solid - the experience of discovery is a cursory one, the land discovered
remains eternal. Martin’s work speaks of this aesthetic. Her wide
20 21
Red Ochre Cove Collection: Parliament HouseArt Collection
Break, 1988oil/linen
280 x 455 cmCollection: Canberra Museum and Gallery
panoramas are populated with the physical details of place (place is
indeed spelt out). Foregrounds act as visual stops before the viewer
leaps into the remote landscape and its topographical constituents.
We enter the act of exploration through the artist’s visual disclosure
of her own discovery. For Martin the exploring artist begins a voyage
into the world encountered in her travels. It is only by entering that
world that viewers can see demonstrated that art is concerned with
an encounter with the self. The self externalized in an a real Australian
landscape acts as our guide. The paintings discussed below may be
records of particular places, but they express more than that place. The
visualisation of the individual gives rise to notions of universality.
Reconstructed Narrative: Strzelecki Desert No.4 (1992) was first shown
at the Ben Grady Gallery in Canberra in April-May of 1992. Martin
presents an atmospheric world where order and regularity are not
constants. The voyager into this world of shifting perspectives is
confronted by new and old phenomena. The new in the form of the
intrusive gas field, the old in the land which provides the reason for
the introduction of the new. The sense of the layered history of the
landscape also relates to the 19th-century explorer/artist Ludwig
Becker (1808-1861) who was part of the Burke and Wills expedition,
and whose Eurocentric view of nature adds to the visual, textual and
historical impetus. This is tempered by the artist’s experiences of the
site depicted and the imperatives of her stylistic expression.
Lake Eyre (1992) is a handsome and engaging painting. The broad
swathe of the sky impressed with the names of places encompassed
in its sweep, is imbued with a lyrical rhythm accented by a graceful
innuendo of swinging movement. The thickly painted ground, low
on the horizon, acts as a powerful foil to the lightness and lyricism of
the sky. Tonal and textural celestial and terrestrial contrasts become
effective metaphors for nature (the sky) and culture (the land). The
opposing directional impulses - lateral versus perspectival, advancing
versus recessional - impart a tense structural play that is at once
captivating and elusive.
O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N (1993) sees Martin as artist-explorer par excellence
absorbing those details and minutiae which give a place its
24 25
Yallourn Power Station, 1991oil/linen
180 x 244 cm Collection: The Artist
topographical identity while simultaneously articulating her own
act of discovery. The use of the low horizon imbues the impact of
the immensity of the landscape. The highly evocative and vaporous
sky, again redolent with suggestive power, insinuates notions of the
eternal nature of the land and the ongoing processes which the artist
expresses in pictorial form. The word oblivion so intentionally made
plastic as O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N is spelled out as part of the landscape and
a possibility for the latter’s future. Its insistent presence allied to the
threatening black clouds suggests possibilities for destruction. This is a
majestic image, ominous in its message and powerful in the portrayal
of that message.
In 1997 Martin made 2 drawing trips to 2 ostensibly very different
places – South-West Queensland and Italy. Both trips were related to
her ongoing investigations into the relationship between practice and
theory – between how one sees the world and articulates that visually,
and how one relates that visualisation to readings of art, the history of
art and readings of the story of place.
The first trip was an essay in contemplation – a way of dealing with
Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of
Australia…(London,1848), and a way of accommodating that with her
own explorations of some of the territory (intellectual, historical and
actual) that Surveyor-General Mitchell deals with in his perambulatory
and embracing study.
Mitchell was a complex character. His Journal…reveals this. It is a book
full of allusions, revelatory not only of his own learning (Mitchell was
widely read in several languages and proficient in several branches of
science), but of his self-conscious need to translate that learning into his
professional life.
Amongst the most conspicuous references in the Journal…are those
to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to those artists whom we now describe
as Romantic or, at least, precursors of the Romantic, and in particular
Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673).
For Martin, Mitchell’s literary and visual allusions provided not only
a new and different way of dealing with the actualities of a harsh and
often inhospitable environment, they implied real connections between
(art) history and mythology and the deeper cultural connections with
which she has continued to deal in her recent practice.
26 27
Reconstructed NarrativeStrzelecki Desert No4, 1992
oil/linen 60.5 x 137 cm
Collection: The Artist
The pinch, 1991 oil/canvas 57 x 157 cm Collection: The Artist
The density of Mitchell’s readings gave her the opportunity to widen
the visual vocabulary which gives her work such breadth and force.
The need to explore (some of) Mitchell’s sources and to manifest those
sources in her own work resulted in the second of her drawing trips.
Martin decided to physically follow Rosa’s 17th-century journey from
Rome to Ancona through the much pictorialised landscape of Umbria.
The contemporary unorthodoxy and extravagance of Salvator Rosa’s
paintings may have pushed him to the cutting-edge of the art of his
time. The loosely defined atmospheric melancholies and dark tonalities
of this same work made him one of those artists who appealed to
18th-century English aesthetic taste and saw him (perhaps
retrospectively) as one of the major precursors of Romanticism. Rosa’s
art (either original or reproduced) became a sought-after necessity in
the collections of those that could afford it, or in the minds
(like Mitchell’s) of those that considered it.
To add to the allusory network the late work (1652 – 1665) of the
great French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665) becomes an
important ingredient in Martin’s contemporary recipe. The changing
cycles of nature and the concomitant grandeur and awe given to its
manifestations, informed Poussin’s late creations. He used a layered
mythology (and particularly that articulated by Ovid) to express the
living processes ofv the real world.
For Poussin, nature as manifested in reality and in myth tells us about
ourselves. For Martin, as for Poussin, the poetry of the personal and
the universal are encapsulated in the expression of landscape – the
personification of the order, power and (ultimate) balance of nature.
For Martin, the idea of text and subtext is an essential aspect of the
way she views her environment. This does not define, but rather opens
dialogues about the relationships between history, contemporaneity,
visualisations and illustrations of history and mythology, and the
overriding impact of the environment (the land) on how we, as
Australians, should view the world.
The above concerns were articulated in Salvator Rosa Series I, shown
at the Christine Abrahams Gallery in Melbourne in July/August 1998.
Peripateia (1998) is a densely beautiful painting. The title is a Greek
word meaning a sudden change of circumstances or a reversal of
fortune. It is used mostly in dramatic literature and signals a move from
stability and happiness to destruction and downfall. References to the
environment are hence quite appropriate and finds a fitting matrix in
Martin’s painting. The surface is thick and heavily textured and gives
pictorial unity to the entire picture plane. The colours are limited to
greens, browns and ochres yet within the limitations of this palette
the artist has been able to draw on the full expressive potential of
each. Despite a certain wildness in the overall image there is a feeling
of contemplative calm. An untamed place perhaps but nevertheless a
place instilled with possibilities for meditative thought.
This Eldorado of Pure Recognition and Desert of Pure Non-recognition
(1998) is a large diptych (135 x 488cm). Martin has created an
imaginative tour de force, a blockbuster image which sums up her
art historical, historical, mythological and environmental interests.
Mitchell made many references to the fabled land of el Dorado and this
work exemplifies Martin’s explorations and investigations.
30 31O-B-L-I-V-I-O-N, 1993ochre, pigment, oil/linen 152 x 274 cm Collection: Ian Potter Museum of Art,University of Melbourne
The marvellously grand and rugged terrains and tempestuous sky depicted
in this painting hold reverberations of destructive power.
Man is not overtly present but the artist’s inscription of the work’s title
across the whole of the bottom of the picture plane is a clear and assertive
note of the creative personality and its almost alchemical role in the natural
(and created) world.
Salvator Rosa Series II (Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, July/August 1999)
highlights Martin’s continuing aesthetic of the literal and philosophical
exploration of (art) history, mythology and the meaning and significance
of place to the individual. The places visualised here are taken from further
journeys made by the artist. Some are intimately familiar to her, others
less so, but all are graced with that shock of recognition which the artist
experienced on confrontation with these places. For Martin confrontation
is not a simple physical action. It is a subtle and infinitely complex process
of accumulative distillation involving the conceptual amalgamation of the
cultural baggage which we all carry, the immediacy of emotional response
and the appropriateness of the experiencing to the individual artist’s
expressive needs.
This is further complicated by the fact that places for the artist do not
necessarily exist geographically. A place as visualised by Martin may be
predicated on an image produced by an artist two or three centuries earlier.
It is a product of the artist’s imagination despite possible overt visual
reminders or clues to places that exist in reality and that have significance
for her.
32 33
Winrae at Dusk. 11 July, 1999 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 90 x 165 cm Collection: Guy Fitzhardinge, Manduramah
In The Dream (1999) the figures are given a spectral, inchoate quality.
Visually they are the same as the environment from which they
emerge. The rocky surfaces not only provide the scenic backdrop for
the activities of the protagonists, they literally shape and give external
appearance to these protagonists. Man is here part of nature and
formed in (one of) nature’s images. This is a haunting picture, at once
dramatically beautiful and philosophically disturbing.
In 1995 Martin was award a grant to undertake a project to produce an
exhibition of paintings and drawings to tour the Murray-Darling Basin.
The resultant exhibition and publication Tracts: Back O’ Bourke
(1996) was the first of three projects which combined historical,
environmental, art historical and curatorial expertise with that of
the artist (10).
The works resulting from these projects were concerned with the
landscape, both in actuality and in (art) history. Since indigenous
occupation the natural environment has provided a fecund source
for artistic production. In the late 1990s theoretical discussions
of contemporary visual arts practice, landscape was somewhat
marginalised. In fact, as Martin’s art avers, it remains a vital and viable
genre whose variously textured experiences can provide not only
aesthetic pleasure but also establish a dialectic between the individual
and the wider environment. In viewing the history of our land as
pictorialised by artists we place ourselves in a process in which we
may begin to understand the character of contemporary subjective
and societal identities.
For Martin the real environment and the depicted environment are
in a constant state of dialogue. The artist’s active involvement with
both reinforces for her the ability of each to penetrate the other. Her
concerns lay (and still remain) with constructing landscapes on canvas
(culture), with the land itself (nature) and with celebrating the particular
qualities of each whilst simultaneously celebrating the transcendence
of their innate dualism in her art.
The political dimension in her work remains/. Although her work may
resonate with the intensity of her private sensibilities in relation to the
land depicted, that intensity evokes very public statements about the
ongoing degradation of the land. That this is visualised through her
coercively seductive images reinforces the subtlety of her politicising
and the validity of art as a political tool.
The works discussed below (both from Watersheds) continue Martin’s
documentation of ecologically fragile areas of inland Australia. In her
earlier work the artist began keeping a visual diary, a programmatic
recording of sites visited and an accumulation of empirical facts. These
diaries act as aides-mémoire for the later translation onto canvas. They
are not preliminary sketches but rather impulses for the imaginative
journeys which result in the complex metaphors which are the real
subjects of her paintings. The complexity of Martin’s metaphors is an
abiding characteristic of her art. Hers is a multi-layered expression
analytically drawing on all the elements alluded to above to evoke a
final synthesis (or series of syntheses).
34 35
This Eldorado of Pure Recognition a Desert of Pure Non-recognition, 1998
ochre, pigment, oil/linen 135 x 488 cm
Collection: The Artist
36 37
Peripateia, 1998 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 135 x 244 cm Collection: National Gallery of Vicotria
The dream, 1999ochre, pigment, oil/linen
135 x 244 cm Collection: The Artist
38 39
The Descent, 2000ochre, pigment, oil/linen 244 x 180 cm Collection: The Artist
Deluge over Mount Playfair, 1999 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 90 x 165 cm Private Collection, Canberra
Winrae at dusk (1999) brilliantly evokes the enormous distances and
unforgiving isolation of the Australian landscape in a beautifully
nuanced image. The artist juxtaposes earth and sky yet intimates
the necessity of their interrelationship and the fragility of that
interrelationship. This is achieved pictorially by the extreme subtlety of
the contrast and concurrent melding of the washes of yellow and blue
which constitute the painting’s background. It is probably incorrect
to use background in this particular context since in reality it is the
subject of the work. The tree at the left provides the only visual (and
topographical) relief in this landscape where the horizon and the sky
merge in a shimmering expanse of light redolent of emptiness and
despair, but emptiness and despair figured in beauty.
Deluge over Mt Playfair (1999) is a dramatic and forceful painting
imbued with immense energy through striking contrasts. The land
is being refreshed and replenished by the great curtains of rain and
clouds. The individual episodes of nature are part of a continuum
just as a work of art is the product of a larger cultural context. Martin
has evoked in a stridently beautiful way the contiguities which exist
between nature (the land) and culture (the landscape).
Martin’s interest in Salvator Rosa continued into 2000 with Salvator
Rosa III (Christine Abraham’s Gallery, Melbourne, September/October
2000). By this time Rosa’s art had become integral to Martin’s practice.
The aesthetic appeal of his work for Martin is partially related to her
interest in 18th- and 19th-century English landscape at and in particular
notions of the Sublime. Rosa’s proto-Romantic scenery of isolation
40 41
preceding intimates the complexity of thought that characterises
Martin’s approach to her art practice. It is not complex for the sake
of complexity. It is complex because the artist’s need to understand
why she is where she is demands complex thought processes. The
landscape has triggered for her an ongoing course of acculturation
that demands an interrogative and investigative procedure. The
historic precedents of Rosa, Martens, Mitchell, et al, are melded
with the actuality of place to produce images in which the persistence
of cultural memory is more important than exactitude of
topographical citation.
The Descent (2000) is a conspicuous example of the above. This
is a classic Romantic image – wild, inhospitable, isolated – nature
untamed, but nature desired. The impossibility of definitive and
unchanging representations of nature and culture is championed
here. Martin’s present embraces history in its conscious investigation
of the past.
La Gruta (2002) was shown in April/May 2002 in Mandy Martin:
Peripecia. The Salvator Rosa Series at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
This work resulted from the artist’s trip to Mexico in 2001 and
continues the quest for the meaning and significance of place. It is
exemplary of the artist’s research that Mexico should be included in
her travels and exemplary of her concern for the environment and
man’s mistreatment of the environment.
The title of the exhibition – Peripecia – is same word we saw earlier
in a Greek incarnation (peripateia) and means vicissitudes or setbacks.
It is a reference to the degradation of the land inflicted by man and
I think also an intimation of the failed relationship between man
and nature. As in all the works in the various Salvator Rosa series
discussed above, La Gruta (the ladder) draws on a number of art
historical precedents all of which have been filtered through the eye
and the intellect of the artist. The process of acculturation allied with
the process of apprehension of (new) place imbues this work with a
range of allusions, at once fugitive and blatant in their availability to
viewers. This is an intimate place, strangely quiet and subtly inviting.
Martin’s painterly achievement is impressive in this richly layered and
textured work.
Martin has been living in the central west of New South Wales outside
Cowra for some years now. The environment there has prompted a
number of projects and resulted in some of her major later works.
Home Ground 3 (2004) is one of these. It is a large painting (183 x 405cm)
and a gentle but incisive reminder of the balance between Aboriginal
knowledge and ownership of the land and Eurocentric notions of
ownership. It is about values and how the interchange of these can
result in more considered strategies for dealing with and caring for the
land and for acknowledging the views of all communities who inhabit
our country. It is also about the power of art to create beautiful and
resolved aesthetic statements in ways that embrace us all.
The artist has limited her palette to browns, reds and ochres. She
has incorporated real ochres and natural pigments into her colours
to more fully realise the connection she feels between the land she
is depicting and her art, as well as indicating respect for the original
owners of this land. The hills are voluptuous in the sweep of the
and savage beauty struck a highly sympathetic chord with her. The
unheard melodies in his landscapes of mood and the ability of pictorial
components to address such abstract concepts were seen by Martin
to offer myriad possibilities in her explorations of the relationships
between nature and culture. The contemporary relevance for Martin,
as an artist working with the Australian landscape was self-evident.
This exhibition investigated the influence of Rosa on the way that some
19th-century Australian artists described their environment. Martin’s
process of investigation is complex. Conrad Martens (1801 – 1878) has
provided impetus for her work. His deft visualisations of Sydney, for
example, appealed, with their broad views offering the possibility of
picturesque interpretation.
But it was a series of Martens’s drawings and watercolours of the
Abercrombie Caves produced between 1843 and 1848 that were of
more interest to Martin than his Sydney work.
It has been postulated that these were the first plein air works made in
Australia. Such generalisations often hold a germ of truth. For Martin
the possibility of truth was sufficient. The influence of Rosa on English
artists was substantial. A professional like Martens would have almost
certainly been familiar with Rosa’s work, and almost certainly through
engravings rather than originals.
That Martens elected to travel to the (then) relatively isolated
Abercrombie Caves fascinated Martin. She believes that this trip
to the exotic Caves was prompted by his wishing to be part of an
aesthetic which projected inner states onto the external world. The
La Gruta, 2002 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 224 x 180 cm Collection: Canberra Museum and Gallery
44 45
Ocean Bore, Craven’s Peak Reserve, Simpson Desert, 2008
ochre, pigment, acrylic/canvas 100 x 100 cm (25 mm spacing)
Collection: The Artist
Sandhill Camp, Ethabuka, Simpson Desert, 2007 ochre, pigment, acrylic/canvas 100 x100 cm (25 mm spacing)Collection: The Artist
46 47
curves, and the lyrical structural rhythms she has invested in them
allow for allusions to the female form. This is a landscape loved
and respected.
Martin’s art has many layers and she continues to explore her
environment in tandem with a range of experts so as to more fully
express her concerns and her attachment to the places she paints.
Sandhill Camp, Ethabuka, Simpson Desert (2007) and Ocean Bore,
Craven’s Peak Reserve, Simpson Desert (2007) are works produced
during her ongoing series of environmental projects (11).
Both these works exemplify the artist as scientist in the way they
present us with very real studies of the flora of places visited. They
also impress with the artist’s ability to imbue the microcosm into
the macrocosm. They are delightful.
In March 2008 Martin presented Wanderers in the Desert of
the Real at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. This was a
show of grand painterly paintings, richly textured and
conceptually forceful. Many of the paintings are dark and
brooding but they are also magnificent in the eloquence of
their visual and thematic statements.
Iceberg (2008) is an important painting. It is important as a work of
art because it shows the artist at her mature best fully in control
of the means she needs to best depict the themes and concepts
she so passionately espouses. It is an incredibly powerful image.
The iceberg floats in solitary isolation in a deep black sea. The berg
is silhouetted against a band of golden-white sky and juts into a
further band of sky, this time a more threatening bruised yellow-
black. The sea is dark and menacing, as indeed is the berg with
only a small part of its mass visible above the surface. References
to global warming are of course overt. References to a range of art
historical exemplars are also present but these are subsumed in
the force of the artist’s own stylistic language, a language uniquely
and absolutely her own. In Iceberg the elision of form and content is
exquisitely achieved.
Tanami Spinifex fires (2008) is a summation picture in its drawing
together of the concerns found in Martin’s landscape studies over
the past decades. She depicts a visually and actually dramatic
moment – the desert after fire – a time of loss and simultaneous
regeneration. She captures the beautiful infinity of the Australian
landscape with spare and simple means which are equivalents of
the sparseness of the desert terrain. Man’s ongoing despoliation
is figured in the termite mounds which are placed through the
topography like mute sentinels, blind witnesses to the powers
of nature. The land depicted is a land of optimism and resilience.
The terrible beauty that is the aftermath of the desert fire is the
precursor to growth.
Following this exhibition Martin has continued to explore and
expand on the pictorial and thematic issues that were so strongly
visualised in Wanderers in the Desert of the Real .The titles of the
latest works discussed here is each prefaced by Wanderers in the
Desert of the Real. For the most part the palette in these has been
reduced to tonal blacks and greys. Size ranges from small
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Iceberg, 2007
ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 270 cm
Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
48 49
Powerhouse 4, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen
30 x 40 cmCollection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Powerhouse 3, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen
30 x 40 cmCollection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Tanami spinifex fires, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 270 cmCollection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
50 51
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Wallerawang Powerstation, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 180 x 410 cm (25 mm spacing)Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, 2007 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCollection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
52 53
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:After Stephenson, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen
30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:After Friedrich, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Aftermath, 2009
ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm
Courtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real: “Rain-blur”, 2009
ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cm
Collection: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
54 55
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Iceberg, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Two Figures, 2008 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
(30 x 40cm) to massive (180 x 410 cm). Scale does not suffer in
reduction nor is it lost in immensity. Wallerawang Powerstation (2009)
is a physically large and imposing painting. Martin has used a triptych
format that resonates with Renaissance altarpieces and in the selection
of this format one could read an ironic comment on the place of industry
in the contemporary world (the factory becomes the cathedral ?). The
lateral panels are filled with the towers of the powerstation belching
out smoke into the grim and sickly sky. These are menacing both in
their activity and in their pictorial supremacy within the confines of
the panel. The central panel has a figure moving away from a wall
of falling dust and muck. The figure is tiny and totally overwhelmed
by his surroundings. His vulnerability is visualised by his shadowlike
presentation and by his physical stature compared to the behemoths
of the towers.
Martin’s choice of palette is extremely effective and imparts a sort
of documentary-like timbre to the overall image. While this is a dark
painting and calls to mind Martin’s 18th- and 19th-century predecessors
– J.M.W. Turner and John Martin,for example – it is also a powerful and
commanding image that offers no solace but expresses the powerful
relevance of art to comment on our world.
After Friedrich (2009) is a small (40 x 30 cm) painting. The central figure
is cited from a painting by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich
(1774 – 1840). The figure with his back to us contemplates a boiling surf
and stormy sky – man contemplating nature. The pairing of opposites
– action versus contemplation – is particularly effective and in a sense
sums up the artist’s concerns that have been accumulating since the
early 1980s. For Martin the present is always conditioned by history.
Her present examines the real world of our natural environment
through the eyes and minds of those who preceded her and through
her own highly sensitive faculties. Martin’s work continues her
involvement with the environment and man’s continued interpolation
into the environment. The overlaying of this with an informed web
of cultural history and visual and literary allusion makes a significant
pictorial statement. Martin’s researches and the products of that
research continue to provoke and seduce in the forthrightness and
aesthetic power of the issues raised and their expression in her art.
Peter Haynes
Director
ACT Museums and Galleries
May 2009
56 57
NOTES:
1. For a concise summary of this period see Carroll, Alison Graven Images in the Promised Land: A History of Printmaking in South Australia Art Gallery of South Australia, 1981; Roger Butler’s survey of Australian Posters, The street as art galleries – walls sometimes speak: Poster Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, 1993, is also useful.
2. Smith, Terry in Smith, B. & Smith, T. Australian Painting 1788 – 1990 Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991, p.490
3. Martin continued her printmaking practice both as a teacher, at the (then) Canberra School of Art (1978 – 2003), and as an artist, alongside her painting career, the latter certainly her dominant practice from the mod-1980s.
4. See Cork, Richard Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003, for an invigorating if subjective account of this period.
5. For the purposes of this discussion it is sufficient to cite the following exhibitions/publications: A New Spirit in Painting (Royal Academy, London, 1981); Zeitgeist (Berlin, 1982); Godfrey, Tony The New Image. Painting in the 1980s (Phaidon, London, 1986)
6. Recent Australian Painting 1970 – 1983 curated by Ron Radford at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Vox Pop. Into the Eighties curated by Robert Lindsay for the National Gallery of Victoria.
7. op.cit. 2, p.546
8. For a full discussion of the relationship between these 2 paintings see Haynes, P. “Tom Roberts and Mandy Martin: From the Big Picture to Red Ochre Cove” in Headon, David & Williams, John (ed’s) Makers of Miracles. The Cast of the Federation Story, Melbourne University Press, 2000, pp212 – 220.
9. Barbara Novak’s Art and Culture. American Landscape Painting 1825 to 1875, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, provides an excellent introduction to this field.
10. The other two were Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego (1999) and Inflows: The Channel Country (2001). T9
11. These landscape studies (and others) are from the series painted in the artist’s visual chapter in Desert Channels. The Impulse to Conserve (forthcoming 2010).
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Termite mounds, Fitzroy Crossing Road, 2007 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Wanderers in the Desert of the Real:Termite mounds, Diamantina Road, 2009 ochre, pigment, oil/linen 30 x 40 cmCourtesy Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Readers should note that not all works discussed in this essay will be displayed in the exhitition.
58 59
1977 Heresies, No.1 Murphy, Bernice Project 18. Some Recent Art in Adelaide, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1979 McIntyre, Arthur “Mandy Martin – An Artist with Something to Say”Aspect, 4/1-2, Sydney
1980 Lindsay, Robert Survey 12. On Paper, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Symonds, M.J., Portley, C. & Phillips, R.E. The Visual Arts, Sydney
1981 Lindsay, Robert in Murphy, Bernice (ed) Australian Perspecta 1981, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Radford, Ron Spectres of Our Time, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide
From the Bottom to the Top, Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, Sydney
1982 Haynes, Peter “Mandy Martin”, Canberra School of Art Staff Exhibition
Lynn, E. “Letter from Australia”, Art International, Vol.XXV/5-6
Carroll, A. Australian Screenprints 1982, Print Council of Australia, Melbourne
Waldmann, A. Project 39: Women’s Imprint, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1983 Sayers, Andrew Structures, Newcastle Region Art Gallery
Buckley, John Commentary: Mandy Martin, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Murphy, B & Parfenovics, J. (ed’s) Australian Perspecta 1983, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Mendelssohn, J. “Jenny Watson and Mandy Martin”, Art Network 10, Sydney
Carroll, A.” The Last Decades”, Graven Images in a Promised Land, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Radford, Ron Recent Australian Painting: A Survey 1970-83, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Lindsay, Robert Vox Pop: Into the Eighties, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1984 Cramer, Sue “Vox Pop”, Art and Text, 12 and 13, Melbourne
Bond, Tony Form-Image-Sign, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Waldman, D. “Impressions of Australia”, Australian Visions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Holloway, M “Bleak Romantic”, ibid.
1985 Ewington, J. Heartland, Wollongong City Art Gallery
1986 Haynes, P. Mandy Martin, Anima Gallery, Adelaide
Ewington, J. Triad, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide
1987 Marcon, Marco Invisible Cities, Praxis, Perth
Walsh, J. Urban Anxieties: Australian Drawings of the 1980s National Gallery of Australia
Sturgeon, Graeme The New Romantics, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
Haynes, P. Mandy Martin, Gallery 52, Perth
1988 Barbour, J. “Mandy Martin’s Mural”, Art Monthly Australia, 8, Canberra
1989 North, Ian Riding the Tiger, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1990 Holloway, M. “In the Boiler Room of Art: Mandy Martin, Painting and the Industrial Landscape”, Mandy Martin. Latrobe Valley Series, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell
Desmond, M. “Canbrart”, A Selection of Works by Artists from the ACT and Districts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Haynes, P. “Canbrart”, Art Monthly Australia, 33, Canberra
Heathcote, C”Martin and Frank”, Art Monthly Australia, 33, Canberra
Haynes, P. ”Mandy Martin. From the Sublime to the Industrial”, Art and Australia, Vol. 28/2, Summer
Heller, Nancy G. Women Artists: An illustrated history Abbeville Press, New York
1991 Smith,B with Smith, T. Australian Painting 1788-1990, Oxford University Press,Melbourne
Germaine, M. Artists and Galleries of Australia, Boolarong Publications, Sydney
Chanin, E. Australian Painting, Sydney
Drury,Nevill (ed) New Art Four, Craftsman House, Sydney
1992 Conway, R. Obsession and Civilisation, Sydney
Haynes, P. Artists from Canberra and Districts in the Parliament House Art Collection, Joint House Department, Parliament House, Canberra
1993 Haynes, P. Recent Landscapes, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1993 Contemporary Australian Women Artists, Craftsman House, Sydney
Mancun, A. Art Through Australian Eyes, Melbourne
1994 Haynes, P. Mandy Martin. Recent Landscapes, St Louis and Washington, USA
Williams, D. & Simpson, C. Art Now – Issues in Contemporary Art Post – 1970, Sydney
Sullivan, G. Seeing Australia. Views of Artists and Writers, Sydney
1995 Hart, D. (ed) Identities: Art from Australia.Contemporary Australian Art to Taiwan, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin”, ibid
Llewellyn, Kate” Mungo Dreaming “, The Australian, March
Buckner, R. Art and Design. Book 2, Sydney
Lindsay, R. The Shell Collection of Australian Art, Melbourne
Cater, M. Out of Line: 25 Years of Women’s Posters, Sydney
Waterlow, N. Macquarie Bank Art Collection, Sydney
“Brave New Women”, The Weekend Australian, 5-6 November
1996 Haynes, P. “ Mandy Martin: The Continuing Narrative” in Haynes, P. et al, Tracts: Back O’Bourke, Canberra
Voigt, A. & Drury, N. New Visions, New Perspectives, Craftsman House, Sydney Grishin, S. Australian Printmaking in 1990s, Craftsman House, Sydney
McAuliffe, C. Art and Suburbia, Sydney
1997 Williams, D. Eyes on Australia. Talking About Art and Culture, Sydney
1998 Haynes, Rosslyn. Seeking the Centre: the Australian desert in literature, art and film. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne
Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: Word and Place”, Salvator Rosa Series I
Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne St James Guide to Contemporary Women Artists, St James Press, Massachusetts, USA
1999 Haynes, P. “Further Explorations”, in Martin, M. et al Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego, Canberra
Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: Word and Place II”, Salvator Rosa Series II, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
2000 Griffiths, T. “Meanjin. Essaying the Truth” Haunted, vol. 59, no 1
Haynes, P. “Tom Roberts and Mandy Martin: From the Big Picture to the Red Ochre Cove”, Headon, D. Williams, J. (eds). Makers of Miracles. The Cast of the Federation Story, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Read, P. Belonging. Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne
Curthoys, A. & McGrath, A. (eds). Writing Histories. Imagination and Narration, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne
Haynes, P. “Mandy Martin: From Word to Place”, Salvator Rosa Series III
Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
2001 Sever, N. The Art of Mandy Martin, Primera Casa de la Imprenta de Los Americas, Mexico City, Mexico
Judd, C. & Lawson, A. Auriferous. The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Haynes, Peter. “Mandy Martin: Ongoing Investigations”, Inflows: The Channel Country, Canberra
Green, E. North, I. & Rowan, M. Orbit, University of South Australia Art Museum,Adelaide
Muddiman, S. Imaging, Identity and Place, Grafton Regional Gallery
Tsokhas, K. Making a Nation State: Cultural Identity, Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History, Monash University Press, Melbourne
Federation! But who makes the nation?, Museums and Galleries Foundation of NSW, Sydney
Allen, Traudi. Cross-Currents in Contemporary Australian Art, Craftsman House, Sydney
2002 Bonyhady, T. & Griffiths, T Words for Country. Landscape and Language in Australia, Uni. of NSW Press,Sydney
Malouf, D. & Sever, N. Mandy Martin: Peripecia. The Salvator Rosa Series, The ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra
Gray, A. Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Sisley, A. & Davidson, D. Alchemy. The Cadia Gold Mine Art Project, Orange Regional Art Gallery
2005 “A life in service”, Portrait 18, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Cranston, C.A. & Zeller, R. The littoral zone: Australian contexts and their writers, Rodopi Press, Amsterdam – New York, New York
2007 Dickman, C., Lunney, D. & Burgin, S., Animals of Arid Australia. Out on their Own?, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Sydney.
Robin, L. & Smith, M. “Science in place and time: archaeology, ecology and environmental history”, ibid
Regel, W, & Köhler, H (eds.), ...hochgerűhmt, fast vergessen, neu gesehen.. Der italienische Maler und Poet Salvator Rosa, Studien zur Neubewertung, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, Germany
Zeller, R The Littoral Zone. Australian Contexts and their Writers. “Literature in the Arid Zone.” Pp.70-92 by Lynch, T. Rodopi Press. Amsterdam-New York NY
2007 Reflections. Canberra Museum and Gallery Collection. Canberra Museum and Gallery and the Cultural Facilities Corporation. 2008
iMPrint Summer 2007, Vol. 42, No. 4, p. 6
2008 Pakula, Karen “Open Gallery: Mandy Martin”, Sydney Morning Herald, 15-16/03/2008
Cranmer, U. & Pearson, H. Landforms in Contemporary Art , Integrated Education Ltd, Whangaparaoa, New Zealand
2009 Aereality. Essays On The World From Above. Fox William L. Counterpoint Press. Berkeley 2009 Robin, L., Dickman, C., & Martin, M. (ed’s) desert Channels. The Impulse to Conserve (forthcoming 2010)
Mandy Martin BIBLIOGRAPHY
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WRTINGS BY THE ARTIST
1980 “Artist’s Statement”, Survey 12: On Paper, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1981 ibid (reprint), Australian Perspecta 1981, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1984 “Different Strokes”, Art and Text 14, Melbourne
1991 “Diary from the Centre”, Art Monthly Australia, November
1992 Reconstructed Narative, Strzelecki Desert: Homage to Ludwig Becker, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
1997 “Letter to Nick Jose” in Niall, B. & Thompson, J. (eds.). The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, Oxford University Press, Melbourne
1999 “An Artist’s Diary”, in Martin, M. et al Watersheds: The Paroo to the Warrego, Canberra
“ Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego”, in People and Rangelands: Procedings of the VIth International Rangeland Congress, Australia
“This El Dorado of pure recognition and desert of pure non-recognition”, in Hamblin, A. (ed).
Visions of Future Landscapes. Proceedings of 1999Academy of Science Fenner Conference on the Environment, Bureau of Rural Sciences, Canberra
2001 “Introduction”, in Martin, M. et al
Inflows:The Channel Country, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra
“They Have a Faith to Move Mountains”, in Judd, C. & Lawson, A. Auriferous.The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
2002 “Artist’s Statement”, in Peripecia: The Salvator Rosa Series The ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra
2003 Land$cape:Gold and Water, Canberra
2004 Martin, M. & Ryan, S. The Lachlan: Blue-Gold, Canberra
2005 Martin, M., Robin, L. & Smith, M. Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future. An environmental project about a significant cultural place, Canberra
2007 “Absence and Presence” in Potter, E., Mackinnon, A.,Mckenzie, S. & McKay, J.
Fresh Water. New Perspectives on Water in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne
1977 – 96 35 solo shows in Australia and America including: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney – 1983, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995 Anima Gallery, Adelaide: 1986, 1989, 1991 Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra: 1988, 1991, 1992 Christine Abrahams Gallery, Brisbane: 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 Michael Milburn Gallery, Brisbane: 1986, 1988, 1992 Missouri Botanical Garden and Austral Gallery, St Louis, USA: 1990, 1994
1997 – 98 Tracts: Back O’Bourke; Nolan Gallery, Canberra; Moree Regional Gallery; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery; Albury Regional Art Centre.
1999 – 00 Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego; Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery;Mildura Arts Centre; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery;Newcastle Region Art Gallery
2001 – 02 Inflows: the Channel Country; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Wagga Wagga Art Gallery; Albury Regional Art Centre;Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery Salvator Rosa series; Casa de la Primera Imprenta de los Americas, Festival Centro Historico Mexico City; Casa Gene Byron, Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato, Mexico, Perpecia: the Salvator Rosa series; The Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, Canberra;Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney,
2005 Strata: Desert of the Mind’s Eye. An exhibition of Ikuniji artists and Mandy Martin. Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
2008 Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
1976 – 84 Numerous group exhibitions
SELECTED GROuP ExHIBITIONS FROM 1984
1984 Form-Image-Sign, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Aspects of the Landscape, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne
Australian Visions, Guggenheim Museum, New York
1985 Heartland, Wollongong City Art Gallery (National tour)
International Triennale der Zeichnung, Kunsthalle, Nürnberg, Germany
1986 Monumental Drawings, Contemporary Art Society, Adelaide
Triad, Adelaide Festival
Painter Prints, 1986 Michelton Print Exhibition (National Tour)
Backlash, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1987 Chaos, Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney
Urban Anxieties: Australian Drawings of the 1980’s National Gallery of Australia
1988 Drawing in Australia, National Gallery of Australia
1989 Prints in Australia, Pre-Settlement to PresentNational Gallery of Australia
1990 Canbrart: A selection of Works by Artists from the ACT and Districts, National Gallery of Australia
Mandy Martin, born 1952 in Adelaide, is a practising artist who has held more than 110 solo exhibitions in Australia, Mexico and the uSA. She has exhibited widely in curated exhibitions in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, uSA and Italy. Her works are in many public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia and major state galleries and collections. In the uSA she is represented in the Guggenheim Museum New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and many private collections.
She studied at the South Australian School of Art, 1972-75. She was a lecturer at the School of Art, Australian National University 1978 – 2003 and a Fellow of ANU 2003-06. In 2009 Martin was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. She lives in the Cowra region, NSW.
Mandy Martin BIOGRAPHY
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1991 aGOG, CanberraTen-to One Print, Print Project, Canberra (Touring)
Cancer Council – 1990 Collection. A Portfolio of Women Artists (Touring)
Indo Eco, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre (Touring)
The Four Elements – Dissonance, Lake Macquarie City Gallery (Touring)
1991 Transitional Times, The Print Council of Australia, 25th Anniversary Print Commission
1992 Works for 10 Square Wilderness, Linden Gallery, Melbourne
Artists from Canberra and Districts in the Parliament House Art Collection, Parliament House, Canberra
Henri Worland Memorial 20th Anniversary Collection, Warrnambool Art Gallery
1993 Briefcase Project, Cairns Regional Gallery, Queensland
Poster Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia
Identities: Art from Australia, National Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan And Wollongong City Gallery
1994 Virtuosi, Youth Music Australia Print Portfolio, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Galleries, Sydney
Prime Television Painting Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery (Touring)
1995 Hidden Treasures. Art in Corporate Collections, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
Eve-Olution, Newcastle Region Art Gallery
Downland College Collection, Toowoomba Region Gallery
The Australian National University Staff Amenities Fund Donations to the Art Collection 1982-1994, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra
The Best Face Value for Autumn, Wollongong City Gallery
Women Hold up Half the Sky, National Gallery of Australia
Australian Art 1940 – 1990 from the Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu Japan
Through Women’s Eyes: Australian Women Artists and War 1914 to 1990, Australian War Memorial, Canberra
1995 Ironside, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale and Casula, Powerhouse, Sydney
The Qantas Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Save Albert Park 9 x 5 Invitations Exhibition, Robert Lindsay Gallery, Melbourne
1996 Prime Television Painting Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery (Touring)
ANU Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, (Touring)
1999 Luoghi Del Corpo e Dello Spirito, Spoleto, Umbria, Italy
Suddenly the Lake Weereewa: Lake George, Canberra Museum And Gallery
2000 Central Queensland Art Purchase, Rockhampton Art Gallery,
Shell Collection of Contemporary Art, Melbourne and Sydney
Prelude: Selections from the Canberra Museum and Gallery CollectionA Thousand Colours. Visual Art for Green ANU, ANU School Of Art
2001 Federation. Australian Art and Society 1901 – 2001, National Gallery of Australia;Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville;Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Uni. of WA, Perth;
Decade, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Auriferous. The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Reflecting Canberra, Canberra Museum and Gallery
First Showing, Cowra Regional Art Gallery
Landscape as Metaphor, Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery, Townsville;Rockhampton Art Gallery;Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery; Bond University, Gold Coast
Orbit, University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide
Imaging Identity and Place, Grafton Regional Gallery
Federation! But Who Makes a Nation? Tweed River Regional Gallery; Albury Regional Arts Centre; Gosford Regional Gallery; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery;Broken Hill City Art Gallery; UTS Gallery, Sydney.
Alchemy. Cadia Hill Goldmine Art Project, Orange Regional Gallery
2002 Imaging Identity and Place, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; Goulburn Regional Art Gallery; Manly Art Gallery and Museum; Orange Regional Art Gallery; Bendigo Art Gallery;Albury Regional Art Centre;
Federation. Australian Art and Society 1901-2001, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston;
Landscape as Metaphor, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra
20, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Sublime. 25 years of the Wesfarmers Collection. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Geraldton Regional Art Gallery; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Brisbane City Gallery;Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Cairns Regional Art Gallery; Bendigo Art Gallery; New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale.
Factor of Ten. A Future Worth Having. School of Art Gallery, National Institute of the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra
Landscapes, Cowra Regional Art Gallery
Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Art Gallery
Australian Art in the National Gallery, National Gallery of Australia
Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002 National Gallery of Victoria
2003 Land$cape: Gold & Water, Cowra Regional Art Gallery;Foyer Gallery, School of Art, ANU;Orange Regional Gallery
Imaging Identity and Place, Tweed River Regional Art Gallery;Campbelltown City Art Gallery
2004 National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Fleurieu Art Prize, Adelaide
Fleurieu Heritage Art Exhibition, Adelaide
Alice Art Prize, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
Landmarks Cowra Regional Art Gallery
2005 Whatever happened to the revolution? Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
Watermarks. Reflections on the water history and culture of Orange and district, Orange Regional Art Gallery
Making a Place for herself. Women’s experiences of Landscapes and national parks, Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney; and touring National Park Visitor Centres throughout NSW in 2006 and 2007.
Landscape Now. Thirty-six Artists interpret the landscape. Solander Gallery, Canberra
2006 The Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Philanthropy Rules!, Orange Regional Art Gallery
The Kilgour Prize, Newcastle Region Art Gallery,
2007 Solander Survey, Solander Gallery, Canberra
Beyond Hill End, Cudgegong Gallery, Gulgong
Winter Solace: Simply Red, Cowra Regional Art Gallery
2008 The John McCaughey Memorial Prize 50 Years National Gallery of Victoria, Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne
2008 The Ecologies Project, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.
The Kilgour Prize, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery
Solander Survey, Solander Gallery, Canberra
Beyond Hill End, Cudgegong Gallery, Gulgong, NSW
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GRANTS since 1995
1995 Environment Education Trust Grant, Minister for the Environment, New South Wales
2000 Main Funding Round ACT Arts Program Grant
2001 Arts ACT Creative Arts Fellowship
2002 Land & Water Australia, Community Fellowship
AWARDS
Australian Representative in Paris (1982), New York (1984), Nürnberg (1985)
1983 John McCaughey Prize, National Gallery of Victoria
1985 Hugh Williamson Art Prize, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria
1990 Alice Prize, Alice Springs
MAJOR COMMISSIONS
1988 Parliament House, Canberra, Red Ochre Cove
1990 Australia Post Head Office, Adelaide, Gorge at Sunrise
1991 Santos, Adelaide
1993 BHP, Melbourne
1995 Coopers and Lybrand, Melbourne, Between Nature and Industry Lies Art
1995 Australian Opera Bollinger Dinner Plate Series, The Flying Dutchman
1996 Australian Opera 40th Anniversary Print Folio
1996 Mobil Circle of Excellence Annual Print
SELECTED MAJOR COLLECTIONS
Art Gallery of New South Wales; Newcastle Region Art Gallery; Art Gallery of South Australia; Parliament House Collection, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Preston Institute; Artbank; Print Council of Australia; National Gallery of Australia; Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston; Banyule Art Collection, Victoria; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; Bendigo Art Gallery; R.M.I.T University Collection, Melbourne; Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Riddoch Art Gallery, Mount Gambier; Fremantle Art Gallery; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum; Tamworth City Art Gallery; Griffith University, Brisbane; University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane; University of Melbourne Art Collection; La Trobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell; University of Southern Queensland; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; National Gallery of Victoria; Warrnambool Art Gallery; Wollongong City Gallery, Australian National University Art Collection; University of Canberra; Emerald Shire, Queensland; Central Queensland University; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Cowra Regional Art Gallery.
SELECTED PRIVATE COLLECTIONS THROuGHOuT AuSTRALIA AND u.S.A.
A.G. Edwards and Sons, St Louis, Missouri; I.B.M.; Australia Post; Macquarie Bank; B.H.P.; Mark Twain Bank Shares, St. Louis Missouri: Blake Dawson Waldron; Price Waterhouse; Coopers & Lybrand; Santos; - C.R.A. Limited; Zoltek Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri; Dresdner Australia Limited; Mercantile Bank, St Louis; Smorgon Family Collection MacDonalds Collection; CRA and Rio KMPG.