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Anne Lord 's recent exhibition , Incongruous Layerings, continues to explore and to develop the themes and techniques with which her work has been concerned for some time: the quality of marks and textures which animate the surfaces of her work, and the relationship to a particular landscape with which her family has been associated for several generations. Lord has referred in conversation to this landscape as a homeland, an emotive title suggesting a place which carries great significance in terms of personal identity and spiritual links. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents took up country in north-western Queensland, and subsequent generations of her family have continued to live and work there, taking on the responsibility for the country and being profoundly influenced by it.
This landscape has continued to provide the source of Lord's work, which has evolved consistently through painting, printmaking and installation in its attempt to devise a language of marks refined enough to carry the layers of meaning which her explorations reveal. In both the lively, interweaving brushstrokes of the paintings, and the delicate scored notations of the wood engravings, the reference to the brittle, windswept calligraphy of the north-western grasslands is apparent.
The strong colours of the earlier paintings have given way to blacks and greys, due in part to the influence of woodblock printing, in which the process begins with the black base of the inked block. In an earlier installation in the exhibition dis/PLACE Lord used the woodblock itself as an artefact, the blanks of the inked block concealing the potential image and history contained in the wood. A laterally-sliced branch of snappy gum (a very dense and tough timber which grows in