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Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape
seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants
than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements
and accidents take place. For those who, with the
habitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer
only geographic but also biographical and personal.
John Berger
Negotiating the territory of landscape painting is a risky business in the present time. By 1975 Bernard Smith had written, "the overwhelming predominance of landscape painting has created a false consciousness of what it is to be an Australian",1 and since then the Australian landscape tradition has generally come to epitomize the antithesis of the development of conceptually based art forms. The predominance of "the Australian landareas. A kind of tactile schizophrenia is at work—the sensual smears of paint and the gentle frottage of graphite are often overlaid by a more hysterical, lacerated grid.
The catalogue statement that accompanies this exhibition describes the artist's intention to recycle landscape imagery, placing it “in a critical context in relation to my personal, physical association with my land".
The voice of the first person is insistent, even though Morgan has titled the body of work “mutespace". (“I identify 'mutespace' as the space between the figure and the shadow.") Given that the shadow in the works acts as a kind of caul across the picture plane, apparently above the polyglot images, that space between the shadow's figure and the picture plane is also the location of the viewer's relationship to the image. The viewer's presence 'upon the land' is established through implication; together with the invisible presence of the absent artist, there is an intimated complicity via the shared