the journey of unspoken things
Seven Tolkienesque mountain-scapes sit on plinths like floating islands casting shadows of treacherous heights and deep valleys across the gallery, conjuring up what Barrie Osborne, producer of The Lord of the Rings, calls ‘the primal, untamed and unruly landscape of the old European Countryside’. Immediately we are transported from postcolonial dialogues of the Top End to a mnemonic landscape inhabited in the recesses of the mind. The artist responsible for this paradigm shift is Anne Ooms, sporadic resident of Darwin over five years, bringing her Eurocentric imaginings into the fringes of the tropics.
In the exhibition catalogue, Ooms quotes Henry David Thoreau on the subject of sauntering. His declaration that ‘every walk is a sort of crusade preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the Infidels’ is a quest Ooms has taken up in the studio. Through her art we are catapulted into an adventure, a crusade, an epic journey or simply ushered off just to take a walk of poetic reverie.
A series of greyscale images in cloudlike formations on the wall act as aides to negotiating the miniature-scapes. These glyphs are aerial maps rendered from digitally scanned images of the models. A red dot marks a site of significance on each image, such as a lofty peak or a contemplative plateau, with accompanying evocative titles. Ooms has a history of delving into the fictitious and here it resurfaces with names such as The Tor of Natural Causes, The Wanderer’s Edge and The Ledge of Leaping Faiths. The viewer is encouraged to embark upon a mythical journey equipped with characters of his or her own making by creating