kathryn brimblecombe-fox
lt takes a certain amount of artistic grit to work with landscape painting as a contemporary idiom. Installation and new media art are much easier. They come already coded as contemporary and proto-nontraditional, and immediately orientate audiences to a largely assumed iconoclasm. Landscape painting arrives coded as almost the opposite. lt is a genre signifying art history Establishment and belongs symbolically to what is past. There is also the difficulty of the whitefel/a Aussie artist expressing a relationship to land postMabo and post-Western Desert acrylic painting. 'Settler' Australians' relationship to land is now 'unsettled' to say the least and any expression of landscape is intrinsically charged with political ambiguity.
Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox takes on this challenge nevertheless. Her exhibition at Brisbane's Soapbox Gallery comprises one large landscape painting (watercolour & gouache on paper) that wraps around two entire walls of a room, along with thirty four very small works on paper whose titles are names of rural properties in south-western Queensland. The large painting is unusual in that its entire background is very deep blue acrylic painted onto paper whilst flat on the ground and applied using a gladwrap technique borrowed from ceramic painting. Superimposed over this dense blue background there is a landscape represented figuratively in the form of contour lines and outlines painted in brightly coloured gouache. The palette has a funky seventies feel to it-not quite psychedelic but more 'electrostatic' in effect. Occasional red lightning bolts and miniaturized shower bursts reinforce this atmospheric charge.
The lines of schematic contouring encourage a perception of the artwork as not about landscape seen, but landscape sensed or felt. Geographical contours communicate as mental contours held together by an experience of place