When Pamela Kouwenhoven won the Heysen Prize for landscape art for her work in South Australia, not everyone was happy. Two letters to the local newspaper, The Courier, said her art was insulting and that it so missed the beauty of our country that Hans Heysen would be rolling in his grave. But Kouwenhoven’s rusty portrayals (or betrayals) of country have captured a sense of place; they speak the ethos of the dry land we inhabit.
Her works are large (around two square metres), using scrapings of discarded malthoid on board or galvanised iron. Malthoid, a heavy black gritty tar-paper, was once rolled onto the base of water tanks to keep them watertight. Its hidden deterioration from long contact with earth, tank, and water capture images of the dryland spirit. Kouwenhoven puts these remnants of discarded tanks to a new use which both memorialises a way of life and comments on the state of our too dry environment. She and we together are ‘scraping the bottom of the tank’.
South Australia and Adelaide have been most aware that the Murray-Darling River is drying, dying. So it is appropriate that this work now comes to Queensland, the source of the water and of the river’s precarious state. The work combines both startling beauty and environmental comment.
These works reflect the round bases of tanks, in browns, rusts, and an almost greenish-grey. They are memories of water, stilled. The symbol of the exhibition is the circular Dryland Base 2, the welds of the tank base more obvious in the pink with orange centre. The unusual pink seems somehow more thirsty for water. These are stranger planets than we know; our