Bay, acrylic on hand sewn canvas 42x54cm 2021
Intruder, acrylic on hand sewn canvas 153x123cm 2021
I have been pouring (pawing) over two of my Rosalie catalogues in awe of her love of the found object and her wonderful sense of aesthetic. There is something about Rosalies sensibility in handling weathered and worn enamel, corrugated iron, road signs and wood that excites my imagination. Her work speaks about the experience of landscape in a way that is not literal, and yet it is. It is the experience of finding an object, washed up on a beach or discarded by the side of a road. The experience of walking through sun dappled trees in summer heat or driving through seemingly endless wheat fields, vineyards, cow paddocks. The endless expanse.
It speaks about the use of materials, abandoned when no longer required, left to weather and age in the landscape, often in tips. It talks about salvage and rescue and repurposing before it became a political agenda. It speaks of history made contemporary, and most importantly it speaks about our interaction with the land.
I have been in adoration of Rosalie since high school, and while she was a huge influence on my work back then, it wasn’t until very recently that one of those pivotal moments occurred and I allowed her influence to once again wash over me. My interpretation of her work has emerged in the form of hand sewn canvas. I have been working on sewn canvas since my final year of undergraduate studies at university. By the third year of my degree, and after having moved out of home for the last two of them, I was pretty well financially ruined. In an attempt to both save money and keep painting, I began to sew together all the off cuts of canvas I had salvaged over the years. That year, I also began sewing paper together to create very large drawings. And now I find myself, once again at the top of that circle. Circle? Well, I guess it’s more like a spiral because it doesn’t end, it moves on. And I once again find myself creating the lush and textural finishes that make playing with paint a pure joy.
It is this that draws me to her work, how playing with such humble materials can evoke such emotion.
