Artist Statement 2004
Series TITLE: Weird Melancholy
By Katherine Blackburne
Most Australians are familiar with the term ‘The Bush’ usually taken to mean collectively the vast and varied Australian landscape. To ‘go bush’ means to retreat to a chosen remote destination surviving on the barest of essentials -to lose oneself within the landscape in order to ‘find oneself’.
This next series begins with a meditation on the Australian bush. Not the bush as a 'Streeton’ landscape painting, but the 'bush' as silent witness- an agent of metaphysical surveillance.
It is of course my own encounters with the bush, my own deeply personal relationship with and nostalgia for place that leads me to this notion. I imbue this ‘nostalgia’ with all the emotional weight of a lost lover or friend. This physical landscape invades my mental landscape and vice versa. Thus the ephemeral notion of loss is realized in the strange indefinable presence the bush has.
Series TITLE: Weird Melancholy
By Katherine Blackburne
Most Australians are familiar with the term ‘The Bush’ usually taken to mean collectively the vast and varied Australian landscape. To ‘go bush’ means to retreat to a chosen remote destination surviving on the barest of essentials -to lose oneself within the landscape in order to ‘find oneself’.
This next series begins with a meditation on the Australian bush. Not the bush as a 'Streeton’ landscape painting, but the 'bush' as silent witness- an agent of metaphysical surveillance.
It is of course my own encounters with the bush, my own deeply personal relationship with and nostalgia for place that leads me to this notion. I imbue this ‘nostalgia’ with all the emotional weight of a lost lover or friend. This physical landscape invades my mental landscape and vice versa. Thus the ephemeral notion of loss is realized in the strange indefinable presence the bush has.
