At the National Art Gallery in Canberra.
I revisited Bea Maddock’s seven-panel work, We live in the meanings we are able to discern. She made it in Launceston in 1987, just after her return from the Antarctic. Seven canvas panels are linked through three perspectives of the landscape, running horizontally across them as three narratives of the one place. The land is drawn, written (or perhaps spoken), and photographed. The stratified composition of this work presages her monumental Terra Spiritus.
Pencil sketches made in immediate response to the landscape have been enlarged and fixed beneath encaustic on canvas, as if embedded under ice. Drawn in the style of early explorers’ topographical drawings, her drawings are similarly made to chart coastlines newly seen. Drawing is used as a language to explore Heard Island, contouring of the known forms (of buildings, a flagpole) amidst the unknown forms (of ice, rock, mountain) .
Aboriginal words – place names from the south-west of Tasmania – are cursively written beneath the drawings, evoking ancient connections of this land and Australia, as Gondwanaland. Tasmania and Heard Island could have once been physically connected.
Photographic replications of a glacier, repeated in tones of ethereal blues and greens, are enclosed in small box frames beneath the whole – three beneath each panel= 21. Like frames of movie film, they suggest a times-lapse capture of the ever changing light and colour, impossible to fix in one frame.