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March 7, 2010
The wild or untamed natural beauty of Tasmania has lured, inspired, enrapt, and obsessed artists since European occupation of the Island. However, the work of Tasmania’s contemporary landscape artists do not represent the sublime or beauty alone, as they have stumbled across the complexities underlying the island’s culture from invasion and ecological destruction and begun to introduce the politics, history and traditions of the island into their artwork.
David Keeling, Hazards Forest 1, 2006, Oil on Linen
This treescape, with its straggly, rhythmic formations, breaks away from wilderness as beauty and the 19th-century landscape painters, whose scenes reinforced an idealised notion of place. It's effect is for us to ask a question rather than confirm a view (the Heidelberg School ) and so become aware of the baggage that comes with representing the landscape. We are obliged to deal with the tradition as well as the politics of the push to develop again in wilderness areas and the on urban encroachment onto the land.
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