March 12, 2012
I've recently been photographing in Tunbridge in the Tasmanian Midlands. Raymond Arnold at LARQ mentioned that Bea Maddock had done a print of the Midlands around Tunbridge in the late 1980s.
Bea Maddock's panorama of the Tasmanian Midlands landscape (sic) is entitled Terra Spiritus....with a darker shade of pale 1993-98.
Bea Maddock, Terra Spiritus....with a darker shade of pale 1993-98.
There is a dialogue between photography and traditional print media in Bea Maddock’s works. She had turned from autographic printmaking to photo-screenprinting in the 1960's and at that time for her photography (understood as reportage) was a form of drawing.
Terra Spiritus was conceived to be viewed as an installation, circumnavigating the walls of a room. The suite of 51 (in an edition of 5) incised drawings took five years of intensive work to complete. Its genesis lies in the trip the artist took to Antarctica in 1987.
Update
I since discovered that Terra Spiritus is not the panorama that Raymond Arnold was referring to with respect to the Midlands. The four panel panorama of the Tasmanian Midlands landscape is entitled Tromemanner..forgive us our trespass (1988-9). It is held in the Queensland Art Gallery and is not online.
Martin Walch at the School of Art in the University of Tasmania pointed out to me that Maddock's Terra Spiritus is not a panorama from inside Tasmania as I had assumed. It was a topography of Tasmania as seen from the sea.
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