Essay by Peter Jackson
A Conversation with Country

Friday 19 August – Sunday 18 September 2005
Burnie Regional Gallery
Fire, Flood, Silt and Change

Introduction

This exhibition by Jane Giblin contains oil paintings; ink wash works on paper, and small, dense black and white photos. They represent different ways in which she has responded to the challenge of working through her responses to the landscape over the last decade.

The landscapes range from western NSW, through open forest, riverbeds and darkened thickets, to the Northwest coast of Tasmania. Giblin has described much of the included work as a learning process: learning about painting in a new style, learning about meaning lies in the landscape, and perhaps most of all, about how the landscape helps to define one’s identity.

There are the oil paintings with their segmented modules, united by raw shapes filled by thick linear webs which surge and move across the surface. There are ink wash works on paper, which represent efforts to capture, in an ever more spontaneous and intuitive manner, essential elements in a passing landscape. In seeming contrast are the small photographs that often project elements at odds with the tactile manual energy of the other works. They are like private moments staring at “the secret place” among the trees.

Art and Landscape

Many of our richest feelings are mysteriously buried in past childhood experiences. These long embedded “memories” subconsciously affect our response to certain kinds of landscape. In Giblin’s case, she has been drawn to revisit places where she lived or travelled when much younger.

In 1998 on such a visit, she was consumed by a passion for the endless paddocks of outback NSW. The simplicity is beguiling; however, the “flat” seen at an angle to the eye is a complex deep space. The mind provides the bird’s eye plan to further complicate the transferal to a surface representation. Ever since the Post Impressionists, nature’s shapes have been subject to a process of formal transformation. The process is complex and even photography transforms what many people see as “real”.

However, the nature of Art is not just to record what appears real in that sense. It is essentially to convert the world and the artist’s experience of it, into a new experience: an Art Object.

The Transient Shadow

The landscape painting process develops out of a curiosity to explore qualities that define a place, and then (to explore) specific aspects that have demanded the observer’s subjective response. It requires the synthesis of memories, contextual meanings, and immediate sensory responses in a creative solution.

Giblin has often experienced an uncomfortable sense of encroachment that has striven to engage with her problem. She recognizes that there are established attitudes, which help to define what meaning a place has. There is a sense of possession, a union with the land, based on generations of occupation, which permeates the contemporary view of place and identity. However, Giblin has a self-conscious awareness of her presence in the landscape. She is struggling with a predicament, where she is not ‘of’ the landscape, but a visitor to it, who finds herself passionately involved or connected to it. For example, the painting ‘My Shadow in Four Positions’ provides surfaces, which correspond with these conflicting psychological and perceptual relationships.

Selection of a subject removes it from its surroundings. On the paintings surface a rocky headland may “float” in its newly created space (see The Last Cape) detached as it were from its origin. The subsequent picture structure is like an analogy for Giblin’s sense of incursion into a land where people have lived for generations, investing it with a sense of heritage and the ecology of renewal burning. For her, their presence pervades and makes her feel that the most she can include is her shadow, because a shadow still allows direct access to the intrinsic value of the land. The shadows are by definition transient.

The Moving Glimpse

It is only when the observer moves through the landscape that you get an appreciation of scale, distance and spatial dimension. Through Giblin’s excursions into the land, she encounters the immediacy of the surface textures and the vital presence, which surrounds them. It is not just a visual but holistic experience. Giblin continually speaks of the smells and sounds which arise as she passes through an area; the crunch under foot and the swish or rustle as she passes into a zone of rediscovering memories. Often, however, a special event or recognition has passed before one can contemplate it. Moving through the landscape produces a myriad of such moments, glimpsed fleetingly, but potentially powerful elements in the experience. To capture this definitively elusive, special moment is not possible in a single image. However, a painting can develop from these seminal moments, which move the observer out of the usual condition of “just looking”. The problem is that the resulting art works are destined not to “look” like what the casual observer is conditioned to believe and expect “their” landscape to look like. They are a journey into new worlds.

Peter Jackson
June, 2005

Essay by Dr Margaret Baguley

Hill’s Edge; Jane Giblin & Sue Henderson
Burnie Regional Gallery 11 April – 18 May 2008

Jane Giblin is an artist who captures an indefinable quality in her sweeping Tasmanian landscapes by bringing together a range of layers both in terms of media and memory. Giblin seeks to recapture fondly remembered childhood experiences of journeys, both in the car and on foot, of discovery beyond the reality of experience. Her love of the Tasmanian landscape results in works which are carefully yet spontaneously layered; anchored by objects which are often manufactured.  Giblin forces the viewer to acknowledge and value every element and aspect of the work, which reveals her story of space and place. Oftentimes the negative spaces in Giblin’s work resonate with the same energy as the forms she depicts. This results in a rhythmic energy throughout her works, which is both alienating yet strangely familiar. It is a sense of the rhythms inherent in seasonal changes, which many people from the land are familiar with, and those who are not are alienated from. Her use of devices such as lengths of paddocks and fence posts recall to her the fleeting glimpses from a car window and the memory of the rhythmic pace of the journey being undertaken.

The sense of being ‘other’ is a recurring theme in Giblin’s work resulting in paintings and drawings, which often contain shadows, symbolising herself, against the landscape. The layering of paint or ink is also important to Giblin because it is in the spaces in between where she recognises existence.  Giblin’s commitment to her art has seen her work in isolated landscapes for extended periods of time. As she states: ‘I adore the Tasmanian landscape, I feel like I am part of this Tasmanian landscape, I love the soil here.’ However, the tension in her work also reflects a quiet sense of dispossession of the land and empathy for others who have experienced this sense of isolation and disconnectedness. The denuded hills symbolise her intuitive concept of their forms rather than a realistic portrayal of their surface. The scratching and scoring of the surface of her work with ink results in her feeling and experiencing the landscape as she did when she was a child ‘with bindy burrs in your feet, walking barefoot, scuffing around in bare feet in gravel or getting the bitumen stuck on the soles of your feet’.

Giblin’s work is immediate and urgent. She seeks to capture a sensory and emotional recollection based on remembered physical immersion in the landscape itself. To this end her most recent works feature the recurring motifs of an irrigator and a shed, which she notes ‘have to take prominence for a time’. Giblin’s work cannot progress without real experiences resulting in her constantly experimenting with these motifs until her next immersion experience with the land. Although rapidly, but expertly executed, these works continually reflect upon and challenge the motifs, which Giblin is working with resulting in landscapes imbued with her story. The inclusion of water in her work, for example, references her father’s work with drought-ridden regions and his responsibilities in examining bores and designing dams for the communities of Tasmania and New South Wales. Including water in her work therefore enables Giblin to seek ‘a tiny vestige of redemption’ for water is a powerful symbol for both cleansing and survival. It is also a tribute to her father for imbuing in her this love of the land, which she constantly honours in her work. Giblin does not try to master her subject matter through challenge and control but allows it to speak to her, with gentle sensory reminders of smells and sounds, which are the same, yet different from those she encountered in the past.

Giblin’s compositions reveal an insightful and intelligent eye, which makes full use of the space available to capture the essence of the land and her relationship to it. Her drawing skills, honed after decades of practice, are expertly used to bring definition to the transient quality she endeavours to capture. Layers of paint and ink are skilfully used to reveal complexity and depth to the forms she has depicted. Her palette is defined by the mood of the work which ranges from brooding to celebratory, reflecting both an internal and external dialogue between her and the land itself. Drips, splashes and scratching into and onto the work allude to her recognition that nature itself is uncontrollable. They also lend a vibrancy and sense of movement to the more formal compositions simmering on the rag paper or canvas beneath.

The somatic experience involved in encountering Giblin’s work is similar to that captured by Lloyd Rees. Both artists seek to capture the immediacy of mood and the myriad effects of light resulting in works, which have an ethereal, enigmatic yet emotional quality. Giblin’s commitment to truth in materials and subject matter brokers no compromise between the way she perceives the landscape, her relationship with it, both past and present, and her absolute passion to capture its complexity and beauty. There is a lyrical quality to Giblin’s work, which reminds the viewer of their transient existence in relation to nature, which positions our lives with seasonal changes; constantly reminding us of time passing. Her work however also reveals that it is possible to work with the land rather than against it; to celebrate its immense power and constant claim on our existence. Giblin perceives denuded, desolate and scoured landscapes as possessing difference, interference and arrhythmia as well as rhythm, warmth, delight and seduction. These are qualities, which she has internalised and transformed into works, which are transitory and immediate, sensual and earthy.

Giblin seeks to create work, which is informed by past and present experiences simultaneously, which explore the qualities of space and personal sensory experiences. Her ability to do this in such a powerful and effective way reveals an artist who has interrogated her arts practice through discipline and hard work. Her prolific output is remarkable and is a genuine commitment to her role as an artist. We are indeed privileged to be able to view and converse with such honest, emotive, passionate and reflective works inspired by the Tasmanian landscape in this exhibition from an artist of Giblin’s calibre

 

Isabella Foster

Catalogue essay, for Dog’s Belly,
July 2016 Colville Gallery

One cannot experience the scoured Tasmanian landscape without enduring the silent presence of the past.

 “Here… be warm and draw.” We are in a colonial garden. Jane instructs, handing me a large sheet of thick cotton paper, a dish of ink, a brush, and a whittled bamboo stick, she points to a fur coat sprawled in the grass. I crouch into the dew and seek out the darting transience of light and shadows across a tree and some emerging sheep and one loud peacock.

For the past eighteen months Jane and I have travelled into the vast lull of rolling hills and continually worked plateaus that are the Midlands of Tasmania. With Lilu the dog, the furs, paper, drawing tables, ink, brushes and bamboo in the boot, we roll into the long thin driveway leading to the scattered remains of some sandstone buildings.

Two women, two artists… a teacher, and a student, trespass in gendered territory, a landscape most often known as a male domain.

Pointing to her stack of thick cotton paper, Jane instructs and offers agency.

Pushing the paper into the parched red earth between patches of grass I imitate Jane’s hunt. Looking up before me, I squint, I search, and I slip the bamboo into the slick dark ink.

Primarily, here, there is a relationship with the landscape. This relationship is built with the present, the past, historic texts, the dirt, the animals, the garden, the paper, and the ink, as well as each other, all of which influence our response to this place. I depict through inspired practice, my own experience of this relationship.

This landscape emerges and recoils. It is fragmented, it is scratchy, and it is whole. These are reminders of core sensualities that saturate Jane’s memories of sweltering road trips with her father as a young girl. Since 2004, Jane has worked in the Tasmanian landscape, but now, she struggles to draw, and paint and photograph the figure in her search for a further distillation.

The existence of the figure in Australian landscape art evolved out of an early intention to provide a realistic yet picturesque report about a new and acceptable world. The Anglo-Saxon women who were shipped here to complete domestic chores and fill the ports with porcelain children share a restricted existence amongst the Tasmanian landscape. Encrusted with its thick history of proud misogyny, the Australian national consciousness has been manipulated and moulded by centuries of Australian male artists’ depictions and exploitations of the landscape. Considering the scrutiny of art made by women as ‘craft’, and the ongoing enforced confinement to domestic spheres, women were, and still are ostracized from the representation of an Australian national consciousness.

The depiction of women’s initial experience in the Australian landscape is one in which exclusion from practical participation and engagements underpin their occasional representation. The understanding of the use of women in Australia, women in bush, female in human animal realm, tension and release, and even student in a teacher’s sphere, are comforting and hostile. Mythologies and historic truths endured and acknowledged are inherent.

The merging of human animal with animals of the land allows for the exploration and recognition of human animal sexuality and animosity as well as the relationship between the working human and the working animal. Identifying herself with the rawness, the fur, the blood and the filth, Jane explores questions of identity and how one’s relationship with a land must consider its history. Jane toys with the intersectionality of female oppression and indigenous cultures by European and British settlers, and the suppression of the human animal.

When Jane tells me to walk out into the overgrown orbicular garden, barefoot and draped in furs, with Lilu to my left and compound bow at my right, she is no longer suggesting that I may, this woman may, be part of the land. She instead allows me to exist, react and respond to the landscape’s silent ethos.

Observing me, Jane records every movement of skin, fat, and hair across my bones, and the rise and fall of my chest, while Lilu and I work together to hold a position for the hunt.

The urgency of her scratch into cotton leaves no room for delayed contemplation. Becoming an automaton to her knowledge, experience, and lingering memories, opaque lines are pushed into the paper, dragging pigment across the cotton, pulling forms and tones together. This capacity to observe what is before oneself, consider and assemble the culmination of knowledge, experience, and the fine-tuning of the ‘control dial’ allows for Jane’s manipulation of risk, a risk she enjoys. The consequent mess and disarray are liberated from the confines of the historical representation of the Tasmania we have been taught to understand.

I sweat under the sun’s unwavering heat, and I shiver and squirm into the warm fur of a possum to escape the brutal bite of the wind.

We are women. We are in the bush, hunting for shadows that dance and hide, chasing fleeting sunlight, interpreting forms and textures, we draw.

Isabella Foster 2016