Long to belong: Contemporary narratives of place. Stories in landscape painting from a non-Indigenous perspective

How do Anglo-Australian artists paint themselves into the landscape with relevance and integrity, in spite of our complicated history? How do we submit to our own ‘small narratives’ and express an experience of land which considers but is not muted by postcolonial dialogues? How do individual artists form a visual language respondent to place and instructed by creative chance? The painting studio is where these questions are raised and where formal problems arise. Disparate ideas are tested in the search for marks and images to build an ambiguous sensation of place. Reflection, doubt, and wonder are the forces behind the paintings, but landscape is the sustaining narrative, and the inquiry is personal, equivocal. A remote valley on the Ellenborough River forms the back-ground to the current body of work, but my practice has taken me to desert communities during the past decade. Living and working in these environments where Indigenous artists paint without inherent effort, immersed in their big narratives of country, our choice to paint landscape is a continual challenge. Regular field trips to the valley and visits back to the desert, immersion in the patterns and phenomena of land, issues of belonging, impermanence and nostalgia have driven this investigation. The almost anachronistic studio practice results in an exhibition of on-site drawings and painted landscape memoirs. In the exegesis I examine my work through the prism of paintings by Indigenous artists from Haasts Bluff and Milikapiti. Non-Indigenous artists who engage with issues of landscape in a contemporary Australian context are also investigated, with a focus on cross-cultural dialogues, collaborations and formal painterly responses.