Unknown lands

This exegesis addresses the imperative to acknowledge the presence of female landscape artists in the profession from 1700 onwards, to expose the reasons for their exclusion from the canon and explore a different method, an intervention, into the current representation of landscape art history. For the purposes of this exegesis the preferred term will be 'artists who are woman,' as opposed to 'female artists.' The project is comprised of a written, a creative, and a digital response. Feminist theory is used here to analyse women’s invisibility and their omission from the canon of landscape art. The social and cultural forces that affected female landscape artists from Australia, the United States of America, Britain and Europe are examined, and case studies provide evidence to show that women have not just been forgotten but excluded, and that they continue to be excluded, from the professional category landscape artist, due to the situating of landscape art as a male occupation and its consecration as a tribute to the male hero conquering the land. Current feminist art practice is used as a personal response in a conceptual framework. This visual aspect of the project is designed to provide a bridge from the art of our foremothers to the present, an expansion of my own practice and an opportunity to to challenge the viewer to think about the lives of these remarkable women. It uses the symbolism of the vagina/vulva to elucidate the constraints placed upon half of humanity on the basis of their sex. A comprehensive spreadsheet is an ongoing project, that provides unprecedented access to artists who are women, a project begun during my graduate degree. It allows the user to select artists who are women by a number of criteria, including dates, nationality, practice, genre and style. For the subject of this exegesis the subset of landscape artists has been extracted from it (Appendix II). The final exhibition brings together these three elements, including information about the landscape artists who are women, an interactive display of the spreadsheet and a display of feminist visual images to challenge the viewer to rethink the work of these remarkable women.