Dobell Drawing prize 2023
The Dobell drawing prize is the leading biennial showcase of contemporary and explorative drawing in Australia
Date: March 2023
Title: Fractured Landscape
Medium: Digital photographic print on 300gsm paper, graphite powder, graphite stick, graphite oil stick, wax, varnish, 81 x 74cm
The work aims to instigate dialogue with the many environmental changes to the landscape and the way in which we engage with them through image and material transformation. The interdisciplinary, practice-based approach builds on the tension and relationship between craft and concept, image and object, local and global, dynamic relationships in a constant oscillatory state of transformation.
The work explores the creation of ‘atmospheric’ work by taking the specific and making it ambiguous through processes of erasure and negation. Media and techniques traverse the technological and the handcrafted, including vintage stereoscope glass negatives depicting landscape scenes, digital photographic printing, mineral pigments, wax and varnish with graphite unifying the techniques and mediums.
These materialising processes instigate a perceptual change by creating a materialised atmospheric veil between work and viewer through multi-layered scarring and staining. We witness the spectacle of a ‘spectral’ image as it sheds its geographical specificity through material intervention, placing the viewer into a form of imaginative correspondence and engagement.