Rosalie Gascoigne (New Zealand/Australia, 1917 –1999) 'Roadside'

I LIKE TO THINK

THAT I CAN

MAKE POETRY

OF THE

COMMONPLACE

— I TAKE WHAT

IS AT HAND²

Lying at the heart of Rosalie Gascoigne’s art is the spiritual interplay between the found object and the landscape from which it came.

Hers is a minimal approach to the visual casting of this abstract connection. Her methods and processes are so deceptively simple that the lyricism of works such as Roadside, 1988, overtakes the reality that we are viewing detritus—as the title suggests—likely found by going into the landscape, into junkyards or along the sides of highways through the Monaro south of Canberra where she spent much of her life as an artist. Gascoigne’s discarded soft drink crates have been sawn and splintered then rearranged in sections on a staged tableau. The act of splintering and arranging is important in the creation process, because Gascoigne never applied paint to make a ‘painting’ in the conventional sense. But Roadside feels like painting. The splinters jostle in rectangular sections giving the effect of the shards bursting within the constraint of the overall boundary. There is similar delight in seeing a child with a colouring-in book enthusiastically crossing the boundaries of the shapes to be coloured. Roadside should never be framed as that would have the effect of reasserting the boundary and crushing the spirit within.

The sense that elements of the work have been arranged, springs not from art school training, but from Gascoigne’s practiced understanding of Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging. Ikebana has more than seven centuries of history and is replete with rules of stem and leaf placement that aim to make flowers come alive in the space that they occupy. These almost sacred aspects are hard won. An Ikebana arrangement must carry more to the eye than the beauty of the initial floral components.

Roadside’s colour, that tawny yellow that we see, carries the trace of past utility. Yellow is a roadpaint colour and Gascoigne invokes a sense of travelling in wide open spaces through her effective titling. In reality, the original paint was likely sprayed on commercially to brand a commodity so as to trigger our collective experience. Objects—even discarded soft drink crates—carry their past history, even radiate their past history, directly into the present by virtue of simply being here. In Gascoigne’s words: ‘In the end, things have to have vitality’.¹ Gascoigne embarked on fossicking expeditions to source vital material and stored it in her studio until it triggered future use.

Gascoigne was born in New Zealand, and those New Zealand roots filter her art, filtering even the seventeen years that she lived at Mt Stromlo with a partner who was a professional astronomer. That isolated existence looking at the skies, looking at the land absolutely fed a spiritual connection between found materials and actually being in the landscape and travelling through it. To get that sense of spiritual travelling, think of Colin McCahon’s famous painting Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, 1950, where his restless spirit navigates a story-board of half-lit painted landscapes.

This is why Gascoigne’s work was shown alongside Colin McCahon’s in a two-person show in 1990 on the occasion of New Zealand’s Sesquicentenary: Sense of Place was staged at The Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney and The Ian Potter Gallery, Melbourne. More than spirit, the two artists shared word associations as a kind of visual language. Gascoigne through her evocative titles and her sawn-up and rearranged instructive roadsigns; and McCahon through his naively painted religious texts and his unshakeable belief that words are needed to paint the spiritual burdens of human existence.

Roadside has enjoyed a distinguished exhibition history including: the 1988 Australian Biennale at Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria; What is Contemporary Art?, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, 1989; Martin Browne Fine Art, 1991; and Material as Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales. The living presence of Roadside absolutely fulfils that curatorial promise.

1 James Mollison and Steven Heath, ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: In Her Own Words’, catalogue

essay in Rosalie Gascoigne—Material as Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales,

1998, p7

2 Anne Kirker, ‘Art that Calls Us into Relationship: A Way of Interpreting McCahon and

Gascoigne’, catalogue essay in Rosalie Gascoigne—Colin McCahon: Sense of Place, Ivan

Dougherty Gallery, UNSW, 1990, p18