Rosalie Gascoigne, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
14 November 1997 - 11 January 1998

In 1974 Rosalie Gascoigne had her first art exhibition. In 1994, just 20 years later, she was awarded an AM for service to the arts, particularly as a sculptor. Now, at 80 years of age, her work is represented in all Australian state and national galleries and in many overseas collections including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Material as Landscape is not a retrospective of Rosalie Gascoigne's career but an exhibition which focuses specifically on Gascoigne's relationship with the natural environment and the ways in which Rosalie Gascoigne expresses rather than describes, nature and the landscape in her work. The exhibition will include approximately thirty works ranging from the late 1970s to the present day, including a number of her major works.

A fully-colour illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by James Mollison and Deborah Edwards, Curator of the exhibition.

Rosalie Gascoigne settled in Australia in 1943 when she joined her astronomer husband at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in the A.C.T.. It was the artist's response to the landscape of Australia there over 20 years that led her to attend the Japanese Sogetsu School of Ikebana in 1962. Ikebana can well be translated as 'awareness of nature' and Rosalie Gascoigne rapidly mastered this discipline which enriched her appreciation of form and line. Not to be limited by this tradition, she began collecting a variety of abandoned and naturally weathered items, during her regular excursions into the landscape around Canberra.

In her work Rosalie Gascoigne uses commonplace objects, often scavenged from the tips and pastures around Canberra, arrranging them with the most minimal of means to create evocative works of great clarity and power. Rosalie Gascoigne's work incorporates both a refined formal sensibility and a poetic inspiration that she finds in the landscape. Everyday objects cease to have a conventional function as they are arranged in such a way that the focus is on them as art objects, with their own inherent qualities and meaning. " I try to provide a starting point from which people can let their imagination's wander - what they discover may be the product of their own experience as much as mine," said Rosalie Gascoigne.

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney NSW 2000
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au