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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Rosalie Gascoigne associated her art with natural processes of fading, weathering, erosion and the passing of time. Pale landscape spells out this fascination. It comprises a carpet of newspapers threaded with swans’ feathers that Gascoigne gathered from the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. She had been fascinated with birds and birdsong since she was a schoolgirl in the Auckland suburb of Remuera, at which time she discovered the poetry of John Keats and Peray Bysshe Shelley, with its stirring evocation of skylarks and nightingales. As well as using feathers, Gascoigne frequently referenced birds in the titles of her works, in the parrots she cut out of Arnott’s biscuit boxes and in her use of the colours and rhythms of birds in flight. In her art, she consciously sought to impart a sense of being airborne and — like the romantic poets — beyond the bounds of the rational world.
Gascoigne spoke of the ‘lonely, free and untrammelled’ reality she discovered upon arrival in Australia in 1943 — in dramatic contrast to the ‘well-disciplined’ environment of her birthplace.1 Pale landscape is imbued with a sense of wonder at the brightness, flatness and openness of the landscape around Canberra, where she was based for the rest of her life. The work incorporates elements of minimalism as well as lessons learnt from her extensive study of flower arrangement and ikebana, which she took up in the 1950s.
Gascoigne associated the meditative quality of her work with the Zen Buddhist tradition, yet at the same time Pale landscape is very much a testament to her direct experience of shimmering air, light and landscape. ‘It read to me like the levels of the lake where I collected the feathers,’ Gascoigne wrote in 1985. ‘It is very level country … and it was all about horizontals and all about pallor … those feathers are so long they curve like waves.’2
Gascoigne said the purpose of her art was to ‘sing a song’ of her district.3 Without losing touch with the matter-of-fact nature of its materials, Pale landscape is an eloquent, lyrical account of her euphoric engagement with time, light and space.
Gregory O'Brien
1 Mary Eagle, ‘Obituary, Rosalie Gascoigne’, Gallery news, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, December 1999–February 2000, p. 2.
2 Cited in Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Paddington, New South Wales, 1998, p. 46.
3 Cited in ibid., p. 37.