Breath and other basics

Essentially, my work is nothing more than a disappearing act. Through the layering of landscape forms I want to represent the land as a series of fleeting moments in a continuous force of change. Whilst painting, often directly on site, I attempt to immerse myself in an experience that seems impossible, that of seeing the sensation of seeing and its apparent dissolution. I want to capture that tremulous state in the land, what Alain Badiou has called elsewhere, “the movement of disappearance”, a disturbance not yet transformed into an object nor cast in negation as an absence, but rather the actuality of disappearance itself.’

All my work is based on experience in the land. I respond with an acute awareness to my surrounds, and reference in particular the rhizomatic model of Deleuzian philosophy (Gilles Deleuze). This philosophy opens up new ways of ‘seeing’ the landscape, and suggests that the landmass contains multiple and shifting points of connection across time and space.

This new body of work draws on earlier methods I developed over 10 years ago during research in the Northern Territory. Now at home in my Tasmanian studio I have gone back to basic concepts that derive from the printmaking and landscape painting I first began to explore in 2006. Bringing this into the present, using shellac based inks and acrylics I have applied similar techniques to painting on linen.

The saffron works in particular adapt elements of my earlier relief printing methods. The printing press is no longer involved, and I paint directly onto the linen. Eliminating the press, I roll the paint directly onto the painting surface (in this case linen) and use stencils to mask shapes. By layering many times, I create slightly shifting formations to suggest the land is in a constant state of change.

Whilst the deep blue and green ocean works are a departure from the print painting methodology and are more abstract, they are similarly concerned with shifting forms in the land, or ocean, in this case. In terms of method, I have poured and rubbed the paint, allowing chance to create the work; a kind of tripartite dissolution between the artist, the medium and the milieu in which I work.

Caroline Rannersberger, 2018