PLATFORM 2024

Landscape painting has made and unmade place in our collective imaginaries for centuries. Burdened by history—too often in the service of nationalism, imperialism, or colonialism—it is always reclaimed by a new generation of artists in their hopes for the future. Having rendered the most sublime, the most violent and the most prosaic moments in lutruwita’s 65,000 history, landscape works, continue to remind us of the joy, the necessity, and the complexity of inhabiting place. This exhibition, Platform 2024, champions this ongoing (un)learning through the work of 5 young women who render contemporary landscape inescapable. Lorna Quinn, Britt Fazey, Frances Malcomson, Kate Lewis and Lucinda Bresnehan consider what it means to care for place and to respect Country. They celebrate how we make our way as part of our natural world, who we are, and who we can become. These artists gift us their personal expressions of inhabitancy and inheritance, inviting us to their windows and opening space for mutual contemplation and awe.

It is striking how familiar these works, each completely new, might seem. If it is not the site that is recognisable; perhaps it is the exquisite detail of the endemic foliage in Quinn’s coastal forests, or the weight of her shadows breaking over those dunes? Perhaps it is the sharpness of Malcomson’s silhouettes, fields of grasses that we know in chorus, soft across the knees, swept off the midlands? Or Lewis’s muted and pregnant skies, muddy tracks, cracked clay, softly crumbling under scrub. Or is it Bresnehen’s immutable midnight where the inky water is only sound and salty smell and a fine silver line of moonlight. And that same ocean, revelatory now, as it breaks in Fazey’s dawn is filled with that low, clear Tasmanian light, that is nowhere else in the world. Every dawn is new, unlike any other, and still we know it’s ancientness as if we can look back through era’s of dawning. This is how landscape works are made, from every stroke that comes before and as if to seed everything that comes after, as every generation of artists work in and out of the long shadows of their predecessors.

Platform 2024, is a masterful curatorial moment that lends itself to deep consideration. What we see elevated here, are 5 artists who will significantly influence the landscape of contemporary art for the foreseeable future. They will do so firmly from practices that are grounded. Grounded in rethinking hierarchical relationships within our ecological milieux; grounded in the fraught tradition of landscape art; grounded in affective experience. And while these collected works strongly identify with the inimitable Tasmanian wilderness, they can speak more broadly to an historical moment in the urgent flush of the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or perhaps the Chthulucene. Fazey, Bresnehen, Quinn, Malcomson and Lewis charge their works with truth, with urgency and with timelessness. These works explore precariousness and are full of love. These are formidable images that call for an investment in a slower future and they are here, as Platform 2024, to elevate the importance of picturing place.