Domestic Landscape (Island)  2012

Medium: Charcoal on printed wallpaper

Dimensions:40x40cm

 

Created while an Artist in Residence at Fiskars Village, Finland. There was a lot of forest and lakes surounding the fillage where I went for walks. I came to see it as a very domesticated landscape, rather than the wild one it might at first seem. Not only is the forest managed for timber production, and used for hunting, fishing and mushroom collecting, but there are many summer houses and cabins throughout the forests, even in locations that seem quite distant from vehicle tracks, including on the lake islands. The Finns are very at home in the forest, and it forms an important part of the national identity too. My drawings don't depict this directly, sticking to a fairly conventional 'natural landscape' form, but the wallpaper I purchased from a local secondhand shop became the ideal substrate to encapsulate the idea of a domestic and lived in landscape. To read more about my residency in Finland, and see more images of Fiskars and the forest, go to the Four Feet website.

 

Exhibited in In Place, Brisbane Institute of Art, and now part of a private collection.