Rosalie Gasgoine

I went to see the Rosalie Gascoigne show at the NGV today. It was pretty good!

She started making art when she was 57. She had never studied art and yet has ended up one of Australia's most important artists, the first woman to represent us at the Venice Biennale in 1982.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalie_Gascoigne
(Click on this link if you want to read more about her)

She is most famous for work made out of old road signs cut and assembled into abstract patterns.

News Break, 1994

What surprised and thrilled me about her work was all the stuff I hadn't seen much of before.
She made really great sculptural work (as opposed to the above which is all flat and mounted on the wall) She still used all found objects, old enamel jugs and plates, dolls, wooden boxes and grasses, twigs, corrugated iron, metal bits and bobs. It all had a wonderful weathered quality and the items were often quite quaint and old fashioned.

What struck me was how non-sentimental it was. A lot of artists use old weathered objects in their work, but there is a danger in working with them. I think people are attracted to them for their old beat up aesthetic and the sense of lost history and untold stories that accompany them and then the artwork ends up relying on the nostalgia the items evoke and trading on that more than it should. Gascoigne's work really didn't do that. The objects were interesting but the art work was not about the objects themselves, it was about the composition. They were all formal and beautiful compositions. I really, really enjoyed that. She also, as far as I could tell, had not altered the items except to cut them up to size. She had not painted or sanded, messed up or cleaned up any of them. She just cut them up and put them together. There was an astonishing authenticity in that. It was a very refreshing exhibition. I suppose perhaps that is where her japanese flower arranging background comes in, she had a profound purity and simplicity to her aesthetic.

Piece to Walk Around, 1981

Step Through, 1980

(This was made with bits of old lenolium stuck to ply wood)

When asked “…how did you come to be an artist?”, at a major
retrospective of her work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Rosalie Replied: “Desperation, filling the void. Everything being
not enough, having an astronomer husband who went away
and looked at the stars all the time. That sort of thing.”