The melancholic horizon in Australian landscape art
Visual representations of the Australian landscape are as diverse as the continent is broad. From impressionistic to the abstracted, artists have responded to the dense rainforest and bleached shorelines to create images that have contributed to a national sense of belonging. Despite the current trend for most Australians to live in coastal cities, it is the delineated horizon of the wide-open plain, either pastoral or desert, which has achieved iconic status.
Since colonisation, depictions of the Australian landscape have been filtered through the psychological state of melancholia that has been promoted by an ongoing critical art discourse. In the 21st century, the cross media works of Tom Nicholson, Hiraki Sawa and William Yang continue to communicate melancholia and encourage the viewer to make subtle connections between the land and marginalisation – or the sense of being an outsider.
Dr Allison Holland is the Curator for the Australian Centre for Photography.
Image: Tom Nicholson, Evening shadows (2011–12) Installation at the Art Gallery of South Australia Courtesy of the artist
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