bea maddock panorama

http://www.nga.gov.au/Landscapes/Pano2.htm

Tasmanian artist Bea Maddock’s work ‘Terra Spiritus, with a darker shade of pale’. The work in its entirety is a series of fifty-one drawings that provide a circumlittoral drawing of the Tasmanian coastline. Worked with hand ground Launceston ochre over a letter-press and finished with hand drawn script, the works include indigenous and non indigenous place names that underscore the panoramas.

In an interview with Diane Dunbar, Curator of Fine Art at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in 1998, Bea Maddock said that Terra Spiritus was a continuation of previous work dealing with Tasmania and Aboriginal place names. But it was seeing and drawing the coastline as she returned from a trip to Antartica that really gave her the spark.


Originally she had an idea to travel around the island in a boat but it was expensive and sitting at sea trying to draw was cumbersome. So she sat with graph paper and maps and found that by calculating the height and distance and allowing for the curvature of the earth she was able to translate the coastline to paper. She spent two years doing the graph drawings and five years in total completing the work in both Launceston and her Oatlands studio from 1993 to 1998. abc

landscapes exhibition homepage

Photos of Strahan on Linden's blog reminded me of this work. I saw it installed in a small room. What was fascinating was that the panorama circumnavigated you, whilst the image it contained circumnavigated an island. A toroidal effect worthy of the the tardis or ringworld.