Wherever you are in Tasmania, the landscape seems to make its presence felt. ‘The Mountain’ kunanyi, where I now live and work, is a dominating presence in my daily life and has made its way into my work, with a focus on the harsh alpine environment. My ongoing work explores landscapes both familiar and alien, tamed and untamed.
Grace Gladdish
Grace Gladdish
Tasmanian Artist
Exploring the Tasmanian landscape through relief printing
"A tree-change to Tasmania from suburban Brisbane in 2009 created a major shift in focus. We bought a flower farm on the beautiful Tasman Peninsula, and the landscape became a fascination for me. The natural environment of Tasmania has such a influencing factor on daily life, especially when farming. It was a huge change and impacted my art practice as I took the time learning to really ‘see’ my new surroundings.
I am seeking to develop an authentic visual expression of my own experience of the landscape. I am still learning to ‘see’ the unique environment that surrounds me and express how it shapes and influences the way I live my life."
My Linocut Process
I work with photographs to create a composition that helps me ‘see’ the iconic elements of a place. It is a process of distilling an image, making decisions about what to leave in and what to take out, how to frame the image, and giving it a presence.
Printmaking using lino is a process of working in reverse. The print is a mirror image of the carved lino. Time is spent working on a ‘negative’ which will be turned into a ‘positive’. I find this element of the process very satisfying.
I transfer my composition onto a lino block and begin the process of carving away the unwanted spaces. The carving part of the process can take days, but I love the repetitive nature of it. Its therapeutic, soothing, working with my hands.
The printing part of the process is all done by hand. I use oil based inks and spend time with a traditional baron, pressing the paper onto the inked lino block to create each print. The moment when the negative becomes the positive - peeling back the first print - is always a thrill.
The hand-made process means I print only a small edition of each block.
I love colour in the natural world. Combinations of colours and their complexity and subtlety in different light can take my breath away. All my prints are conceived with colour and I don’t consider them completed until they’ve been painted. I use watercolour to paint the prints and spend time getting the colours just right before I commit to reproducing them for each print in the edition.
Painting multiples is something that seems to have followed me since spending happy hours painting ceramics when I was younger. Again, as a flower farmer, the emphasis was on multiples, picking hundreds of flowers and grading them. Printmaking feels familiar and authentic to my experience in its production of multiples.