Artist:
Rosaline Gascoigne is a highly regarded Australian sculptor famed with being the first female artist to represent Australia in the 1982 Venice Biennale, a major art festival in Europe. Gascoigne was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1917 before moving to Canberra in 1943. She lived in the Canberra region for the rest of her life up until she died in 1999.
Gascoigne started making art whilst raising her family in Australia. She had no official art education and made her art in her spare time from being a teacher, a profession that took much of her time as well as being a single mother. Consequently, it was not until 1974, aged 57, that she held her first exhibition. Despite this, her career in sculpture lasted 25…show more content… This is a short poem she wrote about just how much she adored the area:
“My country is the eastern seaboard. Lake George and the Highlands. Land that is clean scoured by the sun and frost. The record is on the roadside grass. I love to roam around, to look and hear… I look for things that have been somewhere, done something. Second hand materials aren’t deliberate; they have had sun and wind on them. Simple things. From simplicity you get profundity. The weathered grey look of the country gives me a great emotional upsurge. I am not making pictures, I make feelings” (Gascoigne, 1997).
It can be observed in many of her works her love for the land, as she tried to create small aspects of it. ‘The Crop’ (See Image 3) is a miniature field of grass, dried by the harsh Canberra sun, wrapped in a galvanised fence. A common view in the areas summer. It is made from a malleable wire mesh and ‘salsify heads’ (The fluffy bits of a dandelion seeds that blows away in the wind…) situated on a piece of iron bark. Note that this sculpture is very, very small.
She also took inspiration from famous poets and other artists like William Wordsworth and Pablo
