George Raper Eastern Grey Kangaroo, 1789 , 1993 (purchased by Artbank), welded steel and wire mesh kangaroo sculpture, 191 × 163 × 60 cm (illustrated Artlink 14/1, 92): see Lorraine Hepburn, 'Far Beyond First Impressions’ (pp.91-92), review of Irene Briant’s 'Order Australia’ exhibition, Dick Bett Gallery, Hobart, August 1993. This show also included Briant’s five-part Antipodean Landscape: Quincunx (ill. p.91), a group of large mesh trees made of fly-wire, each of which had been placed in a fine gridded bag and left in Briant’s farm paddock so that spiders and webs were in them. Dr Jennifer Livett wrote: 'Made visible here are many of the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary Australian attitudes to nature…’ The group was first shown in Perspecta 1991. When Briant visited Sydney for the show, she saw the large poster for the major Bicentennial exhibition, 'First Impressions: The British Discovery of Australia’, organised by the British Museum (Natural History), that used George Raper 's kangaroo (uncredited) and recreated the animal 'so familiar to us as both fundamentally Australian, familiar as an historic image, and an example of its total foreignness to Raper. Its scale is realistic, and surprising to stand near. This poster switched and shifted everything Briant was thinking, and she began to understand that it was actually impossible for those people to visually comprehend what they were seeing.’ (Hepburn, 92).
Briant’s second important discovery was Lord Alistair McAlpine’s catalogue of his collection of Australian Depression furniture. The third, seeing an original Coolgardie meat safe. The resulting exhibition merged several of Briant’s obssessions: landscape, formal gardens, topiary, early Australian bush furniture and the transporting of European culture to this alien setting with incongruous results (Hepburn). Both then and now, Briant says, we may love the beauty of our country yet be homesick for things we may never have personally experienced. The latter is a particularly strong theme in her Woman Dreaming of a Green Hedge , with its references to peacock topiary, parterres and knot gardens with their clipped box and rosemary hedges {echoes of Peter Greenaway’s film Draughtsman’s Contract?}, but fabricated in Briant’s [Tasmanian] studio with its vast uninterrupted vistas of paddocks and distant eucalypt-clad hills.
Briant’s April-May 1998 exhibition, 'Landmarks and Curiosities’ (aGOG – catalogue essay by Dr Llewellyn Negrin, Art Theory, TU), had two sorts of creations. 'Curiosities’ referred to depictions of Australian fauna by early exploration artists: George Raper’s emu (1791) as well as kangaroo, the former a depiction in acrylic paint beside a wall of emu feathers; a kangaroo done in 1789 on Governor Phillip’s voyage and published in Phillip’s Voyage to Botany Bay ; native cats by Lesueur drawn on the Baudin voyage in 1802; a wombat done on Bass and Flinders’s voyage on the Norfolk and published in David Collins’s Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1802) – Berwick wombat connection? – one against a naturalistic cut-out of a wombat’s side profile in rusty galvanised iron. Also a large skin-shaped cloak of wire gauze with emu feathers hanging off it, Dromaius diemenensis 1997, the most expensive ($1,100) and impressive work in the show. New Holland Patchwork 1997, wire grid, [machine made] lace, acrylic, presented the Phillip kangaroo as a d’oyley (made of cream paint on wire grid but matching patches of lace d’oyley)
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
