Opening Event :
Friday 11 July 2025 @ 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Exhibition Dates :
Thursday 10 – Monday 21 July 2025
10:00am – 4:00pm daily
Elevation is an exhibition of works on paper by Grace Gladdish, exploring the alpine landscapes of Tasmania.
“Elevation includes my recent printmaking and works on paper, exploring Tasmania’s wild alpine landscapes. I create complex linocuts and paint them with watercolour, creating hybrids that straddle the disciplines of both painting and printmaking. I love the push and pull between the strong, stark linocut and the subtleties of watercolour. I enjoy the way the oil-based ink and water-based paint both repel each other, and work together to form an image. It seems to be resonant with the landscape I am portraying and it’s a satisfying process that keeps me curious to explore its possibilities.
Alpine landscapes have captured my attention since moving to live on the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. The wonder of an alpine environment so accessible to a capital city, like the one at the summit of kunanyi, is one of the things that makes Hobart a special place to live. I am fascinated by the harshness of the place – wild and untamed; an unsafe environment where we would struggle to survive and yet close in proximity to our built environment. I find symbolism within the landscape that speaks to my own life and experience. Visually too, it seems to endlessly fascinate me with its colour, texture and quality of light. Most make a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain for the view of the land stretched out below. It is breathtaking! But I also love the landscape of the summit itself; treeless and patch-worked by the boulders and plants that make their home in that extreme environment.
I’ve recently begun cutting and tearing up my lino prints which has as subversive feeling that I’ve enjoyed. I’ve found these destructive forces to be invigorating and creative, and a new series of collages has emerged. Cutting along ‘found’ lines in the ripped elements and re-fitting pieces of separate prints to create entirely new imagined landscapes is a process akin to drawing. I love finding ways that the ripped pieces connect, as if the landscape itself is dictating the journey the lines travel. These connections have had me thinking about my own connections with both the landscape and the people around me. The resulting collages can be seen as autobiographical, mapping paths both literal and poetic, re-fitting parts of my life and making my own new connections.”
– Grace Gladdish
“Grace’s linocut prints are meticulous and breathtakingly complex. They are reproductions of the environs of the mountain that Grace now lives upon, but the rich intricacy is also analogous of an intricate life. In her myriad leaves and trees, Grace sees the arc and shape of her own existence.
… She takes her beautiful intricate prints and tears them.
They are no longer images of the mountain; they are something else. The images on paper are not end points; they are sites and material for more experiments. She tears them, changes their alignment, moves them, and she sees something new. She cuts away edges, leaving forms, still recognizable as lichen-tattooed rock from an alpine scene, but changed. The torn edges are not hidden; they show that this is paper, worked on and shifted, made into forms like islands. Grace takes the mountain and her interpretation of it and makes an archipelago, makes islands out fragments on paper, and it’s as if she’s making her own new place to be, or a map of the place she finds herself in, made of the fragments and the moments and the shape of her life, literal and allegorical.
Grace makes maps, from the art she makes that she shapes and re-shapes and experiments with, making more art, making a space for herself. The works that emerge from this complex, deeply personal process are floating islands of calm wonder.”
– Andrew Harper, Arts Writer
