Tasmanian Gothic
David Hearne
Presented by David Hearne
Daily opening times:
13 – 16 July, 2023
10am – 4pm
Medieval Madness gone rogue in the Tasmanian Gothic
Tasmanian Gothic is a cliché of fantasy, surrealism, modernism, appropriation, abstraction and expressionism mashed together into a contemporary vulgarity. This vulgarity is defined by the question, has anything changed since the medieval times?
These cliched movements and themes have been pummelled together and placed on a broadsheet that is suggestive of the current and contemporary Tasmanian landscape (figuratively and metaphorically). A Gothic element of decay and horror is fused into that landscape through its subject matter which is full of medieval inklings. Literary evocations of stalked and baked creatures fuelled by the works of Lord Byron’s (Darkness) and Mary Shelley’s (Frankenstein) litter the picture plane. On occasion the players have left the scape and melted into abstraction and tactile formalism. To enhance the horror and repugnance, anti-processes and anti-techniques have been successfully and unsuccessfully explored through risk and experimentation.
When dark and surreal imagery explore the darker aspects of life the unbridled and innate pessimism of a peasant painter screams out for a deeper meaning to the term Tasmanian Gothic. As life imitates art and art imitates life, the fall and broken nature of the characters throughout these scapes, are all faced with or have faced sin and temptation. It is we who mirror this same fear and terror in our own making of this new contemporary Tasmanian Gothic.
