Art Destinations

This is the second part of our two-part conversation with Raymond Arnold. Raymond talks about his printmaking and painting practice, and how he shares his art practice with his community in Queenstown with the aim of revitalising the region. In part one, Raymond gave us some background on why Lutruwita | Tasmania is such an important landscape and how it became an environmental batttleground. For the listeners who have never been to Queenstown, it is an extremely isolated town on Lutruwita's west coast, surrounded by forest and mountain ranges. It is now a landscape healing after bearing scars from an energetic copper extraction and smelter operation starting at the turn of the 20th Century; which left the surrounding mountains bare and the rivers polluted. In the late 1990s Raymond left teaching at the Tasmanian School of Art, and moved to Queenstown with his partner Helena Demczuk. Since then they have focused on their art practises and use art to revitalise the town.

We are in conversation with the wonderful painter and printmaker Raymond Arnold, who has lived in Queenstown, on Lutruwita | Tasmania’s West Coast since the late 1990s with his wife Helena, Demczuk and their four whippets. The conversation naturally shaped itself into two main themes: environmental activism and his art practice, so we have divided his podcast into two 35-minute parts. In part one, Raymond explains his involvement in the Franklin Dam blockade. He had just taken a teaching position at the Tasmanian School of Art when he was invited to join the busload of artists travelling to protest against the damming of one of Tasmania’s last wild rivers. They were all among the 1300 arrested. This formative experience contributed to Raymond’s intimate understanding of Tasmania as a social, political and environmental battleground.

We are in conversation with Lisa Garland, a photographic artist who has been documenting her community on the North-West Coast for more than 20 years. Lisa makes portraits of people so deeply connected to where they live that often the portrait of their place tells more about them than the people themselves. As a new generation is emerging and another passing, Lisa reflects on what she looks for in her subjects and how her focus is changing. In this episode we cover:  how Lisa’s photographic portraits of people and places are influenced by her upbringing and community, how Lisa’s early career as a newspaper photographer made her value her own personal projects, particularly portraits of her family and community members, documenting generational changes occuring in Lutruwita | Tasmania, particularly during residencies in Queenstown and King Island, how the intimate relationship between artist and subject comes through in her images and the extent the stories shared are conveyed through image and text, the changes in Tasmania's cultural and physical landscapes and the loss of traditional craftsmanship, her shift from portraiture to photographing symbolic spaces, and the value of storytelling and the significance of preserving the authenticity of her subjects and their environments.

We are in conversation with Pat Brassington, one of Australia’s most significant and influential artists. Over four decades, Brassington has captivated audiences with her ability to transform the familiar into the fantastical through her enigmatic photomontages.  This conversation is recorded as a radio play where a voice artist performs Brassington’s responses to my questions.   In this episode we cover: how Brassington’s childhood in Hobart has influenced her practice. At a young age, Brassington contracted polio. She was confined to her bedroom for six weeks and experienced a heightened feeling of isolation. This experience, in combination with catching tadpoles with her brother and playing in suburban backyards, sparked her artistic imagination. how Tasmania and the concept of isolation influenced her artistic imagination, Brassington’s exploration of contradictions, inspired by dialectics, surrealism and psychoanalysis, her use of distortion, symbolism, and the provocative use of pink, and insights into her lens-based practice, blending straight photography with manipulated images to evoke unsettling yet captivating emotions.