Breaking Horizons: Appropriation and Collage in Contemporary Australian Landscape Painting

Digital portfolio of Amber Koroluk-Stephenson in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts (Research)

University of New South Wales

School of Art & Design

Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture

September 2024

ABSTRACT

Landscape painting has played a central role in Australian art history since first contact. The well-known representational codes and conventions of this genre, which are primarily borrowed from European traditions, are deeply intertwined with patriarchal regimes and colonial systems, and continue to shape dominant notions of national identity, place, and culture. Given the prominence of landscape painting traditions and their aesthetic and political implications, this genre is continually contested and re-evaluated by artists, historians, and theorists. Artists such as Gordon Bennett and Joan Ross, for example, use painting, appropriation, and collage to disrupt dominant artistic conventions and critique narratives of national identity. Meanwhile, writers, historians, and theorists such as Rachael DeLue, James Elkins, Bill Gammage, David Hansen, Helen Johnson, Lucy Lippard, Miriam McGarry, W. J. T. Mitchell, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Bruce Pascoe, and Allan Wallach haveenablednew understandings of the complex relationships between landscape, painting, gender, place, and identity in local and global settings. This practice-led research project draws on these reference points to examine the Australian landscape in relation to underlying themes relevant to my own painting practice, including identity and belonging.In my own painting practice, I use appropriation and collage to develop pictorial strategies that reframe and restage traditional representations of the Australian landscape. In doing so, this project has resulted in a body of studio work and a written thesis, which combine to challenge and disrupt conventional representations and understandings of Australian landscape painting and their associated colonial legacies.

Breaking Horizons series

Split Vision series

Vanishing Point series