High Country

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1917, Rosalie Gascoigne, AO, came to art late in life. She graduated from Auckland University in 1937 and worked as a teacher before moving to Australia in 1943. It wasn’t until 1974, at the age of fifty-seven, that she held her first exhibition.

Gascoigne developed her distinctive practice during seventeen years spent largely in isolation at Mount Stromlo, near Canberra. Her exposure to the elements and the Australian landscape, which she once described as ‘all air, all light, all space’, was crucial to the development of her sculptural language and her material repertoire of mostly found materials: wood, iron, wire, feathers, yellow and black road signs, and corrugated iron and Masonite.

A signature work of Rosalie Gascoigne’s, High Country responds to a constant in her practice – Lake George and the Southern Highlands – an area she described as ‘my country’ and ‘land that is scoured by the sun and frost’. Between 1981 and 1999 Gascoigne repeatedly returned to this place to track its topography, temperature and atmosphere. Known for its variable water levels, Lake George is notoriously eerie, Appearing and disappearing, depending on rainfall. High Country was one of Gascoigne’s final works and is a summation of her explorations with raw and painted corrugated iron. In a single work it distils the essence of the landscape, capturing the shifting white sunlight glancing on the surface of patches of water.

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art