About
Spending time between two iconic Australian landscapes; farming and grazing country of the Riverina and South West Slopes of New South Wales and less populated areas of Central and Northern Australia I work with enduring and fleeting qualities of landscape through painting and sculpting. Since 1990 I have continually visited Thailand and Japan bringing their influence to how I understand, utilize and express space visually. My work engages with an experiential sense of place, becoming part of the places I encounter through working with Edward Relph’s idea of the existential insider. Strategies for entering into landscapes include walking, performing, collecting, sitting, reflecting, drawing, photographing and, making back in the studio.
I find inspiration in a penumbra of subtle indicators where conditions localize to create micro climates and environments. Differences within sites begin to construct specificity within place. I look for relationships between humans, animals and their environments and where the balances change through existential knowledge. Patterns and rhythms slowly reveal themselves as I trace and retrace to know a place better. The apparent softness of a Spinifex covered hill at distance, on familiarity becomes a spiky thing, and the black scar of a charred peninsula of country burnt in grassland and hunted by indigenous owners form patterns of use and experience within and of land. The fenced settler experience of land care and farm husbandry or indigenous fire stick farming, hunting and gathering each create boundaries along with the patterns of elemental forces through drought, erosion, soaking rain, searing sun and brittle frosts.
This sense of boundary has been heightened through trips to Asia where I am always a visitor rather than an insider and the boundary here is at first overtly cultural. Other strategies to explore the temporal and spatial qualities of environments must be engaged with, and Buddhist considerations of mindful emptiness are key to perceiving different spaces and their values. Time allows insights into patterns within landscape where human and elemental forces shape physical and perceptual matter. I review our ever changing relationship with the land and the evidence of our existence, endeavor and even failure to understand the landscapes we frequent through the pattern and sequencing of my art.
I share a studio at Murrumbateman outside Canberra, Australia with my partner, sculptor David Jensz. I work full time as a freelance artist and arts consultant. I taught at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design for many years and have strong creative ties to Canberra and the ACT. I have maintained a constant research and exhibition schedule, presenting new work each year in solo exhibitions and/or selected and curated exhibitions since the late 1980's. (see CV)
I find inspiration in a penumbra of subtle indicators where conditions localize to create micro climates and environments. Differences within sites begin to construct specificity within place. I look for relationships between humans, animals and their environments and where the balances change through existential knowledge. Patterns and rhythms slowly reveal themselves as I trace and retrace to know a place better. The apparent softness of a Spinifex covered hill at distance, on familiarity becomes a spiky thing, and the black scar of a charred peninsula of country burnt in grassland and hunted by indigenous owners form patterns of use and experience within and of land. The fenced settler experience of land care and farm husbandry or indigenous fire stick farming, hunting and gathering each create boundaries along with the patterns of elemental forces through drought, erosion, soaking rain, searing sun and brittle frosts.
This sense of boundary has been heightened through trips to Asia where I am always a visitor rather than an insider and the boundary here is at first overtly cultural. Other strategies to explore the temporal and spatial qualities of environments must be engaged with, and Buddhist considerations of mindful emptiness are key to perceiving different spaces and their values. Time allows insights into patterns within landscape where human and elemental forces shape physical and perceptual matter. I review our ever changing relationship with the land and the evidence of our existence, endeavor and even failure to understand the landscapes we frequent through the pattern and sequencing of my art.
I share a studio at Murrumbateman outside Canberra, Australia with my partner, sculptor David Jensz. I work full time as a freelance artist and arts consultant. I taught at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design for many years and have strong creative ties to Canberra and the ACT. I have maintained a constant research and exhibition schedule, presenting new work each year in solo exhibitions and/or selected and curated exhibitions since the late 1980's. (see CV)
Wendy Teakel creating a poker work near Glen Helen, Northern Territory, Australia. Photography Kim Mahood