Elizabeth Barsham paints an intensely personal vision of Tasmania. Her paintings are masterfully executed using traditional oil-painting techniques, but the powerful imagery is anything but traditional.
Haunted by the past, Barsham creates enigmatic figures that emerge from her paintings as ghosts, not of specific people or places but as symbols of the land and its history. As a sixth-generation Tasmanian she inhabits a landscape crowded with ancestral memories, decaying farmsteads, half-forgotten family stories of tough women and stray children, farmers, shepherds and foresters. The issues she addresses – dispossession, exploitation, environmental damage and appropriation of resources are timeless. This art is unsettling, forceful and dramatic but it never preaches. The viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.
A blend of humour and horror, myth and memory, her oil paintings are beautiful, intriguing, and definitely disturbing.
Freehand Gallery
13 to 22 January, 2017
Tasmania
Elizabeth Barsham, Following the Van, oil painting on canvas, 66 x 112cm
Courtesy the artist
