Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné
Martin Gascoigne
ANU Press
The catalogue raisonné of Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) opens with a quip of her own – that words are secondary in the art world – the creation of art and our encounter with it are the seed.
But, it is an exceptional record of the New Zealand-born Australian artist’s legacy. More than half the book is dedicated to a detailed list of exhibitions, works and collections, front-run by 200 pages of intellectual, material, emotional and art historical writings and imagery surveying her life’s work which is described as three-fold, by Martin, her oldest child and author of the book, who delineates them ‘as a child and young woman in New Zealand, the second as a wife and mother on Mount Stromlo and in Canberra, and the third as an artist.’
It wasn’t until her mid-fifties that she pursued her artistry, as Gascoigne said, ‘I think you are born the artist, but you’ve got to shake off a lot of your conditioning and you’ve got to shake off a lot of what the people who influenced you in your childhood thought you were, which you certainly are not.’ Life in Canberra is described as equal parts isolated and inspiring with much time spent in observation, and foraging of patterns and the natural world; which obviously lent itself to her 1960s experience of Ikebana which inched her toward the cusp of a new world – or what she called ‘lyrical derailments’ that naturally slipped into a poetic dance with her appreciation of environment and place ‘to set it in time.’
