Cate Blackmore s exhibition launch speech by Mark Clemens: Refuge; Wild Island Gallery, Salamanca Place, 27 th February, 2015. This Savage Beauty Aboriginal acknowledgement. Thanks to Kate Grieve and Rob Blakers and the other Wild Island staff for creating and giving life to such a wonderful venue and thank you to Cate for honouring me with this task. The South West of Tasmania the site for Cate Blackmore s exhibition. These days its called the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, or its acronym, the TWWHA. I really dislike acronyms so I ll just refer to it as the South West. One thing you would have to say straight up about the south west, is that it s a compelling place on so many levels! It s one of the three largest temperate wilderness areas left in the Southern part of the globe. For Tasmanian aborigines it s an area of deep, sacred and cultural connection. It has unbelievable botanical diversity including some of the oldest and tallest trees growing in the world. Some of the deepest and longest caves anywhere on earth, are found there. On any global measure, the South West of Tasmania is an incredible place. Belatedly, our elected representatives and law-makers are catching up to the facts of the matter. Where that will go, we cannot yet know Cate Blackmore, like so many people, has developed a strong affinity, a human connection, with this wild-natured, bare-knuckled place.
You might say that, like so many artists before her, she has been beguiled by its remarkable beauty, its hardness, its softness, and deeply moved by its uncompromising ambivalence towards human presence. Because, after-all, it s a wild natural place and not to be trifled with. The utmost respect and time is required to survive there and meet and understand it. Lately, I have begun to feel, that the human relationship and connection to country or nature, or wild space, can partly be broken down into three different ideas: Human beings tend to either abhor nature, ignore nature or adore nature. Generalisations are always a little dangerous, I know, but I think it s a handy little sentence, because it tells a very old story, of how we relate to the natural world, which feeds and sustains us. And I believe firmly, that that sustenance isn't only material, it s emotional when it comes to nature as well. Here we still have so much to learn from Aboriginal understandings and connections to country. But I think its fair to say that the South West of Tasmania is a place where the utter abhorrence of nature and the utter adoration of nature have paralleled one another for the two hundred plus years of European presence. Whether a rapprochement between the two polarities is ever possible, remains obscure, but hopeful signs of a paradigmatic shift are plainly evident. The fact, that there now is this area of Tasmania, set aside as World Heritage, since 1982, is a testimony to the efforts of those whose adoration of country and nature has been palpable and concrete in action. Artists, writers, photographers, thinkers all have an important role to play in addressing the relationship of ignorance and abhorrence of nature and of helping to foster instead, a reverence and respect for place. And lets face facts here, the bigger picture of the day is about how we ourselves identify and connect with our country that matters: no connection with or insight into nature s cycles and limitations and the destruction will continue unabated. But a strong connection, coupled with insight and knowledge and a healthy stewardship of country may naturally follow.
Which brings me to why we are here: Cate has been painting a long time its her vocation, her calling. She has a deep respect and an abiding love of Tasmania and for her, a connection with the South West is highly valued. To my mind, I feel that Cate s painting gets at the hardness of this place, its gritty, uncompromising self but it also gets the extreme softness of it too it memorialises the wildflowers and the more tender personality of this landscape as well as digging into the sharp, quartzite bones of those mountains, which are laid bare for all to see; on one level, she shows me, I think, a wild landscape turned inside out. And this idea of digging into a place (metaphorically that is with words or photographs or paint) to reveal its innards, its genius to release something of its essence, I think might also be relevant to the future of the South West itself. Why do I think this? A few months ago I met Max Angus. And such a privilege it was too. He and his artist and photographer friends, notably Trish Giles, Elspeth Vaughan and Olegas Truchanas, went out onto the real lake Pedder, (she who lies there, patiently waiting to be released from her temporary state) and immersed themselves, making pictures and paintings and drawings and slowly imbibing the uniqueness of what they rightly recognised as a peerless landscape. They were, I think, so far ahead of their time. What they connected with, and what they released from the earth and lake and the skies above Lake Pedder was remarkable. Just look inside Natasha Cica s book, Pedder Dreaming. A beautifully written and crafted homage to art and photography carried out in the heart of the South West and to the spirit of the true Lake Pedder. But, I sincerely believe, that we have only just begun to dig a little way into this essence and the substrate of this place we call the South West. These artists were the forerunners, the vanguard. So much more has to be done now and urgently too. There is a huge task to undertake and it is ongoing. Many gifted photographers have taken up the work there, since the lake was flooded, but I have a strong feeling, many more painters like Cate and artists who use all types of media, need to get out there and create brand new work in the South West many more writers also need to begin to do the same. We need more art and writing created from out of the ground of this Being. More Australians
need to be made aware of just how important the South West really is, and from an artist, this takes immersion and commitment and patience. This immersion in place is crucial to the task of making this art. It s what has to be present, for there to be an integrity and authenticity to the work. To begin to peel back the layers of one place, one area, I think is vitally important. That s what her work here today visually represents: the process of unearthing and peeling back, both the sublime as well as the ordinary from this one, very particular landscape. And when I look at her work, I feel that she unveiling something of the deep, deep character of the South West, alluding to the way light vibrates off and around the mountains, how the colours here and there, seem muted and shallow, until your eyes tune in to the dynamic array of the colour palette. She shows me that it s a tough environment but how it has, what Richard Flanagan has called Tasmania s West Coast, a savage beauty. I think that this savage beauty, reflects something of what Cate is unearthing too and translating back to the viewer in this series of paintings. I ve never seen the South West painted like this, remembered like this I think it is amazing. Somehow the darker, larger paintings, brood and smoulder, they catch your breath and pull you in, they are visceral in the true meaning of that over-used adjective the bones and ribcage of the mountains are laid bare, you see them, feel them the build-up of paint means, you can almost touch them. The lighter, smaller square paintings show the softness and gentility of the land, its sprays of wildflowers and of light, subtly folding over and around the ranges, but still the diamond-like hardness of the quartzite mountains is there in the background, standing sentinel, stark and ambivalent and a forest in the middle-ground behind buttongrass, feels full of mystery and wonder. Cate s paintings, to me, offer a connection to that nature, that country borne out of an artist s immersion, integrity and patience. Here is this savage beauty, and here is this irrepressible grandeur of the South West nature.
Thank you Cate, for offering to us, these tremendous impressions and recollections of this raw and wild nature. It s with pleasure that I now declare this exhibition, Refuge, by Cate Blackmore officially open. Cheers. Sunrise, Western Arthur Range