- Title: From Siberia to the Kimberley – Each year the Wading birds return to the Mangrove Swamps
- Artist: John Wolseley
- Region: Victoria
- Art Centre: Independent artist
- Medium: Lithograph with hand colouring printed in six colours from six aluminium plates
- Collection:
- Dimensions: 72 x 103 cm
- Edition Size: 40
- Price ($AUD): $ 2400
Artwork Story
Since the Nomad Art Djalkiri Project in 2009, John Wolseley has traveled to Darwin annually to continue his exploration of the Top End and visit Arnhem Land and Daly River to work with Indigenous artists. Parts of these journeys are to research and explore the detail and essence of particular landscapes. In doing so his work investigates the intimate connection between plants and the medicinal, symbolic and mythic properties found in the Aboriginal cultural knowledge. This understanding is a counterpoint to other cultural, intellectual and philosophical structures, symbolised by migratory connections with distant places.
His works show how landscape can be thought of as fields of energy, rendered as passages of life, in which plant forms move or dance with rhythmic life. Rafts of different species weave in-and-out of one another, across the surface the works.
Wolseley’s paintings are a study of the inner workings of living organisms, an idea that has emerged out of the rivers and swamps of the Top End environment. While the compositions can be thought of as figurative, they also go beyond to a combination of stylised dynamic abstraction and rhythmic energy and still further to the exploration of hidden dimensions of being.
This image was drawn on six plates by the artist and printed by senior printer Martin King, assisted by Chris Ingham at Australia Print Workshop, Melbourne, 2012.