Michèle Marshall - Artist's Statement & Review

Michèle Marshall

  Artist Statement
  Biographical Notes
  Exhibitions
  Images

Artist's Statement & Review

In my artwork I seek to portray the sensual and sublime experience of being within a landscape space. The landscape for me is spiritually alive, filled with energy depth and richness of colour. My paintings can be seen both as fields of texture & light and as landscapes. By combining numerous layers of glazes, gold leaf, rice papers and fabrics I am able to produce an inner glow in my depictions of the unique qualities of the Australian landscape.

Michèle Marshall

“Michèle’s regal, gold-filled landscape paintings do not belong to the Australian landscape in terms of representing ‘place’. Rather they engage with the sensuous and the sublime as derivatives of experiences within landscape spaces. Interestingly, there is very little sense of perspective, distance or space itself - the viewer becomes part of the landscape rather than its spectator. With the removal of ‘spectatorship’, the concepts and strategies normally utilised by landscape painting to set up political relationships within the image (Albertian geometry, symmetry, raised viewing positions) are eliminated. With them also goes the sense of three-dimensional place, leaving instead representations of textuality, reflectiveness, transparency, light and lustre as elements in themselves.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…”
T.S.Eliot

Michèle’s work suggests that to ‘know’ place, we must understand on a sensory level, the experience of space within the actual landscape. This is an approach emerging from current work in Writing also, and on a vernacular level, from cultural mythologies of Central Australia, where the experience of the landscape and open is unique, mystical and therefore beyond formulaic concepts of what Landscape “means”. In imaging the land without the standard strategies of representation Michèle faces a difficult task, and succeeds in producing an entrancing body of works that conjure immediately, moments of absolute exhaltation embedded within the psychic space of the Australian landscape.