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Lot Essay
Rosalie Gascoigne's unconventional career as a professional artist began in 1975, when, at the age of fifty-eight, she exhibited four assemblages in a group show in Sydney. Her work was singled out for praise by noted critic Daniel Thomas and she was promptly offered her own solo show. This immediate critical and commercial success, after a long artistic gestation, was a precursor to the enthusiasm with which her work would be greeted throughout her career. For in the following twenty-two years, Gascoigne created both an extraordinary body of work and a formidable reputation as one of Australia's most unique and beloved contemporary artists.
Instantly recognisable as a signature work by Gascoigne, Beaten Track was exhibited in a 1992 show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. This exhibition is now widely regarded as one of the stand-out solo exhibitions of Gascoigne's career, a position that is supported by the fact that at least nine works from that exhibition have ended up in prestigious collections including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Macquarie Bank collection.
Gascoigne had first used what was to become her signature material of soft-drink crate wood in the 1981 work titled Scrub Country. In 1982 Gascoigne represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and posters of Scrub Country were displayed along the Venetian canals. She had sourced the wood from both dumps and the discards yards of drink factories, with some of the Schweppes crates coming from as far away as Tasmania. Recalling that Andy Warhol had run into trouble for his unauthorized use of Campbell's soup cans, Gascoigne informed the drinks factory of her use of their crates and was rewarded with unfettered access to material.
In the yellow background and black lettering of the Schweppes crates, Gascoigne saw "sun and shadow", (V MacDonald, op.cit, p. 34) a comment that alludes not only to the colouring of the wood but to its weather-beaten surface. An important aspect in the lure that this material held for Gascoigne was precisely this scoured and pitted appearance, for the effects of climate are as literally written into the medium as the stenciled lettering of the Schweppes brand name. An intrinsic part of Gascoigne's eye and art was to see beauty in the old and weathered, value in the discarded and the potential transformation into art from commercial debris.
This ability may in part have derived from Gascoigne's study and achievements in Sogetsu Ikebana, a form of classical Japanese flower arranging that was based on line and form. Her use of materials evolved from flowers to bones, scrap iron, found objects and wood. Although her artistic mediums changed, the constant in Gascoigne's art was always a balance between nature and art, landscape and abstraction.
The dominance of yellow in both the Schweppes and retro-reflective road sign works, that are easily Gascoigne's most recognizable pieces, mimics the yellow occurring in nature - the sun and the wheat fields of the Monaro plateau outside Canberra where Gascoigne lived. However, it also had a special, familial resonance for the artist who recalled that: "My grandmother was very fond of yellow. She had yellow curtains. She used to buy a lot of yellow china..." (Ibid., p. 12)
A lover of crosswords and literature, Gascoigne played visual and textual games with the viewer in works such as Beaten Track. The brand names which had appeared complete in works from a decade earlier such as Scrub Country or Spring I gave way to words that have been turned upside-down, cut-up and displaced. Vici MacDonald noted this, stating that: "The text, too, becomes fragmented; by Beaten Track it is mere light and shade." (Ibid., p.34) It is, of course, difficult to look at with its reconfiguration of the familiar Schweppes logo, without recalling the Pop Art advertising aesthetic of Warhol. But commentators on Gascoigne's work have detected other artistic influences also, with Deborah Edwards noting that "Repetition, serial production and the use of the grid, characteristic of much modernist art of the 1960s are central to her oeuvre." (D Edwards, Material as Landscape - Rosalie Gascoigne, exh. cat., Sydney, 1998, p.12)
Titles were a crucial part of the work for Gascoigne, who could spend hours thinking of a title once a work was completed. Beaten Track seems a fitting title for this unruly path of black lettering laid out against the promise of the yellow brick road. But what also springs to mind is the phrase 'Off the beaten track', whose appropriateness becomes more apparent the more the viewer gazes at the work. For this is what this work is - it's a springboard to ideas we have not yet encountered, an invitation to venture somewhere we've not yet been and to which we most probably would not have found the way to by ourselves. As Gascoigne herself said, "The artist makes works that move out into the world. When the work is relinquished, it should speak for itself. As its audience, you are on your own." (Artist's statement cited in D Edwards, op.cit, p.8)
Instantly recognisable as a signature work by Gascoigne, Beaten Track was exhibited in a 1992 show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. This exhibition is now widely regarded as one of the stand-out solo exhibitions of Gascoigne's career, a position that is supported by the fact that at least nine works from that exhibition have ended up in prestigious collections including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Macquarie Bank collection.
Gascoigne had first used what was to become her signature material of soft-drink crate wood in the 1981 work titled Scrub Country. In 1982 Gascoigne represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and posters of Scrub Country were displayed along the Venetian canals. She had sourced the wood from both dumps and the discards yards of drink factories, with some of the Schweppes crates coming from as far away as Tasmania. Recalling that Andy Warhol had run into trouble for his unauthorized use of Campbell's soup cans, Gascoigne informed the drinks factory of her use of their crates and was rewarded with unfettered access to material.
In the yellow background and black lettering of the Schweppes crates, Gascoigne saw "sun and shadow", (V MacDonald, op.cit, p. 34) a comment that alludes not only to the colouring of the wood but to its weather-beaten surface. An important aspect in the lure that this material held for Gascoigne was precisely this scoured and pitted appearance, for the effects of climate are as literally written into the medium as the stenciled lettering of the Schweppes brand name. An intrinsic part of Gascoigne's eye and art was to see beauty in the old and weathered, value in the discarded and the potential transformation into art from commercial debris.
This ability may in part have derived from Gascoigne's study and achievements in Sogetsu Ikebana, a form of classical Japanese flower arranging that was based on line and form. Her use of materials evolved from flowers to bones, scrap iron, found objects and wood. Although her artistic mediums changed, the constant in Gascoigne's art was always a balance between nature and art, landscape and abstraction.
The dominance of yellow in both the Schweppes and retro-reflective road sign works, that are easily Gascoigne's most recognizable pieces, mimics the yellow occurring in nature - the sun and the wheat fields of the Monaro plateau outside Canberra where Gascoigne lived. However, it also had a special, familial resonance for the artist who recalled that: "My grandmother was very fond of yellow. She had yellow curtains. She used to buy a lot of yellow china..." (Ibid., p. 12)
A lover of crosswords and literature, Gascoigne played visual and textual games with the viewer in works such as Beaten Track. The brand names which had appeared complete in works from a decade earlier such as Scrub Country or Spring I gave way to words that have been turned upside-down, cut-up and displaced. Vici MacDonald noted this, stating that: "The text, too, becomes fragmented; by Beaten Track it is mere light and shade." (Ibid., p.34) It is, of course, difficult to look at with its reconfiguration of the familiar Schweppes logo, without recalling the Pop Art advertising aesthetic of Warhol. But commentators on Gascoigne's work have detected other artistic influences also, with Deborah Edwards noting that "Repetition, serial production and the use of the grid, characteristic of much modernist art of the 1960s are central to her oeuvre." (D Edwards, Material as Landscape - Rosalie Gascoigne, exh. cat., Sydney, 1998, p.12)
Titles were a crucial part of the work for Gascoigne, who could spend hours thinking of a title once a work was completed. Beaten Track seems a fitting title for this unruly path of black lettering laid out against the promise of the yellow brick road. But what also springs to mind is the phrase 'Off the beaten track', whose appropriateness becomes more apparent the more the viewer gazes at the work. For this is what this work is - it's a springboard to ideas we have not yet encountered, an invitation to venture somewhere we've not yet been and to which we most probably would not have found the way to by ourselves. As Gascoigne herself said, "The artist makes works that move out into the world. When the work is relinquished, it should speak for itself. As its audience, you are on your own." (Artist's statement cited in D Edwards, op.cit, p.8)