Cataract, available light and upend

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BACKGROUND Australia Felix or the 'Lucky Country' - as Thomas Mitchell named the lush pasturelands of Western Victoria - has been explored historically by such artists as writer Henry Handel Richardson and painters Eugene von Guérard and Arthur Streeton. The theme continues to be researched as evidenced by the 2011 exhibition of the same title at Griffith University. In Beyond Big Land, curator Lisa Sullivan featured Christine Adams, Lesley Duxbury, Les Walkling and Stephen Wickham, to counterbalance more popular, clichéd images (of Australia as replete with endless natural resources) to create photographic images that represent Australia as a fragile, vulnerable country. The exhibition was unique in that most exhibitions remotely addressing the same topic are historical. Duxbury's invitation to participate was based on her previous work depicting fragile environments, e.g. Melt (2008) and Double Life (2009). CONTRIBUTION Duxbury's series of 3 multi-part photographs (Cataract, Available Light, and Upend) came from a research trip to Tasmania, where the country was accessed on foot or canoe, providing a phenomenological engagement with the landscape during heavy rainfall and at twilight - a time of the day and weather conditions not normally associated with the lucky country. The photographs created several points of focus and non-focus and thus varied of ways of viewing each subject, indicating alternative understandings of the landscape. SIGNIFICANCE In addition to the invitation to exhibit these three works at the Geelong Gallery (Regional Gallery), two of them (Cataract and Available Light) had been in another curated exhibition at the Stephen McLaughlan Gallery in 2010. These 'blurred' photographs build on an important contemporary theme in international art: "More and more often images that are out of focus appear in both contemporary painting and photography" (Blur After Richter catalogue, Hamburger Kunsthalle).