Sean O'Brien - Red Top Road, Mungo

Artwork Description:

I draw landscapes impacted by the erosion of marginal pastoral farming. Typically, these landscapes are in the regenerative stage to something better but odd. Lake Mungo in Far West NSW is a superlative example of this type of landscape. In the past 150 years the environment here has been shaped by the hooves of sheep and the wind, exposing a record of a millennia of human occupation, now protected. I've been visiting Mungo since the days when you could walk wherever you wanted on the lunette, but lately I've found my perfect "picnic shelter studio", looking towards the lunette from Red Top Road on the bed of the dry lake. Here I draw rapid charcoal field studies, which I take back to the studio. The studies inform larger works on paper that brusquely push the view to the point of abstraction. Red Top Road, Mungo, is the most recent of these studio works, using gesso, acrylic-gouache and oil pastel on 3 sheets of incised paper.

Artist Statement:

Across the past five years I have walked outback creek lines in solitude, often many kilometres into the landscape, creating works on paper in situ, sitting in the sand and with only the sound of the wind, birds, and my own breath as company. The experience has often been confronting, but equally energising. The field drawings are influenced by the raw arid landscape, the gnarled trees, the sandy beds, the stark rock faces, but are rendered - in charcoal, pastel, and oil stick - with an emotional intensity and a brusque use of the materials. I bring these field drawings into the studio, as inspiration for larger works on paper, pushing the landscape forms to the edge of abstraction. While the resulting works speak to the landscape, I feel Australian society is very much present in the pieces. I am moving through the traditional lands of various First Nations peoples, including the Bandjigali, Wandjiwalgu, Wergaia, and Andyamathanha people, but always with the overlaid presence of marginal agriculture, particularly the remnants of sheep farming. Sustainability therefore has a firm place at the centre of the works – a reflection on care for Country, custodianship, erosion through over-grazing, and ultimately rehabilitation back to a natural state, as many of the places I visit are National Parks, some in the management of First Nations owners.