JOHN WOLSELEY’S Background, Themes, Processes Influences and Cultural Aspects
...underlying cycles of regeneration; people are losing the ability to make connections with what is actually around them”. Many artists have influenced Wolseley’s ideas and art making. Wolseley believes his ideas are almost an extention of what Rousseau and Parpigny believed. That is not only should one be there experiencing a particular valley or group of trees in the flesh, but if you’re in that place, with your pencils and paper, that valley is going to you what to do. The way Wolseley works is that he is actually lying, sleeping and sitting in the mud in it. The land dictates to him, so that every work has a very intimate connection with where it was made. Wolseley’s work has also been influenced by aboriginal art and culture. The aboriginals have such closeness and harmony with the land and when Wolseley travels with them he does things like sitting down and eating some seeds he had been drawing or using things he intended to draw to actually produce the work. Wolseley also feels very strong parallels with some of the earlier people who painted the Australian Landscape like Eugen von Guerard, Ludwig Becker and John Glover who produced extraordinary visions of the Australian landscape and captured the environment in a very original way. Wolseley uses the way these painters looked at nature, but in a scientific way, in a modern way, that of seeing nature as an ecological whole. "The old gentleman naturalists were looking forward and discovering new things, whereas I am looking back, I am deconstructing that. I'm often the last to see something, rather than the first." His work over the last twenty years has been a search to discover how we dwell and move within the landscape. In his exhibition ‘The Memory of Fire’ at Australian Galleries he documented the different stages of a bushfire and the miraculous re-generation of the blackened trees and scrubs in an eternal cycle of destruction and renewal. Like Leonardo Da Vinci, Wolseley breaks down the barrier between art and science and proposes that art and science are not as separate as one may expect. Foe example, the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics have influenced his work; leading to his interest in topology and geomorphology and he has developed an interest in quantum physics, fractals and chaos theory which may well provide a valuable basis for future works. John Wolseley is one of my favorite artists, he documents what it is like to be in a landscape rather than just painting. He is interested in getting to the structure of forms , the actual rhythms and forces that are within the landscape. His works have had a significant influence on my developing work. My photographs are much like Wolseley’s field journal. They provide the basis for my work and are also collaged throughout in drawings and acetate photocopies. His truly unique way of interpreting the landscape has driven me to try to develop my own way of interpreting my environment and trying to get audiences to explore the environments intrinsic qualities which in turn leads them to make their own conclusions about these places and the effects they have on us. The collage format of his works is where I initially got the idea to make my work a sort of collage, however I think the finished products are very different. ‘The barkhan advances downwind by the avalanching of sand down the angle of repose’ This piece is a result of his extensive studies of sand dunes throughout Australia and demonstrates all the qualities typical of his works. The images in the work resemble maps, scientific drawings and diagrams. The images express to the audience the complexity of the forces within the landscape which are constantly interacting with each other. This work is one of a larger series of works centered around the sand dunes of the Simpson desert. He often revisits the same site on a number of occasions, sometimes over several years. Here the surface of the dunes reveal an environment which is in a constant sate of change, the crests of the...