I carry with me a windswept beach and a lonely little lighthouse on the west coast of England, as well as a mountain view of patchwork hedgerows and green fields leading to a grey sea somewhere in Wales.
Each of us carries the memory of a spot where we first became aware of our physical place in the vastness of the world.
For some, the memory is made real by a photograph or a painting. For others, particularly displaced people, a landscape can be the echo of an emotion buried like sediment over the years, to become the bedrock of an imagined place called home. These same people could also carry within them a hellscape of torture and violence.
For some, the landscape is a daily lived experience of tribal stories that inhabit the body and spirit like water and fire.
Shepparton Art Museum’s exhibition The Land Is Us: Stories, Place and Connection brings together all these aspects of landscape as seen through the eyes of Australian, First Nation and international artists. The works are drawn from the NGV collection and present a chance to see how the human experience of landscape continues to evolve as a reflection of changing culture and politics.
So, we have the dystopian Australian landscape of Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly, the nightmare of incarceration amid the stunning beauty of Manus Island in a video from Hoda Afshar, and the mysterious and deep First Nations connection of Lin Onus using feathers and bark contrasted with idyllic impressions of the Australian bush from late Romantics such as Hans Heysen, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.
SAM curators have drawn our attention to the changing way we perceive landscape by using a device that is either crass or clever — depending on which end of the nostalgia telescope you are looking through.
Displayed in the same low-light space as the work of 19th- and early 20th-century Australian landscape painters are three bold symbols in neon pink by Indigenous artist Reko Rennie.
The symbols are so electrically saturating that they are clearly reflected in the glass over the works of Heysen and Tom Roberts. Some viewers have said to me that this is more than annoying — it’s an insult to pioneering Australian landscape painters.
SAM chief executive Melinda Martin said the reflections were a deliberate device to remind people of the continuing presence of Aboriginal people, both at the time when the works were painted and today.
“It is disrupting, but it’s about continuing and deepening the conversation,” Ms Martin said.
It seems that a landscape is not just a landscape. It’s a mirror of the way we see the world — what is important, what is beautiful or hellish, and what or who is included or left out can be expressed in landscape. So, the landscape can be woke or unwoke. Our depiction of it changes according to the times in which we live.
Interestingly, the landscape hasn’t always been a subject for Western artists. While the ancient Chinese sketched mountains and rivers in ink, Europeans were late arrivals in the landscape gallery.
We don’t know much about the landscapes of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. Equally, the landscapes of the Viking and medieval worlds are largely unknown because people, things and religion are more important than the boring stuff you see around you every day. In paintings, an imagined landscape was often used as a backdrop for the main event — such as with the Mona Lisa.
It wasn’t until the Romantics arrived with their reaction to the scars of the Industrial Revolution that landscape became a subject in itself, and nostalgia for the disappearing Eden became a thing.
SAM’s The Land is Us is on until September 1. It is worth several visits because there is a lot to see in a landscape — with or without neon lighting.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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