Q&A

Floorsheet with prices

outLAND is a body of work by two artists and long time friends who visually traverse their artistic journeys via geographic movements over a period of almost 30 years. Through various modes of drawing and painting, both Jude Roberts and Tarn McLean draw inspiration from topographical elements and the  pigments, ochres, and waters predominantly located around the Western Queensland regions of Australia.

outLAND is evocative of location, where both artists lived beyond the urban terrain on adjoining remote properties. The title serves as a disruption to perceptions of the inland, to the physical and constructed boundaries, and to placing the artists themselves into the land/waterscapes. 

Q&A with Tarn McLean and Jude Roberts

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Tarn McLean 

Tarn McLean’s practice is concerned with painterly properties at their most fundamental level including pigment, colour, shape, line, form and perspective. 

With a focus on colour and it’s perspectival movement upon random placement, her Colour Series works are reflective of the spatial organization of colour, revealing how its combination interacts with and effects visual perception. Through this, pictorial illusion is replaced by a purity of constructed form as seen in her other works that sit outside the frame. These works include shaped canvases, textile design and wall paintings, as well as her current Seeing Painting series, link directly with painterly possibilities in fashion and product design as well as architecture.

McLean’s paintings are engaged with the transparency of the canvas and layers of pigment that prompt the viewer to look a little longer, to take their time with ‘seeing’ the experience rather than gazing at the digital image. How can painting offer a way to disrupt the viewer’s way of seeing and experiencing the world around them on a more active and conceptual level? Her dialogue is open to the possibilities that the screen is favorable to muting these interpretive behaviors, while perhaps it is painting that continues to engage and challenge them.

Jude Taggart Roberts

Jude Taggart Roberts is a visual artist with a focus on the changing terrains of inland Australia including the history and interconnections to the water and land systems she has lived on or journeyed into. Her works on paper and mixed media reveal the hidden interrelationships of the watersheds that we cannot visibly experience such as the artesian basins and springs.

Since moving to Brisbane the artist has continued to make direct encounters  with the land and people of Western Queensland through various arts projects  where  Jude sets up alternative studio spaces to work in situ. 

The artist acknowledges the Gunggari, Bidjara, and Kooma Peoples as the Traditional Owners of the Land that is the area of her research and where the work was created. 

 
Alexandra Lawson Gallery 

482 Ruthven Street, Toowoomba City 

Open Wednesday to Saturday:  noon - 5.30pm

0418 603 695

info@alexandralawsongallery.com