Robyn Harman

The sensation of being immersed in salty water, the gleam of aquatic surfaces, the shallow beaches and constant movement of wind and waves, sailing Tasmania’s coastal waters has been an enduring subject of my painting, and in a sense, it is through my practice as a painter that I still vicariously journey through the elements of these landscapes.

Although these elements have been relatively constant, the focus of my work has shifted from windsurfing GPS tracks superimposed on images derived from Google Earth to sea stacks and rocky outcrops and the imagined traces left behind by seafaring travellers. Recently I have started to explore historical viewpoints and methods of conveying the tumultuous and challenging sea conditions experienced by sealers and explorers. 

My more recent paintings depict rocky outcrops and islands which evoke a sense of remoteness and wilderness, of memories and myths. They have the presence of a spiritual site existing in the space between land and sea, between sea and sky. I am interested in the way landscape is viewed; as ancient and tracked with stories, as an antipodean ideal, as terrain refracted by abstraction and digitisation. The viewpoint shifts from a distant horizon to close and enveloping images of water.