The following is a transcription of the video Behind the scenes of Skying: Cloudscapes in Tasmanian Art with Tracey Cockburn.
“I’m Tracy Cockburn. I’m a Tasmanian-based printmaker and I have this current exhibition here at the Allport gallery and Museum of Fine Arts. I graduated in 2004 from the Tasmanian School of Art, with a masters in print making. And at that time my practice was heavily reliant on screen printing, with a little bit of etching and lithography at the same time.”
“This exhibition came about through an application to the Allport, to work with their collection of colonial artworks. Once I started looking at the works in the Allport and gradually sort of developed a fascination with the clouds. The starting point for this exhibition was focusing on the work of W.C. Piguenit, and a particular work of his which has some beautiful beautiful delicate clouds in it.”
“The exhibition is really divided into two halves. This half; the the piece on this side of the gallery; more installation based work where I try to create my own Cloudscape by creating little clouds out of hundreds of prints on Japanese paper, which have some of the colonial works nestled in amongst them as well. On the other side of the gallery these are I guess what you call more traditional Works in frames. Nonetheless still digital prints, the skylines that you see are derived from works in the collection and I’ve then layered those up again with my own photographs of clouds, of other old maps, plans and I’ve also incorporated in them some of the meteorological symbols that are used to denote types of clouds and also the amount of cloud cover.”
“So for example in these ones we have specific symbols which represent cloud types; so I’ve Incorporated those really to kind of talk or as a as a queue as a visual cue to the fact that we’re talking about cloud cover and clouds in the artworks whilst still referencing the old depictions of clouds and Colonial artwork.”
“Things that are asked of artists who apply and are successful in exhibiting here is that they respond to works in the collection, and as I’ve always had an interest in colonial landscape painting in particular it was such a fabulous opportunity to be able to deep dive into the collections here and get a real look behind the scenes at some of the amazing works that that are here that often aren’t really seen. So that aspect of it has been a real treat for me to be able to go in with the curators and look through the the incredible pieces that are in their collection.”