In the painting Cradle Mountain from Twisted Lakes, I use the decorative motifs of wallpaper to construct a lens through which to view the colonised landscape of Tasmania. It's a visual device to raise awareness of how this pristine icon was mediated by the European settler. An ornamental 'veil' to hide and sanitise the brutal excesses of colonisation, whose legacy is amnesia.
"Veronica's large painting Cradle Mountain from Twisted Lakes (2006) includes a pastiche of a partial copy of Rococo wallpaper taken from a 'found fragment'. Because of the pattern's transparency, it appears more like an exquisite net curtain or etched glass screen through which a sumptuous romantic representation of a mountain of Tower of Babel proportions can be seen - rich, exotic and enticing. It is a picture of a picture where the foreground and the background continually shift, creating a ceaseless dislocation of time and place."
David Mabb
Artist, Reader in Art and Course Leader in Postgraduate Studies in Art Practice,
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
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Cradle
Mountain from Twisted Lake
Oil on two separate canvas'
3m by 2m (10' x 8')
2006
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