More Than Ever

By Andrew Frost…

It’d be hard to dispute that the landscape – and by extension nature itself – as a subject in contemporary art has made a big return in recent years. Perhaps it is partly a response to global anxieties brought on by global warming, or the exploitation of natural resources in a precarious world, or perhaps even the uncertainty the future itself, but artists have been reassessing some of the oldest subjects in visual art, connecting to the subject via modern technological society. While the definitions and cultural understandings of what constitutes ‘the landscape’ and ‘nature’ remain vexing, artists such as Lynne Roberts-Goodwin offer a clear eyed understanding of what might be possible using photography to explore these subjects.

Roberts-Goodwin’s exhibition More Than Ever is a selection of works from two recent series – As The Sky Falls and SWARM Think The Mountain – two sequences of large-scale photographs that depict landscapes and mountains in uncertain locations, interspersed with images of feathers and birds in flight. Completely removed from a secular sentimentality or faux religiosity, Roberts-Goodwin’s images are bracing observations of the world as it is, unadorned and beautiful in their simple majesty. Although one might be tempted to call such images ‘sublime’ it’d be hard to think of a more suitable word.

Until September 19
, Woollahra
Pic: Lynne Roberts Goodwin, Think the Mountain #037, 2012 SWARM series, C-type metallic photographic print, 100 X 120 cm, Edition of 3.