Artist of the day: Artist of the day, February 6, 2020: Rosalie Gascoigne, a New Zealand-born Australian painter, sculptor and assemblage artist (#910)

Rosalie Gascoigne AM (1917 –1999) was a New Zealand-born Australian sculptor and assemblage artist. She showed at the Venice Biennale in 1982, becoming the first female artist to represent Australia there. In 1994 she was awarded the Order of Australia for her services to the arts.

Gascoigne was born Rosalie Norah King Walker in Auckland, New Zealand, she was the second of the three children. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Auckland University in 1937. She emigrated to Canberra, Australia following her marriage to astronomer S. C. B (Ben) Gascoigne in 1943 and set up home in the isolated scientific community of Mount Stromlo. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in June 1994, for services to art, particularly sculpture.

During the many lonely years spent raising her three children, Gascoigne found solace by making natural assemblages first via traditional flower arranging then later with the rigorous Japanese art form Sogetsu Ikebana. Her work in this medium was outstanding, earning praise from Japanese master and founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, Sofu Teshigahara. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s, she had become dissatisfied with the limitations of the medium and started experimenting first with small scrap iron sculptures and later wooden boxed assemblages, all composed of materials she found while on scavenging expeditions in the fierce, sunburnt landscape of Australia. While the Australian landscape was initially a shocking change from the damp green hills of her familiar New Zealand, by this time, she had come to love the "boundless space and solitude" of her new home. Much of her art reflects this, though some also hark back to her roots in New Zealand.

She said that her art-making materials "need to have been open to the weather." She thus used mostly found materials: wood, iron, wire, feathers, and yellow and orange retro-reflective road signs; which flash and glow in the light. Some of her other best-known works use faded, once-bright drinks crates; thinly-sliced yellow Schweppes boxes; ragged domestic items such as torn floral lino and patchy enamelware; vernacular building materials such as galvanized tin, corrugated iron, and masonite; and fibrous, rosy cable reel ends. These objects represent, rather than accurately depict, elements of her world. "The countryside's discards ... no longer suggest themselves but evoke experiences, particularly of the landscape."

Although working vigorously into her 80s, with occasional help from an assistant, her age at the height of her success precluded the traveling that would have been necessary to build the international audience her work deserved. Although she exhibited occasionally overseas—including the 1982 Venice Biennale (the first Australian woman to do so), Switzerland and Sweden as well as throughout Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan amongst others), the major holdings of her work remain in Australia and New Zealand, both of which claim her as their own.

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