Jo Bertini Visiting Artists & Critics Series Lecture

Deep in Land is an exhibition featuring the paintings of renowned Australian artist Jo Bertini, with collaborative music, sound and video imagery of musician and composer Thomas Studer. Deep in Land is inspired by the deserts of the American Southwest. The artworks emanate from Jo Bertini’s many decades of research and field work into the unique and fragile beauty of remote desert landscapes and the peoples and cultures that have flourished there. The exhibition explores the extraordinary intrinsic value, interconnectedness and essential nature of desert landscapes through a particularly female perspective, distinct from the established historical archive of desert understanding.

For the artist, these desert places simultaneously invoke a sense of the vastness of space and a personal intimacy while retaining a fierce, unexpected wildness. These seemingly harsh and inhospitable environments inspire in Bertini a primary instinct to create. Artworks become a type of elegy, a memorial, extending the traditions of landscape painting and oral storytelling. Trees can talk - mountains can move - rivers hold secrets - grains of sand weave myth, knowledge and culture from past to the present.