Kristin Haskett - 'Shaping the Undefined'

Wednesday 7  - Saturday 24 July 2021

The Australian landscape has long had a powerful relationship with historical and contemporary culture in this country and following colonisation, a tradition emerged of non-indigenous artists journeying to the interior to create work/find inspiration before returning to the fringes to respond to a landscape so huge and dazzling. In Shaping the Undefined, Kristin Haskett draws on her collective experience of multiple road trips to the interior and, in order to capture her experience of these complex landscapes, Haskett has, over several years, completely reinvented her artistic approach.

Residing on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, landscape artist Haskett searches out environments that challenge and surprise her; places that present extreme contradictions and contrasts. In a past project, Haskett spent several years fascinated by the Clayton landfill site in Victoria. She was captivated by the carefully choreographed movement and forms of the massive machinery as well as the grand scale of the hole in the ground littered with personal artefacts. In the current project, Haskett takes us somewhere else entirely – to landscapes so full of sky and space they feel almost empty, where spiky spinifex gives the illusion of softness from a distance and delicate looking plants survive in the harshest light and conditions.

(First two paragraphs from the catalogue essay by Penelope Gebhardt)