Walking into Marjorie Bussey’s exhibition of new paintings at The Church Gallery is like walking into a magnificent tempest. Atmospheric images in red and black surround the viewer, breathtaking in their power and beauty. Swirls of molten clouds split by lightning above mysterious oceans, or racing above mountainous topography, reveal a new and emotional aspect of the Australian landscape. Several paintings have a light grid superimposed upon their surface, referencing another language and culture that has penetrated the Australian wilderness and remote coastlines.

Marjorie recently wrote about these paintings:

“Sunset Country” is North of the small mallee town where I spent my formative years. When I asked a friend how far his property extended, he pointed to the horizon line and said, ‘see that purple line way out there, well we run our cattle forty miles past that into Sunset Country.’ This memory is the foundation of my interest and emotional connection with the land and its sense of timelessness and spatial infinity.

Sunset country is uninhabited and unchartered; it is also a metaphysical space for me far from human contact, a wilderness where one can contemplate the interconnectedness of things and perhaps gain an insight into ones perceptions. Seen as a metaphor, the wilderness has always been historically and metaphorically, a place redolent with journeys into consciousness, with pain and discomfort and ecstatic visions.
From interior to exterior our ways of seeing are represented by the grid, which has long been used to transfer images from one site to another. This projection is a language, written by culture, belief systems and memories; it is a lens by which we make sense of our lives. We wonder through the nomadic space of the human condition searching for the Promised Land – a place at which we can never arrive but are always in a ‘state of becoming’.

The mapping of experiences becomes a way of examining our cultural differences and heritage, complete with our discriminatory practices. It becomes ‘instrumental’ in change and the valuing of collective needs. Much of my artistic practice uses the metaphor of maps and in particular, weather maps. There seems to be a clear analogy between an overheating planet and global violence while the wind is a known factor in influencing global behaviour, the peaks and valley of the Earth represent human aspirations and self-knowledge. The unchartered territory of the sunset country can expand the mind and the intuition or it can be a place of discomfort and loss. Whichever is the case it creates change.

Marjorie currently lives in Queensland and her artworks can be found in several major collections, including the Art Gallery of WA, University of WA, BankWest, Artbank, and Edith Cowan University.

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