Terra Incognita

Artist: Bec Smith
Title: Terra Incognita
Medium: Acrylic and mixed media on board
Artwork size: 70cm x 60cm / framed 72cm x 62cm
Framed in Tasmanian Oak

From the artist: "Group shows continue to draw from me new ways of seeing and approaching ideas. This piece resembles a world map, and rather than accurate cartography it shows a symbolic graceful, harmonious overlap of the old and new world, and a deliberate exclusion of the gigantic mass of territory beneath only identified as Terra Australis Incognita, the ‘unknown southern land’. If you dig up some old maps the scale difference is astounding, just how large navigators estimated the mass to be, and may have included parts of continents that we now know as Asia and Antartica. Here I’ve separated the southern mass because I’ve had this alternate story going over and over again in my mind that when navigators set off to explore, the land disappeared, magically retreated, became invisible or simply camouflaged via some sort of marine mirage, and was in fact never ever ‘discovered’ or ‘conquered’. Yet it was. And whenever it was that they would inevitably turn up the land was already further ‘progressed’ than any of their countries were: cohesive, inclusive, uncompetitive, uncorrupted.
It’s as though over time, as the outline and shape of this land mass became known, learned, and documented, that so too has a notion of the identity placed upon it and in turn ourselves. Sometimes untraversed places can have more a open, naive, certainly mysterious, but also a virtuous kind of bliss about them. I wish we could undo this trauma."

Price: $880 AUD

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