Barbara McConchie writing looking exhibition

From the exhibition Looking, with Tess Horwitz

Talking to Tess about my work one day I mentioned that over the past decade I have really only being doing landscapes and she replied: ‘what else is there?’

The exhibition delved into the intricateness, vastness, and wonder of nature. If just for today – ghosts 2005-22 was one of three series that I included in the exhibition.

The work started from looking through photo albums of source material collected by my mother, Judy, for her own paintings. Judy died in 2005 and I couldn’t part with these photo albums.

Sitting in the car staring out the window on seemingly endless weekend drives looking at the country, the view, the vista, the landscape was a journey my mother had taken me on since my early childhood. Each of those car trips was punctuated by Judy insisting that we pull over so she could take a photo of a sweeping view, skies with looming clouds, long mountain ranges, and valleys with veins of trees following the river’s path.

I began making these small watercolours using mum’s photo’s eventually moving onto photos taken on my daily morning walks.

The works are small acts of remembering. The images roil around each other using symbols of landscapes; flattened shapes, horizontal bands, and heightened colours.

Each work is only 140mm high by 190mm wide, in other words they are small. Magically the small becomes vast.

I feel that I share in a larger collective grief for the innumerable biological losses due to atmospheric changes occurring across the world. The beauty of the world is not the same as what I paint or draw. These pictures are all ghosts, these landscapes no longer exist.