Thresholds of Terrain Catalogue Essay

13th May 2014 - 31st May 2014

Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Essay by Phe Luxford

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Painter and printmaker Caroline Rannersberger responds intuitively to her environment, referencing the rhizomatic model of the Deleuzian philosophy. This philosophy opens up a new way of ‘seeing’ the landscape through acknowledging that rather than one fixed viewpoint, landscape contains multiple and shifting points of connection across time and space. Working predominantly on paper or wood panels, Rannersberger’s large scale landscapes reference both her Tasmanian surrounds and her German heritage.

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As an artist she has worked in a range of environments, from the vast and ancient expanses of the Northern Territory to the Antarctic chill of Southern Tasmania. Throughout, an intention to address the landscape as an ambiguous site of infinite arrival has been maintained. Her images act to open up a temporal space within the physical reality of a location, to intersect history, place and subjective experience. Being in and being with the elements, the observed marvel of slowly shifting land masses, of great tidal movements and surging weather patterns render the body small in the face of a world in a constant state of flux.

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Employing a system of diptychs and panel sections, horizon lines become destabilized, land and sea merge and any single reading of the panorama becomes impossible. Offered up in fragmentary tracts, these pragmatic units serve to evoke an ‘in-between’ state of awareness. The artist remarks of her direct method of working in the landscape, ‘I realise that I can only begin to paint the landscape when I feel I have “become it” in every cell of my being.’ Such a connection, disembodied from the timeline of literal, everyday experience, creates an opportunity for Rannersberger to enter into ‘the threshold of a landscape not quite formed. Multiples of the terrain emerge from a myriad of slightly shifting tangents.’ - Phe Luxford, 2014

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