Artists Statement - Making Tracks | Denise Campbell

“Pathways oft taken through habit or whim - lead us to our destinies”

Making Tracks offers for your contemplation, richly textured, colourful and
representational selection of landscapes from varying perspectives, that reflect the
isolation and communication within rural and outback Australia.
‘As a farmer’s daughter in country New South Wales, I felt that, particularly through my
childhood years, the dusty roads, tracks and pathways were an essential connection between
friends, families and school life in our quiet, rural community. I have tried to convey, in
fractured or layered images that are reminiscent of tapestries of nostalgic scenes from my
childhood and travels, the physical isolation of families that live off the land. I have also
sought to indicate the physical, with textural tiering to evoke the powerful and repetitious
elemental forces that carve their own tracks in the landscape.’
On a metaphysical level, Making Tracks, is intended to represent the parallel pathways
in our collective memory, where feet have trodden the well-loved and familiar pathways that
lead to home. The tracks I’ve shown can also be seen as metaphors for the yearnings and
ambitions in our lives and the paths that we take to satisfy those needs: directions we take
that can lead us towards happy, joyous experiences or deliver us into painful, exhausting
scenarios of life. Life usually delivers a bit of both.
On a less serious and more optimistic note, I named the exhibition Making Tracks, for
while it may suggest the physical and spiritual in the Australian landscape as I’ve
outlined above, it also conjures a national personality that seeks to ‘make tracks’ or
‘go bush’ - perhaps to escape the pressures of urban existence and find a new way of
living, or even to seek rejuvenation before a strengthened and triumphant return.
Denise Campbell
September 2007