Rosalie Gascoigne

Rosalie Gascoigne
born New Zealand 1917; arrived Australia 1943; died 1999

Sharpe Bros horizontal 1981
assemblage of painted timber
Geelong Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1985
© Rosalie Gascoigne Estate. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia.

Collection treasure in focus

Rosalie Gascoigne migrated from New Zealand to Australia in 1943 and for seventeen years of her life in Canberra lived on Mount Stromlo with her astronomer husband and three children. The expansive semi-rural landscape and particular qualities of climate, light and air filtered through Gascoigne’s imagination to focus her curious eye and poetic sensibility on assemblages of weathered materials that encapsulated landscape. ⁠⠀
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This is an important early assemblage, and a personal favourite of mine because like so many of Gascoigne’s works, it transcends its materiality: it conveys something bigger than the sum of its parts. Titles came to Gascoigne after the completion of works, when raw material and her interest in its physical properties gave way to suggestion, recollection and allusive density. This work has an austere title—literally referencing the handle ends of the drinks crates from which the work is constructed, but in it I see and feel summer, dry heat, weathered fences, and country paddocks.⁠

—Jason Smith, Director & CEO, Geelong Gallery