Mungo : Mildura Arts Centre

MUNGO: PAINTINGS & PRINTS
2019

Dusk at Red Top

2019 Oil on Linen
138 x 144 cm

Red Top

2019 Oil on Linen
138 x 144 cm

Mungo I

2018 Black Ink on Hahnmuhle Paper
58 x 67.5 cm

Mungo II

2018 BLACK INK ON HAHNMUHLE PAPER
58 X 67.5 CM

Mungo VIII

2018 Black Ink on BFK
58 x 67.5 cm

Dr. Thomas Middlemost’s opening speech

Dr. Thomas Middlemost’s opening speech

‘Her lunettes are embodied, rooted, structurally firm and dominant in the landscape, they are enduring, imposing, and strive to show the permanence of the figures embedded in the mythology of Mungo.’

‘In March 2016 I wrote about the “beseeching nature” and, “longing on the faces” of the two figure monotypes I purchased for the SCU Art Collection, and that the approximated stage lighting, brings a deep interest to the dead spaces within the monotypes.  I comment on the large scale of her monotypes, as confident and, monumental stating they are gallery pieces, artworks of gravitas or acting as a perfunctory sketch.  Ending the statement that “Wald is building an important body of both figurative and landscape monotypes”

Read the full speech

Images of national landscape and how they relate to, distance, dryness, first Australians, isolation, environment, gender, and culture.

These are all statements confronted head on by Susan Wald in the Mungo Monotypes, and paintings.
‘These are pictures for out time.  Pictures that are refined by time, they are thoughtful, and speak of death and birth in one.  They speak of the end point of the Australian landscape, the dry, desolate, final images of one of the worlds driest continents.  If we go on neglecting the signs our planet has given us, our country will be unliveable.  And in one the work also shows us the long and enduring history of that landscape.  Mungo is known worldwide as a place of discovery; of Mungo man, and Mungo woman, a marker that starts a chronology for our first peoples.  The feeling the artist is trying to express that spans so many generations must be overwhelming.’