Sheet 30

Bea Maddock was one of the most important Australian printmakers to emerge in the 1970s. Her best-known work is from this period, in which she utilised a pop aesthetic of found images and text, and pioneered the use of photo-etching. The Queensland Art Gallery and National Gallery of Australia organised a major touring retrospective in 1982–83, with another by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002. A major catalogue raisonné was published in 2011.
This work is sheet 30 from a major work Maddock completed in 1993–98. The work is a panoramic circumnavigation of the coastline of Tasmania, as if seen from the sea, inscribed with Indigenous place names. Long resident in Launceston, Maddock worked from maps to trace the edges of the entire island. Troubled by the erasure of Indigenous histories from Tasmania, the work was intended to ‘make a statement about the whole of Tasmania’ (Maddock, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1998), which she saw as defined as a coastline that encloses a whole.