Painters and Writers: D i s a p p e a r i n g
Tasmanian Writers, Tasmanian Painters engage with what is lost and what endures
13 March to 31 March 2021

Disappearing

We’ve long had a secret here.

Disappearing : to cease to be seen; vanish from sight; to cease to exist or be known; pass away; end gradually.

In our islands, their past, the land, seas, the movement of air, its peoples, the cadence of life and in the place itself is something unfathomably beautiful. You sense it as much as see it. It’s about connection and time not the here and now. It’s a secret that has been closely held, cherished, sustaining our soul.

Entwined with that secret has been a hope that one day Tasmania would be recognised, acknowledged and able to stand on its own two feet. This has been elusive but now we are told that perhaps it is so close as to be reckoned by the beads on the accountant’s abacus.

Then again, perhaps not. Is the price we are paying a disappearing, a disappearing of the very stuff that sustains us? Or, is it a more complex story, shedding a skin as part of the inexorable march of renewal?

Disappearing.

We are at a unique time in our life on these islands of Tasmania; forced to pause, reflect, revaluate, to consider, to reset, to look again at where we live with new eyes.

Over the last few decades Bett Gallery has explored what it means to live or have lived in this place we now call Tasmania in a series of important exhibitions including Future Perfect (2003), South of No North (1991) and six Poets and Painters exhibitions.

It is time to again look deeply into this place.

A group of Tasmanian artists and writers were invited to join curators Carol Bett, Gerard Castles and Pete Hay to explore the idea of what it means to be Tasmanian, our island and who we are and might be as islanders at this moment in our unfolding story.