• Of Islands...

    Of Islands...

     

    There is nothing as complex, as potentially self-reflexive, or as joyful as the building of an art collection. For 40 years, the Bett Gallery has supported building collections that feature Tasmania’s most relevant, challenging and committed artists. This exhibition—On Island NOW—introduces new works by 19 artists currently represented in the State’s collection, and exhibited as part of On Island at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

     

    If On Island  highlights the quality of our public collection, On island NOW illuminates the qualities of collectivity itself, offering prescient insight into the necessity for institutions to sustain a healthy Tasmanian arts ecology beyond their own programming. Witnessing the works of our premier artists, simultaneously across two of the island’s important gallery spaces, is an opportunity to understand a bigger picture: a picture—collected, collated and curated as On Island NOW— that celebrates Tasmania’s unique arts ecosystem from the smallest collections to the largest. On Island NOW promotes longevity, sustainability and collaboration as imperatives for our flourishing future. In being diversely represented and deeply moved by our collections, we recognise that none of us is truly an island.

  • raymond arnold

    raymond arnold

     

    With some time to spare before getting on the highway back to my home in the West of

    Tasmania I headed to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Some exhibition signage ‘On

    Island’ introduced the exhibition. What was this about? Stepping into the darkened

    space it quickly became apparent to me what this exhibition might be about. It was about

    ‘time travel’ and another more substantial ‘dose’ of that sense of the past. The feeling of

    my younger self drifting into the room to encounter my older self and the ‘old’ gang.

    Artists who worked together at the Chameleon Artist’s Co-Operative in Campbell Street

    and/or The Tasmanian School of Art in the 1980’s and then formed around the ambitions

    of Dick Bett to open a serious commercial exhibition space in Hobart. My large Elsewhere

    World etching panorama was on display, near David Keeling’s exquisite painting, which

    was behind the late John Smith’s glossy white sculpture, which was partly illuminated by

    Julie Gough’s video projection around the corner from Pat Brassington’s surreal collages

    across from Amanda Davies startling painting of institutional terror on the way to Richard

    Wastell’s painted panorama of highland hunting & gathering.

     

    -  Raymond Arnold, 2025

  • Kelly Austin

    Kelly Austin

     

     

    What does being On Island Now mean to you:

     

    I can’t help think about edges. Firstly, from a very literal and landscape point of view…..I’m nearly always in sight of the sea. This kind of edge represents a duality…..the safety of land and shelter and the unknown and expansive sea and sky. But secondly, perhaps in a more metaphorical sense….standing on solid ground, but always looking beyond, into who knows what….into an expanse of light and space and colour. 

     

    - Kelly Austin, 2025

     

     

     

     

  • PAT BRASSINGTON

    PAT BRASSINGTON

     
    Living on an island certainly has had an effect on me. The feeling of being surrounded by water is either strangely comforting or discomforting at times. Of course, past ghosts linger and being the butt of cruel jokes was demeaning. If you are hinting at the ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ phenomena [some critics have aligned Brassington’s work with the nature and isolation of Tasmania as Gothic] I can’t easily dismiss that, but I guess I’m a bit sceptical.
     
    I recall vividly a conversation I had with a group of established artist friends who suggested I would stagnate here unless I broadened my horizons and travelled overseas. This was in the late 70s. I was having none of that. I was, you could say, fiercely proud of where I lived—the terrain, the skies and the air had always been a solace for me. Of course, this offended me because I took it as a criticism of both me personally and the island on which I had always lived. I don’t know if pride is a good virtue but my retort was, “I don’t feel the need to go anywhere. The world will come to me.” Or words to that effect. 
     
    - Pat Brassington, Art Guide, 2025
  • Pat Brassington, Another way, 2025

    Pat Brassington

    Another way, 2025
    pigment print
    80 x 62 cm
    edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs
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  • amanda davies

    amanda davies

     

    Painting gives form to the ordinary, the extraordinary and to the dreamed. This island’s shifting light – its buttery yellows, cadmium glows, raw umber shadows and falling twinkling darks- challenges how I see and feel. 

     

    I’m not painting the island, but living here keeps teaching me how to paint.

     

     

    - Amanda Davies, 2025

     
  • Julie Gough

    Julie Gough

  • Vanessa Greeno

    Vanessa Greeno

     

     

    Being 'On Island Now' is about feeling grounded through family and cultural connection. It is the place I return to when I need peace and perspective amidst life’s challenges. I was born here, and my bond with the island is lifelong—an unbroken connection that will remain until I, too, become one with the island.

     

    - Vanessa Greeno, 2025

  • Neil haddon

    Neil haddon

     

     

    To live 'on island now' is to feel the entanglement of beauty and difficulty—Tasmania’s extraordinary environment shaped by deep histories of invasion, migration, and survival. In my work, flowers from Gauguin migrate here, to Lutruwita, where they are looped, stretched, and disguised. This act of aesthetic espionage reframes the ornamental, unsettling its colonial echoes while connecting this island to global conversations.
     
    - Neil Haddon, 2025
     
  • DAVID KEELING

    DAVID KEELING

     

     

    Working on island to me means having the clear air and space to think and produce work without distraction, to look inwards intensely, whilst having the time to perfect one’s practice.

     

    - David Keeling, 2025

  • RICKY MAYNARD

    RICKY MAYNARD

     

     

    Traveling in and around Lutruwita/Tasmania following the song lines and ochre trails of my people, I seek the truth hidden from view, the truth long hidden in the hearts of the Elders, in the depth of the archives and in the marks people have left embedded in the landscape. 

     

    - Ricky Maynard, 2005

  • Ashlee Murray

    Ashlee Murray

     

     

    Being on island, to me, means being physically and spiritually connected to my country, lutruwita (Tasmania). Being here means I can continue the ancient Tasmanian Aboriginal artform of Shell Stringing in the same way that my Ancestors did. 

     

    - Ashley Murray, 2025

  • ENQUIRE
  • ROBERT O'CONNOR

    ROBERT O'CONNOR

     
     
    When you're born in a colony, you are a tourist everywhere. The work in this show clumsily combines different images: Some fish that remind me of Ugo Cantoni, a whaling scene from the Allport Collection, a hyper-erotic, milk-based energy drink, and some mysterious vessels. To me, the combination of these things say something about being 'on island'. 
    Fifty years after "The Provincialism Problem" I'm still thinking of the fluid relationship between centres and peripheries. 
     

    I did a project with some kids called "the edge of nowhere is the centre of everything". Then this artist on the mainland used the title for their own work, word for word, because I am on the edge, and they are in the centre and that's how it works.

     

    - Robert O'Connor, 2025

  • MICHAEL SCHLITZ

    MICHAEL SCHLITZ

  • VALERIE SPARKS

    VALERIE SPARKS

     

     

    What On Island Now means to me now is ‘home’. When I came to Tasmania in 2015 to conduct photoshoots for Tempest I was a visitor and captivated by the natural environment. I quickly realised that this is where I wanted to live. It was 6 years before I could make the move but now, being surrounded by such beauty every day is a constant source of joy. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

     

    - Valerie Sparks, 2025

  • David Stephenson

    David Stephenson

     

     

    All photographs document time, if only for an instant. Although I often used long time exposures in my earlier night photography, recently I have been using very long daytime exposures to trace the daily passage of the sun and its seasonal movement north and south. While our human problems sometimes seem overwhelming, it’s both humbling and strangely reassuring to be reminded while watching the sun arc across the sky and etch its image onto my film that we are just specks on a big spinning rock that’s been circling for a few billion years around an enormous burning orb, itself only a tiny mote in an incomprehensively large and old universe.

     

    - David Stephenson, 2025

  • David Stephenson, The shortest day, Lake Echo (Solar Path 2025-06-21, 7:30am-4:30pm), 2025

    David Stephenson

    The shortest day, Lake Echo (Solar Path 2025-06-21, 7:30am-4:30pm), 2025
    hand printed gelatin silver photograph
    diptych: 30.5 x 39.5cm (each) 55 x 102 cm (approx total framed size)
    edition of 2
    AU$ 4,500.00 + framing
    ENQUIRE
  • IMANTS TILLERS

    IMANTS TILLERS

     

     

     I have spent considerable time visiting Tasmania over many decades. It is truly another world - and I love its other-worldly beauty. John Glover is a hero.

     

    - Imants Tillers, 2025

  • richard wastell

    richard wastell

     

     

     

     

     

    Despite everything, living on island now means still being able to catch up a feed of abalone off the rocks and at the same time catch up some inspiration for my paintings.

     

    - Richard Wastell, 2025

  • MEGAN WALCH

    MEGAN WALCH

     

     

    Islands are like droplets of water, blobs of paint, globules of oil. Islands have edges, boundaries and borders, their contents are thus enclosed, surrounded and isolated...like a bubble. That which is contained is defined and often distorted. Forces of adhesion and cohesion cause a liquid surface to curve, creating a meniscus, a lens through which to pull focus on self-contained miniature worlds that exist within larger expanses.

     

    - Megan Walch, 2025

  • BELINDA WINKLER

    BELINDA WINKLER

     

     

     

     

    Amid this island’s ancient forests, shimmering lakes, and windswept shores, it seems as if the forms I seek are everywhere.

     

    - Belinda Winkler, 2025

  • PHILIP WOLFHAGEN

    PHILIP WOLFHAGEN

     

     

     

    Being an Islander is so entwined with my life that it cannot be easily unravelled... the Island is both physical and psychological, we are circumscribed by it geographically and mentally.

     

    - Philip Wolfhagen, 2025

  • Philip Wolfhagen, Twilight Journal , 2025

    Philip Wolfhagen

    Twilight Journal , 2025
    oil and beeswax on linen
    5 panels; 62 x 170 cm (overall with 4cm spacing)
    BY EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST