In his first exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in four years, John Wolseley returns to the city with an exciting presentation of new multi-panelled works the artist calls ‘landscape polyptychs.’ This is a new way of working for Wolseley who has taken inspiration from Japanese Ukiyo-e printmakers.

‘I am ridiculously excited by this way of doing things’, says Wolseley. ‘It enables me to include one or two modes or graphic systems in each panel. There is the birds-eye mappy kind of drawings, or my more traditional fixed point perspective systems. Or my more aleatoric charcoal rubbings from burnt trees. These different modes all brought together in a single work are for me a wonderful way of describing a complex ecosystem. I see each landscape I paint as being a vast single organism - composed of interwoven webs and skeins of marvellous intricacy.’

Since 2019, Wolseley has been documenting the creeks, rivers, and wetlands of Southern Australia in a quest to reveal how water, trees, soil, and the ancient webs of mycorrhizal fungi all combine in the making of country. This all started in 2019 when he took part in the Earth Canvas project in which six artists were paired with six brilliant regenerative farmers to document and celebrate their land. The exhibition toured regional galleries including the National Museum last year. Works from this project are part of this show together with more recent investigations of the same Riverina property, Bibbaringa.

In the main section of the exhibition, we trace the artist’s steps as he follows the flood plains back to his home in the Victorian Mallee. He then travelled along the watercourses of Djaara country to the edge of the Wimmera. Documenting the pools as he went and bivouacking each night beside them.

In the making of the multi-panelled works on paper, Wolseley has, with his usual idiosyncratic mix of mediums and techniques, used the physical elements of the terrain: carbon from bushfires, natural pigments and the pooled reticulation of watercolours. In the making of these works he has employed various forms of nature-printing and frottage so that often a panel is printed or rubbed from different layers of the flood plain. For instance, some paintings are born from the skeins and webs of fungal hyphae as they ripple between the trees. Others take shape from the rhizosphere layer of microbial and other biological worlds in the soil.

Finally, Wolseley presents four large woodcut and watercolour works, exploring termite mounds. These describe what the artist refers to as ‘the most magnificent self-organising farms in Australia – the Termite mounds of Arnhem land”. Wolseley considers these complex structures – with their fungus farms, royal cells, and elaborate ventilation systems – as microcosms of the earth. For him they are a powerful illustration of the Gaia hypothesis and how the earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single organism; an entity with self-regulating feedback mechanisms that keep the conditions on our planet within boundaries that are favourable to life.

Regenesis - Slow Water - Deep Earth is John Wolseley's eighth solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.