Art

Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision

A major retrospective at Geelong Gallery

by Libby Robin •

ABR Arts • 20 December 2022

Art

Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision

A major retrospective at Geelong Gallery

by Libby Robin •

ABR Arts • 20 December 2022

Mandy Martin, Unknown Industrial Prisoner, 1977 (photograph by Andrew Curtis)

Depaysement:

the feeling of not being at home, in a foreign or different place, whether a good or a bad feeling; change of scenery
exile (obsolete)

Before environmental psychologist Glenn Albrecht gave us the language of solastalgia, Mandy Martin painted Depaysement (2003). Martin chose a different word that also explores a sort of longing for a home that was no longer there, a safe place that predated the environmental destruction that rendered home unrecognisable. Where solastalgia has international appeal, particularly to psychologists grappling with climate and environmental anxiety in our troubled times, Martin’s depaysement is all about colonised Australia. It is explicit about remembering the forgotten wars that mark history here. Her works explore the sublime, and the beautiful, and the wild including Country that has been neglected by people exiled at home, cut off from their homeland.

(Left to right) Beyond Eden and Depaysement (courtesy of Libby Robin)

Libby Robin

By this contributor

Libby Robin FAHA is an independent environmental humanities scholar. As Curator-at-Large, she works with museums in Australia, Germany, Estonia and Norway, and with the Museums and Climate Change Network. Her books include How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), The Flight of the Emu (2001) and (co-edited with Jenny Newell and Kirsten Wehner), Curating the Future (2017). Her most recent book is The Environment: A history of the idea (co-authored with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin). She represents the Australian Academy of Humanities for the ACOLA project Australian Energy Transition Research Plan.