Depaysement:

1. the feeling of not being at home, in a foreign or different place, whether a good or a bad feeling; change of scenery

2. 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)