Rosalie Gascoigne

(1917-1999)

Wool Clip, 1995

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1995

EXHIBITED
Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 23 August - 16 September 1995, cat. 9
The Daylight Moon: Rosalie Gascoigne and Lake George, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 26 June - 22 August 2015

LITERATURE
Joanna Mendelssohn, The Australian, 8 September 1995, p. 14
Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 95 (illus.)
Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 286, cat. 563 (illus.)


It was only at the age of 57, in 1974, that New Zealand-born contemporary artist Rosalie Gascoigne held her first solo exhibition, eight years before representing Australia alongside Peter Booth at the 1982 Venice Biennale. Despite receiving no formal art training, Gascoigne was an acute observer of the world around her. She became renowned for developing a lyrical visual language through her poetic transformation of found and often discarded materials - wood, wire, feathers, and reflective road signs - into sculptural assemblages that capture the transitory qualities of the Australian landscape, underscoring what she once described as 'all air, all light, all space and all understatement'.1

Wool Clip belongs to the mature period of Gascoigne's practice and was conceived as a companion to Wild Strawberries (1995), a related sawn-wood assemblage constructed from small copper cable reels. The artist discovered these long, stake-like wooden lengths in Bungendore, near her home outside Canberra. In this work, Gascoigne arranges the timber in rhythmic alignment, transforming utilitarian fragments into a composition of quiet luminosity. She observed that the stakes, 'shaved off at the end', possessed a quality that 'had a good reading to them,' and titled the piece Wool Clip 'because it looks kind of woolly'.2 The cut ends of the undulating wood create a silvery, shimmering surface whose tonal variations evoke the texture and movement of wool fibre - an abstraction of air and light achieved without any literal reference to the material itself. Like much of her late work, Wool Clip distils the experience of the land into form and texture, where geometry and irregularity coexist in delicate balance.

Gascoigne once reflected, 'I look for things that have been somewhere, done something. Second hand materials aren't deliberate; they have had sun and wind on them. Simple things. From simplicity you get profundity. The weathered grey look of the country gives me a great emotional upsurge. I am not making pictures, I make feelings.'3 Wool Clip embodies that ethos: both humble and expansive, it stands as a meditation on material, memory, and the reverence of the Australian land.

1. Rosalie Gascoigne, interview with Peter Ross, ABC, 1990
2. Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 95
3. Rosalie Gascoigne, interview with Stephen Feneley, Express, ABC, 4 Dec 1997