Landscape: Notions of the Spook

This exhibition represents the artwork component of David Usher’s doctorate titled ‘Notions of the Spook: Recollections and Nostalgia through personal artist experiences of the contemporary landscape’. While this exhibition cannot depict three years of thought and making, it has within it, pivotal pieces that mark important markers in the research.

Notions of the Spook focuses on the relationship between environment/landscape and the act of painting. David’s practice represents a personal metaphor for unpacking life experiences. Memories of places, travelling through the landscape and all the adventures along the way translate into paintings that utilise the Australian landscape as a point of departure for making sense of the world he lives in.

Usher explains his research as his ‘understanding of personal experiences and memories of place as subject matter that subsequently manifest as a creative presence in an artwork’. Usher asserts, ‘I am investigating the effect of this presence self-termed as the ‘Spook’, which is best described as a feeling, creative state, or as an intuitive understanding or knowledge that an artist experiences through the process of making an artwork’. 

David Usher, Landscape: Notions of the Spook 2023 (works included acrylic on canvas and ceramic pieces)

Ushers goes on to say that ‘I am actively engaged in disrupting a literal understanding of the landscape, seeking to translate my encounters into both familiar and unfamiliar shapes and forms that generate a level of visual tension between sky and ground, the literal and the imagined. I invite the viewer to rethink their respective understanding of the environment and potentially redirect their ideas toward new possibilities of what ‘landscape’ might be. This is defined by not only the importance of place to a personal narrative but also the connections that exist through memory and family to specific sites that I have known during my lifetime’.

‘The Australian landscape is significant as an environment where I have found solitude and a sense of belonging. It is the space in which I can pause, problem-solve, and ultimately re-interpret these experiences through working with clay, mark-making and painting on a variety of surfaces.” 

Courtesy of the Alexandra Lawson Gallery.