Artist John Wolseley on His Work Currently at the MCA – And a Chance to Win a Limited-Edition Print

When artist John Wolseley answers the phone he is sitting by a dam in the middle of a forest feeding a wallaby. It feels right to imagine him surrounded by nature; the same nature that thrums through the textured, earthy work he has been creating for the past few decades.

When asked to try and summarise the kind of artist he is, Wolseley describes himself as a landscape painter, but is clear that, to him, what this means isn’t as straightforward or literal as one might think. It isn’t necessarily about looking out over a given area and putting what you see onto the canvas. “Nowadays, landscape painters, the best ones, are more to do with the ecology and revealing the landscape, and what's happening in the landscape.”

Despite his own description he doesn’t only paint – his exhibitions also feature sculptures and installations, and his work spans different media from traditional painting, to etchings, to diagrams, to collage. You can catch his work as part of The National 2021: New Australian Art at MCA Australia until 22 August, where he is featured alongside 12 other artists.

Wolseley was born in England – and across the course of our conversation makes a few self-deprecating jokes about the accent he hasn’t been able to shake even after more than 40 years in Australia. After studying art in both London and Paris, he’s had a storied career, working and living across Europe in the 1960s. Then in the 1970s he moved to Australia. His work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows across the country in almost too many galleries to list, including at the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art. He explains that his style tends to shift, reflecting where he is working. “My painting has changed a lot according to which part of Australia I'm painting,” he explains.

At the MCA exhibition, his work is displayed with work by his long-time friend and collaborator Yolngu artist Mulkun Wirrpanda who, sadly, passed away earlier this year. “It has been the most wonderful collaboration, which was almost more like a conversation,” Wolseley says. He describes 15 years of shared history and interests which resulted in three different collections: one about edible plants, a second one that focused on their interest in shellfish and molluscs, and the most recent one – for touring exhibition The National 2021 – which centres on termite mounds, and the surprising relationships between termites and other creatures, in particular birds. “They’re paintings about termite mounds, but they’re especially about the symbiotic relationship which termites have with these birds,” he says. In addition to the works created for The National , Wolseley has produced three different limited-run prints, which are [available for the public to buy from the MCA Store , thanks to the MCA’s Major Partner, Ray White, who celebrates 10 years of partnership and creative collaboration together this year. The prints include Djirrididi – forest kingfisher with scavenger moths and bombardier beetles , Ant nest in a termite mound , and Djudutjudumun – pardalote in a termite mound.

Before speaking to Wolseley I thought creating prints was a relatively straightforward – and perhaps machine-based – process. But that is far from the case here. While often “prints” does mean a photographic version of an existing work, the prints that Wolseley is producing are each done painstakingly by hand. “Two of them are etchings, and one of them is an example of how I mix printing media up,” he says. “The wonderful thing about etching and wood-cut printing is that each one of them is original in the sense that it is actually hand printed from the etching plate or the wood block.”
The kingfisher, for example, is carefully printed each time, then Wolseley goes through and hand colours each of them – which means they are all ever so slightly different. The pardalote prints, though, are even more complex. The bird at the centre of them is created via etching, but the full picture is the result of numerous printmaking methods. To create the image of a termite mound, Wolseley finds planks of wood that bear the marking of insect tunnels, then creates a print of that, making each final print again truly unique.

While the core images of each of the prints are drawn from his larger works, each individual print is its own picture, whether that be via a variation in colour, or in the history of the wood used to shape the background. What connects the three images is the idea of symbiosis. In choosing which ones to recreate in this way, Wolseley explains that these are all birds and insects important in the ecology of termite mounds. He tells me about the first time he learned that birds and other creatures live alongside termites, about how he learned much about them from Ms Wirrpanda, about how she too painted the pardalote, in her own style. “We were listening to each other. And what was wonderful was that I still went on painting the same way I do, and she did the way she did. But we did learn from each other – and this made it a wonderful collaboration in parallel.”

For a chance to win a limited-edition John Wolseley print from the MCA Store thanks to Ray White, subscribe to the MCA Store newsletter.

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