Edith Cowlishaw: Fifty Years Celebrating the Australian Bush
04 - 26 February 2017


How very necessary it is to train ourselves to observe the natural beauty around us so that in the exuberance of our beautification schemes we shall not do things that disturb and eventually destroys the landscape. ...seldom, if ever, do we achieve the quiet perfection of Nature’s planting.

Edna Walling, 1945
 

Edith Cowlishaw is a bush walker and, like well-known Australia artist Margaret Preston, loves walking around the local bushland parks in suburban Sydney and as far afield as her recent explorations in the forests in Manjimup, Western Australia.
Her affinity for the natural plantings of the Australian bush, evident all through Edith's career, are environmentally increasingly important in the current debate over global warming.
Edith's passion for the subtle natural plantings that occur between the trees of our bushland is shown in these finely detailed and delicately excuted etchings that celebrate more than fifty years of her personal observations.

Cowlishaw's sensitivity and powers of observation make us look, and look carefully again, at the minutiae that is the Australian bush.

To take a walk through Edith Cowlishaw's eyes is, in the words of John Stilgoe, to enjoy the best-kept secret around - the ordinary, everyday landscape that touches any explorer with magic. ("Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places" 1998).

Arguably one of Australia's longest working Master Printmaker's, Edith Cowlishaw (b.1923) is represented in many Public Collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT; The MAGAM Collection, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Sydney NSW; The Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney NSW; The Coles Myer Collection of Australian Art; The BRAG Collection, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW; The Portland Collection, Lithgow City, NSW; The Private Collection of the Japanese Royal Family, Tokyo Royal Palace, Japan; as well as numerous private and public collections in Australia and Internationally.

..it was in Australia that I gained my first impressions of the beauty of the world, and it was the Bush that taught me.  Tom Roberts

This is Edith Cowlishaw’s second Solo Exhibition at Artsite Contemporary Galleries.

View previous exhibition here.