CATALOGUE

My mother, Rosemary Burke (1940-2008) was a Tasmanian artist who worked across several mediums including assemblage, photomontage, collage and small-scale sculpture with a variety of historical, organic and textual materials. Her work explored wide-ranging themes of life and death, maternal and familial relationships, adaptation, evolution and change. After her death in 2008, I curated her sprawling collection of work, notebooks and materials in a retrospective exhibition titled ‘Trace.’ This work was assisted by the Minister for the Arts Tasmania. The exhibition toured to Burnie Regional Gallery in 2011.

‘Trace follows twenty-five years of Rosemary Burke’s work. The exhibition reflects her insatiable curiosity, wit, and fluid integration of art and life. She fused an approach akin to stream-of-consciousness with an intellectual interest in history, art, literature and psychology.

She possessed an uncanny ability to interpret life as if it were an assemblage, establishing a unique and deeply personal process of 'selection, retrieval, reformation and replacement of things found, lost, displaced, fractured or hidden' (Artist’s statement: A Beating Heart Devonport Regional Gallery, July 2005).’

Jane Stewart Foreword

EXHIBITION TITLE
TRACE ROSEMARY BURKE: A RETROSPECTIVE

ARTIST
ROSEMARY BURKE

VENUE
THE ROSNY BARN, ROSNY FARM AND SCHOOLHOUSE GALLERY

DATES:
12 NOVEMBER - 5 DECEMBER 2010

REVIEW