GIBLIN SHARPENS HER FOCUS

THE EARTH MUZZLE

Jane Giblin Colville Gallery, 91A Salamanca Place, Hobart Price range: $400-$2700 Until Tuesday

Jane Giblin’s work has echoes and influences from a wide range of art, but it is ultimately personal and singular: her influence is her world, the history she knows, and how she investigates it.

Her art is instantly recognisable and distinctive, however, there has been a critical alteration in how it is presented in this show. Giblin works with slashed ink lines and earthen pigments on paper and, in previous shows, the papers have been largely untreated and hung simply. With The Earth Muzzle, however, the work has been mounted on canvas and glazed.

This simple change in presentation results in a huge, brilliant shift in how we see Giblin’s big, explosive creations of ink and pigment. Something about them is sharper, and the innate motion that has always been present in her work is more spirited and sharpened.

Still, the critical thing is the work. Giblin again has taken a life-drawing model into some of the most isolated parts of Tasmania’s midlands, and gotten to work. What Giblin does is intense in dedication and execution. While she does plenty of studio work, the raw guts of what makes this show is created outside, in the elements, far away from anything like comfort. Giblin is seeking to capture a sense of isolation reminiscent of colonial farming times, when people lived in extreme isolation, working and living directly with the land.

For Giblin’s prior show at Colville, the artist worked with a group of female life models.

Here there is just one. The works show simply one woman and her companion, a big old dog, captured by the artist in expansive drawings and a series of direct, unafraid photographs. The woman, who is mostly nude but is shown occasionally wearing fur, appears to have been living on her own, out on the edges long enough to be getting a bit feral. Certainly there is some kind of shedding of the niceties of civilisation going on.

This is what Giblin captures so well: an understated magic-realist examination of savage femininity that has flourished beyond the edges of human society.

The subject matter and mood of the artworks evoke this notion, and so does the way Giblin makes marks on paper: hard, inkblack and well-defined lines closely follow the line of the body being drawn. There’s a visceral, rough-hewn hardness in the precision.

The artist herself is strongly present in the work; her hand scratching and flicking the ink into place with a precision that seems supernatural. Giblin is doing what she’s always done, but with this series, the work’s hard lush beauty is sharper, fresher.

Almost as if, at a point in an artist’s career where others might be settling into something, Giblin is just getting started.