MEET THE ARTIST

ARTIST Michaye Boulter’s foreboding landand seascapes are informed by her experiences of the secluded bays and waters of places such as Recherche Bay, Port Davey and Bruny Island in southern Tasmania.

“I’ve been working on seascapes and landscapes of sheltered places,” says Boulter, who recently joined the Bett Gallery, Hobart, stable and has a small collection of new works on show at the gallery. “They are quiet, calm corners to reflect and feel a sense of privacy and intimacy and to connect with nature and something bigger than yourself. They are as much internal landscapes as they are external. They are as much about a feeling or an emotion or an atmosphere as they are a topography.”

As the daughter of a seafarer and wife of seafarer Robert Pennicott, Boulter has spent much of her life on or near the sea.

Her artwork, Interlude, a finalist in this year’s Wynne Prize, is a beautiful, moody oil painting on hand-beaten steel, depicting the calm waters of Port Davey.

“My new work follows on from

Interlude. One of the works, probably the largest work I have ever done, is a work on steel. Gerhard Mausz [of Hobart] makes the steel and I paint on it,” Boulter says. “I like the worn surface and it’s an organic round shape that’s almost like a portal into the past.”

The artist has travelled to Port Davey with her husband and two children several times.

“It’s an incredible place to visit,’’ she says. “It’s really rugged and wild to get there along the coastline, and then when you enter into Port Davey it’s just a myriad of different channels and canals that are really calm and peaceful.

“But it also has this wetness about it. It’s always this damp grey whenever I have been there. I just find it really mysterious and beautiful.”

Boulter, the Tasmanian judge for next year’s Hadley’s Art Prize, has been a finalist in the John Glover Prize numerous times, and has work held in various collections around Australia. See Michaye Boulter’s artwork at Bett Gallery, Hobart, Level 1, 65 Murray Street.