Rosalie Gascoigne

Rosalie Norah King Gascoigne (née Walker; 25 January 191725 October 1999) was a New Zealand-born Australian sculptor and assemblage artist. She showed at the Venice Biennale in 1982, becoming the first female artist to represent Australia there. In 1994, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to the arts.

Life Gascoigne was born Rosalie Norah King Walker in Auckland, New Zealand, on 25 January 1917. She was the second of the three children of Stanley and Marion King Walker. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Auckland University College in 1937. She emigrated to Canberra, Australia in 1943 where she married astronomer S. C. B (Ben) Gascoigne whom she had met at Auckland University. She died on 25 October 1999 at the John James Hospital in Canberra. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s, she had become dissatisfied with the limitations of the medium and started experimenting first with small scrap iron sculptures and later wooden boxed assemblages, all composed of materials she found during scavenging expeditions in the fierce, sunburnt landscape of Australia. While the Australian landscape was initially a shocking change from the damp green hills of her familiar New Zealand, by this time, she had come to love the "boundless space and solitude" of her new home. Much of her art reflects this, though some also harks back to her roots in New Zealand. She thus used mostly found materials: wood, iron, wire, feathers, and yellow and orange retro-reflective road signs; which flash and glow in the light. Some of her other best-known works use faded, once-bright drinks crates; thinly sliced yellow Schweppes boxes; ragged domestic items such as torn floral lino and patchy enamelware; vernacular building materials such as galvanised tin, corrugated iron and masonite; and fibrous, rosy cable reel ends. These objects represent, rather than accurately depict, elements of her world. "The countryside's discards .... no longer suggest themselves but evoke experiences, particularly of landscape." Knowledgeable and widely read, she was inspired amongst others by the artists Colin McCahon, Ken Whisson, Dick Watkins and Robert Rauschenberg, and the poets William Wordsworth, Peter Porter and Sylvia Plath. She also had a fondness for the pronouncements of Pablo Picasso. However gradually both colour and text seemed to fade from her work, and in her final years she created meditative, elegiac compositions of white or earth-brown panels. Sydney, New South Wales Australia Art Gallery of South Australia North Terrace, Adelaide Australia Art Gallery of Western Australia Canberra Australia National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Victoria Australia Newcastle Art Gallery Newcastle, New South Wales Australia Queensland Art Gallery Brisbane, Queensland Australia