Elizabeth Barsham was born in the 1950s on King Island, where her father was the electrical engineer at a scheelite mine, but soon after her birth the family returned home to Lindisfarne in Hobart.
Like many young Tasmanians, Barsham left home soon after finishing school and travelled. She explored the Australia Outback before moving to Melbourne to study traditional oil painting techniques under a former student of Norman Lindsay.
Having developed a figurative, narrative style of painting, she established a career as an ideosyncratic and highly original artist. She came back to live in the old family home in Lindisfarne in 1997 and continues to paint and to teach painting and drawing.
Barsham’s paintings have won many awards, have been hung in the Blake Prize and City of Hobart exhibitions, and have been acquired by bodies as diverse as Monash University and Clarence City Council. They are richly coloured, meticulously painted and dense in detail.
They hang in private collections all over the world, but they are not for the faint-hearted!
Barsham has always worked outside accepted genres, making her unique style difficult to categorise, but she is happy to be described as a Tasmanian Gothic painter. The word Gothic evokes sinister images of mysterious figures, crumbling mansions, ancient curses and supernatural forces. In the 20th century it was applied indiscriminately to movies, music, fashion and anything else drawing on dark, morbid, supernatural and horror themes.
Barsham acknowledges all these influences but avoids melodrama – her Tasmanian Gothic returns to its true roots in the excesses of the landscape.
Painted from imagination, her images are drawn from observed scenery, simplified or distorted to emphasise peculiar features and create stylised, but unmistakably Tasmanian settings. Figures take on the twisted shapes and textures of old vegetation; rocks become animals; plants metamorphose into machinery. Boundaries are tested, categories are blurred, preconceived notions overturned. Animal, mineral and vegetable, old and new, sacred and profane, combine to produce something strange, different, but familiar enough to be disturbing, to reveal the uncanny inhabiting the island.
This is Tasmania, with a Gothic twist. Tasmanian Gothic.
These paintings resulted from an Arts Tasmania Cultural Residency on King Island in 2011.
Elizabeth Barsham is a Tasmanian artist influenced by Surreal precursors Bosch and Breughel, as well as Dali, De Chirico, Tucker, Gleeson, Blade Runner and illustrated children’s books. In Hobart, Elizabeth Barsham is represented by Nolan Gallery and Nolan School of Art.
