ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

Rosalie Gascoigne's love of found objects and their beautiful textures is brought into a sophisticated and elegant play of ideas in Venus, with its combination of ancient cultures and modern advertising. The subject is, of course, the Roman goddess of love, Venus, a woman of unparalleled beauty. Daughter of Jupiter, omnipotent king of the gods, born from the sea, her most famous image in Western art is Botticelli's painting, Birth of Venus, circa 1490 (Uffizi, Florence), which shows her standing on a large shell, blown by gentle zephyrs towards the awaiting shore. The Pop Art reference shell in Gascoigne's work is the stencilled trademark of the oil company of that name. Her witty play with imagery continues in the postcard of the extremely beautiful figure of a woman, identified as the stone torso of a statue of Queen Nefertiti, the great Egyptian beauty of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The torso is one of the treasures of The Louvre.

The visual play continues in the textured surfaces. The pleated lines of the garment enhancing the sensuous modelling of this figure of unsurpassed feminity is repeated in the grain of the wood panelling. Both the sandstone figure and the timber have those weathered surfaces so admired by Gascoigne. The postcard comes from the Louvre in Paris, the wood probably from a dump in Canberra, the work itself being another absorbing example of Gascoigne's highly creative adaptation of found objects.