ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

Private collection, Canberra
Christie's, Melbourne, 27 August 1997, lot 207
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Capital Art, Anna Simons Gallery, Canberra, October 1975 (as Specimen Box)
Artists for Labor, Anna Simons Gallery, Canberra, 28/29 November 1975

Vici McDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, pp. 20, 25

This work is in original condition.
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One of the most significant discoveries in Rosalie Gascoigne's early life as an artist, in her slow, steady transition from Ikebana arranger and assemblage crafter to object and installation sculptor, was that of an abandoned apiary in a paddock in the Canberra countryside in May 1973.¹  The cache of handsome worn and silver-weathered bee-boxes provided both a set of ideal physical supports for the artist's extensive collections of natural and cultural residues, and an appropriate aesthetic frame for their display.  Gascoigne was already aware of minimal and serial grid-work and box-work by Americans like Sol Le Witt and Donald Judd and Australians like Robert Hunter and John Armstrong.  The deep frame or shallow diorama format of the bee-boxes also prompted the artist's son Martin to introduce her to the work of Joseph Cornell, which in turn led Gascoigne to explore the conjunction of flat collage and three-dimensional found objects, as in the present work.²

Box assemblages became a feature of the artist's production and exhibitions as she established her reputation through the mid-1970s.  It was a bee box work, Bottled Glass, which prompted James Mollison to request four similar works for the Philip Morris Arts Grant touring collection - her first recognition by the art establishment.  Moth Box is a fine example of Gascoigne's work from this period, in which arrays of distinctly real objects produce a distinctly surreal effect.  When first exhibited, in a Canberra group show in 1975,³  Geoffrey de Groen singled out the present work (then titled Specimen Box) for particular attention:

'Although deeply indebted to Joseph Cornell, Rosalie Gascoigne's Specimen Box, is charming.  It consists of an aged wooden crate which has been lovingly cleaned then altered by the inclusion of odd and contradictory objects.  Wires stretched loosely from top to bottom erect a barrier of tensions, while a glass measure narrow and elegant, sits on a ready-made shelf.  Beside the measure is a jar filled with the shells of dead snails.  The jar looks much larger than it actually is, because of the curious scale used by the artist.'⁴

We are grateful to Martin Gascoigne for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Vici McDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 103
2. A similar format, though using botanical rather than entomological illustration, is employed in Pet Sheep (circa 1975), exhibited in Gascoigne's Gallery A exhibition of 1976.
3. Vici McDonald (op. cit.) errs in describing this work as having been made in 'about 1970' (p. 25) and as Gascoigne's 'first commercially shown art work' (p. 20, note 1). The apiary boxes were not found until 1973, and the work's first exhibition was in the Anna Simons Gallery in 1975, as detailed above.
4. Geoffrey de Groen, Canberra Times, 22 October 1975, p. XXX