Next Friday will be our opening of  Brisbane based artist Jude Taggart Roberts. Predominantly a drawer and printmaker who works in the Australian outback, Taggart Roberts investigates raw elements including time, water and earth.

Western perceptions of boundaries, space and time reflect a permanency that often is in creative tension with the ephemereality and intermittency of watering places in Australia. The fusion of the material, the site specific and the conceptual is used  to create maps of the landscape and to re-imagine these territories and boundaries. 

1.As a practicing artist what are the issues\concerns you have been consistently addressing within your artwork?

Documenting and drawing human relationships to land particularly its will to control these environments.  Informed by a lived experience on a pastoral property, my particular interests lies in the phenomena of ephemeral rivers and groundwater. 

2. Do you classify your art as being one thing more than the other e.g. photography, film, painting, sculpture, music or installation and do you see an expansion into other mediums in the future? 

The outcome to my practice is predominately works on paper. The traveling to specific sites, the documenting, fossicking, immersion and processes of soaking, rubbing and perforating holes into the drawings is a personal performance. Different elements created from these encounters are part of an ongoing installation experiment which I will continue with in the future. 

3.When you think about making new work do you always consider applying a degree of historical content or do the works weigh more heavily towards a more personal investigation?  

How artists have depicted the landscape in the past is imperative to my approach but the works are a personal investigation. As a documenter of land, there is a need to witness and record particularly with the rapid changes taking place now in various environments. The recontextualising of past structures allows a new interpretation of ownership, barriers and times irreversible onward flow. 

4. When you look back through this body of work do you see any answers unfolding within this investigation? 

It may sound like a cliché, but each set of work poses more questions. Ian Burn has described landscape painting as a ‘crucial site of conflict, change and innovation’. The works are part of a shifting landscape. Every visit to a site, the weather, seasonal changes, precipitation and state of the water determines the work’s process. New problems arise each time.