Featured Artist - Christine Porter

Salmon Galleries is proud to present

Sheds, tanks and shearers: a portrait of rural Australia
by Christine Porter

Exhibition dates: 22 October to 6 November, 2005

Please scroll down for detailed images.

Christine Porter paints pictures of shearing sheds. She never meant to do that, growing up on the coast, or even in the years she spent working in western Queensland as a governess, station cook then primary school teacher. A chance request by her boss in Charters Towers twenty years ago, to make a painting of the family shearing shed, has resulted in more than fifteen hundred paintings of shearing sheds from all over Queensland and western NSW: an accidental but inevitably rewarding career move.

"I have become like a serial artist-in-residence", she said describing her practice that has become about portraying a rural Australia way of life that is fast changing. "Typically, when people invite me out to paint their place, I might do twenty or more paintings of the buildings - the sheds, yards, tanks - anything that catches my eye.
This exhibition is drawn from two such projects: one on the New England and the other in South-East Queensland. I try and make a collection of paintings that tells as complete a story as possible, so I set out to paint the buildings and, if chance has it, those men and women working in and around them."

With an artistic practice so tied to the architecture of the sheep industry, Christine is in a situation to observe first-hand its changes. "I've painted sheds that for a hundred years were home to the best shearers of the finest wool in the area: now haysheds. There are crutching sheds perched incongruously in paddocks, up to their stumps in barley or wheat". What was the commonplace of the everyday, needs now to be treasured. "I think that's why I choose to make paintings of actual working sheds", she adds, "I love the picturesque in the incidental that is not easily found in a shed abandoned".

Christine explains that although hers is essentially a visual response to the properties she visits - the shapes and lines and tones and colours for example - each project is enriched by the people she meets and how their stories relate to that place.

She speaks of recording exactly how a shed looks like then, on that day, at that moment. She writes, "I'd like to think that perhaps I'm creating something beautiful about the present that is also important for remembering the past: that maybe my paintings take on some sort of custodial role - chronicling a history; storing a memory, celebrating a way of life."

Lismore August 2005