Self portrait

Bea Maddock was born in Hobart and studied there before attending London’s Slade School from 1959 to 1961. After returning home she taught ceramics, drawing and printmaking in Launceston, and made a number of self portraits in etching and woodcut. Moving to Melbourne, she taught at the National Gallery of Victoria School and in her practice – inspired by Andy Warhol and others – she became increasingly interested in photographic processes such as photo-screenprinting and photo-etching. From 1979 to 1980 she made a large wax-coated collage of embossed hand-made paper words on commission for the new High Court in Canberra. Following the loss of her home and studio in the Ash Wednesday fires in early 1983, she went back to Tasmania. In all, between 1964 and 2006, Maddock held more than 40 solo exhibitions and her work was included in over 70 Australian and international group shows. From 1993 to 1998 she worked on Terra Spiritus: With a Darker Shade of Pale, a monumental 52-sheet panorama of the entire coastline of Tasmania made from ochre pigment she sourced and ground herself, and featuring placenames in local First Nations languages in refutation of the colonial notion of terra nullius – uninhabited land.

Gift of David Archer 2016