Faultline

The painting featured on the Joshua's Fault wine bottle label is titled Faultline and is by local artist Kim Mahood.   The work was purchased by Chris and Sophie Joshua because they saw a connection with the fault lines in their own landscape.   The painting is reproduced on the label with the kind permission of the artist.

Kim Mahood

Kim Mahood is an artist and writer whose work addresses the Australian landscape through a variety of media. Her memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, is the account of a journey back to the remote Tanami country where she lived for a number of years as a child. It was published in 2000 and won a number of awards including the NSW Premiers award for non-fiction. Her essays are published regularly in contemporary journals.

Both her writing and her visual art explore the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous people and the places they inhabit, particularly the central and Tanami deserts where she grew up and which she continues to visit regularly.

Faultline is the first work in a series that explores a non-indigenous visual iconography that responds to a particular place. The Faultline is a conceptual faultline that acknowledges different ways of seeing and being. The techniques used in this work include the use of a carved plaster template as a printing block, allowing for the repetition of the forms which were then developed with acrylic paint.   The work hovers between abstraction and representation, with its repetition of arched forms that refer to the endless termite mounds, and at the same time replicate the ovals of hollows, containers, lakes, hills, shields. Other works exploring similar techniques and themes are Faultline Triptych and Balgo Pound Horizon.

Kim Mahood studied painting and drawing at the Julian Ashton Art School in the early 1980s, and sculpture with Tom Bass at the same time.   She has exhibited throughout Australia, including Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin and Townsville.   Her work is held in collections in the Queensland Art Gallery, the Wollongong City Gallery, the Townsville Regional Gallery and the Canberra Museum and Gallery.   She lives and works near Braidwood and is represented in Canberra by the Helen Maxwell Gallery on whose website you will find more images of Kim's work and details of past and any forthcoming exhibitions.