A major retrospective exhibition of the work of Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne opened on October 24 at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. The exhibition traces Gascoigne’s artistic development from her early arrangements inspired by ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, to her later assemblages incorporating found materials such as abandoned beehives, sports equipment, and weathered timber crates.
Gascoigne’s art career was notably late-blooming. She first exhibited solo at the age of 57, having spent decades as a teacher, wife, and mother before emerging as a prominent figure in modern Australian art. Over three decades, she gained recognition for her innovative use of everyday objects, eventually showing at international venues including the Venice Biennale in 1982, where she was the first Australian woman artist formally selected to represent the country.
Born in New Zealand, Gascoigne moved to Australia with her astronomer husband, Ben Gascoigne, in the early 1940s, settling near Mt Stromlo Observatory outside Canberra. The isolated, dry landscape marked a sharp contrast to the verdant surroundings of her homeland, influencing her artistic sensibility. She began collecting natural and discarded materials from the environment—dried grasses, stones, metal scraps—which she arranged initially as decorative compositions before evolving into complex sculptures and installations.
Gascoigne’s artistic method was deeply personal. She insisted on choosing and handling all her materials herself, selecting only items that resonated with her visually or poetically. Her daughter, Hester Gascoigne, has described this process as capturing the character and “transcendent” quality of ordinary objects exposed to the elements. The artist credited this migration and the resulting dislocation as formative to her work.
The retrospective, curated by NGA curator Hart, includes approximately 80 works drawn from public and private collections, including pieces rarely exhibited due to their fragility. Notable among these is Feathered Fence, which features a line of vertically arranged swan feathers evoking the fences near Lake George, and Monaro, a large-scale wall installation made from hundreds of painted soft-drink crate panels. Gascoigne’s studio innovations, such as the use of a bandsaw that imparted a natural curve to Monaro, reflect her resourcefulness and evolution in scale and ambition.
Gascoigne’s later works show a progression towards refined abstraction, with wordplay and subtle color interplay derived from materials like road signs and faded packaging. Throughout her career, she was inspired in part by poetry, drawing on influences from English Romantic and Australian modern poets. Despite lacking formal academic art training, beyond her study of ikebana, she found affinity with modern art movements such as assemblage, pop art, and arte povera, with influences visible in the work of artists like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp.
While the Venice Biennale marked a peak in public recognition, Gascoigne’s experience there was not without difficulty—logistical issues with the exhibition space and health problems on her return tempered the event’s success. Nevertheless, her work continued to mature, and she remained artistically active until shortly before her death in 1999 at age 82.
The NGA exhibition runs through February 14, 2027, and includes an activity space allowing visitors to create assemblages inspired by Gascoigne’s practice. Accompanying the show is a catalogue featuring her writings and family photographs, as well as a new film by Catherine Hunter and an upcoming biography by Hannah Fink.
Gascoigne’s legacy endures as her work continues to be celebrated for transforming overlooked, everyday materials into poetic expressions of place and memory. Her daughter Hester notes that Gascoigne would have been pleased by the ongoing interest in her art and the recognition of a life and career that defied convention to produce something uniquely compelling. Admission to the exhibition is free.