The exhibition has closed, but Sasha’s review remains of interest
Launch of Art of Roslyn Kean and opening of Ground Lines. March 2025
I first encountered the work of Roslyn Kean over thirty years ago, many years before I met the artist. I was blown away by its sense of spiritual presence – its ability to draw you in from the outside world and to create a meditative oasis. I love that experience of surrendering to a work of art and being drawn into a special realm, that once a medieval cleric described as neither existing entirely in the slime of earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven, a realm in which you can contemplate an alternative, spiritual reality.
It came as a bit of a shock, when I first met Roz Kean – this very organised, hyperactive person who seemed to cram into 24 hours what we mere mortals could manage in about a week. I suppose I imagined her to be some sort of Zen Buddhist mystic reciting a haiku, instead of a highly organised and committed artist with her feet firmly planted on the ground and living in the here and now.
As a Mokuhanga artist, Roz Kean has travelled an unusual path. As an artist, she initially trained in Sydney, then at the Slade in London and, only after that, while studying in Tokyo and already in her early thirties, she became completely seduced by Japanese traditional woodblock printmaking and has devoted the rest of her life to its study – in Japan, in Tibet and elsewhere. If in Australia, we had a different cultural framework and respected our artists as much as we respect our sportspeople, we would celebrate her as a national living treasure.
A few years ago, when we embarked on our collaborative journey of working on this monograph, I came to understand the richness and complexity of her oeuvre. Roz Kean has never been a derivative artist – not at least since she left her teens – she grasps techniques and concepts and then creates art that is intrinsically her own. Prints in this Ground Lines exhibition could not have been made by any other artist. The blend of the organic and the geometric, the intricacy of the woodcutting technique and the ethereal sense of beauty are all a hallmark of her art.
She is also a thinking artist, one who rarely repeats herself and with each exhibition or with each new body of work, there is a conceptual development – creating a new thematic unity within the exhibition. I signed off on the text of the book in December 2023, so when writing a book on a living artist it is always a ‘work in progress’ and, if the timeline was different, I would have included some of the prints from this Ground Lines exhibition in the book. What I find quite exciting about this exhibition is that the artist adopts what I could term an earth worm’s perspective on the world yet through it examines the whole universe, almost conceived as a universal statement.
Prints, including the Ground Lines diptych, Lines from my Garden and Enshrined in the City, are wonderful contemplations on how the microenvironment affects the global macroenvironment. If one thinks of the closest we come to in English literature to a haiku, William Blakes’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” In this exhibition, Roz Kean presents for our contemplation, how an invasive weed from a manicured lawn can affect the whole environment and how the spot where water and earth meet can more broadly designate the meeting of the celestial and the terrestrial. She gives voice to the murmurings of water and to the wind in the grass; and she explores the patterns of steppingstones or the fence posts in a paddock. It is a question of contemplation and, through the help of the artworks, we are introduced to a greater and more universal reality.
As an art community, we need to take ourselves seriously and speak with dignity and respect about our tribal elders – the art tribe in general and the tribe of printmakers in particular. Roslyn Kean is one of our tribal elders – an exceptional artist – an exceptional technician, thinker, innovator, teacher and creator. Beagle Press, that for the past 45 years has established a reputation for publishing important books on Australian art and artists, books of exceptionally high production quality, and has been our collaborator on this volume. I hope that you will find this as a serious and beautiful book – over 200 pages with a text of about 50,000 words and profusely illustrated. Hopefully this will set a benchmark for the publication of monographs on contemporary Australian printmakers.
Today, for me, it is a double humbling honour. The first is to open this outstanding exhibition – Ground Lines, and the second, to launch of this glorious book – The art of Roslyn Kean. Both present a celebration of the work of one of our most significant contemporary artists – Roslyn Kean.
Sasha Grishin
