Jo Bertini: Elsewhere

The poetic paintings of Jo Bertini are an ode to the wild. Having inhabited diverse desert landscapes for decades, Bertini contemplates and celebrates the personal and anthropological profundity of remote wilderness. The sacredness of sites that cannot be tamed, conquered or colonised, and the ways in which these wild places speak to the sublimated and primal parts of the human psyche. For Bertini, her inexplicable affiliation with the world's most isolated desert landscapes connects with an elusive yet fundamental human longing, seeding creative consciousnesses.

In this new suite of paintings, entitled ‘Elsewhere’, Bertini leads us to otherworldly places and surreal psychological states. Spectral trees are sentinels of secrets, and ethereal skies coat the land with impenetrable mystique. Bertini reads the desert like an ancient archive of stories, with only fragments visible at any one time. Her paintings lasso these fragments into free verse stanzas or floating chapters that forge fictional landscapes as her own personal allegories. After years of working en plein air, the artist feels she has been “gifted” a new maturity, or “enlightenment”, less tethered to actual places and more in tune with her own internal landscapes: “I’m working more intuitively, esoterically and imaginatively from my heart and mind, my dreams and the unseen”. For Bertini, “trees can talk, mountains can move, rivers bury secrets, grains of sand weave myth, knowledge and culture from past to present.” These paintings are a synthesis of all her years of experience – “it's like I have built up this huge mound”, she explains, “layers of leaf litter from which to grow my own ideas and imaginings about wild desert landscapes and the natural environments I live in and love.”

In translating the beguiling beauty and biodiversity of remote wilderness, these paintings proudly depart from the cliched visions of aridity and desolation dominating the traditional trope of the desert. Employing natural ochres and iridescent pigments, the artist achieves a mineral richness that shimmers with life and abundance. Opalescent colours glaze the land in a pastel splendour like a perpetually unfolding twilight, hatching a sweet surreality – as if the magic crystal trees of our childhood have come alive. Bertini’s dusty, feathery application of oil sings of memories cherished, and moments lost, while her sumptuous forms embody fecundity, and freedom. A dance of revelation and concealment can be found in Bertini’s generosity of colour and form, with personal parables falling across the canvas like a shooting star. Beautiful, and fugitive, much like the migratory birds that silently traverse Bertini’s compositions.

The landscape genre here is softened as Bertini offers an intimate, feminine perspective on the archived historical context of these environments. For her, the female experience of wilderness has been long overshadowed by macho manifestations and mythologies of the land. Bertini’s gentle application of paint in tender tones summons a sense of nurture, as if she is caressing the land with each brushstroke, embracing and sustaining it.

For this series, Bertini has taken inspiration from the female poets her late mother introduced her to at a young age – many personal friends of hers. In the work Etching for Oneself a Memory the words of Jennifer Rankin contour the trees, whose reflections bleed into the landscape like sprawling arteries or visceral roots: “When I sit down all the places I have been shall twist and reform in one revolution, uprooting, replanting favourite trees”. In another painting, Language Without Wind, moonlit trees resist the darkness with impossible luminescence: “Standing here in the night we are turned to a great tree, every leaf a star, its root eternity” (Judith Wright).

Bertini’s lyrical paintings are deeply devotional, paying tribute to a land that has inspired and nourished the artist for many years. Though her depictions are at once familiar and foreign, they radiate with an unexpected benevolence. They are emotional expressions of an elusive ‘elsewhere’ that exists only in the pristine wilderness of the heart.

Jo Bertini dedicates this series to her late mother, sculptor Anne Ferguson, honouring her lifelong love and mentorship.

Elli Walsh – Principle Writer, Artist Profile