Andrew Paul Wood
My Own Sort of Heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne by Nicola Francis (ANU Press, 2024), 412pp, $75
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) is best known for making art from the things most people drove past: road signs, split timber, linoleum, corrugated iron, materials that had already lived a life before she coaxed them to speak again. Born in New Zealand but long a resident in Canberra, she was, like the pavlova, claimed by Australia. As is often noted, she gained wider notice later in life, but she didn’t so much suddenly arrive on the art scene as accumulate into it, slowly and with understated power. Gascoigne’s first exhibition took place in 1974, when the artist was fifty-seven years old.
Nicola Francis’s My Own Sort of Heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne is a major contribution to a tiny pool of Gascoigne literature that includes Martin Gascoigne’s 2020 Catalogue Raisonné and the exhibition catalogue Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain air, put out by City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University in 2003. This is the first biography of the artist not written by a relative or close friend, which might quite reasonably lead the reader to expect a far greater degree of objectivity and independence than hitherto seen. That’s debatable, but what Francis does really well is deconstruct and try to move beyond the late-blooming myth by looking back into Gascoigne’s artistic development and revealing its atypical trajectory.
I would like to make it very clear that, despite any criticisms of the book I have, this is an essential text for any antipodean art library. There is much to recommend it and its approach to storytelling and personal touch would be a welcome influence on many a dry art-historical monograph. The reverse is also true: My Own Sort of Heaven is a little light on the kind of art-historical analysis that Rosalie Gascoigne really warrants. After all, it is Gascoigne’s art that makes her an interesting subject for investigation and what is most likely to attract people to this book in the first place.
The first part of the biography deals with Gascoigne’s early life in Remuera when it was still quasi-rural, and it’s a startling series of revelations: the mysterious death of one cousin; the hanging of another cousin for an unrelated murder; and her father’s problem drinking. The second part deals with Gascoigne’s emigration with her husband from Auckland to Australia in 1943 and her pre-artworld life. This is undoubtedly the strongest part of the book, lively and engagingly told. The third part, outlining Gascoigne’s aesthetic life and emergence, is not as strong, though not without surprises. Digging back, Francis uncovers some fascinating and unexpected roots in flower arranging and makes a tenuous connection to the general influence of the innovative Constance Spry, even though this contradicts Gascoigne’s own account. From there she traces an even more surprising departure to the radical Sōgetsu school of ikebana flower arranging, popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.
Gascoigne’s direct contact with ikebana is thoroughly documented via a friend from the First Canberra Garden Club, Dawn Waterhouse, whose mother Janet was the founder of the Sydney branch of Ikebana International. Both schools seem to have informed her later assemblage practice, but the ikebana probably had the most to do with evolving the artist’s later minimalism. When Japanese master Sōfū Teshigahara visited Australia in 1967, Gascoigne was tasked with gathering materials from the Canberra countryside and was rewarded by Teshigahara telling her that she had ‘a great eye’, leading to her devoting herself to ikebana with considerable acclaim.
The problem is that Nicola Francis never explicitly sets out how we get from A to Z, from craft to art. You can see that there must be a connection but there is little where the critical and theoretical mapping should be, and it’s the sort of thing an art historian would pick up on. For example, there is only a brief mention of a visit to England in 1963 where Gascoigne allegedly became acquainted with the sculptures of Henry Moore.
As can probably be gleaned already, Francis’ research as far as the biographical and historical outline goes is top-notch stuff, thorough, getting into the nitty gritty of Gascoigne’s unsettled and unsettling childhood, the artist’s peculiar position as an insider–outsider in the Australian art establishment, and tracing—though not really articulating and anatomising—that long, slow evolution from flowers and quilts to high art, especially her signature use of retro-reflective road signs. Those marvellous assemblages have always seemed to me a kind of landscape painting, alluding to places through place names as though, like McCahon, she ultimately needed words as well as images to communicate what she needed to say. It is fair to say, however, that McCahon has long been better served by the literature around his work than has Gascoigne, his contemporary.
One particularly enjoys Francis’ subtle critique and reframing of the usual gendered reception of Gascoigne’s work by highlighting how the artist took those traditionally domestic and stereotypically ‘feminine’ praxes like flower arranging and quilting and turned them into powerful statements of aesthetic formalism. One might argue, though, that this had more to do with Gascoigne’s appropriation of the bits and bobs of the traditionally masculine sphere: the road signs, the corrugated iron—in Australia, a country high on the fumes of its historical settler masculinities.
From the art-historical perspective My Own Sort of Heaven is often lacking. The author makes reference to all of the key exhibitions, the curators, the critics but the actual engagement with art theory is relatively superficial. We are presented with the picture of an artist who actively rejected theory: ‘I have taken on influences. Rewarding but in the end clouding my own vision … false, false … this a.m. returned to my true loves and think I have pulled it off.’ The ‘true loves’ in this case being nature and the Monaro landscape around Canberra. Given that this quote came from a letter that also mentions William Chapin Seitz’s The Art of Assemblage (1961) and a book about Marcel Duchamp, I am not sure how convinced I am by this self-mythologising. Francis accepts Gascoigne’s statements uncritically but a paragraph later writes, ‘At the same time, a critical biographical study must address context and formation.’
Yet there is very little dialogue with the art assemblage movement of the time. In Australia, for example, you have Robert Klippel, who does get a few sparse mentions. Over the ditch were Don Driver and Jim Allen, both of whom were more or less her contemporaries. More broadly, it misses out on a perfect opportunity to set up Gascoigne in an international context of women artists making use of assemblage to talk about the female condition through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of ‘abjection’: El Anatsui, Louise Nevelson, Betye Saar, Mary Beth Edelson, Martha Rosler, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Her achievement is just crying out for an analysis of parallel contexts and strategies so this book is a missed opportunity to properly triangulate Gascoigne’s pioneering genius the way it deserves. What is the point of over-the-teacups speculations such as:
As an older, menopausal woman, Rosalie stood in strong contrast to other artists achieving acclaim. For instance, Sydney painter Brett Whiteley was young, male and lived a life of excess seen to be a successful artist’s due. Rosalie’s appearance was noted because of her difference. She was steady and no-nonsense … She was seen as honest and, together with her direct gaze, this made her stand out.
Aside from some instances of interviewees describing Gascoigne’s dress sense, no evidence is provided to substantiate these remarks, and Whiteley—whose self-destructive heroin addiction was of great concern to those close to him, particularly his wife Wendy—seems a strange point of comparison. Gossipy asides to the reader like this suggest either some personal hobbyhorse or the author’s lack of confidence in establishing a feminist art history perspective.
It’s not until we get to chapter eleven and the years 1974 to 1979 that anyone interested in Australasian art history will really enthuse. Gascoigne gets noticed by James Mollison, director of the Australian National Gallery in Canberra; her first solo exhibition, Assemblages at the Macquarie Galleries in 1974, achieves widespread acclaim; her work is shown in Sydney in 1975; her first Brisbane shows happen in 1977; and a major Rosalie Gascoigne survey exhibition takes place at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 1978. For the most part this gives the narrative great impetus, although there is a lengthy and plodding section, rather alarmingly titled ‘Art historical context’, which feels far more detailed than it needs to be. Given that the sort of person who will be reading this study will already be familiar with the influence of social change and the commercialisation of the art world at this time, it feels like unnecessary padding by a tyro writer in the world of art history.
But then, once we are actually into this incredibly fertile period of Gascoigne’s career, Nicola Francis breaks into a gallop to get to the end. Gascoigne’s representation of Australia at the 1982 Venice Biennale and visit to Documenta in Kassel, Germany, is dealt with in a scant couple of pages:
Rosalie did not particularly enjoy Venice. The ornamented and decaying visuals were too fancy for her taste: ‘Everything man-made and so decorated. Look what we have [in Australia]: space, skies …’
It is a tired cliché that the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world, but like all clichés there is an element of truth to it. To not discuss or deal with such things as how the Australian government positioned Gascoigne’s work as a national triumph, or to evaluate what an international audience of critics thought of it, seems bizarre.
Many of these failings likely stem from Francis being trained as a social historian rather than an art historian. Her frequently uncritical over-reliance on interviews with Gascoigne conducted from 1980 to 1998, which puts the artist right there on the page in her own voice but without external reference or pushing back against the artist’s self-mythologising, comes across as too sympathetic to Gascoigne’s romantic, essentialist view of her own career. That leaves an unfortunate vacuum as far as critical interrogation goes. In other areas, Francis is inclined to get bogged down in banalities. Gascoigne’s move to Canberra was certainly a bit of a wrench for the artist to adjust to:
I had to make a friend in a strange country … I had to discard the New Zealand landscape, which I was passionately fond of. And make friends with this one. Which takes some years if you’re not a tree, not a something, no harbour, no Rangitoto, no nothing. All the things that were built into you had disappeared … I was fairly desperate for something that I could associate with. And well, nature was my friend.
But to then launch into such hyperbole as, ‘Her acute visual awareness became crucial to her survival’, and attempt to make exile analogies with Vilém Flusser—a Jewish Czech-born philosopher who fled to Brazil from the Nazis—can only invite eye-rolling. Yes, okay, Canberra often does feel like an endless bureaucratic and suburban purgatory, but hammering the point home is to mangle it out of shape. Surely it suffices to say that Gascoigne experienced a certain amount of loneliness and homesickness and took solace in nature and the local landscape?
There isn’t a lot of illustration in My Own Sort of Heaven, which is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to artist biographies. While there is a scattering of pictures of flower arrangements and a couple of quilts, there are no examples of her artistic practice, which seems a peculiar impoverishment when that’s where all of this is leading: the work of the artist. Francis explains in an introductory note that this is due to copyright issues, which seems to be an increasingly common problem in art publishing, as also seen with Mark Forman’s recent Tony Fomison: Life of the artist. This is a disturbing trend which forces the reader to rely heavily on what images can be found online. Not that Francis goes into much analytical detail regarding Gascoigne’s striking language of postmodern visual and semantic fragmenting and reformalising of text and object, but illustrations would help to enrich the text.
Without wanting to undermine the interest and insights of My Own Sort of Heaven, I’m left with the impression that a more ruthless editor would have made for a better, more focused book, and it is, in fact, something of a surprise that a presumably supportive and knowledgeable academic press like that of the Australian National University didn’t contract one. I do feel like I have come away with a far greater understanding of Gascoigne’s life and the evolution of her vision, for which I am grateful, but this artist’s story is also confirmation that Gascoigne’s innovative techniques are best appreciated through direct engagement with the works themselves.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a cultural historian, art critic and editor based in Timaru. His work appears across a range of publications in NZ, Australia, the UK and the US and his most recent book is Shadow Worlds: A history of the occult and esoteric in New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2023). He is currently writing a book on New Zealand architect F.W. Petre.
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