University Art Gallery

Sites of Significance

Sites of Significance showcases paintings by Dr Barry Gazzard and are the result of the artist having made several extended trips to the remote outback desert areas of Australia in recent years.

Many of the works are inspired by the landscape found within Mutawinji National Park, the rugged, mulga-clad Byngnano Ranges, located near Broken Hill.

The artist has a particular affinity with this landscape, which has caused him to return to it again and again. However, it is not the landscape as such that interests him the most, but rather the experience of being there within it.

Barry states that 'Landscape painting usually has a strong connotation of place, however the desert is more a carrier of meaning and symbolic correspondences. Deserts are featureless country, hostile and challenging on all levels. This is a landscape that in a sense, beyond existence. It is a landscape of abstraction.'