46. TIM STORRIER

In 1976, Storrier travelled with fellow artist John Olsen and his dealer Stuart Purves, the Director of Australian Galleries, to Lake Eyre. It was a key moment and a revelation:

I was more interested in the sense of limitless space, the flatness, the utter stillness and the merging of the sky and the horizon that one experiences in every vast terrain.¹

Unlike others who found the desert depressing, Storrier found the emptiness intriguing. The desert became the backdrop of much of the work he produced at the time and continues to do so today. 

Storriers work concerns the elemental earth, wind and fire viewed through the dimension of time. Altitude Landscape belongs to the period when Storrier confirmed his aesthetic engagement with the contrast between the fundamentally basic elements that make up the world and the manner in which their character alters in time; the way in which basic elements become ephemeral. The elegance of the concepts that interest him is matched by the austere grace of his work.

Footnote

Tim Storrier, originally quoted in Linda van Nunens Point to Point, here quoted in Capon, E., Tim Storrier Moments, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2009, p.296

Timothy Abdallah BA