the heart land 2013-14

DEL KATHRYN BARTON born 1972

the heart land 2013-14

synthetic polymer paint, watercolour and ink on canvas (5)
240.0 x 180.0 cm (each); 240.0 x 900.0 cm (overall); 242.0 x 181.5 cm (each, framed)
panel (iv) signed, dated and inscribed lower right: - the heart-land -/ del kathryn barton/ 2013 - 2014
panel (i) signed, dated and inscribed verso: panel one./ - panel one -/ "the heart land"/ 2014/ del kathryn/ barton
panel (ii) signed, dated and inscribed verso: panel two/ "the heart land"/ 2014/ del kathryn/ barton
panel (iii) signed, dated and inscribed verso: del kathryn Barton/ 2014/ panel three/ - panel three -/ of "the heart/ land"
panel (iv) signed, dated and inscribed verso: - panel four -/ del kathryn barton/ 2014/ panel four/ the heart land/ 2014/ del kathryn/ barton
panel (v) signed, dated and inscribed verso: panel five/ del kathryn barton/ 2014/ panel five/ the heart land/ 2014/ del kathryn/ barton

Provenance:
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, August 2014
Private collection, Sydney
Private collection(s), Sydney [as five separate panels]
Acquired from the above, private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Dark Heart: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1 March - 11 May 2014
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at the Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 12-17 August 2014

Reference:
Mitzevich, N. (ed.), Dark Heart: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp.66, 185
McDonald, J., 'Master Showman', The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 15 March 2014
Grishin, S., 'Melbourne Art Fair is a Supermarket, But Any Help is Welcome', The Canberra Times, Canberra, 15 August 2014
Frost, A., 'Melbourne's Tale of Two Art Fairs: Paintings, Perfume and a Rolls-Royce', The Guardian (Australia), 18 August 2014 (illus.)
Ewington, J., 'Del Kathryn Barton', in Bullock, N. et al (eds.), Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020, pp.40, 41 (illus. pp.38, 39)

Estimate: $1200000 - 1600000

‘Art is my religion, my art practice is my very own unicorn, it’s my prolonged pleasure zone that hurts so good’. (1)

The broad and sustained public appeal of Del Kathryn Barton’s art is all the more remarkable for the very private world of the artist it enacts and asserts. Barton’s art practice, across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and film – now in its thirtieth year after her first show in 1995 –  saw her acclaimed in 2018 as ‘the nation's most sought-after female artist’ at auction, a decade after being named the most Collectible Artist by the Australian Art Collector magazine in 2007. (2) The celebrity status that has accrued to Barton and her art, enhanced by two Archibald Prize winning portraits of 2008 and 2013, continues into 2025.

So what is it about the wondrous world of Barton’s art, the ‘strange magic’ of its teeming pictorial vocabulary, its alluring blend of art historical and popular cultural influences, its conjured reveries of a singular otherworld reality? This spectacular five-paneled painting of 2013-14, created at a high point of Barton’s early public acclaim and half-way into her 30-year practice, offers some explanation.

Barton’s the heart land, commissioned for Dark Heart, the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, presided over the entrance to the exhibition whose stated thematic intention was to be an ‘inherently emotional experience – immersive and visceral … to explore our current social and spiritual situation through a poetic frame’. (3) Described later as one of Barton’s most ambitious works, it is ‘a grand statement of her ambition to place woman-driven creative energy at the heart of life – familial, social, creative and public’. (4)

Although Barton’s painting is explained in the accompanying catalogue as taking its cue from literary sources including Patrick White’s fiction and the Australian landscape painting tradition, the heart land is less landscape than a meticulously orchestrated mindscape. Its centrepiece provides an inverted female form, planted in the earth, with flailing skeletal arms and a spliced torso sprouting branches from its open heart – a tree of life or ‘Earth mother’ trope – which became a persistent theme in her work following the birth of her first child in 2003. Flanking this lurid central panel are posed female forms with big hair and probing, pointing hands, like a Greek chorus, with only one staring sphinx-like out to the viewer.  We see floating heads, entwined snake-like vines, a kangaroo with another open heart, a Tasmanian tiger, and a tiny bird, all suspended across the shallow airless space of the expansive picture plane. As a symbolic celebration of motherhood and feminine empowerment, it is a strange, extravagant tableau vivant of female avatars, each one porcelain perfect with the impassive, inscrutable stare – the ‘look but don’t touch’ pout – of a catwalk model. Barton, it has been noted, often turns to fashion magazines for visual references, especially for contemporary images of feminine beauty, and looks at fashion to see the ‘contrary ways society is celebrating and defining female sexuality’. (5) And since 2006, she has collaborated on fabric designs with the Australian fashion label, Romance Was Born.

In the heart land, the luminous bloodless flesh of these fantasy female forms is countered by the vibrant coloured patterning and exuberant representations of animals and plants, creating a sort of wild Edenic place, a garden of earthly delights, where everything is connected to everything else, everywhere, all at once; a fantasy or ‘romantasy’ world of a fluid exchange between the human and the nonhuman and that is, for Barton, ‘a personalised primordial soup where I come into being, or I don’t come into being.’ (6)

Barton’s self-identification with the process of creation is central to her practice:

‘What matters most for Barton’, it was early noted, is what goes on beneath the surface of her figures and her worlds. What concerns her are the forces propelling the creation of those worlds – forces of chance and intuition, exhaustion and drive – of how, in (her) own words, ‘the resulting narratives are so much about the quality of the process of their making’. (7)

That process of making a painting for Barton is long and arduous; it starts with outlines drawn in fibre-tipped pen, an unforgiving medium that refuses correction or removal, mapping a face with eyes, morphing lines into shapes both geometric and organic, aligning a scatter of paint dots into ornate colour descriptions, a performing of self that has been described as a ‘perpetual push and pull between becoming and unbecoming’; the artist’s untethered pictorial imagination in tandem with the visual drama played out on canvas. She generally works on two or three paintings at the same time and has names for the different brushes from ‘Big Maman’ to ‘semen’ for the dots. (8) ‘With each new painting’, she admitted, ‘I try to keep it simple … and look what happens! ...There are tiny marks littered everywhere … everything stirring, crashing … The unempty.’ (9)

Barton, born in 1973, had an Australian bush childhood, living in tents and sheds at Kurrajong, near the Hawkesbury River in the foothills of the Blue Mountains.  She spent a lot of time alone in the bush where she had ‘very scary hallucinatory experiences’; she was also writing and illustrating her own stories with fairies, unicorns, coexisting with ‘companions created in my imaginary world’. (10)  Fantasy books like The Hobbit, the C.S. Lewis Narnia series, Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows were formative and set up an extensive visual literacy and image bank that continued into her adulthood and the digital age. Barton’s parents, both teachers, valued alternative educational philosophies espousing the developmental value of narrative and fantasy and Barton, with her sister, attended a Steiner-influenced school at Leura in her last years of high school. It was, she recalled, ‘a strange, almost hippie-style upbringing. …I very much lived in the world of the imagination. And I do feel those years deeply informed my creative spirit and essence, which is still incredibly manifest in my work today. I draw a lot of energy from the natural landscape’. (11)

During her teenage years, her family took a long summer vacation to India, where she imbibed the bright colours of Indian life; its festivals, textiles, and particularly, the bold non-naturalistic colour tessellations of miniature paintings. Between 1990 and 1993, Barton attended Sydney’s College of Fine Arts (CoFA) and while a student, modelled for classes there and at the National Art School. After graduating she became a sessional lecturer in drawing at CoFA from 1994-1996, and travelled to California, spending time in bookshops in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Her first show in 1995 at Sydney’s Arthaus Gallery featured monochromatic drawings and paintings of children and that year she was a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Sulman Prize, the first of subsequent finalist selections over the next decade including the Archibald Prize, the Bowness Photography Prize, the Wynne Prize for Landscape and the Dobell Drawing Prize.

Drawing provides the foundation, the core discipline of all Barton’s work ‘that holds all other disparate energies and directions together, to which she regularly returns’ and this practice continues into her large later paintings that are built on under-drawing all over the canvas, often left visible. (12) Barton’s graphic expertise was encouraged by Ray Hughes’ selection of drawings for the first of her three solo shows with his gallery in 2001. These drawings derived from time spent in the United States when she undertook an artist’s residency in San Francisco over 2000-2001. Along with the hiking and rock climbing that expanded Barton’s repertoire of natural imagery, visits to art museums advanced her understanding of contemporary art and her own practice, and provided the opportunity to engage with the work of European-born American artists, Kiki Smith (born 1954) and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) as exemplars of female artists pursuing their own intensely personal creative vision, dealing with themes of sex, birth and regeneration. While these artists were formative for Barton, their example extended the earlier influences of the psycho-sexually charged self-portraits of Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), together with the Viennese Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), whose sinuous, snake-like figures on flat ground, offset by ornate surface patterning, Barton had absorbed as a student. The other experience that profoundly shifted her practice, as she described, was the birth in 2003 of the first of two children.  Both Kell and Arella would appear in Barton’s Archibald prize-winning painting from 2008, You are what is most beautiful about me, a self-portrait with Kell and Arella.

Barton began making increasingly intimate, confessional works, all founded on drawing, and exploring her own physical, emotional and psychological self through the human figure. (13) She later reflected that Bourgeois gave her the courage to pursue an ‘unashamed emotionality’ in her practice, where the artist and her body were both the model and the subject. (14) She later remarked: ‘I find the narratives at play within my practice often hard to define. They speak more to, and grow from, the emotional body, the private body, the dreaming body ... I do work very intuitively.  I make work that I am compelled to make … I want to feel as free as the protagonists in my work’. (15) Barton’s periodic engagement with portraiture she regards as a vital discipline and counter to this compulsive and fantastical, figurative work. (16)

Nonetheless, Barton has been clear about not wanting ‘to be projecting this kind of narrative onto other women’s experiences of their bodies’ (17) and she has never been moved to make overtly political gestures with her work. (18) While Barton has stated that her work ‘in part always attempted to celebrate the history of women’s craft and art making’, (19) her ‘first consciously feminist work’ was the 2016 film Red (with Cate Blanchett as the notorious mate-devouring, red-back mother-spider; a vivid reimagining of Bourgeois’ arachnids, such as her massive sculpture, Maman 1999). This work featured in the artist’s expansive solo exhibition Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway Is a Disco, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017-2018, which included paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs, providing an extensive account of her ‘personal and idiosyncratic musings of desire, sex, motherhood and the natural world.’ (20) In 2017, Barton also held her first international solo exhibition Del Kathryn Barton: r u a bunny, in New York.

The generic female figures of the heart land are relatively benign ‘hyper-women’, as Barton describes them, compared to the later ‘heightened, idealised she-beasts’ and multi-breasted ‘lady monsters’ (21) that appear in such later paintings as the equivalent five panelled, sing blood-wings sing 2017 and of pink planets 2014 (see Figures 2 and 5), both of which were included in the 2017-2018 NGV exhibition. In these paintings, the female forms have taken on a mythological status, now not just an Earth mother figure but Medusa or Greek goddesses, icons of feminine power and Tantric sexuality – or simply Dancing Queens. With these later works, the kaleidoscopic interlocking of image and paint is complete, the melding of form and material insistent and the pictorial space entirely flattened. They are closer in their seamless pixelated surface effects to the repetitive craft work traditionally associated with the feminine, the needle and thread work of tapestry. The hectic profusion of dots, tangled and swirling lines, the decorative binding of limbs and the disco colour cacophonies of Barton’s mid-2000s paintings, such as the diptych works in state gallery collections, for the feeling 2011 and come of things 2010 (see Figures 3 and 4), are deployed to their surface activation or agitation, and play out her expressed ‘attempt to impart a quality of energy’. (22)

Barton has distanced herself from reference to her ‘dots’ technique (both deliberate and improvised) as assimilated from contemporary Indigenous painting while acknowledging her awareness of it. Instead she cites the influence of British artist Chris Ofilli (born 1968), whose dot paintings she discovered in the early 2000s (he won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1998). She remarked, ‘many aspects of his work at that time made an impression on me and informed my work … fields of layered patterning, stylised figuration, flat pictorial spaces etc.’ The net paintings and dots of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) were another influential source then, but she explained ‘there is something about the energy of the dot that links back to my hallucinations as a child, those fields of energy and unravelling of perception …’ (23)

The expansive scale of the heart land at nine metres long, was anticipated in a painting of four panels in 2009, we too have been there, which coincided with Barton’s move to a larger studio. Scale produced from composite parts was already being explored by Barton in her nine-part, multi-panelled fabric sculpture no other side 2013 the year she started the heart land. Her progression towards installations would be realised in the NGV exhibition. For sheer pictorial ambition relative to Barton’s practice of that time, and for its deployment of decorative patterning to a black line drawing technique, it shares some affinity with Howard Arkley’s composite painting, Fabricated Rooms 1997-99 (see Figure 7). This immersive unfolding of interior spaces originally spanned 13 panels, expanded to 17 panels for inclusion in his Venice Biennale exhibition at the Australian Pavilion, The Home Show 1999. (24) Arkley’s paintings too derived from varied sources, from advertising material and real estate brochures to international architecture and design magazines, along with his extensive personal library. Or, by comparison, and closer in time to Barton’s the heart land, there is the five panel painting Seafood Paella 2007 by fellow Archibald Prize winner John Olsen, one of various ‘landscape’ paintings on a food theme by this artist. Olsen, then aged 90, was one of Australia’s top 10-selling living artists in 2018; Barton was the first and only woman to enter that list.

FOOTNOTES
(1) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted by Frew P., ‘An Interview with Del Kathryn Barton’, in Wallis, P. & Frew, P., Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway Is a Disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, p.96
(2) Boland, M., ‘Del Kathryn Barton's Prices Put Her in Australia's Top 10 Living Artists,’ ABC News, 16 June 2018 (accessed October 2025): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-16/del-kathryn-barton-most-sought-after-australian-female-artist/9875182
(3) Mitzevich, N. (ed.), Dark Heart: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014
(4) Ewington, J., ‘Del Kathryn Barton’, in Bullock, N. et al., Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020, pp.38-39
(5) Kathryn Barton, Piper Press, Sydney, 2014, p.106.
(6) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Flatt, N., ‘Del Kathryn Barton’, in Tunnicliffe, W. (ed.), Wilderness: Balnaves Contemporary Painting, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p.21; see also Colless, E., ‘Eden and After’, in Del Kathryn Barton: The Whole of Everything [exhibition catalogue], Karen Woodbury Gallery, Sydney, 2008, p.35
(7) Gardner, A., ‘Del Kathryn Barton: A Paradox of Ecstasies’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol.45, no.3, Autumn 2008, pp.424-433
(8) ‘Del Kathryn Barton is a Painter,’ Small Giants Academy, Youtube video, 12:23 minutes (accessed October 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gb1HhOWR8WA
(9) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Del Kathryn Barton: The Whole of Everything, op. cit., p.3
(10) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Wallis, P. & Frew, P., op. cit., p.96
(11) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Rigby, M., ‘Del Kathryn Barton,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, n.d. (accessed October 2025):https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/del-kathryn-barton/
(12) Ewington, J., op. cit., p.131
(13) Ibid., p.139
(14) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Ewington, J., ‘Big Maman: The Curious Case of Louise Bourgeois and Australia’, in Smith, J. & Michael, L., Louise Bourgeois in Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2013, p.61
(15) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Frew, P., op. cit., p.96
(16) ‘Winner: Archibald Prize 2008 - Del Kathryn Barton,’ Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008 (accessed October 2025): https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2008/28606/
(17) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Ewington, J., 2014, op. cit., p.140
(18) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Frew, P., op. cit., p.96
(19) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Coslovich, G., ‘Stealing a Kind of Beauty’, The Age, Melbourne, 31 May 2008, p.12, cited by Flatt, N., op. cit., p.20
(20) Elwood, T., ‘Foreword’, in Wallis, P. & Frew, P., 2017, op. cit., p.xi
(21) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Frew, P., op. cit., p.96
(22) Gardner, A., op. cit., pp.424-433
(23) Del Kathryn Barton, quoted in Ewington, J., 2014, op. cit., p.77, note 41
(24) 'Howard Arkley: The Home Show', in Gregory, J., Arkley Works (accessed October 2025): https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/21/howard-arkley-the-home-show-venice-biennale-june-nov-1999/

Jenepher Duncan is an independent art consultant.  She was previously Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and Director of the Monash University Museum of Art and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. 

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