Josh Foley Craft Fair featured artist

OCTOBER 2017 | Sharon Webb

IN NORTHERN Tasmania Josh Foley’s major claim to fame is winning the Glover Prize for landscape painting in 2011.

In southern Tasmania, he could be known arguably in future years as the guy who painted the splashy four-storey wave that wraps a Derwent-side Taroona High School building.

This year, Josh will be the Featured Artist at November’s Tasmanian Craft Fair in Deloraine.  Another notch in the belt of a home-grown artist who seems determined to absorb the State’s history and landscape for translation into his creative style.

“The Glover gives artists great exposure to the art-loving public and winning it surprised me.  I would have been happy just to get into the exhibition because I’d failed to do that on six previous occasions,” he said.

The back story of his winning work is deceptively simple: as Josh tells it. Living next door to the Quarry Rd site in West Launceston, he was intrigued by its growing hoard of 14 trailers and other junk and decided to paint it.

In his hands, this urban junkyard location, named after Launceston Mayor Henry Gee (who watched supply ships coming up the Tamar from there), became a brown hut nestled in a swirling multi- coloured texture of hills and river. The work described by the Glover judges as “standing out as unlike any of the other works” in that year’s prize.

Earlier this year the historical thread appeared again when Josh created a multi-media installation.  Exhibited during ‘Ten Days on the Island’ with work by three other artists at Patterdale, the homestead of colonial artist John Glover.

The installation was a different creative step for him.  His work from his 2017 intermittent residency at the Woolmers Estate (Longford) will also be different.

“I’ve immersed myself in the history of Woolmers, interpreting it in paintings and video,” Josh said. “I’m experiencing a week in each season there, and the work will be exhibited in the opening of their new centre next year.”

As someone whose creativity seems enmeshed with growing up and living in the Tasmanian environment, UTAS-educated Josh sees advantages in being located away from the world’s big cities.

“Having a sense of isolation can help ideas germinate,” he said.

“Being in Tasmania can be challenging logistically and to find audiences, but it’s an interconnected place these days.  Living here, I can develop a more unique voice.”

Photo | image supplied