Joan Ross Possession – imagine if they’d cared

In this work, Joan Ross wonders ‘what Australia would be like if the British colonisers had a caring attitude to both the original occupants and the plants and animals.’ She paints a couple in 18th-century dress nursing a giant drooping flower – an absurd posture of loving care, incongruous with what she sees as the negligence of white settlers.

The figures are superimposed on an image of Eugene von Guérard’s 1863 Weatherboard Falls. Today known as Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, NSW, the site is in an area Ross called home for over 30 years. In her digitally manipulated and hand-painted remake of von Guérard’s work, she makes the waterfall a fluoro yellow – a colour that evokes contemporary ‘high-vis’ and creates an alien appearance in the landscape. The scent of colonisation is still strong, Ross suggests: ‘Possession is a perfume of greed.’

A regular in recent Archibald and Sulman exhibitions, Ross won the Sulman Prize in 2019. This is her first time in the Wynne Prize.