Margaret Ackland’s latest body of work is literally the residue of layered experiences which began with an artists’ trip to the University of NSW Research Station at Fowlers Gap in 2011.

Ackland’s practice has previously dealt with the relics of human experience, albeit a more urbane and contained version. Known for her exquisite rendering of historical garments, her images represented the inanimate in animated form – the memory of the body and traces of its movement inscribed into her imagery of the clothing. In this new body of work, she reinvents and extends this approach – the imprint of the body extends into the imprint of the landscape – to offer a multi-layered reading of the Fowlers Gap experience and its unceasing evolution in memory.

Dislocation emerges as the underpinning theme as Ackland explores this distinctive red ochre landscape through a refracting cultural prism. Visual tropes from different cultures are fused to reinforce this notion of dislocation – hailspots on dainty muslin morph into indigenous dot painting; the willow pattern from shards of broken china overlays the burnt earth; and undulating hills of pin-tucked voile sit as a veneer over horizon lines of scrubby trees. Everywhere are human stories from half-understood cultures intersecting, but insistent beneath the human drama is the unyielding burnt biscuit landscape.
- Excerpt from Vestiges essay written by Elin Howe


Margaret Ackland is represented in a range of national collections including Artbank, the Holmes a Court Collection and Deakin University. She has won and been a five time finalist in the Portia Geach Portrait Prize, a Blake Prize finalist and has had her work featured in Italian Vogue and on ABC TV's Compass series. She was recently included in Not the Way Home -13 Artists Paint the Desert, a group expedition organised by Artist Profile Magazine and exhibited at the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney. She has just been announced as a finalist in the Blake prize.