Rosie Hastie

Artist Profile

Rosie Hastie is a Hobart based artist who uses illusive photography techniques to manipulate and augment perception of place and reality. Blurring the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and light manipulation, her constructed ‘paperscapes’, made from simple materials like plastic sheeting, crumpled paper, smoke and water droplets, result in images that evoke sweeping natural landscapes. The resulting works appear as traditional tourism photographs, yet in truth they are carefully staged illusions. Ultimately her work speaks to the voracity of photography and ideas of what is considered ‘truth’. Challenging notions of authenticity and evidence, her practice is deeply informed by a fascination with questioning what we see and how images shape our understanding of the natural world.

Hastie’s work often engages with themes of tourism, nostalgia, and environmental fragility, reimagining famous landscapes, both Tasmanian and Victorian, stripping them of human presence and presenting them as eerie, depopulated spaces. Her images playfully critique the way wilderness is packaged and commodified, raising questions about whether mass tourism preserves or erodes the landscapes it celebrates. More recently Hastie has extended her inquiry by incorporating artificial intelligence, expanding the borders of her compositions beyond the physical diorama. Rather than fearing AI, she bends it to her artistic will, continuing her exploration of a constructed reality. Her work invites viewers to look closer, and to question what is real, what is fabricated, and what that distinction truly means.

Truth and deception lies at the heart of my work. My mind is always desiring purity and absoluteness, or states that cannot or do not exist. These constructed 'landscape' spaces can only be inhabited through the imagination. The works explore photography's ability to transport the viewer to new places through the experience of colour, light, texture and space. Utilising modest materials such as crumpled paper and the backyard science of bicarb soda and dry ice, these ‘paperscapes’ conjure feelings of wonder, but on closer inspection reveal oddities in their detail. Similar to being woken from a dream, the mind inhabits a place that can only exist in thought.
Artist Statement - Rosie Hastie

‘This is not any real place, but it looks like one. Your eyes tell you this image is a sunset across the bay, which it is, but this image is also paper and light, with the steam from a chunk of dry ice creating punctuation for a vernacular of land, of sea and sky. This is a language of images. Rosie Hastie’s photography demonstrates her internalised and instinctual understanding of this visual language. She knows that the paragraphs of the sky are intrinsic components of the essay that is the image; how the grammar of light creates a formal structure. She breaks down each component: sentences are formed from prepositions, nouns, verbs, adjectives: all in the correct order.’
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Andrew Harper 2025

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Artist CV

Rosie Hastie completed her Masters in Photography at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania in 2011, where she developed her arts practice using analogue cameras. Her unique technical skills, and distinctive style has been recognised through various awards the Nelson Prize for Fine Art in 2008, and the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2022. Most recently she was announced as a finalist in the 2025 Bridge Prize, the 2024 Hadley's Art Prize where she also received an Honorable Mention, & Finalist in the 2024 National Alice Prize. In 2023, she undertook a residency at Arthere in Istanbul, where she produced and showed new works and in 2017 she participated in a 3-month placement at Takt Berlin Artist Residency. She has undertaken a number of public art commissions, including at the Hobart Police Station and most recently at the Royal Hobart Hospital in 2024. Her work has been featured in Object Magazine (Italy), Artichoke Magazine, Ignant Magazine, and Art Guide Australia.

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