Outsider View

Outsider View presents new paintings by Anne Marie McCaughey, an established Irish artist, who has been exhibiting since graduating from art college in England in the mid-eighties.

The exhibition consists of two distinct series of works, small oils in which she investigates the nature of the mining machinery machine as a valuable cultural artifact, and a number of paintings of Fremantle and its surrounds.

Anne moved to be with her husband in Fremantle just six years ago and these works continue an investigation into the integral nature of tools in the history of human development.

There is something quite beautiful in the precise construction of machines/tools which are created for a specific purpose. I wished to portray the old mining equipment as something worthy of serious time and consideration on my part. Quite as beautiful in its own untrammeled way as Epstein’s, ‘Rock drill.’

The contest and collaboration of humanity and nature is very raw and alive in this part of the world, whereas transmutation of European lands have seen successive artifacts become part of great archaeological excavations, used, buried, dug up, museum housed.

The move from the intimacy of a hand constructed wind sifter, practically human in its arthritic old-man stoop to the alien feel of the gargantuan dinosaurs which chomp