glover eve exhibition ― celebrating our landscape

Image details: Martin Rek, Misty Boulders, Mount Wellington National Park, 2023, watercolour, carbon pencil, 22.5 x 28 cm

Celebrating our Landscape showcases many of your favourite artists, including Martin Rek who reminisces as he finds himself far from home.This Friday the Glover Prize is announced. The night before Handmark unveils a special landscape exhibition, showcasing different works to those at the recent Evandale pop-up. “The Glover is Australia’s penultimate landscape award, and the biggest event on Tasmania’s arts calendar,” Handmark Director Allanah Dopson enthuses. “And, this year with four Handmark artists – Rebecca Coote, Chantale Delrue, Melanie McCollin-Walker, and Luke Wagner – as finalists, we have an extra special reason to celebrate.”Celebrating our Landscape includes five poignant pieces by Martin Rek which perfectly capture Tasmania’s wild beauty. Most interestingly, these watercolour and pencil works were done after Martin relocated to Scotland. “I found myself reminiscing about what was left behind, and these are a collection of some of my favourite places in Tasmania,” Martin tells us from Edinburgh. “My recent move to Scotland to be closer to family in Europe, is naturally lending itself to an exploration of loss, remembering, and reimagining.”As Martin reflects, beautifully detailed wilderness springs to life. In Misty Boulders, Mount Wellington, wind bent trees and giant rocks are shrouded in fog, while a cold mist cloaks a still river in Silence, Frenchman’s Cap. These are scenes from Tasmania, but could just as easily be Scotland. “It’s curious how life has its way of changing ones path suddenly.”Celebrating Our Landscape exhibition opens at Handmark Gallery on Thursday, March 7 and runs until March 18. It also features jewellery by Janine Combes.

View exhibition online here.