Elizabeth Barsham

Elizabeth Barsham is Tasmania’s original Tasmanian Gothic artist. With an extraordinary realist oil painting technique she tells Tasmania’s stories with dark humour and uncompromising vision. Influenced by Surrealism’s precursers, Heironymous Bosch and Grunewald, her figures in a landscape mutate and transform, combining with the giant kelp or sloughing their skin to become skeletal. Thylacine shades inhabit the hills, witness to rapacious chainsaw men. Leering sheep promise a day of reckoning when the cost of bringing European farming practices to a dry continent will be met. Elizabeth Barsham tells uncomfortable tales in beautiful paintings.