Terra Spiritus

Bea Maddock’s TERRA SPIRITUS…with a darker shade of pale is a forty-metre panoramic drawing of the coastal profile of her homeland Tasmania. The Latin title, meaning spirit of the land or land of spirit, conveys the artists desire to explore the implications of living in a specific place – in the present and with a sense of the past. On fifty-one sheets of paper, Bea Maddock has drawn the bays, inlets, mountain ranges and gullies as they would be viewed at a short distance from the coast. Unable to make the physical journey herself, Bea Maddock devised a method of generating the view from geographical and topographical maps of Tasmania. Each drawing was made as if looking into the centre of the island and there is noconcept of north or south, east or west; there is only the compulsion of lookinginwards. (Bea Maddock)