This Viewing Room presents a selection of John Gollings’ aerial landscape photographs, examining the abstraction of terrain and the geometry of human intervention within the Australian landscape.
In these works, Gollings removes the horizon and any stable sense of scale. What remains is surface — precise, flattened, controlled.
At Mount Baw Baw (2019), snow compresses the terrain into tonal planes and sharp edges. At Dimboola Lake (2024), mineral traces and receding water form pale geometries that oscillate between landscape and construction.
From above, the world becomes edited.
CREDITS
Artist
John Gollings, OAM
Exhibition
Online Viewing Room, Aerial Survey. From exhibition The Beauty of Disaster & Neglect.
Medium
Archival pigment inkjet prints, limited edition and AP editions currently available.
Enquiries
Pricing and availability on request via Maud Gallery. Please quote the. artwork title.
CURATORIAL NOTE
Works from Gollings’ ongoing investigation into aerial perspective and the refinement of the photographic surface.
In these aerial works, John Gollings approaches the landscape less as place than as structure. Stripped of horizon, atmosphere and conventional orientation, the photographs shift toward a language of pattern, interval and surface tension. Roads, waterlines, snowfields and mineral deposits begin to register as marks within a larger compositional field rather than descriptive landscape details.
This compression of space produces a curious instability. At times the images resemble mapping, painting or constructed design; elsewhere they retain traces of erosion, weather and environmental change. Gollings holds these readings in suspension, allowing the photographs to move between documentation and abstraction without fully settling into either.
Underlying the series is a sustained attention to control — not only within the photographed terrain itself, but within the image-making process. The aerial viewpoint introduces distance and order, yet the works continue to reveal the unpredictability of the land beneath them.
