Behind the Glass at TarraWarra Museum of Art

Welcome to the Visible Art Storage at Tarawarra Museum of Art. This centre was launched in March of 2025. We're currently in what's called the airlock where we balance the humidity and temperature control for the artworks between the outside environment and the inside. I'm going to take you on a walk through the Visible Art Storage so you can see some of the amazing treasures that we've got hidden inside. In this room we can see a focus on landscape painting in the collection. Eva and Mark Beeson, our founding patrons, collected a number of works over a 70-year period. They focused on the Australian artists of their time. They were particularly enamoured with the beauty of the Australian landscape and over half the collection is focused on our natural world. In this room here not only do we have portraits of Eva Beeson and Mark Beeson, we also have iconic works by some of Australia's most significant artists including Russell Drysdale, Sydney Nolan, John Olsen, Fred Williams and many others. In the Visible Storage area at Tarrawara Museum of Art we have 64 double-sided racks. These racks can be pulled out so that we can access the works for forthcoming exhibitions. One of the important aspects of the ways in which Australian artists depict the landscape is that they have a point of view on that landscape and that's no more evident than in this incredible work by First Nations Australian artist Daniel Boyd. Daniel came down to Tarrawara Museum of Art for one of our biennials and worked with the descendants of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station. He worked with a historical photograph that was taken during colonial times of the inhabitants of Coranderrk fishing by the river. They're dressed in Victorian costume and obviously it's a set-up photograph. What Daniel Boyd has done is asked us to look again at this image, to think about it through the filter of his own First Nations lens and the many dots and dimensions that he introduces with this incredible charcoal and resin technique.