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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

The Gallery’s Acknowledgement of Country, and information on culturally sensitive and restricted content and the use of historic language in the collection can be found here.

Fleeing figure

1988
Bea Maddock AM and Larry Rawlings (printer)

colour photo screenprint on paper, edition A/P (sheet: 91.8 cm x 67.0 cm, image: 57.5 cm x 41.6 cm)
Image not available (NC)

Bea Maddock AM (1934–2016) studied at the Hobart Technical College in the early 1950s before travelling to London, where she attended the Slade School from 1959 to 1961. From the time of her return to Australia, she taught: at the Launceston Teachers’ College, the Launceston Technical College, the National Gallery of Victoria school, the Victorian College of the Arts and the Bendigo College of Advanced Education. In 1979–1980 she made a large wax-coated collage of embossed hand-made paper words on commission for the new High Court in Canberra. In February 1983 her home and studio at Mount Macedon were razed in the Ash Wednesday fires. She returned to Launceston where she was head of the school of art at the College of Advanced Education for two years. Between 1964 and 2006, she held more than forty solo exhibitions and her work was included in more than seventy Australian and international group shows. In 1986 she held the Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University; the following year she went to Antarctica, the trip giving rise to panoramic views of the territory. Metaphysical enquiry, dread and loneliness were often evoked in her introspective self-portraits; the exhibition Being and Nothingness toured state galleries and the National Gallery of Australia in 1992–1993. In 1993 she was the winner of the Clemenger Award for Contemporary Art. From 1993 to 1998 she worked on Terra Spiritus: With a Darker Shade of Pale, a monumental 52-sheet panorama of the entire coastline of Tasmania made from ochre pigment she sourced and ground herself. Informed by her identification with Aboriginal spirituality, the work featured placenames in local Indigenous languages in refutation of the colonial notion of terra nullius – uninhabited land.

Maddock’s work was the subject of survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002 and is held in the collections of most major Australian galleries.

Gift of David Archer 2016

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. Works of art from the collection are reproduced as per the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The use of images of works from the collection may be restricted under the Act. Requests for a reproduction of a work of art can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

Artist and subject

Larry Rawlings

Bea Maddock AM (age 54 in 1988)

Subject professions

Visual arts and crafts

Donated by

David Archer (2 portraits)

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