Biography

Caroline Durré has held numerous solo shows in Australia in painting, drawing, most recently at the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Victoria. She has recently been selected for the Aomori International Print Triennale in Japan, Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award, and Footprint International Print Biennale in Connecticut USA. In 2003 she was resident at the Cité des Arts in Paris for three months, pursuing research into the history of the formal garden. In 2006 she won the Swan Hill Regional Gallery (Victoria) Print and Drawing Acquisitive Award for her drawing Hortus (in)conclusus (convex). Her works are held in national, state, regional, corporate and private collections. She completed her PhD entitled Post-Op: on the experience and representation of paradoxical space in 2008. As a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, she concentrates on the supervision of graduate students in MFA and PhD degrees. Her website is

Academic Paper

The poetics of flatness: from imperial cartography to sacred geography
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Australia’s outline, uniquely distinct both as continent and as nation, gradually materialised in European cartography. The construct ‘Australia’ was thus perceived as shape before it was ever widely experienced as space. With further incursions into a landmass defined by its edge, European explorers struggled to identify features that could qualify as a landmark.

Since those days the Australian romance has been with the stretched horizon, a narrative that speaks through exploration narratives, to the disorientation of refugees and migrants, a thread that unravels from the secondhand experience of modernism to the visual language of desert art. Indigenous artists have always held the horizon, so dear to Western vision, in scant regard, and this has exerted increasing pressure on the naturalised order of non-indigenous iconography. Simultaneously Modernism, in its Australian manifestation seamlessly congruent with our old obsession with the plane, challenged the icon of the horizon, in a confluence of geography with aesthetics, yet in effect exchanged one representation of flatness for another.

In this paper I argue that flatness is a particular model of spatial experience that has underwritten Australian art. A trope of flatness, one that incorporates yet transcends the formalist claims of Modernism, has continued to inspire Australian visual culture, and can be found expressed as a continuity through colonial, modernist and contemporary images. Print, in particular – the image that is produced under pressure – has both an iconographic and a formal resonance with this poetics of flatness.

This paper thus negotiates a confluence comprised of the geography of Australia, its representations in imagery from colonial topography, to modernism, to contemporary and indigenous art, and the ways that this is mirrored in the formal qualities of two-dimensional media, with an emphasis on works on paper, to uncover one of the ruling metaphors for Australian spatial-visual experience.