Carcass 2014: Alison Alder's despair depicted in art

Melbourne-born Australian artist, Alison Alder (1958-), has worked extensively with communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia from 1994 to 2004. During that decade, Alder lived primarily in Tennant Creek, 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs in the centre of Australia. It was also in Tennant Creek where artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), famous for his Ned Kelly paintings, spent some time in 1948. Five years later, in 1953, he created his iconic “Carcass” painting (enamel on composition board), a cattle carcass depicting the desolation of the place – brown on brown. Alder had the opposite experience, but has taken Nolan’s work as inspiration for her exhibition, Carcass, at the Canberra Museum and Gallery from July 5 to September 14, 2014.

Alder exhibits her series of colour screen prints called Carcass I-VIII (2009) which was originally part of her Carcass and Intervention exhibition in 2009. Additionally, she exhibits Shopping Day (2007) which is a series of shopping dockets and advertisements, and Intervention (2008), also a series of screen prints which chronicles her despair at the impact of government policies on Northern Territory communities.

Sidney Nolan's Carcass 1953

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