Amidst the crippling shortage of inner-city studio space currently being suffered in Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre has been providing relief in the form of a residency program being run from a small studio in its picturesque grounds.

This initiative is proving critical in allowing early and mid-career artists to produce less commercial, exploratory works that may otherwise have gone unrealised. A

case in point was sculptor Susan Flavell’s superb Unhorsed exhibition of large-scale cardboard works, produced in the space during 2007 (see aAR Issue 15). The latest artist to take advantage of the residency is Paul Uhlmann, one of Western Australia’s most prominent mid-career artists, whose practice incorporates painting, print and photography.

JOHN MCDONALD takes an admiring glance at the Corotesque landscapes of Michelle Hiscock.

Michelle Hiscock went through her experimental phase while still a student at Canberra School of Arts. As part of a semi-legendary course taught by Petr Herel, called ‘Graphic Investigation’, she sampled all manner of techniques and undertook a succession of conceptual projects. No one would have suspected that almost eighteen years later she would be painting small landscapes in a classical tradition heavily indebted to Claude Lorrain.

Image: Michelle Hiscock, Early Morning, 2008, oil on panel, 27 x 20cm.