Turner and Australia

Extract from Turner and Australia, exhibition catalogue.

The Sublime takes a different form in the quietly radiant paintings of Tasmanian artist Michaye Boulter. Indeed, while having a keen awareness of the concept, and of the work of Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, she says that she is 'not attached' to the concepts. The presence of Turner here is subtle, muted and introspective, and is found in Boulter's deeply emotional connection to the landscape. After discovering Friedrich's work in art school, she has devoted herself entirely to unpeopled, meditative landscapes, and while the lush natural environment of Tasmania is her source material, the actual locations of her paintings seem to be somewhere else-an internal place or state of reverie. For me, reverie is the mind untethered at play, she explains. In the quiet solitude of the places I love, I am free to wander and wonder, what hidden colours and visions emerge? What memories, what ineffable realisations sustain me?

Boulter's Everything is less certain, IV (2021), painted onto hand-beaten steel, takes us to a place of spiritual respite, where the volume of life has been turned right down to allow us to hear and see the magic in our world. The work is Tasmanian in essence only and exists more as an ethereal dream that carries us to another place entirely. The twilight lit clouds steal our focus, but the meticulous rendering of ocean and landscape ground the work to ensure that all parts of the whole participate in this wondrous theatre of nature.

Recalling Friedrich's assertion that an artist must paint what he sees within, Boulter admits to an attraction for places she returns to, that are embedded in me, rather than sought out. It's more about looking inward to find these paintings than outward. | Simon Gregg