Exhibition text

What Stays Within

Words from Bett Gallery

Michaye Boulter’s landscapes, though undeniably Tasmanian, have a universal quality. The bulk of the headlands and the dark cuts of the escarpments are softened by a timeless mist. The ragged shorelines are washed softly by an ocean that touches shores elsewhere. These are not landscapes framed by windows, they are seascapes that engulf us from an impossible shoreline.⁣

Locating oneself in Boulter’s present is at once inescapable and impossible. Her landscapes are photographic the way memory is, the details are perfect—light catches the crest of every wave, shadows thicken at the edges of the water—but the colour is deeper, the sound is heavier, losing itself in the noise of the blood pulsing in your ears. Place is rendered so vividly that it becomes indiscernible from anywhere else, it is a shared dream, an imagined, internal ocean.⁣

We are enveloped by Boulter’s visions as they dissolve single point perspective and with it the sense that we are separable from our surrounds. Though alone with these images, there is no loneliness, we breathe this bay, this ocean, this light, sheltered in this cove of low-lying cloud with something beyond only ourselves.⁣