QG Focus: John Waller Prints

Exhibition dates: Feb 4 – 17, 2025

In 2006, John Waller embarked on a suite of etchings, employing diverse techniques and multiple plates.  Working in close collaboration with master printer Andrew Gunnell and editioning printer Miranda Leighfield, Waller crafted a series that transcends the simple depiction of landscape.

These planar and figurative etchings explore a region at the confluence of the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian borders.  This area, nestled between the Murray River and the near-desert expanses to the north and south, may appear to the uninitiated as a bleached and arid terrain. However, Waller’s vision is profoundly different.

This is his country—the landscape that shaped his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.  His etchings become a testament to the intricate connections between people and place.  Having grown up locally and encountered ancient remnants in his youth, Waller perceives this land not merely as the backdrop of his own personal history.  Framed by the modern town of Mildura to the south and the archaeological site of Lake Mungo to the north, this seemingly harsh and monotonous country has resonated with the sounds of human life for millennia.  It is a plain that has witnessed the ebb and flow of human endeavour for at least fifty thousand years.