North Geelong 1996

In the early 1990s I moved to the hilly hinterland of Apollo Bay, on Victoria’s wild south-western coast. Although I loved that country, I am not a gum-tree painter, and so I soon found myself making the two-hour drive to Geelong, to explore the industrial shoreline of Corio Bay. A series of on-site sketches soon started suggesting the composition of a major work, North Geelong, which was exhibited in 1994 at Geelong Art Gallery (which holds the work) and the Charles Nodrum Gallery Melbourne.

As poet John Forbes wrote in his catalogue description: ‘North Geelong could be interpreted as a vision of industry, but it is not a celebration of ownership, as much Australian landscape has been… [It] is a diagram of how it works rather than a prescription as to how we should see it working. While the pol refinery, the natural gas terminal and the fertiliser factory dominate their environment and dictate its structure, they are not given any metaphysical dominance in this painting… All of Ken Searle’s urban work has had a political intention, but it has always been more subtle than the gestures and sermonising that usually determine the content of political art.’