“I saw myself as a kind of missionary,” the master printmaker and painter Raymond Arnold tells me recently of his move to the Western Wilds of lutruwita/Tasmania. We are sitting in the kitchenette at PressWEST, a significantly kitted-out “creative lab” and printmaking workshop Arnold set up in Queenstown, a proud area whose raison d’être has mostly been mining and heavy industry.

With an almost five-decade practice in printmaking and painting, Arnold’s story is also intriguing, especially since his move to Queenstown in 2006 with his partner, artist Helena Demczuk.

In his beret, pattern knit cardigan and ubiquitous Blundstones, the 74-year-old artist reminds me of the similarly sartorially adventurous David Hockney. Around us are a number of handsome printmaking machines and presses that facilitate etching, lithography, screen and relief printing, each with its own story of how it ended up in a mining town at the end of the world.

With an almost five-decade practice in printmaking and painting, Arnold’s story is also intriguing, especially since his move to Queenstown in 2006 with his partner, artist Helena Demczuk. It was, as Arnold puts it, a “flight and an escape” after an extended stint making and teaching art in Melbourne and at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, as well as multiple printmaking sojourns to the Atelier Lacourière et Frélaut in Paris. In Queenstown, a three-hour drive from Hobart, the two-time Glover Prize winner says he found a space where he “felt free and unencumbered and beautifully driven to make work”, and was drawn to “the smell of wet rainforest, the sound of the Currawong bird and the touch of dusty, warm dolerite rock”. Arnold says both he and Demczuk “found a space of contemplation and sensory delight”.

“Living here is fulfilling, with so much to do, artwork to make. Stories yet to be told.”

Demczuk, whose own work focusses on what unites the people and landscape of the West Coast, has spoken how her Ukrainian parents escaped the aftermath of World War II, migrating to a coal mining town in Gippsland, Victoria. “Decades later I found myself in the mining town of Queenstown, Tasmania trying to create another type of future,” Demczuk says. “The reality of living in an unknown place surfaced quickly; the isolation, the lack of social services in a small community. But you were part of a whole and you rubbed shoulders with all of its life, death, disasters. Living here is fulfilling, with so much to do, artwork to make. Stories yet to be told.”

Stories of the past and questions about the future surround you in Queenstown. For 150 years the copper mine wrought catastrophic environmental hell on the region as the mine’s sulphurous waste stripped the landscape of trees and eroded the earth. It earned Queenstown the notoriety of being a ‘moonscape’. Today, the regrowth around town is so spectacularly life-affirming that you could be forgiven for thinking the environment has fully healed. But drive 20 minutes south and you get to The Confluence, a juncture where the pristine King River mixes with the polluted Queen River carrying the orange, soupy runoff from the still functioning copper mine.

“I am painting in a type of museum as much as a cemetery!”

This mix of beauty and devastation are major elements within Arnold’s creative practice. He makes work as “a type of witness to places, events and physical structures”, where the inclusion of his art by public institutions “forms a type of personal narrative as well as a record of social and environmental action”. For instance, an early acquisition of his work by the National Gallery of Australia focused on both his own involvement and wider implications of the Franklin Dam controversy, one of the most significant environmental campaigns in Australian history. Of his 2007 Glover Prize-winning painting Western Mountain Ecology, 2007, depicting a pair of pallets of salvaged Huon Pine logs, Arnold wrote, “I am painting in a type of museum as much as a cemetery!”

Demczuk’s own prize-winning work Landscape as Memento Mori – the Poet, the Painter, the Curator and the Photographer, 2019, comments on the people and personalities that occupy the area’s incongruous landscape. In an interview with the ABC, Demczuk once described how the locals’ rich histories “feed into her art”.  This is still the case today. “I began my artwork by focusing on the women in this town as they seemed invisible in this mining story,” says Demczuk, who’s now creating new work that builds on a 2022 exhibition about women who have recently chosen to make Queenstown their home. “In that earlier show I wanted to express the barrier they had as women in this male dominated world of mining. Now I want to make work about the bursting of that barrier, and include the West Coast landscape that is reshaping them.”

Arnold believes in the continued, wider socio-economic power of print media, stating it “can make serious contributions to community well-being and social development”.

In many ways PressWEST is reimagining the mining image of Queenstown, while at the same time responding to its histories. Those handsome presses and chemical baths, distant cousins of the machinery and equipment of the mines, are deeply aligned to the history of the West Coast, where printmaking was integral to storytelling, news-making and protest. Writing in the 2024 PressWEST catalogue, Arnold believes in the continued, wider socio-economic power of print media, stating it “can make serious contributions to community well-being and social development”.

This year PressWEST is embarking on its most ambitious program of events yet. From 24-25 May artists Michael Schlitz and Tom O’Hern will run a weekend printmaking workshop where participants are invited to work with ink, paper, wood and metal to conjure animal spirits, and the gallery will host new work by O’Hern and Hobart-based painter Liam Ross Baker. Arnold says that the May workshop is shaping up with an Animalia theme: “Monsters to devils and everything in between. The principal approach will be through a visit to the mine and the development of drawings and prints of degraded mine machinery. Then, in turn, studio activities [will] build a type of anthropomorphic picture or animation out of what we find.”

It’s hard to think of another artist couple who are more inspired by their surroundings, to tell its stories, and who give back as much as a place gives them.

Ultimately Arnold hopes PressWEST brings to Queenstown “a sense of place to the practice of making art”. “I’ve thought for a long time that artists have a role in restoring damaged landscapes, and for confirming the need for greener approaches to how we live in the world. I hope PressWEST becomes an instrument in helping to create a better community.” To which Demczuk adds, “There is an energy here that wants its stories to be told.”

It’s hard to think of another artist couple who are more inspired by their surroundings, to tell its stories, and who give back as much as a place gives them.

Michael Schlitz and Tom O’Hern
PressWEST
Queenstown, Tasmania
24—25 May, an ongoing throughout 2024

For more information about PressWEST and its ongoing 2024 program, with workshops and exhibitions open to the public, head here.

Spion Kop, Oslo’s newspaper of drawings about Queenstown, is available at oslodavis.com.