Lynne Boyd: The Enigma of Distance
Few artists working in the 1990s and early twenty-first century have explored the irreducible elements of land, sea, and sky, and the atmospheric effects of water and air as poetically as Melbourne artist Lynne Boyd (1953–2022). Her paintings of the immersive sublime confirm her as an important female artist of Australian contemporary art.
In this talk, Sheridan Palmer discusses Boyd’s approach to such enigmatic qualities as tranquillity, distance, and the unfathomable, and the existential framework Boyd developed to express the liminal and the metaphysical conditions of “limitlessness.”
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Lynne Boyd was known for her exquisite and haunting paintings of atmospheric hazes, the psychology of distance, and the dynamics of spatiality, particularly in her paintings of Port Phillip Bay. Peter Booth, a sessional teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts in the early 1980s, considered Boyd’s work among the best to emerge from the VCA. Over the following decades until her untimely death in 2022, she relentlessly pursued the sensual and indeterminate states of consciousness. In transposing both what is perceived and what is concealed, her work has affinities with the Australian modernist Clarice Beckett, the surreal expressionist Georgia O’Keefe, and the quiet minimalism of Agnes Martin.
As Jason Smith (Director, Art Gallery of South Australia) writes, “Her obsession with the Bay and its ever-changing qualities and unpredictable conditions of light and climate … signalled her special capacity to unite seeing with feeling, resulting in mesmerising, ethereal landscapes that trigger recognition, or recall bodily and emotional experience of place in ways that can be profoundly affecting.”
Dr Sheridan Palmer is editor of LYNNE BOYD: LIMINAL (Index Press, 2025). She is an independent art historian, curator and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Image: Lynne Boyd, Twilit Trentham Landscape, 2010, oil and pencil on linen, 76 × 92 cm. Private Collection, Melbourne. Photographer: Gavin Hansford.
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