Visiting a gallery without an agenda can often reward deeply. Last week saw me in Launceston, and with a few hours to kill, I took myself off to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG).
Walking into the upstairs gallery, it was with sheer delight that I faced the survey exhibition, Gentle Protagonist: Art of Michael McWilliams. Over 90 pieces had been loaned back from collectors – a kind of treasure hunt over the past two years – to track this much-loved Tasmania artist’s oeuvre from 1991 to the present. The outcome is witness to his prolific and cohesive career. How had I not heard of his work before now?
At 69 years, it is McWilliams’ first institutional solo exhibition – and it is exhaustive. It is also lots of fun, gently probing and elegantly presented. It is a credit to both the artist and the QVMAG team.
A colonial thread sits across McWilliams’ body of work; many of the paintings feel like they are the outpourings from some grand expedition, meticulously recording Tasmanian flora and fauna. But something is amiss. Rather, these paintings carry an environmental or animal rights message.
While there are doses of humour in McWilliams’ work, there is also deep empathy – and a connectivity that reaches across audiences and ages. Animals stare out beyond the picture plane and engage the viewer with deadpan expressions – their daily habitation disturbed by strange intruders. It is almost as though it is an engagement between witnesses to the damage that humans have inflicted on the natural environment.
Williams pulls it off by keeping his paintings highly staged, their quirky arrangements heavy with cues to contemporary conversations. For example, a lone domestic chair sits on alpine slopes in the painting The mountain climber (2020), a striking metaphor of human dominance over the natural realm.
In A day at the falls (2018), that colonial prop is replaced by a flock of sheep scatted across the rocky tiers of a water course – all staring out to the viewer. Similarly surreal, the painting Mixed lamb with vegetables (2013) places a circle of sheep around a cottage garden of introduced produce, while surrounded by classic wheat-coloured fields reminiscent of ‘sheep country’.
Introduced (methane producing) livestock, such as sheep and cattle, are common subjects for McWilliams, but so too are threatened or extinct native species, especially the Tasmanian devil and the thylacine. Two powerful works are Tiger country (2002) and A pointed reminder (2021), painted almost two decades later, speaking to the ongoing loss of biodiversity and native species, and the artist’s stylistic persistence. In Tiger country the devil is behind a fence with a clump of trees, begging their protection.
Both paintings place the thylacine centre to logged country (a visitor to Launceston will encounter logging trucks as a normal daily event) – a kind of ‘elephant in the room’ reality of the timeless and timely aspect of this narrative.
Yet, there is no aggression in these painting, or demonstrative politics. McWilliams is a master at getting the balance right. This is easy to observe in the second gallery, where one wall is hung heavily in the salon style, with many of the McWilliams’ paintings riffing off art history traditions, pastoral narratives and Australian folklore.
Aside from the paintings, central to the galleries are pieces of antique furniture (typically colonial) that McWilliams has painted in his unique style, adding yet another layer to this exhaustive survey.
He worked in his father’s antique store helping to restore furniture pieces, so the leap is not so left of field. Where these pieces are interesting is their symbolism as treasures of early settlers – dressers, tables, chests – made from Australian timbers, that they once cleared. Smart twist.
Simply, McWilliams aims to disarm us through his work. And, while it is easy to get snagged by the charm of his subjects, diving in for a deeper look at that detail and delighting in our own discovery, there is an elegance to their delivery by McWilliams that is so polished. This survey is clearly a long overdue salute to this Tasmanian treasure.
Gentle Protagonist: Art of Michael McWilliams
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG)
Art Gallery at Royal Park, 2 Wellington Street, Launceston
14 December 2024 — 23 March 2025
Free entry
Accompanying the exhibition is a fabulous activity book for kids and a catalogue.
