Hunter's extraordinary artworks evoke the colours, textures, wind and sound of Wimmera, the landscape of his childhood.
He is both a printmaker and painter. Over the past ten to fifteen years he has been working on a series of images that he collectively refers to as The Flatlands Project. This project explores what the landscape is, and what it means to him. He explains that he has "looked at the shaping influence of wind and water on the Australian continent, the once present now absent inland sea, the impact of ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), soil migration, dry land salinity, agricultural cycles and even the movement of animals, birds and machinery through the landscape. All of these have given me certain amounts of information and impetus to bring to the daily practice of painting. The core idea has been the prospect of making paintings about places, districts and events that aren't so easily quantified or pictured".
Since 2013 Hunter has become intrigued by events that happen below the earth's crust and shape the landscape, such as 'post-glacial rebound'. He didn't limit his investigations to the landscape forms that resulted, but also tried to imagine what the magnitude of sound created by the expansion of the lithosphere (the area from the earth's crust to up to 100 kilometres below the surface) might be like. He then came across an article and geophone recordings of movement from deep in the earth's Geosphere that were translated into audio by specifically designed computer software. These mesmerising sounds, like a muffled strong wind overlayed with a heartbeat and gentle crackling, so appealed to Hunter that he named his exhibition after them.
Philip Hunter was born in the Wimmera 1958. In the late 1960s his family relocated to Melbourne where Hunter attended the Prahan College of Advanced Education from 1977-79, obtained a Master of Fine Art in 1995 from the Victorian Collage of the Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy from Deakin University in 1999. He first exhibited in 1982 and went on to win numerous awards and exhibit internationally. His artworks are held in many prominent public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, several university and regional art galleries, Macquarie Bank and Artbank.
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