Bob Kerr’s panoramic landscapes combine the specifics of location with history, geomorphology, botany, cartography and the evidences of human use amidst the on-going processes of nature and event. These are unsettling landscapes in which the past is felt as strongly as the present. The stretched format references early mapping of the land and colonial photography while also playing tricks with spatial understanding by providing views impossible to capture from one vantage point. (1)

He uses the choreography of line and the rhythms of gestural marking plus the intersection of horizontal and vertical elements (a river, trees, a telegraph pole, a roadway etc) and sinuous paths as strong compositional features. This allows the viewer to walk across the landscape with a dominant sense of the ground being travelled. The gaze is fixed at the base of the landscape and on the elements of a stubborn country rubbed raw by the elements. (2)

He presents the Central Otago environment as one that is worked, transitory and vulnerable. An environmental debate emerges with the shingle fans and the omnipresent marks of man seen in gates, poles and eroded tracks. He captures the moods and varied colours of the landscape accurately with open, fluid brushwork that has an immediate viscous quality as well as a directness of detail. In this way Kerr expresses the immensity of the mountains, moraines, alpine deserts, and river flats that give Central Otago its unique character.

1. Mark Amery, “Sweeping across landscapes”, The Dominion Post, November 12, 2006. 2. Ibid.