ROSIE HASTIE
During winter, the city of Hobart is like a jewel box. Every door closed against the cold can open into something wonderful, transporting you to uniquely colourful and strange other worlds. That’s why LARK asked five innovative Tasmanian photographers to show us how they “Follow the Amber Glow”. In this series, we peek into their studios to see what worlds they can conjure, inspired by our elusive winter release of DARK LARK single malt whisky.
Stepping into Rosie Hastie’s studio is like entering a portal to another world. On first impression, there appear to be the typical shelves filled with scraps of raw material, stacks of books, and miscellaneous odds and ends. Take a closer look, however, and the details start to resolve into something entirely different. The pile of paper crumpled on a desk is actually a detailed mountainscape; the bent piece of posterboard against the wall is actually a perfect fog-drenched horizon line; and the clear stack of cellophane is actually an inlet waiting for the tide to come in. This is the magic of Rosie’s artform, where she created shockingly realistic landscapes using only a few simple materials. LARK asked Rosie to show us the amber glow of DARK LARK through her unique lens. We stopped by to ask her a few questions while she tinkered away at her headquarters in Good Grief Studios.
LARK: Rosie, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your work?
ROSIE: My name is Rosie Hastie, and I am an artist and photographer working in nipaluna / Hobart. My work takes on all kinds of forms, from architectural to commercial photography, but for my art I’ve been working since 2011 creating these landscapes right here, at home and in the studio.
In my previous series, I emulated twelve different well known Tasmanian landscapes in this form, using tissue paper, lighting, and vapor to essentially recreate this sort of dusky dreamscape feeling. The more you look at these landscapes, the more they take on a bit of an apocalyptic sense, as you realize that they're devoid of any life.
LARK: How do you create these images?
ROSIE: For my DARK LARK photoshoot, I wanted to create a sense of the bottle itself becoming a landscape, to capture the mineral, elemental, aged quality that the single-malt whisky has to it. For some of the images, I made a diorama by covering the bottle with tissue paper, making it look like a giant cliff. For others, I made the inverse version so the bottle looks like a sea cave.
To create the texture in these images, I sprayed water onto the tissue paper, and use vapor which I blow carefully through a tube to give the appearance of fog and water. I experimented with using the whisky itself as water, dripping it on to the top of the diorama, pulling away, and letting it flow down as if it was this kind of melted, decaying figure of whisky and the apocalyptic landscape.
I also have all sorts of rules for my practice. I don't use any Photoshop. However, I do allow myself to use Photoshop in the sense that, if there is a technique I can use to develop colour film in a dark room, which I learned to do in undergrad, I'm allowed to do it in Photoshop.
Another rule is I can't use artificial coloring. No artificial colors in paper. I can't use coloured cellophane. All of the light has to just be bounced off a mixture of halogen, tungsten, and ambient daylight. This is when you actually start to get the really convincing, natural feeling colours coming through.
LARK: What do you enjoy about your work?
ROSIE: The most enjoyable part of sharing my work is the trickery. On the most part, people will look at my work and initially see a landscape. But the longer that you stand with the work, you can see it unfold as something that is constructed.
The moment that the flaws and the creases start to reveal themselves is what really draws people in. I think the most satisfying thing about this process is that I put such tight parameters on the way that I make the work. Figuring out how I can push these boundaries all the time, it’s really satisfying to see how different and convincing the results can be.
LARK: How did DARK LARK inspire your process?
ROSIE: I think these photos speak to DARK LARK in a playful way. Obviously, there's this emulated shape of the bottle, but I really wanted to give it this sense of bringing a figurative element to it. The painter Casper David Friedrich made these surreal landscape paintings. He had a rule that if he had the horizon line cutting through the figure’s waist, it would feel as though you, the viewer, were in the landscape with the figure, seeing what they see.
So, I think that this speaks to DARK LARK in that it has this darkness, but it's still playful. The way that the images are produced has this sort of almost childlike science to them. And I am thinking about what a time winter in Tasmania is, which is just a hell of a lot of fun.
Seen through the magic of Rosie’s photography, a bottle of DARK LARK is transformed into an imposing geological pinnacle or an enticing sea cave. To view more of Rosie’s series Dreams of Drams in person, visit The Still in Hobart from June 6th. You can see more of her work at https://www.rosiehastie.com/.
