Highlights from the ANU Art Collection: Wendy Teakel

Wendy Teakel, Intersections 1998

Her beauty and her terror / The wide brown land for me!
— Dorothea Mackellar (1904: lines 15–16)

Intersections represents Wendy Teakel’s connection with the Australian rural landscape as a space of human inscription. Through its linear network Teakel mirrors the mapping of fields, fence lines, and tracks: human-made marks that convey ownership, division, and cultivation.

Intersections was created using the technique of pokerwork. The slow, physical process of burning into wood reflects the scars of agricultural labour on our landscape. Teakel’s use of industrial plywood highlights the tension she sees between the natural world and our damaging human intervention.

Here, landscape is redefined as a living archive of interaction. The physical traces of land use become an account of the ‘intersections’ between ecology, industry, and caring for Country.

Intersections reflects the marks of agriculture, recasting them as signs of the emotional and cultural bonds we share with landscape. Teakel’s work is a reminder that our interactions with the land leave traces that become woven into its surface and reshape our memory.

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On show in ANU Art Collection: Conjunction, 24 October – 21 December 2025