Jo Bertini
Jo Bertini lives and works between the arid lands of Australia and the deserts of New Mexico, USA. Her artworks incorporate landscape, portrait painting, science, ecology, history and cultural heritage, informed by working with indigenous communities living in arid, isolated regions.
Jo is an established, awarded Australian artist, renowned lecturer and teacher. She has a history of 40 years exhibiting experience, with solo exhibitions at public and regional institutions, galleries and museums as well as commercial galleries both nationally and internationally. She was a recipient of an ‘0-1 Extraordinary Ability’ Visa and currently working on projects in the American Southwest. She has had tworecent, solo,US museum exhibitions,‘Deep in Land,’ at the Galleries of Contemporary Artat the University of Colorado in 2022 and‘Mountain of the Watchful Heart’ at the historic ‘Blumenschein Museum’ in Taos, New Mexico in 2023.
For ten years Jo worked as Australia’s first female ‘Expedition Artist with ‘Australian Desert Expeditions’, with scientists on environmental research in the most remote desert regions of Australian. She has contributed to many scientific publications and museum archives.
Jo’s paintings have been curated in hundreds of group exhibitions, exhibited as finalist in numerous art awards, winning many prizes. She has been awarded solo museum, gallery & touring exhibitions throughout Australia as well as awarded public commissions, grants and residencies. She has been awarded international residencies in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Colorado, USA and Indian Government sponsored residencies in India. Her paintings have also toured internationally, including solo exhibitions in India, Malaysia, China and the USA.
Jo’s work is represented nationally and internationally in private, public, corporate, and museum collections. She has been widely published and reproduced in newspapers, magazines, books, film & TV documentaries internationally. The Art Book, Jo Bertini ‘Fieldwork’, was published in 2014 by Zabriskie Books.
Way finding is a metaphor for searching. Desert birds, just as other animals and fish, often use watercourses as pathways on their migratory and breeding routes. Natural landforms are deeply imprinted into their species psych and sometimes even ‘skin mapped’ into their bodies. Scientific analysis of animal skin appearances and traits can reveal changes in climate, geography and multifarious data. The migratory routes of birds and animals, their tracks and scats all contain information and meaning. Indigenous peoples and scientists, have taught me to look for natural signs, for meaning in the landscape. Weather can be predicted by watching insects. Cloud formations can affect birthing cycles. I have been told that if you walk out into the desert and ask it to reveal itself, it is your duty to hear and see its answer. Landscapes tutor us. The subtlety and variety of these desert places in particular are places where I feel situated, incorporated and have learnt to listen, read the signs and see more clearly. My skin and psyche too is weathered, changed and mapped from many years of my own desert way finding.
‘There is no innocent landscape’, landscape is a container of history’ (Anselm Kiefer).
The topography of the land has an effect on the weather and vice versa , it is a reciprocal relationship. The high desert mountain ranges of the American Southwest attract magnificent weather systems often bringing spectacular cloud formations that pass their shadows over the land, promising desperately needed moisture. These water systems are temptresses – bitter rainless clouds. The Tewa peoples of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama lands attribute the sacred to, and respect and revere all aspects of the desert. Ritual ceremonies are performed following annual cycles which are believed to impact not only the way of life of the people but also directly affect the weather and land. The indigenous people are ‘weather watchers’ , paying close attention to the topography of the land formations and sky and finding pathways to call out and seed the ‘bitter clouds’ .
A longing that never abates that amounts to a kind of love. Just like a tree searching into the earth for water. The desert rivers and creeks may only flow for short periods of time after rain but there’s usually a depth of water beneath the sand. Rains that fall here can become underground reservoirs, artesian basins, subterranean creeks and rivers. These stored waters can be over a million years old and are essential, ancient life sources that when flooded reappear on the surface of the desert, bringing up buried secrets. Permanent pools or waterholes are the most biologically significant places. If there is a tree or even microscopic plant in a seemingly harsh desert environment, it is a sentinel of hope, a sign of water. Natural springs, wadis and pools are the surface manifestation of the artesian basin. Water seeps to the surface through fractures and vents in the land. There are many species only endemic to particular desert springs with numerous rare or relic micro flora and fauna restricted to a single spring. Life in these places comprise long periods of suspended animation followed by bursts of accelerated growth and activity. Seeds and eggs can survive hundreds and thousands of years in the dry sands or baked mud until the next rains fill the creeks again.
Indigenous people have a long history of care-taking these places, knowing their sacred significance, traversing the desert using their knowledge of these waters. Since colonial settlement bores have been sunk, resulting in much reduced aquifer pressure and many ancient water extinctions. We too must value land as sacred and not see it merely as an interminable resource. We must value the ‘boom and bust’ cycles, times of stasis and torpor, suspended animation as an offered refuges of peaceWater moving from the heart of the earth, up through cracks and fissures, up the wild mountains and dunes is the same water that moves through our bodies.
The geology of New Mexico is littered with precious gemstones and rare rocks.
Many of these difffferent stones are recognised as having sacred or healing
properties, New Mexico is known as the ‘Land of Enchantment’. Smokey quartz,
turquoise and natural obsidian are scattered across the desert and buried deep
beneath the sand.