All My Fat Country - Rod Moss

The Araluen Arts Centre presents All My Fat Country, an exhibition of large scale graphite drawings by nationally recognised and renowned artist and award winning author, Rod Moss.

In the early 2000s, whilst Moss was driving Patrick Ampetyane Hayes from his Undoolya outstation to the town camp of Whitegate, Hayes said to the artist ‘All my fat country this one my son. You be paint it. Any time. Your time or mine.’

Twenty years later, Moss took up Patrick’s invitation, creating a series of large scale works which depict Patrick’s country, where Moss has lived for almost four decades.

These monochromatic landscape drawings, a selection of which comprise this exhibition, forego the direct depiction of people and their relationships with place that’s been an indicative feature of much of Moss’ works. However, relationships are still at the core of these works.

Moss has articulated not only the rock, earth, vegetation, sky and places where water moves and holds, but has also rendered an intimacy with these places and the personal histories interwoven with them.

Paring things back to the grey tonal values of a graphite pencil, working with scale and rendering the macro and the micro in his detail, Moss invites viewers into an intimate encounter with country with these drawings.

As Arnold Zable, Australian writer, novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate tells it, “Rod Moss’ luminous drawings are born out of decades of intimate relationship, conversation, engagement, and profound friendship with Arrernte peoples and their beloved country”.