Dore Stockhausen

Artist in Residence 2 February - 2 March 2026

In echoes of a new eden, artist Dore Stockhausen presents a series of abstract paintings that reflect on life in a post-natural world. Initially seeming devoid of flora and fauna, closer inspection reveals traces of irrepressible nature emerging through her artificial constructions.

Stockhausen’s paintings confront the reality that our landscapes have been reshaped by human influence; through hard-edged abstractions that combine geometric and organic forms, Stockhausen crafts her own post-natural scenes that prompt us to reconsider our relationship with the environment.

The sky is blue. The sky is orange. The sky is black. What colour is the sky? The sky is grey.

The air heavy with smoke poses the question, should we stay or should we go. We evacuated twice and stayed the third time. The 2019/20 fires burnt 75% of our beautiful East Gippsland environment, where we lived at the time. It destroyed ancient trees, old growth forest, houses, animals and more. I grieved for this loss for a lasting time. But it gave me the chance to visit and revisit a couple of chosen burnt sites where I could follow the recovery or the lack of regrowth and paint. For the next one and a half years all my paintings dealt with the aftermath of the fires. Then I decided to let the fires go. It had become too depressing. But this process moved my focus onto nature, the protection of it and its fundamental importance. I built a little model stage, put small natural elements of flora on the podium or projected images of nature all over the model. This became the base for a whole new body of works and lead to more ideas for future series. In my latest work "echoes of a new eden " nature again is the main player. This time nature is harder to find. In these post natural landscapes nature only shines through the surface of the structured landscapes as a reminder what was there before. The new landscapes invite you, the viewer, to add your own natural elements into these barren fields. New trees, new fungi, new ferns, new mammals and insects. Let your mind go wild!

Of course we do live in an altered world already. Only a few places are left that are truly untouched, pristine and pure. We created fields and cultivated crops, built water storage and manipulated the flow of rivers, we dig into the ground to extract minerals, the list goes on and on. Some of these interferences advance our lives in various ways, whilst others don't. In this series of works you will find some bright yellow, for example.  For me the yellow represents canola fields. A crop that is heavily genetically manipulated to the point that farmers have to buy new seeds every year. Seeds from their own crops don't germinate. Yet, how beautiful do the yellow fields look in spring? It's an amazing sight of a post natural landscape. Another example in the paintings are the strange towers/rock formations that are golden or silver trying to reach the sky. Like in the parable of the tower of Babylon, the sky or Eden is impossible to arrive at, the task is too big and the outcome possibly questionable. In the city of Babylon, the power of unity confounded their speech, no longer could they understand one another. The denizens then stopped the construction, left the city and scattered around the world. My towers stand as a reminder of the power of unity in humankind. 

For over thirty years I worked as a goldsmith and my focus was enamelling. This allowed me to introduce colour into my jewellery pieces. I had developed my own technique where I fired a layer of transparent enamel onto silver, then ground it back to a smooth surface.  After filing a pattern with diamond files into that plane, I would fire it again, grind it back and repeat that process several times until I was happy with the outcome.  This procedure resulted in enamel pieces that had a lot of visual depth to them, despite the glass not being thicker than 0.8 of a millimetre. My painting technique is quite similar, although there is no firing involved!

Regardless of the hard-edged, minimal look of my works, there is storytelling through the layers and the paintings change quite dramatically during the process. Remember when you were a child and in kindergarten or school you produced a wax crayon drawing, then painted thin washes of black ink or acrylic paint over the top and using an etching tool to scratch back into it? Removing the black allowed the crayon colours to appear. That is basically what I am doing!

I start off with some very thick paints, that get scraped, combed and brushed over the canvas in many layers using tools that I made for this purpose only. This creates an abstract pattern that sets a rhythm and tone to the underpainting and tells the first story. In 'echoes of a new eden' the understories are natural, abstract landscapes with rock formations, grasses, undergrowth and trees. Once the paint has dried, it is sanded back to a smooth surface. In the next stage thin washes are applied and worked back into to reveal what lies beneath. This process continues with working back and forth through the layers and painting further washes over the top until the final image emerges, and it is finished.