Lot 59

Private collection, Sydney

Alice Mary Parsons studied at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School, where she developed an enduring interest in landscape. Across her work, she returned frequently to the natural environment, depicting quiet waterways, wooded paths and the surrounding bushland.

In 1916, Parsons joined the Society of Arts and Crafts of New South Wales, where she exhibited pokerwork regularly into the 1930s. Closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, pokerwork involved using a heated tool to burn designs directly into the surface of wood. While the technique was commonly used to decorate domestic objects, Parsons approached the medium as an artist, using variations in line and tone to create pictorial scenes with a sense of depth and atmosphere.

Parsons's screens are among the more ambitious examples of her work in the medium. A four-fold screen dating to the 1920s, now held in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum, features an expansive Australian landscape extending across its panels. The present two-fold screen similarly brings together these decorative elements, with two intimate landscape scenes incorporated into its upper panels. Through these works, Parsons extended the possibilities of pokerwork beyond the decoration of smaller domestic objects, bringing her enduring connection with the Australian landscape into the interior.

Hannah Ryan
Senior Art Specialist