In her latest body of work Betra Fraval investigates the symbolic landscape. Taking her cue from artists such as Gauguin, Munch and Van Gogh, Fraval situates her landscapes with vivid colour and mark-making to express personal visions and internal states. Fraval’s graphic forms are not a reduction of the landscape, but are instead an opening-up, allowing for improvisation and self-expression.

Folding, sweeping brush strokes weave into each other in Fraval’s paintings, unravelling into space. Within these unfurling landscapes, there is a sense of bodies on the precipice of emerging, such as the torso-like forms in Fraval’s Body and Landscape. Until this body of work, the human figure, even in its abstracted form, has been omitted from Fraval’s paintings. However, Fraval’s symbolic exploration of the landscape has stepped confidently into this new terrain – one in which the personal and the subjective are woven into boundless skies, soaring mountains and open plains. Suggestions of paths, bodily forms and flows speak to the multitudes of journeys made across the exterior and interior landscapes of our lives.

Through her paintings, Betra Fraval graphically and poetically interprets the landscapes she encounters. Mountains of the Mind and its meditations upon the intersecting, interwoven landscapes of the internal and the external worlds followed a recent trip by Fraval to the Northern Territory. Specifically, Uluru, Mpulungkinya and Tjoritja. For the artist, the desert flowers were an unexpected blanket of colour against the red earth, symbolic of the persistence of life and abundance amidst seemingly difficult conditions. Likewise, unexpected waterfalls over Uluru left oxidised, dark grey, surging lines on the parched desert surrounds. These lines were reminiscent of brushstrokes, traces of the memories of recent flows to brimming waterholes. Mountains of the Mind speaks to the life and resilience often found in the places and moments we least expect.