Strangerlands II is a large drawing continuing themes I have been developing in recent work. Questions of how we perceive nature, the alliances and disjunctions that we create at the point of intersection with nature. The large graphite and watercolour drawing is based on studies and photographs I have made in ancient myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghami1) and sassafras (Atherosperma moschatum) forests in Victoria.
Strangerlands II also includes references to past representations of landscape, popular culture, ancient manuscripts and the graphic arts including William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, an Iranian illuminated manuscript from the 15th century, and Goya’s Los Caprichos, 1799. The work plays with the imaginative possibilities of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ histories.
Martin King 1All quotes in the essay are from Martin King in dialogue with Cathy Leahy, February 2026.
In Martin King’s Strangerlands II, 2021, an aggrandized book hovers against a backdrop of conflagration based on William Strutt’s iconic painting of the catastrophic bushfires in Victoria in 1851, Black Thursday, February 6th 1851, 1864.2 In the collection of the State Library of Victoria. Martin King was awarded a State Library of Victoria Fellowship in 2017 to research and make work inspired by Strutt’s painting. Central to his research was the flora and particularly the fauna depicted in the painting and the idea of a cataclysmic event, and how it affects environment, diversity and species. The glowering red sky and tumultuous stampede of livestock and colonial settlers provides a counterpoint for the dense amalgam of images presented across the giant book’s pages. Likening this visual ‘cornucopia’ to ‘a cabinet of curiosities’, King celebrates through his imagery the wondrous diversity of Australian flora and fauna while sounding a warning about its vulnerability and loss.
The myrtle beech and southern sassafras species pictured by King on his book’s pages are ancient, their origins reaching back through deep time to the Gondwana supercontinent, their habitat in Southern Australia today restricted to gullies protected from fire. Playing across this backdrop of towering trunk and feathery fronds are species of birds, from lyrebirds and cormorants to the owlet nightjar perched in the book’s lower left corner. Based on a watercolour of the 1790s by the so-called Sydney Bird Painter, this image of the nightjar speaks to a more recent history, when Australia’s first European settlers were so entranced with the colony’s exotic birds that they created a significant body of natural history drawings of species new to Western eyes.3This watercolour is part of an important collection in the State Library of New South Wales of hundreds of drawings of birds, plants and animals. These are unsigned and now thought to be the work of a number of artists, who have previously been known as the Sydney Bird Painter. In contrast to this scientific tradition of representing nature is the lushly drawn excerpt from an Iranian illuminated manuscript in the upper left in which the decorative, intertwined trees and birds reflect a perception of nature and gardens as paradisical and inspiring.
Integrated amongst these images are symbols of death – memento mori – drawn by the artist from many sources. A shadowy human skull is picked out against a dense background on the left, while skeletons of bird wings and a human arm glow white against the foliage on the right. Adjacent to the owlet nightjar is the iconic final scene from Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, where Death leads the characters away silhouetted against the sky. King appreciates Bergman’s poetic reprisal of the medieval Dance of Death allegory which is a reminder of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. The repetition across the book’s pages of memento mori and depictions of the natural world from different traditions and times allows King to build a complex reflection upon the cycles of life, and upon continuity and death in relation to the natural world and the pressures facing it in the Anthropocene age.
King’s use of an enormous volume as the compositional focus of Strangerlands II is underpinned by his appreciation of the book as a ‘repository for ideas and images’. Unlike the single viewpoint of the canvas, King states, ‘a book can tell a single story over many pages or many stories as single pages’. The artist’s engagement with books has been sustained over a long period – he has made numerous hand-printed artists’ books during his career and in recent years has begun exploring books as sculptural objects. Second-hand books are transformed by the addition of King’s bird etchings and encaustic wax and assembled into composite displays. The physical book of these object-based works takes on a new ‘beguiling hyperreality’ in the series of large-scale drawings to which Strangerlands II belongs.
King based the volume in Strangerlands II on a book from his own library, Thomas Bewick’s British Birds, 1804, which appealed because he ‘liked the binding of the book and the way it sat when it opened out, giving a sculptural quality’. With the volume chosen, King then began compiling his images and ideas, initially in Photoshop, before turning to making the actual drawing itself. At this stage the process becomes ‘intuitive and responsive to the progress of the drawing as it takes shape in real life’
‘Strangerlands II is remarkable for its technical complexity and the immense skill with which the artist breathes life into the dense philosophical and aesthetic layering of his composition’
Cathy Leahy
While he has worked across many media during his long career, from large canvases to hand-drawn animations, Martin King’s abiding métier remains works on paper – drawing and printmaking. He sees his practice today as being essentially drawing based. It is the materiality of the drawing media – the various qualities of graphite, watercolour and paper – that most excites him.
Strangerlands II exemplifies King’s fluent control of different drawing techniques and his embrace of the medium’s flexibility. In this large drawing, which measures 148.0 x 226.5 cm, graphite, watercolour, gouache and gold foil are deployed on drafting film and paper. The primary support is a huge sheet of drafting film, a material the artist loves for its translucency and the unique way in which the graphite sits on the surface, explaining how ‘the directional aspect of each stroke of the graphite catches the light, enlivening and defining each stroke and direction’. He uses these directional strokes to create ‘rhythms and patterns in the imagery and objects which would be impossible on paper’. This is evident in the whorls in the background sky and abstract patterns that play across the book’s pages, creating dense, glittering black tonalities. This depth of tone gives way to evanescent smoky greys brushed on with water-soluble graphite and to brilliant whites that stand out against the moody depths of the composition. Subtle colour glows through the transparent sheet in the sky and foreground areas, which the artist has applied to a sheet of paper that sits behind the drafting film. This novel approach provides a ‘muted, mysterious’ quality to the colour that is singularly appropriate for the ominous, glowering red sky and muted pall thrown across the land, that is known and feared by all Australians, as the harbingers of bushfire. This complexity of technique underpins the philosophical ambition of this major drawing which weaves history, culture and environmental concern into a powerful statement about human-engineered environmental crisis.
Cathy Leahy is NGV Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings.
Strangerlands II was awarded the 2021 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award and was generously donated to the National Gallery of Victoria by the artist in 2025. The NGV warmly thanks Martin King for this donation and for sharing information about the making and sources of this work.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 58 May–June 2026.
Notes
All quotes in the essay are from Martin King in dialogue with Cathy Leahy, February 2026.
In the collection of the State Library of Victoria. Martin King was awarded a State Library of Victoria Fellowship in 2017 to research and make work inspired by Strutt’s painting. Central to his research was the flora and particularly the fauna depicted in the painting and the idea of a cataclysmic event, and how it affects environment, diversity and species.
This watercolour is part of an important collection in the State Library of New South Wales of hundreds of drawings of birds, plants and animals. These are unsigned and now thought to be the work of a number of artists, who have previously been known as the Sydney Bird Painter.