In his youth as a regional gallery director Peter Timms imagined an exhibition called Flat Earth that would show all country artists that where they actually lived was, like anywhere else, able to be transformed into art. This article looks at the different approaches to landscape taken by the work of Tasmanian artists David Keeling, David Stephenson, Philip Wolfhagen and Richard Wastell, and how they transcend social, moral or political point-scoring to achieve their own kind of beauty, a clear-eyed, unsentimental appreciation of the environment as it really is, which frankly acknowledges the harm, both physical and conceptual, that has been inflicted upon it.

Timms paints a vivid picture of one of David Keeling's paintings, simultaneously posing questions surrounding how we as audiences deconstruct, interpret and therefore place values on certain images. His argument clearly lies in the appreciating of a process, a journey over the final image, especially when the image is as seemingly banal as that which typifies Keeling's practice. Keeling's previous works tended to acknowledge the traps of both the dewy-eyed romantic and the coldly rationalist approach. With his recent shift from a surreal satirical atmosphere to the common everyday, though the subject matter may be different, the locating of meaning is still the same.

Many years ago the Chinese writer Lin Yutang expressed that, from an Oriental perspective, Western artists always seem to depict objects from the outside, whereas those from China and Japan express their experience of them from within. This Eastern approach is inherent in the culture, not a position able to be merely adopted, and springs in part from religious inheritance, but also from the pictorial nature of Asian written languages. This inherent approach can be found in the recent work of Catherine Woo, expressing some sort of biological affinity. If the paintings can be said to be about anything, it is a the fine balance between energy and rest rather than the apparent subject matter.

Timms' account of a personal journey through Japan and South Korea and the traditional history of fine pottery crafts that accounts for a large degree of Eastern culture. He here explores the distinctions and connections between Eastern and Western material culture as exemplified through the life and role of the chopstick.