John Wolseley was born 1938 in England and settled in Australia in 1976. He has travelled and painted all over the continent from the deserts of central Australia to the forests of Tasmania and the tidal reaches of the far north west. His work over the last twenty years has been a search to discover how we dwell and move within landscape – a kind of meditation on how land is a dynamic system of which we are all a part. In his most recent exhibitions he has documented the different stages of a bushfire and the miraculous re-generation of the blackened trees and scrubs in an eternal cycle of destruction and renewal.

Much of the artist's work in recent years has been about the evolution of the earth's surface through continental drift as seen in the 1996 exhibition Tasmania to Patagonia : Tracing the southern continents and the 2001 installation Tracing the Wallace Line . Both these exhibitions described how the earth's geological structures have metamorphosed over time and how the microcosmic world of species evolved and changed as an integral part of those greater movements. These projects looked at how even the land beneath our feet is moving and unfolding and included painting, drawings and installations which related the minutiae of natural forms to the abstract dimensions of geology.

John Wolseley is represented in all state galleries and numerous public and private collections. A monograph: Land Marks by Sasha Grishin was published in 1998 by Craftsman house and a second edition is due out in March 2006. The DVD John Wolseley: The Smokers Have Taken the Gold is available from Creative Cowboy Films (www.creativecowboyfilms.com). He is represented in Sydney by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and in Melbourne by Australian Galleries. In September 2005 John Wolseley was awarded a Doctor of Science, (Honorus Causa) from Macquarie University , Sydney.