Night patrols (Around Maliana)

Jon Cattapan (b. 1956) has been interested in night scenes and the nature of nocturnal light since the mid-1980s. This triptych was inspired by Cattapan’s experience of viewing the landscape and soldiers through night-vision goggles while he was on deployment as an official artist to Timor-Leste in 2008. He wanted to convey anonymous peacekeepers as they try to communicate with people and integrate into their surroundings.
While Cattapan’s paintings and drawings are highly subjective, they constitute alluring evocations of the Timor-Leste landscape that reveal the magnitude of the task the Australian Defence Force peacekeepers took on.