My studio practice
Welcome to my studio in Fern Tree, in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Keep scrolling for a peek into how and where I create my work …
My work often begins with photographs. Because I slot in my art practice between caring responsibilities for my youngest child with disability, I find that I use what ever is at hand to allow creativity to flow and my smart phone is always at hand. I use photographs as a form of note taking when I’m out and about. Later, I play with the photos to create compositions, shapes, colours that interest me. I’m interested in images that remind me of how I feel when I’m in a place, or images that symbolise experiences.
Jerry Saltz
American Art Critic
“A camera is one of the great drawing tools. Take lots of pictures of anything and everything that interests you. These things are trying to tell you something. The pictures become notes, sketches, touchstones, references. In drawing, ABC means Always Be Clicking”
Printmaking is a process of many stages. I can have lots of different pieces on the go at once at different parts of the process. There is always something I can pick up and do when I have some time. Some ideas are being transferred or drawn onto lino. Some are in the process of being carved. After carving, I print with oil based relief printing ink, mostly onto Stonehenge paper. Once dry, I work on colouring a new print until I am happy with the results. Prints in the edition are painted as they are ordered so I keep my colour trials and use them and photographs for reference. In this way, my work straddles both printmaking and painting. I produce multiples, but each is unique.
Recently I’ve begun to rip up old prints and refit them, cutting and pasting to make entirely new compositions. I love ‘drawing’ with the found lines within the older work, cutting along them and finding ways they connect with each other, as if mapping paths taken in the landscape. Once these collages have come together, I then paint the resulting composition.
“…it’s as if grace is making her own new place to be, or a map of the place she finds herself in, made of the fragments and the moments and the shape of her life, literal and allergorical.”
Andrew Harper
“A complex life has no manual, so you must write your own, find your own way, sing your own song, choose your own adventure: because it has chosen you.”
Andrew Harper
For more thoughts about my collage work, you can read some words by the excellent Andrew Harper in my ‘About my work’ section