Swan River Print Studio Spring Exhibition
City of Melville Art Awards
Bodies of Work
This Friday 31st July, the Printmaker’s Association of Western Australia’s (PAWA’s) ‘Bodies of Work’ exhibition opens at the Moore’s Building Contemporary Art Gallery in Fremantle (46 Henry St, Fremantle). The opening is from 6-8pm and the exhibition, which comprises works from PAWA members, runs until the 16 August. The exhibition is a combination of ‘bodies of work’ from a number of PAWA members as well as single work contributions from other members.
Six works from my ‘The Waratah and the Thylacine’ series are being shown.
Many thanks to PAWA for creating this opportunity.
Ever Present Absence
Heathcote Cultural Precinct (HCP) has just opened an exhibition showing work of artists associated with the precinct. The exhibition is called ‘HCP – In an Era of Isolation’. Each of us were invited to submit a work that we made during lockdown or which might reflect on our experience of lockdown. The work I submitted is a hand-coloured linocut print called Ever Present Absence.
Ever Present Absence is part of my Waratah Series, a series of images combining the waratah flower (Telopea speciosissima) with thylacine motifs. The series was begun during the Australian 2020 bushfires and continued through the COVID-19 lockdown, and seeks to explore beauty, ephemerality, and loss through combining these two iconic images. The thylacine and the waratah reference impacts on Australian fauna and flora following colonisation and the ongoing degradation of the environment subsequently (waratahs are now a protected species, ‘in the wild’). Telopea (from the Greek word telopos, meaning ‘seen from afar’), is also a way of talking about the many years that we have known about climate change and its likely effects.
Ever Present Absence/ Hand-coloured linocut print on Magnani 300gsm paper/ Edition of 10/ Waratah series.
Heathcote Open Day
The Swan River Print Studio will be open again during the Heathcote Open Day, Sunday 3rd November. Lots of stalls at the markets and of course our prints…
City of Melville Open Studios 14 & 15 September
Harvey Mullen & I at the Swan River Print Studio getting ready for the City of Melville Open Studios Weekend, coming up on the 14 and 15 September. Swan River Print Studio is one of the participating studios. Photo courtesy of Miles Noel Photography https://milesnoel.com/
Further information on the Open Studios can be found here: Open-Studios-Art-Trail-Map-2019
Koto the artist
SRPS opening
Swan River Print Studio Summer Exhibition
Map of a Falling Dark at the Butter Factory, Denmark
Map of a Falling Dark is a small exhibition at the Butter Factory, Denmark. It combines some work from my Scent of a Falling Dark exhibition held in Fremantle last year with new work exploring the theme of de-extinction. ‘Reproduction’, the print on the far left, draws on images of preserved thylacine joeys to show them being sent upwards to the skies in hot air balloons while another thylacine watches them from below. There’s a couple of other thylacines hiding in this work too…
‘Re-animation’, next to this, shows two human-like figures wearing thylacine masks. In the background, a view through a large window references the ‘Reproduction’ linoprint as well as a framed picture of Benjamin, the last thylacine in captivity, on the wall.
These prints along with the others on this wall will also be on show at the Swan River Print Studio’s Summer exhibition opening Saturday 9th February at Early Works in South Fremantle, along with the work of other Swan River Print Studio artists.
