Tell us about your creative process. What drives your practice?

Broadly speaking, my practice is process-driven. Materiality and experimentation are often the starting point for a body of work, although as the conceptual aspects emerge, they are generally focused around the idea that materiality can be employed in order to evoke connotations of care, time and intimacy. In exploring this, I often employ slow techniques, including natural dyes, weaving and elementary stitching in the hope that the palpable time invested in making the individual objects encourages a reciprocal exchange with the viewer. As an extension of this, I am currently investigating a social practice element to my work whereby the handmade objects are gifted to the audience and exchanged with other artists without expectation of reciprocation, but function more directly as a gesture of care.

How has printmaking and its methods influenced your approach to art making?

I suppose printmaking becomes important within the framework of labour intensity and slowness as something embodied in the outcomes of my practice. Drawing is spontaneous, quick and direct whereas the process of printing requires several stages of development prior to the final result. This additional time spent developing the matrix is important for my practice. It is also the development of the matrix itself, often the imagery that I create is site specific, related to ‘home’ spaces, the domestic and mundane as well as natural spaces – the matrixes I develop become records of this, and they are at times employed in projects that come to being years later. 

It is rare for me to edition an image in the traditional sense – and increasingly it is rare for me to print them onto paper at all, instead the matrixes are used for varied outcomes at different times and will often only appear once or twice in my work. 

Are there any female printmakers and/or artists that influence you?

There are several female printmakers whose practice I greatly admire, Elizabeth Banfield and Jo Lankester are a current obsession of mine. Although I think the most substantial influence on my current practice would be contemporary artist Rebecca Mayo – Rebecca’s work also merges printmaking and textiles and she has worked with a number of site-specific projects. I credit Mayo with broadening my perspective on how site-specific recordings and projects can evolve, she has a fantastic way of documenting her own presence within a space rather than the space itself – these outcomes can be incredibly powerful.

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

Currently, I have an exhibition opening on the 7th of August at Scratch Art Space where I am exhibiting alongside my partner, Nick Wakeham. This has been an exciting and challenging experience for us both as we have generatedindependent bodies of work that are responsive to the same site-specific location and yet still present incredibly different outcomes. We also share a studio for the first time this year, so it has been interesting for us to see the influence that this has had. I am also planning a major new project that expands to social practice, this involves producing small handmade ‘squares’ or ‘patches’ of art and sending them to other female artists as an ongoing exchange. This project comes from my interest in 1970’s mail art (or Femailart) and my ongoing admiration of Australian artist Pat Larter, I expect this project to come to fruition during 2020.   In addition, I have recently joined the board of AIRspace Projects in Marrickville which has presented an exciting new opportunity to meet and a support a range of emerging and more established artists, which is something that I am incredibly excited about!