Tell us about your creative process, what drives your practice?

Through my work, I explore the built environment. I’m interested in how values and ideas are embedded within our everyday surroundings and how these impact our relationship to place. Looking at what is valued and what is not is one way I approach that idea. My process is intuitive and open-ended and starts with observation. Part of my thinking is that I want to express what it feels like to look at something, to observe colour and light. I use printmaking, photography and installation to explore and record my perceptual experiences. Each medium has a place in the process. Photography is explorative, I use it to find things. I take my camera and just go looking. Printmaking is the slowest part, but it’s where ideas are clarified and the work really moves forward. The process-based nature of printmaking is important because it creates a structure to work within. Each step involves making decisions, so I work steadily towards clarifying what I’m doing. I print and reprint, working in layers and building up colours gradually. There are endless combinations of colour, plate tone and paper possible within the medium of etching and I find that vastness of possibility so exciting. 

Printmaking is traditionally a 2D medium, however you often pair your printed works with found objects to create abstracted installations. What is the role of installation in your practice? 

Printmaking, particularly etching, is usually two-dimensional, but the materials lend themselves to installation. I use Japanese papers, which can be very thin but strong. Because they’re translucent and pick up the light, I see them more as objects in space rather than as neutral substrates. I like the idea of pure colour floating in three-dimensional space and I’ve found bleed prints with oil-based inks on translucent paper allow that to happen. I like the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica’s description of this as “the monochrome’s will to three-dimensional space”: because it lacks subject matter, the image exists in space differently and becomes an object. By combining the prints with found objects in installations, I can explore different ideas of aesthetic value. I think the found objects become similar to the prints because of the gallery setting – we pay attention to their aesthetic material qualities and many of them are also monochromatic. The relationship between a print and an object, within an installation, becomes an active thing. Installation is a way to explore the relationship between art and the real world, and by bringing real objects into the gallery, questions of value instantly emerge.

Your work shows a tension between hard and soft in both material and process - heavy stones accompanied by delicate papers, and aquatint etchings printed with almost translucent ink. How does this duality translate from your conceptual practice? 

I’m interested in the in-between, in things becoming their opposite. In my recent work, the prints have some of the qualities of the objects: the prints replicate aspects of the object’s colours, tones and textures. In one work, thin paper is printed to echo a silver tarpaulin and these are displayed together. One is cheap, durable and utilitarian, the other delicate, handmade and aesthetic. I want to communicate beauty in the everyday, but not an idealistic beauty. The materials with the dirt and dust are there because I want to retain what those objects are like in their environment. The purity and cleanness of the prints suggests a different space, the space of the mind, of ideas and perfection. I’m interested in how those two spaces relate to each other and I’m attracted to the fact that they seem irreconcilably different. By placing them side by side, those two different realities can exist at the same time. 

Are there any female printmakers | artists that influence you?

I really like the work of R. H. Quaytman. She uses screen-printing as a fundamental part of her process but often also transforms those printed images with painting and other processes. Another great printmaker is Anne Appleby - her aquatints are so beautiful. They are almost monochromatic but have the subtlest colour blends at the edges, which are based on colours in nature changing with the seasons. Her process involves printing many layers of coloured inks and really shows how subtle colour can be when printing aquatint. Kathan Brown, the founder of Crown Point Press has been an influence. From the early 1960s, her studio invited conceptual artists to work with the etching process, which really transformed the medium. Poetry also informs my work. Some contemporary poets that are an influence at the moment are Tracey K. Smith and Karen Solie. 

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

I’m about to begin an artist residency at Gallery Lane Cove Creative Studios and will spend this year making a new body of work that explores the way materials are transformed through the printmaking process. Lane Cove has a great printmaking studio, so I’m excited to have the opportunity to work there. 

I am looking to expand my focus from my own home to other areas of the city, other people’s experiences, to get inside another world. I’m planning on exhibiting more as a part of my practice, as a way to test out ideas, which is a new direction for me. I’m excited about where my work will go. How it will develop or what will result from the process is always an unknown, but I feel like I’m moving towards something and finding the way as I go.