Jacqui Driver

Jacqui Driver is an installation artist living and working on Gadigal land. She makes large scale lithographs and silk drapes which form the basis for her installations, as well as audio visual work. She has had 5 solo shows over the last few years and has been a participant in various art prizes, including Hazlehurst Works on Paper, The Waverley Art Prize 2022, and Burnie Print Prize 2021. She has worked in Sydney as a casual printmaking academic for over thirty years, having taught at UNSW, NAS and ACU and run numerous independent workshops and is well known for her experimental printmaking knowledge. She is currently represented by Redbase Art Gallery in the Aotearoa Art Fair.

11 | Jacqui Driver, Nest, 2022, lithograph in 8 panels printed on Arches Rives BFK, 152 x 112 cm. $3500.

Anxiety, mothering and living with a disability frame her research into transgenerational trauma. This personal perspective with its psychological and physical wounding, is interconnected with her experiences of ‘mother blame’ and other societal judgements. Her work looks to multi-disciplinary printmaking to articulate the emotional complexity faced with mothering, and the ambiguity of love, distress, and avoidance when faced with mental health crisis when her thought processes have been impacted by her encounters with childhood trauma. The thicket imagery grew from contemplating these interconnected elements and just seems to fit with the complexity of difficult mothering.

The Nest is about the protection of the thicket, how the attachment with family and learning to live with mental health issues can sometimes provide you with love and the feelings of being held safely and securely. There is hope in this thicket as it advances over the rocky environment in which it is growing.