about me
I have been producing and exhibiting artwork for more than 30 years. Solo shows have included painting, sculpture, printmaking, collage and ceramics. For the last 10 years I’ve been focusing on printmaking, creating hand painted linocuts. Printing with oil based printing ink, and colouring with watercolour, it is as if I’m creating work from two opposing forces. I find this combination of materials and processes gives me the tools to explore the Tasmanian landscape and its light.
My early work was centred around the human body and gender. I explored womens issues and the experience of embodiment and gender throughout history, often using found images or illustrations from historical printed matter. Pattern and repetition were important elements of my practice.
A tree-change to Tasmania from suburban Brisbane in 2009 saw a major shift in my focus. For ten years, I ran a native flower farm on the beautiful Tasman Peninsula. It was then that the landscape and the plants that emerge from it became a consuming interest for me.
The natural environment of Tasmania has a much more imposing influence on daily life than my previous experience of mainland city living. It was a huge change in the early days of farming and impacted my art practice as I took the time learning to really ‘see’ my new surroundings. My paintings from this period, the Sight Seeing series, are transitional, merging my earlier themes and my new found landscape obsession.
Printmaking became my primary way of working after the birth of my youngest child who was born with significant health problems and disability. I needed to find a new way to make work that fit in with the demands of caring and farming. Because of its multi-staged nature, printmaking allowed me to continue my practice by fitting in the art making around other responsibilities.
Relief printing involves many elements that I love. The carving process is tactile and sculptural. I love the abstraction that relief printing brings to an image, reducing it down to black and white spaces, light and shadow. Painting the linocuts with watercolour is an integral part of the way I currently work. I find the combination of materials very satisfying in that it combines the seemingly opposing properties of oil and water - oil based printed image and water based colour. Linocuts work from black, carving out light and colour. Watercolour begins with the white of the paper, and tone and depth are added. Its as if the work is born from the tension between opposing forces. For me, this reflects the dualities I see and seek to express in the landscape.
‘The Mountain’ kunanyi, where I now live and work, has become a dominating presence in my life. For the past five years, I’ve been exploring the alpine environment at the summit. Its a place that gets me excited, a place of both beauty and hostility. Emerging themes include the patterns and rhythms of time and the seasons, light and shadow, transcendence, and ways of mapping or tracing the landscape and my interaction with it.
Contact me gracegladdish@live.com
