Exhibition Feature

Rebecca Waterstone: Field

Curator Hayley Zena Poynton interviews

Altitude artist Rebecca Waterstone about her upcoming exhibition Field.

Hayley Zena Poynton: Your practice is deeply intuitive, with an emphasis on the natural evolution of the artwork. With this in mind, how do you approach the process of artmaking?

Rebecca Waterstone: The process of making the work starts long before I actually put paint down. Walking, thinking, spending time in the landscape, gathering thoughts and ideas into a kind of mental collage, bound up with physical sensations, memories and feelings, all these experiences percolate sometimes for months or years before eventually emerging in the work itself. Once I feel the impetus to make work that expresses these things in physical form, it usually all comes out in a torrent of focused activity.

HZP: The mist of the Mountains is a strong motif within your work; to what extent do you think living in the Mountains informs your practice and even how you approach life itself?

RW: Living in the Mountains is everything. It’s like I’m plugged in to something that feeds me creatively and in my everyday life. Whenever I’m away from the Mountains, I feel myself being pulled back to them. The mist creates a world where I feel enveloped in something protective, wrapped up and safe, and all is right with the world. There’s nothing quite like a misty mountain day where the cloud is so low that everything is veiled in a thick, soft white blanket, and the black cockatoos are calling out as they soar over the landscape. Dropping into that sensation is when I feel most at home. That sense of peace is a central element of my work, both in the making of it and the final piece, I’m trying to get back to that place, that feeling.

HZP: From beeswax to pigment, oil paint to found objects; can you expand on your relationship with materiality?

RW: I’m a highly tactile person so the way something feels, and it’s physical qualities, is extremely important to me. Beeswax is both a liquid and a physical, more solid embodiment of the mist I was just describing – the way it partially obscures and veils imagery so it’s barely there, its opacity is akin to the qualities of the mist. The found objects and the collaged elements – old book covers, vintage papers, photographs, in wooden or metal housings – contain lived history and memory, evoking another time and place.