Published on the occasion of Seven + Seven: Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain
Australian Artists
Rebecca Beardmore
G.W. Bot
Tamika Grant-Iramu
Barbie Kjar
Wendy Murray
Janet Parker-Smith
Judy Watson
Canadian Artists
Derek Besant
Sean Caulfield
John Dean
Liz Ingram & Bernd Hildebrandt
Alexandra Haeseker
Walter Jule
Jewel Shaw
Publication and Design Development
Townsville City Council
Contributing
Authors
Jo Lankester
Derek Besant
Rebecca Beardmore
Artwork documentation
Andrew Rankin
Acknowledgement of Country
Townsville City Council acknowledges the Wulgurukaba of Gurambilbarra and Yunbenun, Bindal, Gugu Badhun and Nywaigi as the Traditional Owners of this land. We pay our respects to their cultures, their ancestors, and their Elders – past and present – and all future generations.
SEVEN + SEVEN:
Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain
12 July - 15 September 2024
Pinnacles Gallery
Foreword
Jo Lankester
I warmly and gratefully write the introduction to Seven + Seven: Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain exhibition held at Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia.
As an Australian Artist and Arts Worker, I live in a world of imagery, exploring the complexities of my personal experiences navigated and traversed in the landscape and the built environment and told through topographical images. My art practice involves physically walking the landscape and creating prints that reflect my inner landscape as gathered visual inspirations and said through the printmaking process of various techniques. When I met Derek and Alexandra in Portugal in 2017 at the Douro Global Print Symposium, we immediately connected through our visual language and our shared geographical experience in landscape and its influence on our work. We shared stories about our similar connections to country and printmaking, as well as our career choices. These conversations sparked the idea that has continued to develop, even in the face of global crises such as climate change and the challenges of the worldwide pandemic. Australian and Canadian artists have worked with the broad theme of ‘landscape’. We can now see the serendipitous approach the seven Australian and seven Canadian artists took in sharing their local and global thoughts and experiences as image makers, particularly in print technology. This shared experience creates a sense of unity and connection among the artists and the audience, fostering a deeper appreciation for the exhibition.
The exhibition features a diverse range of artists from Australia and Canada. The artists included in the exhibition are G.W. Bot, Rebecca Beardmore, Tamika Grant-Iramu, Barbie Kjar, Wendy Murray, Janet Parker-Smith, Judy Watson, Derek Besant, Sean Caulfield, John Dean, Liz Ingram & Bernd Hildebrandt, Alexandra Haeseker, Walter Jule, and Jewel Shaw.
These artists work in various media, including innovative commercial print technology and traditional techniques and processes, including etching, lithography, screenprinting, and relief printing. Their interpretations of the theme align with a shared landscape experience and print media’s shared universal visual language.
The artists explore independent responses to landscape themes, each offering unique perspectives on the vastness of their countries and the challenging environments that the artists inhabit. It also addresses the impact of climate devastation and grief, migration, and colonialism in Canada and Australia. Their responses to the theme ‘Across Unknown Terrain’ offer a rich tapestry of landscape elements, including the built environment, encompassing the physical, cerebral, symbolic, political, nautical, navigational, environmental, cultural, and social aspects. It also examines the treatment of First Nations peoples by British colonialism, with Judy
Watson, a proud Mundubbera/ Meanjin/Magandjin woman, directly addressing the impact of colonialism on Australian First Nations peoples through her prints and video work. The artists’ unique perspectives promise to intrigue and captivate the audience, offering a deeper understanding of the themes explored in the exhibition.
While the artists in the exhibition employ diverse approaches, they all share a common thread of innovation. For instance, Canadian artist Walter Jule’s installation, ‘In the Solitude of an Autumn Stroll‘, incorporates branches, while Australian artist G.W. Bot uses mulberry tree pulp as the substrate of her print, ‘Ocean and Grassland Glyphs I ‘. These unique approaches demonstrate the artists’ commitment to incorporating raw and manually produced materials. While utilising more traditional print techniques, other artists in the group are printing on Alpha cellulose paper made from processed wood pulp and 100% rag paper. These innovative techniques used by the artists will inspire and impress the audience, showcasing the ever-evolving nature of printmaking.
Rebecca Beardmore, a Canadianborn Sydney, Australia artist, and John Dean, a Calgary, Canada-based artist, bring a unique approach to the landscape. Through their innovative use of photography and printmaking, they disrupt the image as an object of representation and distort the perception of the landscape, urbanisation, and climate change. Tamika Grant-Iramu is a Brisbane, Australian-based
artist who uses traditional carving techniques to capture her visceral impressions of ‘place’ within the built environment.
Jewel Shaw, a Canadian Artist in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, is a proud Cree and Métis woman who descends from the Treaty 8 Territory in Northern Alberta. Alexandra Haeseker, a Calgary, Canadian artist, Janet Parker Smith, Sydney, Australia, and Barbie Kja, Melbourne, Australia, collectively work on themes of memory, identity, loss, migration, navigation, the environment, territory and time, grief, identity, and perception and experience from found objects through graphic symbolic imagery.
Wendy Murray, a visual artist born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Sydney, Australia, and now based in Los Angeles, brings a unique perspective to the exhibition. Sean Caulfield, an Alberta, Canada, located on Treaty 6 territory, artist, uses text and imagery to prompt viewers to contemplate social, political, and environmental questions. Derek Besant, a Calgary Canadian artist, and Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt, working collaboratively, are Alberta, Canada artists considering climate change through installations that engulf you in their presence. Their thoughtprovoking imagery and text aim to engage the audience in meaningful debates and encourage collective action on these critical issues. By sparking these conversations, the artists invite the audience to participate actively in the exhibition, fostering a sense of engagement and shared responsibility.
Essay
Derek Michael Besant RCA
In 2019 Australian artist, Jo Lankester and I began a discussion about geographic identity.
We wondered if an exhibition of contemporary graphic works by Canadian and Australian print-artists would somehow reveal particularities or influences of translation in ways we perceived each of our geographies and whether that affected our imagery... being from different continents.
Would each country find there was an underlying embedded psychological association with their physical environment and consequential art making, even in our contemporary global village mind set?
The curated exhibition, Seven + Seven: Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain is a response to those questions.
Based upon these elements of trust, randomness and the accidental, and now seeing the works for the first time together: it is as though the artists have constructed a magnetic field, a mapping of Nature - and an altogether aware perspective aligned to contemporary environmental issues of PostMillennial thinking.
I’ve always seen relationships between Canada having an abiding identity to the vast raw landscape it covers, where the boundaries, provinces, river systems and oceans hold proximity to its densities of urban centers. Where it is the distance between settlements that measures time, and survival instincts based on climate, culture, geography and weather in how we navigate our country. Similar
to how Australia settlements dot the outer edges of the island; but have a psyche drawn from the vast interior landscape that each individual carries...
The Canadian artists invited for this exhibition have experience representing the country in many international Graphics Triennials around the world. However this project, in context with Australia has given them a challenge to step outside their usual studio practice, to look at where they live... differently.
Do we as Canadians regard ourselves in ways that until now, we have simply not recognized as shared algorithms of perception? Do the Australians also bring different probabilities to their work and how they define their identities across their work as something inherent to their environment? The dialogue and debate about how we “see” and how that informs what we “construct” is at the heart of this exhibition.
Walter Jule’s work incorporates actual branches of trees with imagery that represents nature, with a play on our auditory faculties. Leaf structures become patterns extracted from Nature. The hundreds of leaves occupying the floor space are actually printed and laboriously glued double-sided in order to mimic the viewer’s experience of walking through real leaves.
But Jule also has introduced an augmented audio track of walking through leaves, playing slightly off from real time - as an interactive enticement for spectators to break the rules and walk onto the art itself. Boundaries between real, fictional and remembered experiences filter through his definitions of the unknown, as something to be reconsidered anew.
Sean Caulfield’s black & white linocuts regard Nature as forces to be reckoned with. Trees protrude through constructed walls. Groundswells smoke with volcanic energy. Microcosms grow to monumental scale, inflated by funnels and waving plant-like floral appendages. At the base of Caulfield’s themes lurks a cautionary wariness - in how our human exploitation of Nature can come back on us (as we’ve witnessed over the past decade in how our finite geography does not have infinite resources to be extracted, ultimately). Caulfield’s use of black & white linocut is like surgery on the body, leaving scars, stitches and wounds to heal.
Fire and water appear to engulf the fabric structure of collaborators, Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt’s work. Though both elements have associations of rebirth: they also reference the wildfires and flooding Alberta has experienced in recent years due to weather changes. Buried within the flames we notice a figure and text fragments turning to ash... in hypnotic fascination the eye explores the surfaces that are in conflict. Constructed as a tentlike structure, the fire becomes an inner sanctum between danger and safety. This dilemma drawn together as image, surface, object and text, becomes a reading of skin, in how the work registers temperature, movement, bulk and thinness all at the same time.
Another reference to purifying fire can be unearthed in John Dean’s series of aftermaths of forest fires. The strong vertical gestures of ravished tree trunks, stand like sentinels, juxtaposed with wooden window frames - at once interfering with our ability to go beyond the picture plane - yet revealing possible interiors that draw us in. The play between Nature inside and out,
invites spectators to investigate what lies through the window frames. However these ghostly grids elude our perceptions, remaining mysterious, while transforming the forest into a kind of transparent ground cover.
Another art equation set up between our illusions of Nature and the potential outcome of our desire to control it, can be found in Alexandra Haeseker’s mirror image. On one hand, the leaf-cutter ants deconstruct the leaf into a countenance of the artist herself... While the collective brain of the ant colony - reconstructs her likeness into their own image of her looking back at herself. Assembled into an Escher-esque conundrum - both portraits are representations rather than physical realities, though in our quest for meaning and understanding, the gestalt becomes an involuntary act of perception, whereby we bring our own recognition to situations that invent what we think we see...
Jewel Shaw’s set of six graphic surface treatments, explores the unknown terrain in maplike notations akin to navigating latitudes and longitudes. Are each of these fields viewed from a drone... where what you see is only from the advantage of removal and elevation?
Each image feels like a time-lapse of the same location being updated with current new data, alterations, additions and subtractions. Wood grain acts as evidence of the artist’s hand, almost like drawing with charcoal. The phantom image of a dog mask remains elusive, as if this spirit inhabits and governs this territory. Counting crosses and her awareness of the edge of each rectilinear sheet, has the power of searching for what lies under the ground (an archive of missing souls
perhaps...)? Is this an unmarking, erasing before our eyes, yet to be reclaimed?
My own work references the flotsam & jetsam / bits and pieces we all gather in kitchen drawers, on shelves in the garage, or find unwittingly assembled, like middens on construction sites. These accumulations start to have their own architectural integrity as recycled particles we do not quite know what to do with coalesce around themselves. “Throw away” culture has allowed such resulting particles to become armadas of floating plastic in oceans, and mountains of metal in landfills... They create their own familiar terrain, where some things are recognized, while others are like fading memory, left unnamed.
Together, the Canadian section of Seven + Seven circles around concerns that are close to home, yet are becoming global issues as we reach a tipping point on population, recycling, energy, and economies. Print media too has evolved with the works presented, spanning traditional methods, but incorporating advanced ink technologies, industrial materials and new hybrid applications. We live in worlds dominated by print technologies now at every turn, so there are intriguing ways to work with these developments to take graphic art potentials ahead as well.
Artists have always had the role of reflection and response to whatever their era demands. If I attempt to take each of the Canadian artist’s resulting imagery and observe how they might “speak” to one another - connections to the physical landscape still draws heavily upon a desired gesture to respect and embrace the wild... but from a very different vantage point.
The landscape across Canada is as varied as the groups of people who found their way there over centuries, and the differences reflected and transported into its matrix. However, gone is the unending romantic empty wilderness that once was depicted. Gone are the radiant explosive untamed mountain, forest, lake and icebergs painted en plein air. Gone are the never-ending wild territories traversed by migrating humans and wild species of animals and birds. Gone is the idea of the ends of the Earth... and more critically, our invention of those perceptions.
Underlying each of the Canadian artist’s perception of “terrain” seems to be a melancholy associated with how our habits as humans have consequences that need to be addressed.
The artist’s voices that call out to acknowledge the fragilities, the pressures, or appreciation of what is in crisis - is what has showed itself in these works. Perhaps the theme of unknown terrain is where we actually find ourselves standing while taking stock of the present, respecting and reflecting on the past, in order to prepare to face what will be the future of where we live, and who we are...
Essay: Neither Here nor There
Rebecca Beardmore
The trees lining the streets in my Sydney neighbourhood appeared especially autumnal on my run this morning. Maybe it was the early fog subduing all but these flashes of yellows and deep reds, but I couldn’t help marvelling at how Canadian it all felt. The fact of this sudden awareness seemed at once, quite ridiculous—it’s not like these trees had suddenly burst up through the ground. Why this sudden wave of nostalgia?
I was born and grew up in Montreal’s West Island, a largely English speaking precinct of a largely French speaking city in eastern Canada. My parents, both from Brisbane, had paused there, on a working holiday (of sorts), that started in London several years earlier. Mum called it an extended honeymoon, a rather ironic characterisation given most honeymooners seek the sun and surf rather than stray from it. Theirs lasted 25 years, and in the meantime, at age 20, I migrated back home.
When I was approached by Jo Lankester for inclusion in this exhibition, Seven + Seven: Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain, and asked to ‘draw upon the notion of the surrounding landscape and how we are tied to our vast geographies…’, I pondered notions of place and space and cultural connection and whether I had any conflicting sense of belonging.
Which group of Seven (no pun intended) did I represent? Is the place where one has lived most of one’s life, one’s origin? Were my roots and culture embedded in the fabric of my Canadian childhood or the Australia of my present and family lineage? Now, on the cusp my 50th birthday, I have lived in Australia for more years than I have not. I have raised a family here,
established my professional career as artist and academic here and so seamlessly woven myself into this country that I rarely get asked, ‘where are you from?’ And yet, running through the leafy mulch on this cool, damp morning, I felt my Canadian-ness with a wistful longing.
What is it to make a work about our land of origin, to investigate the meaning of landscape and understanding of place within the majestic geographies of these mutually expansive countries?
Despite their geographical distance, Canada and Australia share a similar history of colonisation— stolen lands scarred by violence, cultural effacement and conflict that is ongoing. A relationship to land has been a defining characteristic in their national identity; the countryside or country providing a sense of belonging and place, a place tainted by the colonial mission to seize and cultivate, a myopic endeavour that still haunts.
Landscape is the aestheticised representation of the land. The idea of landscape from a Western cultural discourse, is a genre of image making tied to the European traditions of painting and photography, and integral to the forging of a collective consciousness through the act of place making. As colonial outposts, Australia and Canada were defined by and distinguished for the beauty and terror of vast, seemingly unpopulated wilds, harsh uninhabitable climate, and pristine
isolated wilderness needing to be tamed.
In some cultural contexts, these mythical characteristics prevail, at least from a perspective of distance. Despite the most densely populated areas of Australia hugging the coastal fringes of the eastern seaboard, the outback, with its fabled expansive flat stretch of uninhabitable, hot, dry, red earth and venomous snakes still lingers like an old cliché, on the periphery, somewhere.
I am also guilty of regaling my Canadian youth to friends and family through vivid descriptions of ice, snow and freezing winds with a sense of Northern pride, when truthfully, I have never felt so cold as sitting at my computer in a draughty, poorly insulated Sydney house on a damp winter’s day.
The most significant and contested of shared mythologies is that of the empty land—terra nullius, a convenient position to declare for political expediency from a white sensibility. These lands were never empty and our fraught and difficult reckoning with the reconciliation of the past is ever present in the ethos of our contemporary shared landscapes.
Photography and printmaking too, have a shared lineage; a technical heritage of image production and re-production, the former primarily concerned with the documentary representation of its capture and the latter with the mediation of its transcription and dissemination.¬ The act of constructing nature as landscapes is hard to separate from the technologies of image making. The places we represent are transformed by the medium in which they are represented. Picturing places implies a sense of viewership and spectatorship in their framing. Often presented
as spaces waiting to be recorded, landscapes are staged as a kind of natural backdrop to humanity. They are inscribed with the narration of our own projection standing within or before them- as culture in nature or is it nature in culture?
Printmaking’s distinctive and materially rich production methodologies characterised by a process of layering provides a conscious reflection on the complexities of representing place as an aestheticised experience. Prints, like places, are palimpsests of meaning; a topography of experiences, stories and memories narrated through sedimentary layers of ink. Unlike photography with its emphasis on light, printmaking’s indexicality, articulated through a physical exchange between plate and pressure, puts the viewer in direct contact with the labour and material of its making, emphasising the image encounter through its material surface. Place is literally imprinted in a palpability of matter, prescribing a slower, more contemplative seeing, moving from subject to surface, image to object.
In my photo-print based practice, I have been looking to the horizon for much of the past decade, framing the landscape to examine and represent the habits of our own viewership. Using reflective surfaces to both capture and present the photographic outlooks I frame, I seek to obscure the specificity of place and supress the urge to locate the scene in favour of locating oneself within or before it. My intent is to represent the idea of place rather than the specificity of location, to present the landscape as a view to be looked at, a claiming of the land that recalls not only the condition of cultivation, but the authority of visual literacy enacted in the very partiality of our looking.
I strive to make grasping the image with any certitude difficult, to incite a labour in looking.
As a white settler of colonial descent, I am aware the partiality of my looking does not extend to other, indigenous ways of seeing country. Acknowledgement of this limitation does not account for what has been and what still is, but may possibly, gesture toward a way forward?
The history of Australian landscape is in a constant state of re-appraisal, propelled by increasingly complex and fluid systems of representations and viewership that shape our relationship to and identity with the space(s) we inhabit. As the mobility of the photograph’s digital form brings events and location closer to hand, the natural world feels ever more distant and I wonder if the photographic image (in this form), has perhaps lost its ability to speak to broader narratives of place and belonging.
Within our contemporary context it is difficult (even remiss not) to discuss the land (and landscape) without considering environmental issues that press upon us with increasing urgency and decisiveness. In recent years the frequency and severity of extreme weather conditions; floods, fires and droughts, have a had a catastrophic effect on both countries—environmentally, socially and economically. The awesome indomitability of the Australian and Canadian wilderness is proving more than symbolic and clearly, these abundant and bountiful lands are not the robust, ever-plentiful spaces that early Europeans perceived them to be. Indigenous Australians, with thousands of years of caring for country, are only recently being consulted for land management assistance,
as we come face to face with the fragility of places on the brink of disappearing.
The cultural practice and production of landscapes endure within the iconography of both nations. Pictures of national landmarks, natural or otherwise, persist upon us with abundance and efficiency, saying more about the lifestyle and landscape of our non-physical environment than the sites and scenes they project. I have traversed across unknown terrain, walked the Australian bush and hiked the Rocky Mountains, feeling a visitor and at home in the awe and unfathomability of both my homelands. Perhaps, the landscapes of our land of origin, those that connect us to place, are the images we carry within us—neither here nor there—in the liminal spaces between one time, one place and another. These are the constructions of place brought to bear through a conflation of observations, experiences and memories- both personal and shared. Nowadays, it can be difficult to see through the visual stimuli that pulls our attention this way and that until unexpectedly, a flash of colour comes into view. An image appears in the mind, a kind of landscape, uncannily both familiar and foreign but before you can grasp it fully, it slips back into the fog.
Rebecca Beardmore
Rebecca Beardmore is a Canadian born Australian contemporary artist based in Sydney. She completed her MFA in the department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, a Centre for Excellence in Printmaking. Through an innovative and experimental approach to materials and techniques, Rebecca seeks to expand the rhetoric around image perception and disrupt the image as an object of representation— evoking tensions between reading, seeing and perception. An accomplished print artist, Rebecca is particularly invested in the material properties that print affords to the photographic image. In this work, refined traditional hand printed photographic processes mingle with reprographic 4-colour separation printing, to emphasise the image encounter through its material surface. Crucially, the works present a convergence between the photographs proposed authenticity and experience of immediacy with the material subtlety and sensuality of more painterly impressions. Exploiting technologies of image production, old and new, Rebecca’s practice engages directly with the legacy of fine art printmaking to elicit contemplative viewing scenarios. Rebecca is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts. She
has published papers on the intersection of printmaking and photography in contemporary art and the expanding technologies in contemporary print practice. Rebecca is a previous winner, has been an invited judge in Australia’s most prestigious print prize, The Fremantle Print Award. She exhibits internationally and is represented by Artereal Gallery, Sydney.
Image (3333/N3333) are part of a series of CMYK photo-polymer prints of places I photographed on a field trip I took during COVID lockdown, with my aging parents, three teenage sons and two large sheets of shiny metal in an old diesel van. In their pairing (and colour inversion), these images speak more to the technical conditions of imaging the land, photographically and in print. I had always considered my subject as indicative of landscape, as placeholders for the act of looking, where specificity of site was not primary. But I acknowledge location is not entirely incidental, and always in the frame. I did drive west with the view of reaching the border of New South Wales or perhaps the fringes of where civilisation meets the wilderness… somewhere out back. Maybe it’s the vastness. Maybe it’s the flatness. Maybe I was looking for a landscape both
familiar and alien—a search for something Australian. I’m not sure I have entirely unpacked this yet but driving and watching the landscape shift the further west I drove was always the intention.
Crucial for me is the framing of the land—as reflected in a sheet of polished zinc. It distorts the depth of field and calls attention to the illusory distance in pictorial representation, rendering the familiar, a little unfamiliar or maybe it’s the unfamiliar, familiar? The perceptual space of landscapes has always intrigued me. The image as reflection in marred zinc softens detail and flattens space, democratising the picture plane. In its transcription through inky layers of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the surface becomes as important as the depth.
The diesel engine cut out seven times on our homeward journey, the sudden border closures forcing us down a very dry and lightly travelled dirt road with absolutely no reception. When we finally (unnervingly) crawled into Sydney, I learnt two important lessons: 1) The geography of NSW is striking in its diversity. 2) My dad, at age 80, is still very much the unfailing heroic father of my youth.
Rebecca Beardmore, Image (3333), 2021
Four plate photogravure on BFK, 76 x 76 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Rebecca Beardmore, Image (N3333), 2021
Four plate photogravure on BFK, 76 x 76 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Derek Besant
Derek Michael Besant RCA has had several selected solo exhibitions, such as “Drawing Conclusions” where he was the Canada Commissioner at the 10th International Douro Bienal in Portugal in 2020, “One Day...” at Myseum Of Toronto/ Intersections Public Art Project, Metro LRT Stations, Canada in 2019, “Nothing Personal” at The Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge University, Great Britain in 2018, and “Besant / An Atmosphere of Shadows” at Prince Takamado Gallery, Canadian Embassy, Tokyo, Japan in 2018. In 2017, he exhibited “The Dis-Integrated City” at The
Centro de Arte Moderno, Madrid, Spain.
He has also participated in selected group exhibitions, including “Postcards From The Edge” at Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca, New York City, USA in 2023, “Graphica Creativa: Artist’s Untold Stories” at Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland in 2022, “Triennial International de Gravure” at La Boverie Musée, Liège, Belgium in 2021, “Strand Ephemera” at The Northern Queensland Festival of the Arts, Townsville, Australia in 2019, “Tradition + Innovation” at
Haugesund International Museum of Fine Arts, Norway in 2019, “The Meetings” at Jutland International Video + Performance Festival, Denmark in 2019, “Immersed in Images” at Krakow International Triennial, Main Exhibition Krakow, Poland in 2018, and “Xuyuan Engraving Biennial” at Beijing International Centre for Research + Creation, China in 2018.
I had a dream after viewing large circular ice crystals gathering along the North Saskatchewan River in Canada. Formed by
colliding temperature changes and the current’s undertow, this phenomenon of circular discs rotating like whirling Dervishes along the river surface was like a ballet in Nature.
However: awareness of how our quotidian culture expels so much flotsam and jetsam plastic, metal and paper particles into water systems and landfills - my dream morphed into a correlated pure Physics equation: where the freezing ice discs become a flotilla of throwaway components that have an
equal and opposite reaction.
The new “terrain” we create under the misdemeanors of recycling realities erases the Nature experiences we seek, becoming a fragmented hybrid environment of its own existence..
My work assembles randomness created by the fallout of technology, as these elements coalesce around what used to be our notion of Landscape.
Derek Michael Besant Origins, 2023 UV thermal ink transfers onto triptych veil scrims 150 x 450 cm
Courtesy of the Artist
G.W. Bot
G.W. Bot. She has been a full-time artist for over 30 years, working as a printmaker, painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. She has exhibited her work extensively nationally and internationally, with over 70 solo exhibitions in cities such as Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Additionally, she has participated in over 200 group and invitational exhibitions, received numerous commissions, and earned residencies in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
G.W. Bot’s work has been represented in a number of prestigious exhibitions, including the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy in London (2013), Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now (Part 1) 2020, touring nationally 2024/2025, Out of Australia: prints and drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover
Thomas at the British Museum in London (2011), and The story of Australian printmaking 18032005 at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (2007). Her retrospective exhibition, G.W. Bot: The Long Paddock: A 30-year Survey, showcased across Australia from 2010 to 2013.
G.W. Bot’s work is held in over a hundred public art collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fogg Museum of Fine Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and many others.
G.W. Bot explains that she chose her exhibiting name 40 years ago, inspired by Aboriginal totemic belief. According to this belief, each clan member has a totemic relationship with a specific plant or animal in
their region. She identified with the idea of unity with the environment and chose the wombat as her totemic animal because they are abundant in her area. She derived her exhibiting name “G.W. Bot” from the earliest written reference to a wombat in a French source where it is called “le grand Wam Bot.”
Born in Quetta, Pakistan, to Australian parents, G.W. Bot studied art in London, Paris, and Australia and graduated from the Australian National University in 1982. Her drawings were first published as illustrations in a book in London in 1980, and she has been working as a full-time artist with an independent studio practice since 1985.
G.W. Bot’s two linocut artworks, Glyphs – Three Trees - Homage to Rembrandt and Ocean and Grassland Glyphs, were created in 2021, and
G.W. Bot, Glyphs - Three Trees (Homage to Rembrandt), 2021 Linocut on Hahnemühle paper,74 x 124.5 cm Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
both depict the land uniquely. The first artwork pays homage to Rembrandt’s etching, The Three Trees, which portrays three trees standing on a hillside facing an approaching storm. In Bot’s version, the flattened horizon lines create a dark sea of mountains, with austere bare trees in the foreground and three more trees in the distance. This image is a reference to the Crucifixion of the landscape.
The second artwork, Ocean and Grassland Glyphs, was also created in 2021 and is a one-of-a-kind piece in a series of 25 featuring linocut on tapa cloth. It is a ‘portrait’ of both the ocean and the grasslands, the moon (or sun) facing the viewer in all its majesty, the marks of the body and the background suggesting the strength and fragility within each of us as well as in nature.
G.W. Bot, Ocean and Grassland Glyphs I, 2021 Linocut on tapa cloth, 122.5 x 55 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Sean Caufield
Centennial Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Sean Caulfield is a Professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, located on Treaty 6 territory. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition titled “Evolving Anatomies” at the Ottawa School of Art, Orleans Campus, Ottawa, which also travelled to Espace Corps Secrets in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In 2018, he had solo exhibitions titled “Active Workings” and “The Flood” at The Esplanade in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In 2017, he presented “Firedamp: Revisiting The Flood” at the Edinburgh Printmakers in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2016, his solo exhibition “The Flood” was showcased at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Manning Hall, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In 2015, he exhibited “Landscapes in the Approaching Present” at the Alfred Glassell Jr Exhibition Gallery, Shaw Centre for the Arts, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. In addition, he participated in selected exhibitions such as “Dyscorpia” at the Enterprise Square Galleries in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 2019, “Lithography: Around the Stone” at the Musashino Art Museum, Musashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan in 2018, “Flux: Responding to Head and Neck Cancer” at the International Museum for Surgical Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, USA in 2018, “Under Pressure”
at the Rochester Contemporary Art Centre in Rochester, NY, USA in 2017, and “Immune Nations” at the Art Academy of Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway (in conjunction with GLOBVAC conference), which also traveled to WHO/UNAIDS in Geneva, Switzerland in 2017.
Fight-stopping Tools and Rules for Sharing are part of a series of eight large-scale linocuts created in collaboration with Susan Colberg (typography) and Steven Hoffman (text). Hoffman’s text is a distillation of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prizewinning work on design principles for sustainably managing commonpool resources and avoiding tragedies of the commons in which individuals draw on finite resources in ways that run counter to the longer-term common good. Ultimately one of the key themes of this new linocut series, which has the working title, Stories of Division, is to consider the polarization that can emerge as society works to take collective action to address environmental issues, or any other crisis. How do we collectively engage in meaningful debate, that involves difficult decisions about the longterm health of our society, without descending into a highly polarized space that results in inaction?
Sean Caulfield,Fight-Stopping Tools, 2022
Linocut, inkjet, silkscreen, Diptych, 102 x 125 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Sean Caulfied, Rules for Sharing, 2022
Linocut, inkjet, silkscreen, Triptych, 105 x 185 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
John DEAN
the beautiful are found at the edge of the room (…after Bukowski) [detail], 2022
Ultrachrome Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle
German etching paper
5 panels; 157.5cm x 81.3 cm each
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Andrew Rankin
John Dean
John Dean, a distinguished graduate of the Alberta College of Art & Design in 1975, has garnered international acclaim with his artwork. His pieces have graced prestigious exhibitions such as the Pro-TO-type(s) Canadian feature at the Krakow International Triennial, the Douro International Graphics Bienal
in Portugal, and the Novosibirsk International Graphics Triennial at the State Art Museum Russia. Notably, his works have been showcased at esteemed galleries like The Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt and the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary. His art has been permanently placed in esteemed collections,
including The Canadian Museum of Photography in Ottawa, the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts in Edmonton.
the beautiful are found at the edge of a room (after Bukowski)
“As a visual practitioner, I’ve always seen the camera as my third eye. For years I’ve looked into the aftermath of what forest fires leave behind in the mountain valleys of where I live near the Rocky Mountains.
The burned remains, although stripped of foliage, paired down into subtle shades of grey, to black and sometimes white ash, reveal their past lives as something that remains intact still.And though half of what they were is gone, they still manage to block a person’s view deeper into what the forest was, which has its own kind of mystery that draws me to it. I’ve had the wooden window frame for years as a studio prop, often in the background to suggest a room, which it does again. Now in a full frontal position inviting the viewer to look farther. What it reveals or conceals is still a mystery to me…”
Alexandra Haeseker
BFA, ACAD, MFA, RCA
Alexandra Haeseker, BFA, ACAD, MFA, RCA has exhibited extensively at various international exhibitions and galleries, including Fleurs Du Mal (solo) at VPAG Vernon Public Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada 2022, Anthem: Expressions of Canadian Identity at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt 2022, and Impulse at Tallinn International Drawing Triennial, Ars Project Space, Estonia 2021. Other notable exhibitions include The Botanist’s Daughter (solo) at EP Edinburgh
Printmakers, The Castle Mills Contemporary, Scotland 2020, REBELLIOUS: Women Artists of the 1980’s at AGA Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada 2019, and IAPA Invitational, International Art Alliance at the Taoxichuan Art Museum, Jingdezhen, China 2018. She has also exhibited at Departures: Masterworks from Canada at The Ardel Museum, Bangkok, Thailand 2017, The Silk Road Invitational Exhibition at The Shaanxi Art Museum, Xi’an, China 2017, Inter-
Woven at Kobro Museum of Fine Arts Lodz and National Cultural Centre Gallery Warsaw, Poland 2017, and The Phobia Project: New Work on Beauty & Repulsion at Cerveira International Sculpture Biennial, Portugal 2016. In addition, her work has been showcased at Canada / Japan The Kyoto City Art Museum, Japan 2016, and RESONANCE, Canadian Art at the Shengzhi Art Centre, Beijing, China 2015.
Alexandra Haeseker, “Across Unknown Terrain” conjures images associated with explorers,
navigators, and the history of migration in my mind. Though those are all examples having to do with our human impositions upon a larger geography. Whereas part of my studio practice investigates less obvious worlds that build around our inventions, in observation of flora and insect worlds...
The subtle signs of change in the plethora of life forms of the valley woodlands where I live in Southern Alberta, have taught me there are encrypted systems, social constructs and patterns interrupted by climate
change that affect us all. Perhaps the “unknown” aspect of the exhibition’s title, is indeed the very subject my image responds to with its problem of symmetry
Taking the Leaf-cutter ant as a metaphoric mirror in how we deconstruct nature in our own image, while nature itself has the propensity to reconstruct itself anew. The answer lies in between the two.
Alexandra Haeseker Problems of Symmetry, 2023
UV Latex ink on synthetic paper cutout components
150 x 450 cm
Courtesy of the Artist
Liz Ingram & Bernd Hildebrandt
Liz Ingram, a distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta, is a globally recognized artist with a string of prestigious awards to her name. Her work, which has been honoured in Canada, Slovenia, Poland,Korea, Brazil, Estonia, India, and Finland, has captivated audiences worldwide. She is a member of, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the City of Edmonton Hall of Fame, and 2017 was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. She is also recipient of the the University of Alberta Kaplan Award, and the University Cup (the University’s highest award). Her solo exhibitions, including ‘Touching Gravity’ at Proyecto´ace Gallery in Buenos Aires in 2018, ‘Water/ Bodies’ at FAB Gallery, University of Alberta in Canada in 2017, ‘Liz Ingram: Site Collaborations’ at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2017, and ‘Liz Ingram: Print Encounters’ at Prince Takamado Gallery, Embassy of Canada, Tokyo in 2015, have garnered international acclaim.
Bernd Hildebrandt is a freelance exhibit designer. Working for University of Alberta Museums until 2007, he designed exhibits on topics including dentistry, mummification, drawings from Rubens to Picasso, fluorescent minerals, meteorites and uncut diamonds. Working freelance he designed exhibits on, Chinese robes and paintings for the Mactaggart Art Collection, ‘Discovering Dinosaurs’, Women of the Rockies, ‘Edgar Degas’ (Art Gallery of Alberta), and ‘Inuit Sanaugangit’ in the new Qaumajuq addition of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He has also designed wayfinding banner posts for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, as well as numerous gallery exhibit cases. As an installation artist Bernd has participated in exhibits working collaboratively with Liz Ingram in Canada, Poland, Argentina, Germany, and New York from 1996 to the present. These exhibits utilized his expertise in exhibit design and spatial arrangement, and often incorporated his poetry into their projects.
The human condition, with a focus on the human body in nature, is an ongoing preoccupation for us. Our collaborative art practice attempts to connect the viewer to a sense of place within nature. Through artistic and physical interaction with the land, and nature’s raw and delicate forces, we are witness to the regenerative power of nature at a site in the northern boreal forest of Alberta, Canada that has been severely affected by settler and industrial activities. Using metaphorical images of fire and floods, destruction and nurture, “Beyond Reckoning” attempts to express a truth about the pressing need to love, to act, and to find our place within nature.
Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt Beyond Reckoning, 2021-2022
Tamika Grant-Iramu
Tamika Grant-Iramu is an artist based in Brisbane. She was born in 1995 and graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2017 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Interdisciplinary Print Media. Since then, she has been focusing on developing her relief printmaking practice. Her work is inspired by the natural environment around her, particularly the unnoticed details of native flora. Tamika’s connection to relief print carving mirrors the strength and fluidity of her natural surroundings, allowing her to discover new forms. She emphasizes the importance of the connection between the artistic process and herself as the medium, creating a new dialogue in her art. As a landscape artist, Tamika immerses herself in natural landscapes and utilizes relief print carving to capture her visceral impressions of place.
Her practice reflects her cultural identity, incorporating her Papua New Guinean, European, and Torres
Strait Islander heritage. Through her work, she merges her culture’s carving techniques and storytelling aesthetics with the Western influences of her upbringing as she explores and develops her own story.
In addition to her printmaking practice, Tamika translates her artworks into new mediums such as textiles, interior furnishings, and public art.
Tamika Grant-Iramu uses handcoloured relief prints to closely connect with nature, expressing the complexity and interconnectivity of natural forms. The intricate patterns below the horizon line symbolize the complexity of nature, while the simple forms above the surface reflect an underlying diversity and connection within the natural environment. Through her work, the artist communicates a narrative of interconnectivity and expresses her connection with nature through printmaking.
Tamika Grant-Iramu Complex Ecologies: Summer Haze II, 2023
Vinyl-cut relief print on Hahnemühle paper with hand-coloured water colours
50.5 x 79 x 4 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Onespace. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Tamika Grant-Iramu Complex Ecologies: Summer Haze I, 2023
Vinyl-cut relief print on Hahnemühle paper with hand-coloured water colours
50.5 x 138.5 x 4 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Onespace. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Walter Jule
WALTER JULE, born 1940.
Active as a printmaker, graphic and interior designer, writer, editor and lecturer, Walter Jule is considered the “catalytic figure in the Edmonton School of printmaking which is internationally recognized for pushing the boundaries of traditional printmaking through mixed-medium works combining traditional and photographic techniques.” He taught at the University of Alberta from 19712006 where he was instrumental in developing and growing Canada’s first printmaking masters program. His work has been shown in over 350 exhibitions in 44 countries, winning awards in international print biennials in the USA, Korea, Estonia, Hungary, Japan, Yugoslavia and India. Notable group exhibitions include: “Images: Printing ’81” Bruxelles, Belgium (with Richard Hamilton, Nam June Paik and Tetsuya Noda), 1981; “Inside/Out: Four Artists from Edmonton” (special exhibition of the International Triennial of Prints, Krakow, Poland), 1991; “Hot Plate, International Print-Installation exhibition”, Phoenix Brighton Gallery, UK, 2010; “Approaching Zero: At the Frontier of Contemporary Printmaking”, Kala Instate, Berkeley, California, USA, 2014 and “MIRROR/ MIRROR, Documenting the Edge of Contemporary Printmaking, CanadaJapan”, Kyotoodd Gallery, 2024. He represented Canada in the “5th Beijing International Art Biennial”, 2012 and “Millennial Wind (The Mind)” Haein temple, South Korea (to commemorate the thousandyear anniversary of the carving of the Tripitaka Koreana (Buddhist scriptures) in 2011. He was the only Canadian included in the sweeping
historical exhibition, “Hanga-The Wave of Exchange Between West and East”, The Hagi Museum, Yamaguchi; Mie Prefectural Museum and University Art Museum, Tokyo National University, Japan (in the section “HANGA: what could it be?”) 2005. Solo/retrospective exhibitions of his work have been presented at: Ai Gallery, Tokyo, 1976; The Edmonton Art Gallery, 2000; Utah State University, USA, 2003; Miklos Borsos Museum, Gyor, Hungary (Special exhibition of the Masters of Graphic Arts International Drawing and Graphic Biennial), 2007; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon, USA, 2008; The Nickel Arts Museum, Calgary, Canada, 2009; Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada, 2011; The Prince Takamado Gallery, Canadian Embassy, Tokyo (with Ryoji Ikeda) 2013; Houston Central College Gallery, USA (with Wendy McGrath) 2016 and The Projective Eye Gallery, University of North Carolina, USA, 2023. His work can be found in over seventy public collections world wide including: The Museum of Modern Art, Lodz, Poland; Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; The Guang Dong Museum of Art, China and the Museum of Modern Art, USA. In 2007 he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy and the City of Edmonton Arts and Culture Hall of Fame and in 2015 was awarded the Southern Graphics Council International Teaching Award. In 2019 he received the Alberta Lieutenant Governors Distinguished Artist Award. In 2022 he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2023 received the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal.
In The Solitude of an Autumn Stroll
“For defenders of the real from Plato to Feuerbach to equate image with mere appearance - that is, to presume that the image is absolutely distinct from the object depicted - is part of that process of desacralization which separated us irrevocably from the world of sacred times and places in which an image was taken to participate in the reality of the object depicted.”
Susan Sontag
Walter Jule, In the Solitude of an Autumn Stroll [detail], 2023 Mixed media, including: two dead tree branches, digital printing with gampi chine-colle, hand offset, relief and “abrasion” frottage with an audio soundtrack by Derek Besant 205 cm x 335 cm x 180 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Barbie Kjar
Barbie Kjar is a Tasmanian artist currently living in Melbourne. She has completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT, Melbourne, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Education at the University of Tasmania, Hobart. Kjar has undertaken international artist residencies including Art Print Residence in Arenys de Munt, Spain; Draw International in Caylus, France, Australia Council studios in Rome, Tokyo and independent studios in Havana, San Francisco, Mexico City. Since 1986, she has held 36 solo exhibitions in Australia, more recently in Barcelona and Tokyo. Her work has also been exhibited in China, Korea, Siberia, France, Canada, USA and Japan.
Kjar’s drawing was selected as the winner of the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, PLC, Sydney (2024). Her work was recently selected for significant art prizes, including the National Works on Paper exhibition, Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery (2024, 2020); Rick Amor Drawing Prize exhibition, McClelland Gallery, Victoria (2024); Geelong Print Prize exhibition, Geelong Art Gallery, ‘Flow”, Contemporary Watercolour exhibition, Wollongong Art Gallery, Lyn McRae Drawing Prize exhibition, Noosa Regional Gallery (2019). Paul Guest Drawing Prize exhibition (2018), Highly commended Waterhouse Science and Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia (2017) Dobell Drawing
Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Kjar’s work has been purchased by the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Parliament House, Canberra; Wagga Wagga Gallery; National Gallery of Victoria; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; Fremantle Arts Centre; Grafton Regional Gallery; Queensland University of Technology; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; University of Southern Queensland and is held in private collections in USA, France, Sweden, England and Australia.
Barbie Kjar’s prints and drawings focus on the sea, particularly the underworld. In her work, the viewer witnesses the changing tides, the breadth of the ocean, the abstractions of patterns, the uncertainty of shadows, the myriad of colours dancing in the light, and the effects of climate change.
During a residency on King Island in 2022, she was captivated by the strength and transformative potential of bull kelp, which now serves as a significant theme in her practice. Her passion for the ocean and its inhabitants is deeply embedded in her family roots, with Danish and Cornish connections and through continuous travel to Spain. Kjar’s work also features human figures interacting with nature.
Barbie Kjar, Lions tides, 2023
Wood lithograph, drypoint, 224 x 304 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Janet Parker-Smith
Janet Parker-Smith is a Sydneybased artist who uses crossdisciplinary processes,including Print Media, Sculpture, Collage, and Altered books. She has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for over 30 years. Her work deals with identity, materiality,memory and the surrounding environment.
Janet has held several solo exhibitions at May Space Gallery and has been represented by Van Rensburg Gallery, Hong Kong. She has been a finalist in many art competitions and has had work purchased by the Art Gallery of NSW and National Gallery of Victoria. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections. She was recently commissioned by Willoughby Council to create a large-scale copper artwork for the Chatswood Library.
Janet is a sessional lecturer in Printmedia at the National Art School and Sydney College of the Arts and teaches in Public Programs across Australia. She has also been involved in public art projects with various councils across Sydney.
She is an experienced Printmaker and has custom printed for various artists, including Locust Jones, Debra Dawes, Rebecca Beardmore, Pia Larsen and UK artist Mario Minichello.
Janet Parker-Smith’s work features photographic and found imagery repurposed to explore themes of identity, memory and surrounding landscapes. The artist’s pieces intend to provoke thought on concepts of territory and time.
Through the process of collage and printmedia the juxtaposed images of varying landscapes hint at actions and changes we unconsciously make that inform future identities. The work looks at the changing environment of our natural and urban space and how we learn to adapt to it. It considers our need and reliance on nature but also our unconscious exploitation of the land.
While using forms of familiarity and sentimentality we look at disjointed images that sit along further disjointed forms showing an ambiguity in their composition.
Janet Parker-Smith Bountiful, 2023
Digital print on fabric with applique 96 x 86 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Jewel Shaw
Jewel Shaw is an accomplished printmaker who received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2008. Her work has been featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions worldwide, including the Transitional Impressions: Visualizing Environmental Change at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2022, What’s Held at TREX NW, Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta in 2022, Anthem: Expressions of Canadian Identity at the International Artist’s Book Biennale in Bibliotheca Alexandria,
Egypt in 2022, Proto-Types at the International Print Triennial Krakow in Poland in 2021, Bienal Do Douro 2020 in Douro, Portugal in 2020, Global Print 2019 in Douro, Portugal in 2019, Li Salay at the Alberta Gallery of Art in Edmonton, Alberta in 2018, Memory Bones at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery in Red Deer, Alberta in 2017, New Impressions: Experiments in Contemporary Native American Printmaking at IAIA MoCNA in Sante Fe, New Mexico, Kyoto Hanga 2016: International Print Exhibition Canada
& Japan at the Municipal Museum of Art in Kyoto, Japan in 2016, Weaving Past into Present: Experiments in Contemporary Native American Printmaking at the International Print Centre New York (IPCNY) in New York, NY, LandMarks: Indigenous Communities Connect at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and The View from Here: Alberta Biennial for Contemporary Art at the Alberta Gallery of Art in Edmonton, Alberta in 2013.
Jewel Shaw (She/her) is a Printbased artist practicing in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. Her family lines are Cree and Métis, descending from the Treaty 8 Territory in Northern Alberta. She explores memory, identity and loss through graphic symbolic imagery and reinterpretations of found objects. Shaw uses traditional printmaking, drawing and digital media to evoke personal narratives that investigate transience and the collective and genetic memory of trauma and grief.
The objects, images, and text are metaphors, intended to trigger memory and elicit stories that may otherwise remain buried and forgotten. Migration of Grief continues this line of creative personal exploration and highlights that cerebral and physical landscape, which simultaneously holds both shared political experiences alongside deeply personal perspectives... that the land, like our own bodies, embody grief that is intuitive and connected to all of us.
Jewel Shaw, Migration of Grief, 2022 Etching and Woodcut, 91.44 x 182.88 cm
Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Wendy Murray
Wendy Murray was born in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She is a Los Angeles-based visual artist and arts educator who addresses social and political issues through drawing, poster making, workshops and public artworks. Murray has exhibited in local, national, and international exhibitions, including the survey poster exhibition and catalogue FEMINAE – Typographic Voices of Women at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (USA). Murray’s works are held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia (AUS), Australian War Memorial (AUS), National Library of Australia (AUS), Centre for the Study of Political Graphics (USA), Colorado College Tutt Library Special Collection (USA) and the University of Sydney (AUS).
I’ve made stencils and posters for the street since 2003, and for years, these works reflected my thoughts and ideas about the environment we live in – the changing city streets, pollution, architecture, politics, and people. People are a crucial part of my practice. I work with artists, community groups, and young people – taking the seed of an idea and transforming it into a poster. A poster that communicates a powerful message using my drawing and printmaking skills but still retains the essence of their voice.
Wendy Murray, Tag, 2023 Screenprint on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm Printed at University of Sydney. Wendy Murray in collaboration with Dieter Hochuli and Kurt Iveson for Wallflowers: Ecologies of Forgotten Urban. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Wendy Murray, Chatter, 2023 Screen print on paper, 84 x 59.5 cm Collaborative poster. Artists: Katie Stanley, Flynn, Lala Zarei, Samira Mir, Jess Fulmer, Vincent Ciolli, Ashley Ronning, Jack Whitemore, Charlotte Runnels, Samuel Price, Anthony Lee, Adrian Kellett, Wendy Murray & TROPPO STUDIOS. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Wendy Murray, Ladder Brake, 2023
Screenprint on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Printed at University of Sydney. Wendy Murray in collaboration with Dieter Hochuli and Kurt Iveson for Wallflowers: Ecologies of Forgotten Urban. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Andrew Rankin
Judy Watson
Judy Watson, born in Mundubbera, Queensland 1959, comes from an Aboriginal matrilineal family from Waanyi country in northwest Queensland. She has achieved significant recognition for her work in the art world, including representing Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale, receiving the Moët & Chandon Fellowship in 1995, the National Gallery of Victoria’s Clemenger Award in 2006, and the Works on Paper Award at the 23rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in the same year.
Her artworks are part of significant Australian and international collections and have been exhibited in various prestigious venues worldwide. Notable showcases of her work include the exhibition “Waterline” at the Embassy of Australia in Washington, DC, in 2011 and her participation in the Sydney Biennale in 2012.
Judy Watson created public art installations, including a fifty-meter etched zinc wall for the Melbourne Museum, a sculptural installation at the Sydney International Airport, and various other significant works around Australia and internationally.
She has also been recognised for her contributions to the field of visual arts, being appointed as an
Adjunct Professor at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and receiving the Australia Council Visual Arts Award in 2015. 2018 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Art History from The University of Queensland.
Furthermore 2009, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing published a monograph about Judy Watson and her work,” Blood Language.”
Judy Watson is an artist who embraces her mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage, with ancestral roots in Aboriginal, Scottish, and English cultures. Through her artwork, she delves into the intricacies of cultural identity and the catastrophic impact of colonisation on Indigenous communities, specifically in Australia, the birthplace of her Indigenous heritage. Watson’s artwork is known for featuring cultural imagery from First Nations, using bright colours, and incorporating meaningful symbols that stimulate thought. She highlights Indigenous peoples’ endurance and ingenuity through her work while acknowledging their cultural traditions’ complexities.
Judy Watson, experimental beds 2 [detail], 2012 3-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Grahame Galleries + Editions, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photo: Andrew Rankin
List of Works
Rebecca Beardmore, Image (3333), 2021, Four plate photogravure on BFK, 76 x 76 cm
Rebecca Beardmore, Image (N3333), 2021, Four plate photogravure on BFK, 76 x 76 cm
G.W. Bot, Glyphs - Three Trees (Homage to Rembrandt), 2021 Linocut on Hahnemühle paper, 74 x 124.5 cm
G.W. Bot, Ocean and Grassland Glyphs I, 2021, Linocut on tapa cloth, 122.5 x 55 cm
Tamika Grant-Iramu, Complex Ecologies: Summer Haze I, 2023, Vinyl-cut relief print on Hahnemühle paper with hand-coloured water colours (framed with UV70 glass), 50.5 x 138.5 x 4 cm
Tamika Grant-Iramu, Complex Ecologies: Summer Haze II, 2023, Vinyl-cut relief print on Hahnemühle paper with hand-coloured water colours (framed with UV70 glass), 50.5 x 79 x 4 cm
Tamika Grant-Iramu, Complex Ecologies: Summer Haze III, 2023, Vinyl-cut relief print on Hahnemühle paper with hand-coloured water colours (framed with UV70 glass), 50.5 x 49.5 x 4 cm
Barbie Kjar, Mask/torso, 2022/23, Mokulito, 112 x 62 cm
Barbie Kjar, Lion Tides, 2nd state, 2023, Mokulito, drypoint, stencil print, 224 x 304 cm
Barbie Kjar, Blink, 2023, Porthole box animation, 38 x 38 x 38.5 cm
Wendy Murray, 8 Billion People, 2023, Screen print on paper, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Put Water Back on the Table, 2023, Screen print on paper, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, CHOUT, 2022, Screen print on paper, 57 x 38.5 cm
Wendy Murray, Who’s Got the Power?, 2023, Screen print on 90gsm litho, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Who’s Got the Power?, 2023, Screen print on 90gsm litho, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Who’s Got the Power?, 2023, Screen print on 90gsm litho, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Don’t Go There, 2022, Screen print on paper, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, You’ll get a Cold Shoulder there, too, 2022, Screen print on paper, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Just Pretend it’s Already Gone, 2022, Screen print on paper, 43 x 28 cm
Wendy Murray, Chatter, 2023, Screen print on paper, 84 x 59.5 cm
Wendy Murray, Buff, 2023, Screen print on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Wendy Murray, Tag, 2023 Screen print on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Wendy Murray, Ladder Brake, 2023, Screen print on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Wendy Murray, Poster, 2023, Screen print on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Wendy Murray, Fig, 2023 Screen print on 100 gsm litho, 76 x 51 cm
Wendy Murray, If you Freeze it will Melt!, 2021, Digital print (Indigo), 70 x 21.5 cm
Wendy Murray, What Burgers are Made of, 2021, Digital print (Indigo) from 23 colour stencil painting, 70 x 21.5 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Bountiful, 2023, Digital print on fabric with applique, 96 x 86 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Bound, 2023, Digital print on fabric with applique, 96 x 86 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Rationale… Response #1, 2023, Digital print and collage on archival paper and fabric with plastic, 106 x 75 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Rationale… Response #2, 2023, Digital print and collage on archival paper and fabric with plastic, 106 x 75 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Rationale… Response #3, 2023, Digital print and collage on archival paper and fabric with plastic, 106 x 75 cm
Janet Parker-Smith, Rationale… Response #4, 2023, Digital print and collage on archival paper and fabric, 106 x 75 cm
Judy Watson, experimental beds 1, 2012, 3-plate etching with chine colle, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, experimental beds 2, 2012, 3-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, experimental beds 3, 2012, 3-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, experimental beds 4, 2012, 2-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, experimental beds 5, 2012, 4-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, experimental beds 6, 2012, 2-plate etching, 49.5 x 37.5 cm plate; 70 x 54 cm sheet; 81 x 67.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, dispersal, 2000, Etching with chine colle, 24.5 x 16.5 cm plate; 39.5 x 35.5 cm sheet; 52.3 x 43.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, fruit and seeds 1, 2000, Etching, printed in black, from one plate, chine colle, 24.5 x 16.5 cm plate; 39.5 x 35.5 cm sheet; 52.3 x 43.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, fruit and seeds 2, 2000, Etching, printed in black, from one plate, chine colle, 24.5 x 16.5 cm plate; 39.5 x 35.5 cm sheet; 52.3 x 43.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, fruit and seeds 3, 2000, Etching, printed in black, from one plate, chine colle, 24.5 x 16.5 cm plate; 39.5 x 35.5 cm sheet; 52.3 x 43.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, hollow trace, 2000 Etching with chine colle 24.5 x 16.5 cm plate; 39.5 x 35.5 cm sheet; 52.3 x 43.3 cm framed
Judy Watson, vessel, 2000 Colour etching, 67 x 50.5 cm sheet; 77.2 x 60.3 cm framed
Derek Michael Besant, Origins, 2023, UV thermal ink transfers onto triptych veil scrims, 150 x 450 cm Hang; Drop; Tilt (individual titles in triptych)
Sean Caulfield, Fight-Stopping Tools, 2022, Linocut, inkjet, silkscreen, Diptych; 102 x 125 cm
Sean Caulfield, Rules for Sharing, 2022, Linocut, inkjet, silkscreen Triptych; 105 x 185 cm
John Dean, the beautiful are found at the edge of the room (… after Bukowski), 2022 Ultrachrome Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle German etching paper, 5 panels; 157.5cm x 81.3 cm each
Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrandt, Beyond Reckoning, 2021-2022, Inkjet prints on Silk Habotai with reactive dye, aluminum rods, Velcro, vinyl floor.
Alexandra Haeseker, Problems of Symmetry, 2023, UV Latex ink on synthetic paper cutout components, 150 x 450 cm
Walter Jule, In the Solitude of an Autumn Stroll, 2023, Mixed media, including: two dead tree branches, digital printing with gampi chine-colle, hand offset, relief and “abrasion” frottage with an audio soundtrack by Derek Besant, 205 cm x 335 cm x 180 cm
Jewel Shaw, Migration of Grief, 2022, Etching and Woodcut, 92 x 183 cm (overall) 6 panels; 46 x 60.5 cm each
Galleries Team
Holly Arden Galleries Director
Jo Lankester Senior Exhibitions and Collections Officer
Veerle Janssens Collection Management Officer
Michael Favot Exhibitions Officer
Zoe Seitis Exhibitions Assistant
Chloe Lausen Curatorial Assistant
Rachel Cunningham Senior Education and Programs Officer
