Hidden

Another of the images in the new ‘Book of Nature’ series I’ve been working on for some months now. I’m imaging making an entire landscape from this series, playing with the presentations of these intricate macro depictions, and also creating an expansive geography as the images are placed in a line beside each to form a long sequence. The books will create an undulating and rhythmic horizon line, akin to hills and valleys…

The Book of Nature

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a new series of etchings – intense drawings of macro environments on book pages. In these works I’m wanting the  foliage and animals  to be captured on the pages of a wordless book – creating a text of animals, a calligraphy of foliage…..

‘Wildlife Preserve – Birds’

Recently I had the good fortune of winning the Great Southern Art Award Print prize with the above print of two etchings. I’ve been making images of small glass biomes for around a year now – small, delicate environments which hold various birds and animals. They are intended to evoke museum specimens, where animals are recorded, stored catalogued – but in my depictions the animals are alive in these fragile environments. In this image there are two birds – one is the Buff-banded Rail which leads a furtive life in the vegetation of our backyard, and the other is the endangered Noisy Scrub bird which lives in only a few reserves east of here.

Land of Longing

This is a detail of ‘Land of Longing’, an etching that’s been exhibited since March in the Burnie Print Prize, as part of the Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania. There’s one more week left to run of this show, which looks to have a wonderful array of prints across a range of print media. My own humble offering is a smallish print –  an etching and aquatint printed over a collagraph background with hand stitching around the edges.

Strange to behold

Tomorrow is the last day of my exhibition of prints ‘Strange to behold’  which has been showing at Printmaker Gallery in Fitzroy, Melbourne (from the 18th August to the 8th September. The works are a collection of small scale etchings, collagraphs and solarplate intaglios :

A series of images that evoke the space between the ordinary and the uncanny. There are unlikely encounters between animals, plants which curl and furl and scenarios encapsulated in jars. Some of these are playful imaginings whilst others touch on environmental concerns and anxieties we hold about changes in the natural world. Presented in part as a group of specimens to be looked at anew for clues they may hold.

Not prints this time! I’m currently part of a group exhibition of contemporary textiles showing in Perth, WA. The other artists are Anna Sabadini, Anne Walmsley, Kate Campbell Pope and Lizzie Riley, and the work is largely an exploration of a sense of place, with all the artists having deep ties with the far south coast of WA. The show will be on until 1st May at Nyisztor Studio, on Canning Hwy, Melville.

Nullius_web   ‘Nullius’, collagraph print

Tomorrow is the opening of ‘Of Nothing’, a non-figurative exhibition of mixed media works by 16 artists on show at the Kent River Studio, Kentdale WA. Participating in this show was an interesting challenge for me – my work is usually so relentlessly about ‘something’, and often so explicitly has a narrative, that this one gave me some pause. My landscapes are usually occupied with human or animal figures, but here is an empty site! I hoped it would feel like an activated space, and maybe hold a touch of poignance.

The exhibition is on from the 26th of Sept to the 11 October.

Thamo_Kati_Ingrained- Flying at dusk

This is the last weekend of the 2015 Silk Cut Award in Melbourne. There’s a brilliant array of linocut prints in this show – I can see that from the catalogue as I am too far away to go there in person. However I’ve had a tryptich in the show, a linocut (with watercolour wash) called ‘Ingrained: Flying at dusk’.