Annabel Nowlan’s art practice is a project that delves deep into the Australian landscape, exposing forgotten histories, personal experience, human error and focusing on the endless bounty of everyday aesthetic nuances. 

Each work reflects a deep engagement with the natural (and unnatural) environment.  Nowlan’s artistic gaze is drawn to physical sites of failed solider settlements, swagman symbols, ruins of disastrous agricultural pursuits and aggressive agriculture. The beauty in the seemingly mundane and the everyday is celebrated in Nowlan’s work, which uses the unique surfaces and textures of crude and unrefined ‘waste’ materials. 

Her goal is to illuminate the often-overlooked inscriptions wrought on the land.  The landscape is both the setting and primary subject and nothing is off limits: wire tension knots, corroded water tanks, gerry-built structures, mining map legends all attest to the tactile and kinaesthetic properties of agriculture and landscape.

A visceral and instinctive attraction to rudimentary materials and surface qualities is clearly evident. Nowlan manipulates scrap metal, found tin, rivets, tarpaulin and natural minerals in a process of recycling and repurposing. She is particularly drawn to surfaces that change and deteriorate with time and exposure to the elements, a process often represented in the altering shades of her signature colour, copper verdigris green. 

While the mixed materials mimic and celebrate the rich vocabulary and nuances of the untamed environment, they also speak to human endeavour and misguided attempts to dominate and subdue the land.  Nowlan’s work often references her connection to Bimbi in south-western NSW, where her Irish convict ancestors have been farmers for six generations. Nowlan acknowledges that the land is a continuously changing domain, and, any non-Indigenous attempt to narrate unceded lands will always be partial and incomplete.