Annabel Nowlan
- RECENT WORKS
-
Vanishing Point
Making Space
Panel Works
Unfinished Maps
- EARLY WORKS
Mixed Media
Painting
Metals
Sculpture
Annabel Nowlan
About
RECENT WORKS
Making Space
In my art practice I seek to illuminate, rather than illustrate, registrations of place and life experience.
Making space is a deep engagement with the natural (and unnatural) environment, conceptually the works obliquely explore themes of: nostalgia, the inevitable cycles of decay and the environmental chaos caused by industrial greed.
My ongoing connection with the land manifests itself in my work through a visceral and instinctive attraction to rudimentary materials and surface qualities and is clearly evident in these mixed media works.
It is the beauty in the seemingly mundane of the everyday that I celebrate and bring to life. I like to utilise worn out tarpaulin, discarded corrugated tin, patinated copper combined with various pigments. The appeal of these unique surfaces and markings are for me, suggestive of the tactile and kinaesthetic properties of the earth.
I am particularly drawn to surfaces that change and deteriorate with time and exposure to the elements, and express this through the altering shades of copper-verdigris green. These patina surfaces that are un-treated (unfixed) and remain in flux with colour variations responding to the surrounding humidity.
While the mixed materials mimic and celebrate the rich vocabulary of the tamed and 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, Wiradjuri country, where her Irish convict ancestors have been farmers for six generations and where Annabel herself grew up and later worked the land.
In ‘Making space’ 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.’
Annabel Nowlan
2023