Description
Exploring the monoprint and layered bushland as evocation, this body of work portrays the importance of landscape in our lives – how it mirrors our thoughts and moods; how it provides beauty and solace; and how it’s destruction can speak to our personal loss. My inspiration comes from Baigup Wetlands on the Swan River floodplain – a place of mutable shadows, light and reflections. It possesses a haunting beauty and timelessness, compelling me to pause and reflect on all that we have and all that we stand to lose. Individual print layers are created through an etching press using additive and reductive techniques, ghost prints, mirror images, bark and paper stencils. There is something very seductive about this process with its potential for serendipitous mark making. Each layer simultaneously creates and denies form which is integral to the aesthetics and meaning, speaking of memory, time, loss and renewal. There is deliberate oscillation between marks on paper and spatial illusion describing the intersection of nature, abstraction and lived experience.
Karen Prakhoff Rickman is a Perth based contemporary artist who completed a Master of Creative Arts (Art) at Curtin University in 2006. This is her seventh solo show. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and been a finalist in many art awards including the Fremantle Art Centre Print Award (2023), City of Melville Art Awards (overall winner 2021), Printmakers Association of WA Award (winner 1999). Her artwork is held in private and public collections including the City of Melville and Eden Floreat Apartments.
