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| Riona Tindal |
Riona Tindal is an artist and passionate conservationist based in Newcastle. She completed her PhD in Natural History Illustration at the University of Newcastle in 2016. Riona recently expanded her creative arts career as the Deaf Arts Coordinator with Accessible Arts and Co-facilitator of the Artist Run Initiative Inside Out in Maitland 2016-2018. Sharing her time between Sydney and the Hunter region, she is a strong advocate for inclusive, cultural accessible arts. Riona was born Deaf, she grew up surrounded by nature and takes inspiration from the environment in her creative practice. Being Deaf brings its own unique isolation, discrimination, different communication methods and attitudes, so Riona sees things visually and differently. However, deafness is not a main identifying part of her, nor is it a defining disability for Riona, but rather an aspect of a multifaceted part of her being. Art is her language. Riona uses arts as a visual communicative language working with mixed media, illustration, photography, typographic design, painting, poetry and writing.
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| Riona Tindal, Leaf Utopia study - detail from Moss Garden, watercolour and pencil on timber board |
In both her art practice and conservation advocacy, Riona seeks out the impact of climate change in different landscapes, and these firsthand experiences have a profound effect on her arts practice. In 2018 Riona travelled solo through central Australia for two months, experiencing the diverse uniqueness of the landscape, reflecting on the symbolic shapes and structures that show the beauty of the earth that is slowly being destroyed or transmuted to serve humanity’s needs. Riona is expanding and exploring traditional and contemporary arts practice, with science, seeking to combine the three as a trinity in the arts. Conservation through science and arts where she hopes to educate the audience around our rapidly vanishing earth, climate change, species driven to extinction, communicating through creative media where it can immediately capture the audience and engage.
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| Riona Tindal, Scientific illustration of a frog, 2016, stippling ink, 27 x 21.9 cm |
During my residency I plan to develop poetry, narrative storytelling and imbedding poetry working on watercolour sheets and recycled timber boards to explore pathways that make connections and move between the rigidity of science into storytelling and communicative visual language.
