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Robyn Kinsela, 10pm, 2009, acrylic on canvas,120x240cm
This work is about spaces and sounds. I am investigating spaces and how
they are occupied – even whether they are occupied. Walking after dark in bushy
suburban areas, such as Mittagong where I live, I hear muffled voices and
music, small nocturnal creatures and the sounds of the breeze. I see lights on
in living rooms and moonlight through the trees. I hear my own footsteps. 10pm
captures a sense of physical, manmade spaces or places nestled within a rugged
overgrown bushland by expressing and identifying the sounds inherent in those
spaces. Silence is also one of those
sounds.
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Robyn Kinsela is interested in interpreting micro and macro textures as well as sounds found
in the natural environment. She considers human presence and interference in the landscape and
how it has been adapted and changed by people over time. Robyn’s work is created from drawing, photography and
memory, then realised as paintings and works on paper, including digital prints.
Robyn is interested in surface textures and patterns and the visual
communication of the senses of sound and smell. Playing with ambiguities of reality, appearance and illusion, she hones
away unnecessary detail in the search for the essential message or feeling
through the use of form, colour, tone, texture, contrast, memory and
experience.
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Robyn Kinsela, Seeking Songlines, 2011, acrylic and oil on canvas, 81x81cm
Seeking Songlines is one of many
recent works that I am developing in order to help me and others understand
more about Australian Aborigines’ ancestral history, albeit in an abstract
way. The European terms Songlines or Dreaming tracks are, to the Aboriginal,
“Footprints of the Ancestors, or the ‘Way of the Law’”¹. What interests me is
this idea of repetition of a shape, colour or texture, brought together to make
a “whole” as in the painting and repetition of song, story and language through
time, past, present and future, being brought together to make sense of a
culture and history, another “whole”. (¹Bruce
Chatwin, The Songlines, page 2, Picador, 1987)
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My interest in the question of ownership
of marks and mark-making, has led me to create my own library of visual
references with strong influences from the work of other artists, cultures and
art movements. By establishing a system of visual cues or symbols
I am capturing the intensity of my sense of place.
Whilst artist-in-residence at Gunyah, Robyn plans to continue her exploration of the landscape both past and present, and make new work for her two upcoming solo exhibitions: Depot II Gallery, Sydney, in December 2012; followed by M16 Art Space, Canberra, in 2013.
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Robyn Kinsela, Silence and Sadness, 2011, acrylic
and oil on canvas, 122x61cm
Part of the West of Wilcannia series, this
work happened after a visit to Kinchega shearing shed. The lost and forgotten
memories of people from the past are heavily embedded in the old, worn and
weathered boards of the shed. There is a fogged over window before which
bottles collecting years of dust sit clustered as a tribute to the past. The misty,
dusty light showing through the panes of glass of the window and then though
these bottles, unites to present a beautiful, peaceful, hazy glow within the
warm darkness. The silence of this scene
is pays homage to those who once occupied this environment and I wanted the
simplicity of that reverence to be mirrored by the simplicity and calm of the
composition of the painting.
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“There’s a point where you’ve got to interpret the world, not make a replica of it.”
(David Hockney)
Robyn Kinsela lives in Mittagong and teaches painting, drawing and
digital imaging at Goulburn and Moss Vale TAFE. She has studied Architecture, Industrial Design and Art Education, and was
artist-in-residence at the Hungarian Multicultural Centre, Lake Balaton,
Hungary, in 2007; and artist-in-residence in the Furniture and
Design Workshop, ANU School of Art, Canberra, from 2001 to 2006. Robyn has held over 13 solo
exhibitions since 1986, the most recent being West of Wilcannia at Form Studio
and Gallery, in Queanbeyan. She has also participated in many group exhibitions
and has been a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Open Art Award, Outback Art
Prize, Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Norvill Landscape Painting Prize, Heyson
Landscape Prize, Banyule Works on Paper, Arc Yinnar Drawing Prize, The Island
Art Award Tasmania, Geelong Print Award,
Hazelhurst Works on Paper Art Award and the 33rd Alice Prize. As an active
member of the Southern Highlands Printmakers, Robyn has exhibited in Goulburn
Regional Gallery, Campbelltown Regional Gallery and Wollongong City Art
Gallery. Her work is also included in the Vario Print Exchange, which travelled
to Wales and Hawaii. Robyn’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of
Australia, National Gallery of Wales, NSW Historic Houses Trust, Westmead
Children’s Hospital and Canberra Hospital public collections, as well as
various private and corporate collections in Australia, USA, UK and Hungary.
You can see more of Robyn's work on her website www.robynkinsela.wordpress.com
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