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| Rebecca with her beeswax and oil works at her 2016 exhibition ‘Ethereal’, in Sydney. |
Rebecca Waterstone is an artist and teacher currently based in the Blue Mountains. She has recently returned to Australia from Scotland where she taught, ran a gallery on the Isle of Skye and was Vice Chair of the Board of ATLAS, a contemporary art organisation on Skye supporting artists to make extraordinary ideas happen in the landscape. Rebecca is currently studying Masters of Art by coursework at UNSW Art and Design and was a finalist in the 2016 Tim Olsen Prize for Drawing.
Rebecca's work makes connections between dualities of place both physical and imagined. Exploring location, distillation, edges and colour, she works across drawing, painting, photography, with wax, film, sound and scent. She seeks to draw attention to opacity and translucency, absorbed and reflected light that can be contained within the surface of the picture plane. Layers of veiled, minimal imagery creates a tension between obfuscation, containment and revealing of information. Veils of colour and topographical mark-making sit below the surface. Rebecca's works seek to resonate with the viewer and evoke a concentrated sense of experience.
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| Rebecca Waterstone, The Lost and Found, cast beeswax and oil paint with eucalyptus oil, with Camden Cooperative NSW butterbox lid found in Scotland |
During my residency, I plan to explore the area, ‘tap into’ and also re-connect with the essence of the location. My work is concerned with a deep sense of place, and having spent all my childhood holidays in Port Stephens, I have a strong connection here and it has special significance for me. I'm looking forward to delving into the area again and discovering how how this will evidence itself in my work. I plan to gather visual, geographical, topographical, elemental and weather-specific information focusing on materiality as a metaphor for experience of a place. The change of environment will give me a fresh perspective, responding to locations that are on the edge of coasts or mountains, and having recently returned to Australia from Skye, the idea of the ‘antipode’ resonates strongly - as Scotland and NSW are diametrically opposite points, connected by a straight line through the centre of the Earth.
