Greta Laundy

"From the age of five I knew I was an artist when I won first prize in our local agricultural show, a very humble beginning. Importantly, this experience left me with a lifelong passion for connecting with others through my paintings and drawings. 

 I was brought up on farms in rural South Australia and this has had an enormous influence on my studio practice. I am highly attuned to the seasons and climate, and pay close attention to the subtle patterns that nature creates, whether that be tidal lines along the shore or wispy clouds in the summer sky. The ebbs and flows of nature, its innate intelligence and striving for eco-system balance, is endlessly inspiring to me and informs my work in the ways I seek compositional balance, and the interconnectedness of elements through colour, shape and line. A regular visitor to my childhood homes of Kangaroo Island and Yorke Peninsula, these places bring a treasure trove of memories and emotions I draw upon in my abstracted imagery of undulating hills, paddocks, and still and moving bodies of water.

 Exploring ideas of play, chance, and risk-taking, I take an experimental and intuitive approach to my studio practice; rarely are paintings pre-planned. Rather, careful attention is paid to the process of painting itself with each additional mark, colour or shape informing the next move, until a conversation begins to form within the work with the overall aim to create a sense of ambiguity of place with multiple pathways through the work (and life). There is a call-and-response relationship that occurs with each artwork, where the painting begins to 'talk' to me, and I take a step back allowing the subconscious to guide the development.

 My love of colour and shape informs each canvas with numerous layers of opaque and translucent paint, building up a story through the composition with fortuitous ‘happy accidents’, moments of clarity and cohesion all purposefully visible.

 In this respect, my arts practice shares what it means to be human: a narrative of vulnerability, love and connection, the duality of perfection/imperfection, and our relationship with the natural environment. These works become both meditations on the physical, geographical world, and the inner emotional and psychological ‘landscape’ we all experience." - Greta Laundy