rosslynd piggott

artist in residence 2002

Rosslynd Piggott is an artist of international calibre, exhibiting at ARCO O2 in Madrid, the 1999 Liverpool Biennial, and has held solo exhibitions in Japan and Belgium. Her work is held in 25 major public collections. In 1998 the National Gallery of Victoria acknowledged Rosslynd with a major survey of her work, titled ‘Suspended Breath’. Whilst in Perth, Rosslynd spent four weeks working with ECU’s post graduate students at the Mount Lawley campus.

Rosslynd’s exhibition at The Church Gallery was comprised of two series of six digital inkjet prints, ‘Storm 2’ and ‘Tracing Sky’. Digital imagery is a new medium for this innovative artist, whose work also encompasses painting, sculpture and installation. Her work has been variously described as ‘subliminal’, ‘intuitive’, ‘transformative’, ‘feminine’ and ‘delicate’. It beguiles and seduces the viewer with its simplicity and enigmatic properties. These new powerful and romantic images are no exception. Rosslynd has referred to them as her ‘High Romantic’ period, however the works also reveal considerable intellectual restraint.

‘Storm 2’ is a series of prints that have evolved from her involvement in the 2001 Citylights project in Melbourne. Rosslynd discovered a photo booth in Melbourne’s China town that provided a range of digital landscape based backdrops for the sitter, which she utilised to create spontaneous and abstracted self portraits. These have been printed in a large scale format in an intense ultramarine blue.

‘Tracing Sky’ is a series of cloud studies based on photographs taken by Rosslynd. Within these she has created interventions that investigate notions of space, emptiness and metaphysical voids. The surface quality of these, and the ‘Storm 2’ prints, are important to Rosslynd. She chose to print them on cotton rag mat paper to give the images a velvety luminosity and sensuous surface, very much in keeping with their romantic themes.

Collections include State Galleries of NSW, SA, WA, Qld, Vic and the National Gallery of Australia.