A grounded art practice
Marion Wassenaar's prints evoke the environment of her recent residency.
The Wollemi wilderness area, in the northern Blue Mountains in Australia, is a unique area where scribbly gum and other native trees grow on a sandstone base. After a fire break was burned to control the devastating bush fires of 2019-20, regrowth has been quick, with tree trunks shedding the outer burned layer of bark and growing new limbs, and leaf litter beginning to accumulate again underfoot.
Senior Lecturer and print artist Marion Wassenaar spent several weeks in Bilpin, on the doorstep of Wollemi National Park, on an artist's residency with BigCi. While there Marion took the opportunity to participate in bushwalks conducted by Yuri Bolotin, an experienced mountain guide and author, and to learn first-hand about the unique biodiversity and geodiversity of the area.
Inspired by this environment, and by Elsie Locke's book Look under the Leaves, Marion produced a series of monoprints, applying soy-based inks to a plastic matrix then hand-printing with fine Japanese paper onto the matrix. She worked with a monochrome palette, limited by travelling with art materials to the residency, using a range of found and local tools to add and remove ink from the matrix. The series of works respond to the resilience of lichen growing on sandstone. Laboratory filter papers were used to create impressions of leaves, suggesting the constant layering, filtering and renewal of the bush environment. The residency offered an important reminder to tread gently on the earth.
Marion's residency coincided with that of four other artists working in different genres - a comic artist from Germany, a local photographer, a sculptor from Melbourne, and a painter from China. Her works were included in the group's public exhibition at the end of their time in Bilpin.