The fragmentation of memory and indefiniteness becomes apparent in her making through the use of collage, illustration and film photography.
Bronte Naylor is a Toowoomba based artist currently undertaking her Honours in Creative Arts. Through this, Bronte is driving in to her practice head first to uncover why she paints what she paints and how her concepts transfer from gallery to public art contexts.
In between painting large for Sea Walls Australia last month and getting on the road for School of the Air in the coming weeks, we caught up with Bronte in her studio to chat about her work and what’s coming up next.
At age 24 Bronte has started carved out a career path in the arts much earlier than most. After completing her creative undergrad in the tropics of far north Queensland, she’s back on the Darling Downs, a place she considers a home base in between projects.
Her illustrative brush work and considered compositions discuss the cyclical relationship between memory and reality. Collaged and distorted imagery in her paintings slip between the physical, digital and analogue exploring the familiar, and the unfamiliar.
Her creative processes are inspired by the continuity of memory and how it is as continual as time. Naylor considers the way the human mind returns to relive memories, warping them dramatically in this process so the space that is returned through remembrance, cannot be as consistent as the original moment in time. Through retrieval and experience, a sense of identity and self is established and reinforced.
Naylor’s documentative process is not a practice of holding on to times past, but to appeal to a collective sense of nostalgia. In the context of her peaceful and dream-like acrylic paintings, nostalgia is longing for a slower pace of time. By this same idea, she understands that memory is a collection particular, special moments that appear to be in slow motion, allowing the mind to capture detail and momentous emotion. This fragmentation of memory and indefiniteness becomes apparent in her making through the use of collage, illustration and film photography.
Join Bronte for an intimate skillshare at First Coat Studios this month. She hand preparing art boards for eight participants and over the two and half hour session, will share an introduction to acrylic painting. Working with Ironlak Heavy Body Acrylics, this class runs Thursday 28th June from 6 - 8:30pm. Only two tickets remain – $70 per person, materials supplied.
Book your seat here.
Words by Laurie Oxenford.
