The Printmedia and Drawing workshop is staffed by practising professional artists who have national and international reputations, and who actively maintain contact with other institutions, arts organisations and practitioners. Staff have a broad range of technical expertise and research interests, from traditional printmaking skills through to digital image-making and installation-based drawings and prints. The Art Theory Workshop, ArtForum public lecture program, SofA Gallery, Foyer Gallery and Photospace provide additional stimulus from a wide range of visiting artists, crafts people and theorists.

Patsy Payne
Artist's Statement

These images emerge from touch, they are felt into existence. The skin, as an organ of great sensitivity feels from the inside and the outside. At the skin’s surface, it is not decided what belongs within and what does not.
A ‘border’ may be where it is not decided to move one way or another. Here, the skin is a metaphor for ‘border’ and these drawings are border crossings.
They are about intuition, about whiteness, about presence and absence, about everything and nothing. We inhabit a landscape of change – cultural, physical and technological. In these prints I reveal and conceal forms held within the dots, lines and the mesh of marks used to create the illusion of clouds and other intangible shapes. The images suggest the flux of reality, and meanings and emotions that are emerging rather than definite.
The prints also refer to the distance between individuals. I consider the anxieties of contemporary existence, where technology has infiltrated our lives to such a degree that we often do not even know it. Machines categorize and identify us, denying the flexibilities and uncertainties of communication and relationships. Language, thought and emotion hover between us, in the space between our heads, between our bodies.
These pictures are reflections on potential connections between people and between imaginings. The edges and boundaries are mutable. The layering processes are analogous to the way that apparently random thoughts connect and lead to moments of insight.

Patsy Payne
May 2003

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by Patsy Payne

article at Australia Council

John Pratt
Artist's Statement

The shifting character of landscape and our ephemeral presence within it has been a central theme over the recent past. A short residency in Switzerland in 2000 was catalytic in generating a sequence of drawings which documented the transient qualities of the local terrain. While these works owed much to the specifics of a particular site they seemed to indicate a broader and more generic condition.
'Rather than the archetypes of Swiss landscape, (alpine peaks and ridges etc.) it was the mutable and fleeting aspects of the location which provided the more compelling subject matter. Slopes of scree and the play of shadow on the valley walls - gravity and light gently shifting and redefining what seemed durable and physically certain. The resulting drawings dissolved the landscape into fields of fragmentary and flux like matter, fluid and elemental.
More recently these shadowy grounds have suggested and yielded a number of fragmentary elements - heads, hands and feet (shifts of material and perception playing a significant role in this process). The meaning of these elements still seems uncertain to say the least, at times they are gently inflected and dependent on the slope and incline of the surrounding terrain whilst at others they suggest a rather haphazard and tenuous presence within it.'
Artist's Notes, 2002

While the provisional nature of drawing is critical to the current work the mediation of mark through relief print and etching is an enduring aspect to this practice. More recent projects have also involved site specific projections in public spaces which have been generated in response to current political circumstance. These have been driven in part by a belief that prints can again play a significant role in the discourse of public affairs.

by John Pratt

Peter Jordan
Artist's Statement

Any statement about my work is usually prefaced with the following from Charles Baudelaire:
"Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling".

My choice of subject is often people, a figurative representation of feeling in relation to inner perception of the world and experience around us. Some have a more social aspect others an internal, personal aspect. Suffice to say that something of yourself is in everything you do.
The Bright Empire is an example of a more social metaphor, made as it was under the current poltical situation it could be seen as some kind of spectre of propaganda.
Sear Me 2 is more internalised, a figure that has suffered and survived wearing the scars of it's ordeals.

Datura is by far the most upbeat, a mythic archetype enjoying a contented peace either real or imagined.

Peter Jordan 2003

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