Annika Romeyn

In 2025-26, Annika Romeyn travelled to the Antarctic Peninsula, a long-held dream to experience and respond to this unique remote environment. Her upcoming exhibition 'Flux' in October 2026 will delve into this impactful experience, including watercolour monotype prints and paintings, alongside a selection of sketches from the journey.

Romeyn’s 2022-2024 works are a response to camping in Mutawintji National Park on Barkindji and Malyangapa Country, as part of the 2022 Broken Hill City Art Gallery’s Open Cut Commission. These works centre on the experience of entering Old Mutawintji Gorge, continuing Romeyn’s quest to understand her relationship to personally significant places.

I hope my work conveys something of the experience of walking into the Gorge. Passing between weathered walls of rock rising up beside the dry creek-bed, I saw sky and earth converge and reflect in vital pools of water. As I moved inwards, towards a larger waterhole, I also approached an internal space and state of stillness, reflection and contemplation. Beside the campfire I read James Fox’s ‘The World According to Colour’, which influenced my thinking in its consideration of red through themes including blood, life, humanity and its use in rock art across the world.  Later, from the distance of my Canberra studio on Ngunnawal Country, I leant into the intuitive, emotive and symbolic dimensions of colour. A memory of dusty pink creek sand became a diluted wash across the sky, while the same pigments in higher concentration produced primal reddish browns that reminded me of the interaction of iron and oxygen both in the earth and in our bodies.
Artist Statement - Annika Romeyn

A true departure from the artist’s use of blue, Old Mutawintji Gorge & Old Mutawintji Gorge 2 present the Gorge in a reddish-brown-purple reminiscent of blood – considered by the artist to represent a sense of interiority associated with entering the Gorge. Romeyn’s considered and symbolic use of colour continues to pervade her thinking; reading James Fox’s 'The World According to Colour' between walks and around the campfire each evening. A mastery of colour assigns this deep reddish brown to the feeling of Mutawintji. It references the spectrum of ochre, sand and mineral you find in Far West NSW, but amplified, made more intense with a specific mix of permanent rose, burnt sienna and rose of ultramarine. Where the layered works relate to our perception, this time colour bridges the physical and symbolic; blood of body, red of rock.
Excerpt from exhibition essay by Blake Griffiths 2024

Project Archive: Annika Romeyn Turbulence Solo 2022 from Flinders Lane Gallery on Vimeo

Watch: Annika discuss works at Bayside Gallery Ellen Jose Art Award

Watch: Annika discuss her winning piece Endurance 5 at MPRG

Watch: A process video on Instagram

Listen: MPRG In Conversation with Artistic Director Danny Lacy

Listen: Annika discussing her work with GAG Curator Erin Mathews

Read: Canberra Times Review by Sasha Grishin, Aug 2019

Read: The Canberra Times Review of 'Across the Distance'