Turbulence

Inspired by the environment of Guerilla Bay (NSW South Coast), Annika Romeyn’s large-scale watercolour monotypes convey the immersive and restorative experience of being in nature. A recent winner of the National Works on Paper Award, Burnie Print Prize and Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, this exhibition showcases Romeyn’s interest in the intersect between the intimate and the infinite, the immediate and the recalled.

Turbulence Catalogue essay by Gina Mobayed, 2022

The sea and the sky, two mystical stretches of blue space that humankind continues to harbour fascination for. We’ve thrown ourselves up into the sky and down into the ocean in desperate attempts to see what these spaces hold and to test if indeed they can hold us. In reading a text Annika shared with me1 I am reminded that ‘blue thrives only in the unearthly realms of sky, sea and horizon’. Unlike sea and sky, a horizon anchors us. It is a line positioned at our own individual eye level; it is always where we perceive it to be.

As I write I am recalling a time when I lived in the unknown waters of a new place and something beautiful and spectacular bobbed by. It was Annika Romeyn and her work, ‘Endurance’. Standing before this work gave me the sense that I was descending – pitch by pitch – from sky to sea against the surface of a monumental place outside of time. Romeyn’s workings of the landscape have a literal depth of view that can make you believe the sea might be swirling around your ankles when you make it down on to land. In the manner that your horizon line sits exactly at your eye level so too, your experience of her work will be oriented from your own emotional state the very moment you encounter it.

Physically traversing the exquisite contours of the places she recreates, Romeyn knows Guarella/Guerilla Bay on Yuin Country intimately through meaningful shared experiences with her immediate family. So fervently has she come to recall the Bay, she can unbind it from its pure physicality as well as time. Back in the studio her fingers dab, swipe, trace and mould her signature blue pigment across polypropylene plates. As she manipulates the Blue she imbues it with memories of a salty, rugged terrain, transferring the sensory experience of stone against salt water. Through her hands the Bay signals the many turbulent moments with and without those we love, among other intensities of our lived experience.

Using just blue has remarkably upped the ante for Romeyn. She has stayed a difficult course in continually finding new marks, methods and perspectives from which to render this captivating, complex place. For Romeyn the physicality of the Bay stands in for life; it is simultaneously thriving and eroding. Through a reduction of palette Romeyn heightens the intensity of this place and renders it anew. Her light falls in a slightly different direction to the sun, water foams and reaches higher and with ever more excitement against rock formations that reveal their ancient legacy rather than reflecting it. Her blue Bay rises toward a blue sky just as that sky itself threatens to fall, the two tussle often. Not all is set awry though. Looking through the vast depths of the paper we find the horizon line. It is as blue as it is today and tomorrow whether we look for it within the work or out there in real time. Whilst Romeyn’s work calls to the clashing elements it is her relationship with Guarella/Guerilla Bay that stalls the erosion and shows us a surging, wild place instead.

1 Fox, James. 2021, ‘The World According to Colour, A Cultural History’. Penguin Random House.

Read: Annika Romeyn's monotype process

ARTIST PROFILE:Annika Romeyn graduated with First Class Honours in Printmaking and Drawing from ANU School of Art and Design in 2010. She is a finalist for the 2022 Ellen José Art Award, a $15,000 non-acquisitive award for young women at Bayside Gallery.In 2021 Romeyn was awarded the Burnie Print Prize, and in 2020 she won both the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the National Works on Paper Award. She has been a finalist in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2021), the McClelland Contemporary Waterolour Award (2021, 2018), the Burnie Print Prize (2021), the Megalo International Print Prize (2020, 2019), the prestigious John Leslie Art Prize (2020, 2018, 2014), the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award (2019), the Commendation Prize for the Banyule Works on Paper Award (2019), the M16 Drawing Prize (2018), and the Gippsland Print Award (2017).

In 2019 she was invited to participate in Global Print 4, Portugal, one of the largest printmaking events in the world, and was the recipient of a Craft ACT Residency at Corin Dam in Namadgi National Park. In 2018 she was commissioned to create work for the Biennale of Australian Art, Ballarat. In 2015 she undertook a Hill End Artist Residency and in 2013 was commissioned to create a unique work for the Print Council of Australia.  She was the winner of the FLG Emerging Artist Award in 2014. 

Annika Romeyn’s work has been acquired by Artbank,Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Burnie Regional Art Gallery, ACT Legislative Assembly, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Canberra Museum & Art Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, ArtsACT, KPMG, Port Jackson Press, Megalo Print Studio, Print Council of Australia Inc., The State Library of Victoria, Monash University Gippsland, Douro Museum Printmaking Biennial Collection (Portugal), Guangdong Museum of Art (China), and the James E. Lewis Museum (Morgan State University, USA), amongst others.