Endurance

Beyond describing the rock-face and its multiplicity of form, Romeyn hopes to create experiential artworks coloured by her memories and feelings of wilderness areas actively explored by foot, raft or kayak. Working across the mediums of drawing, painting and printmaking, she is particularly interested in the intersection between the intimate and the infinite, the immediate and the ancient.

Artist Statement:Endurance draws inspiration from the personally significant site of Guerilla Bay, Yuin Country (South Coast, NSW): a beautiful place that will always be intertwined with memories of Summer 2016/17, the last shared with my Mum. Around that time I encountered Rebecca Solnit’s thoughts on ‘the blue of distance’ (the blue at the horizon, which we can never quite reach). In the process of revisiting and reimagining such a powerful site from the physical and temporal distance of my studio, blue suggested an appropriate sense of memory and emotion. The fluidity of the watercolour monotype medium directed the atmosphere of the work, while the drips came to signify a release, disrupting the otherwise carefully rendered environment and breaking the horizon to link sea and sky. The rock formations of Guerilla Bay are some of the oldest on the east coast of Australia, dating back as far as 510 million years, offering a humbling perspective in line with the words of Frédéric Gros: “Walking in nature gives you a feeling of duration that exceeds your own existence.”

CATALOGUE ESSAY by Elli Walsh 2020

Tunnelling into personal experiences of place, Annika Romeyn visualises the loss, life and longing embodied in the natural Australian landscape. Through a combination of drawing, watercolour and printmaking processes, the Canberra artist engages with sites of erosion and flux to express  the precariousness of the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. Sheer cliff faces, weathered rock formations and twisted trees symptomise the plight of nature as it staggers on the edge of no return.

In her latest series, ‘Endurance’, Romeyn captures the mnemonic power of place. She draws from time spent at Guerilla Bay, Yuin Country, a profoundly personal place that embodies the final Summer shared with her mother in 2016/17. It was at this time she encountered Rebecca Solnit’s thoughts on ‘the blue of distance’ – the blue at the horizon, which we can never quite reach. For Romeyn, blue became the symbolic colour of memory and emotion in the process of revisiting Guerilla Bay from the physical and temporal distance of her studio. Tones of ultramarine, pthalo and indigo reconstruct the coastal landscape with brisk detail, which recedes into the cool hues and indistinct washes of aerial perspective. There is the echo of traditional Chinese blue and white porcelain in these densely detailed compositions, each mark dancing between representation and abstraction to suggest a liminal space between the landscape experienced and the landscape rendered.

This is Romeyn’s first series using the watercolour monotype process, a new medium that has created more subtle tonal variations than her previous oil-based monotype technique. Fluid marks buzz with energy like particles assembled together to forge an image, threatening to dissipate at any moment into the hazy abyss of reminiscence. Aqueous drips become ladders between sea and sky, clouding the horizon and conjuring the psychological distance of memory.

Though these works seem serene and sublime, there is the hint that the landscape is – and will be – the helpless victim of humanity’s hamartia. Viewing them, we become aware of how easy it is to marvel at nature’s beauty and strength whilst ignoring the fragility in front of our eyes. The cool blues and rainy atmosphere depicting the NSW South Coast stand in stark contrast to the infernal imagery of the present moment. Yet buttressing the vulnerability of Romeyn’s watercolour washes is the elemental fortitude of rock and water, carving open a symbolic space for endurance and hope.

Scaling her works in relation to her body, the artist explores how place imprints itself not only on the mind but also physically, corporeally. The encounter between ourselves and the land is a haptic exchange: it overcomes us and we, sadly and slowly, overcome it. Retaining traces of her hand – the white marks made with the tip of her finger and the darker areas with her brush – Romeyn’s works beckon us to step into this in-between space of physiological and psychological encounter; of landscapes felt and landscapes remembered.

Ultimately, Romeyn does not seek to express a place of the present moment, but how place seizes us in its absence, how it summons the imagination and speaks to our emotions. In her works, blue is the colour of longing, evoking the fissure between us and the glow of our past. If we can look out across that vast gulf of memory without wanting to close the gap, without yearning to possess the horizon, then the colour of solitude and desire becomes the colour of healing and endurance.

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Romeyn graduated with First Class Honours in Printmaking and Drawing from ANU. In 2019 she was awarded the Commendation Prize for the Banyule Award for Works on Paper and in the same year was invited to participate in Global Print 4, Portugal, one of the largest printmaking events in the World, and was the the recipient of a Craft ACT Residency at Corin Cottage within the Namadgi National Park. She has been a finalist in the Megalo International Print Prize (2020 & 2019) and the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award (2019). In 2018 she was commissioned to create a unique work for the Biennale of Australian Art.  She has been a finalist in the M16 Drawing Prize (2018) , the Splash: McClelland Contemporary Watercolour Award (2018), the Gippsland Print Award (2017) and the prestigious John Leslie Art Prize (2018, 2014) and was the winner of the FLG Emerging Artist Award (2014). In 2013 she was commissioned to create a unique work for the Print Council of Australia and undertook a Hill End Artist Residency in 2015. Her work has been acquired by Canberra Museum & Art Gallery, Gippsland Regional Gallery, Arts ACT (A.C.T. Government), KPMG, Port Jackson Press Australia, The Australian National University Library, Megalo Print Studio, Print Council of Australia Inc., The State Library of Victoria, Canson Australia, Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Monash University Gippsland, Print Biennial Douro Collection, Portugal and The Brooklyn Art Library, New York amongst others.