Centred on the experience of entering Old Mutawintji Gorge, this exhibition encapsulates Annika Romeyn’s 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. Further works, completed after returning to the same sites in 2023, seek to deepen and extend her ongoing engagement with place.
Download the exhibition catalogue Photography of artworks by Brenton McGeachie
‘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.’ - Annika Romeyn, Artist Statement 2024
Catalogue essay by Blake Griffiths, 2024 In In Return, Annika Romeyn plunges us into a series of monolithic, layered landscapes of the Old Mutawintji Gorge. The multi-panel watercolour monotypes and pencil drawings bring forward a limitation of our perception - through the overlaying of two landscapes – forcing us to visit one place, twice. The title of the exhibition – a proposal contemplating what is it exactly, to return? After 3.5 weeks on Barkindji and Malyangapa Country in Far West NSW, Romeyn returned 12 months later to the same sites, aiding a hypothesis to challenge the necessity of physically returning compared to a reliance on solely memory. A proposition metabolised in the studio where, after returning from her second visit, the experiential has continued to influence the formal parameters of her monotype process. Known for her recent and almost exclusive use of the colour blue and assertive compositions ‘anchored by the horizon’1, Romeyn found herself fundamentally challenged by Country; a place that despite its open sky resonates anything but blue; of ancient ochre grounds, deep time striations and iron rich earth. The subject of the enquiry, Mutawintji National Park is politically, and spiritually versed in the topic of return. Since time began, Wiimpatja2 have been returning to Mutawintji for regular council; a site of creation, ceremony and community. Demanding the return of the park to its Traditional Owners after over 100 years of dispossession, the 4th September 1983 saw a group of dedicated Wiimpatja blockade the park. By 1998 Mutawintji became the first park returned to Traditional Owners through the establishment of The National Parks and Wildlife Amendment (Aboriginal Ownership) Act.
This complex context cannot but help set the tone for the show, which oscillates between one view and another. For instance, In Return (Old Mutawintji Gorge) documents two perspectives from opposite sides of the same waterhole in a process the artist describes as “looking in and looking back, entering and returning”3 . To do this, a methodology of documenting a single place from multiple perspectives, across multiple times ensued. While the physical experience of visiting and returning to Country was central to the project – the artist remained bound by her Canberra based studio and printing press some 1000km away – in part, relying on her memory to return to place.
It is this understanding of looking in and returning that reveals a layering of memory, an accumulation of experience grounded by ‘ghost prints’ suggestive of the haziness of our own memory. Trees, layered in pencil confuse our innate need to find a horizon and instead offer a different reading of place; perhaps akin to the way our memories are stored. What sort of access does memory give us to a place?
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.
Romeyn’s epic works grapple with what it is to know place both through presence and from a distance. They begin to explore how memory can allow us to return to place, but more importantly, they document a methodology of visitation; the artists’ concerted effort to know this place of such spiritual and cultural significance. Romeyn manages to evoke the majesty of Mutawintji – no easy feat – through symbolic colour, epic scale and strategic use of layering. They raise questions about the dynamic tension between memory and place and to us, the audience, offer the rare opportunity to return without ever having gone at all.
1.Turbulence, Catalogue Essay by Gina Mobayed, 2022 2.Wiimpatja means Aboriginal People 3.Artist's Instagram @annika_lucy
Portrait photography by Sammy Hawker. installation photography by Brenton McGeachie. Photography of Old Mutawintji Gorge 1 and 2 by Brenton McGeachie.
Read: Annika Romeyn Artist Feature in Art Almanac, May 2024
Read: Annika Romeyn featured in Art Guide, May 2024
WATERCOLOUR MONOTYPE PROCESS Watercolour monotype is a printmaking process that allows for a one-off painterly print to be taken from watercolour applied to a thin sheet of plastic. When the watercolour is dry, it is passed under the heavy roller of an etching press and transferred onto damp paper. There is no edition and no permanent matrix; after the primary print and one significantly faded ‘ghost’ impression are made, the plastic is washed clean and reused. - Annika Romeyn
ARTIST PROFILE Annika Romeyn graduated with First Class Honours in Printmaking and Drawing from ANU School of Art and Design in 2010. In 2023 Romeyn was the recipient of the Mandy Martin Art and Environment Award. In 2022 she was a finalist in the Ellen José award for young women, was the recipient of the Open Cut Commission, facilitated though Broken Hill City Art Gallery, and was a finalist in the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Awards and the prestigious John Leslie Art Prize (2022, 2020, 2018, 2014). In 2021 she 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 M16 Drawing Prize (2023, 2018), the Ellen Jose Award (2022), the Swan Hill Print & Drawing Awards (2022), the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2021), the McClelland Contemporary Watercolour Award (2021, 2018), the Burnie Print Prize (2021), the Megalo International Print Prize (2020, 2019), the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award (2019), the Commendation Prize for the Banyule Works on Paper Award (2019), 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.
