PAPER NATURE
My own experience in art-making has sprung largely from my discovery of gardening. I can certainly pinpoint that the confidence and patience needed to experiment have leaked into my studio from the work I’ve done in planning and planting outside. A brilliant side effect in my books!
Colleen Southwell’s delicate paper creations mirror this concept and more. As a horticulturalist, garden designer and rural woman, her gardened spaces and wider environment have infiltrated her need to create and the results are truly original and achingly beautiful. Her concentration on form beyond colour zooms us into the fascinating architecture of nature’s specimens, offered to us as if a frozen moment in time.
Enjoy this view into her practice as shared in her own words.
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You can dive into Colleen’s beautiful garden in our full feature here.
Julia xo
Artist profile
NAME: The Garden Curator - Colleen Southwell
LOCATION: Near Orange, Central West NSW
Australia
@thegardencurator
www.thegardencurator.com.au
I am a paper sculpture artist specialising in finely detailed nature-focused works. Each piece is comprised of hundreds, sometimes thousands of elements, each drawn in fine pigment pen, water coloured, cut, embossed and assembled. The pieces are pinned using entomology pins giving them the appearance of floating, bringing an everchanging shadow into the work and alluding to scientific specimens intended for collection, study and safe-keeping.
The intention is to create gentle and mindful works that draw the viewer in to look closely and appreciate the tiny details that are so often overlooked in the rush of the day-to-day. While I love colour in the garden, my work is all soft sepia tones as I find colour is the first thing that registers – I want people to look more deeply, for the work to whisper.
We live in a rural area and my studio is a little tin cottage surrounded by the garden, so I am inspired daily by nature, both wild and cultivated. The big picture landscape is beautiful, but it is made up of countless tiny parts – it’s these that my work brings into focus.
I come from a creative family – my grandparents, aunts and uncles were or are all artists and makers of some kind. My mum made everything – clothes, furnishings, music, food and garden – and my dad is internationally renowned for his craft which was also his business. I feel blessed to have been raised in an environment that celebrated making. I have always been a maker too - sewing, embroidery, painting and drawing, and my background in horticulture and detailed hand-drawn and rendered landscape plans certainly influenced my current art practice.
I held my first exhibition in 2018, a duo with sculptor friend Peter Worsley, and sold out on the first day. It was overwhelming, and I’ve been full-time ever since. I’ve had a number of solo shows, and exhibited in groups shows in Australian and internationally.
NATURE AS A MUSE
While I am guided constantly by my surroundings and the things I grow, nature is the ultimate artist so I rarely intend to replicate a subject. I draw instead on the patterns, shapes and forms, silhouettes and shadows - putting them together in largely imaginary works, usually at a scale equivalent to or smaller than the subject.
I do however do extensive research for particular projects, like a large piece commissioned for a project on Fifth Avenue New York, depicting a walk through the indigenous flora of the northeast of the USA, or another commission for an Australian collector celebrating their extraordinary native garden.
I am inspired by nature around me, the changes in the seasons throughout the year, and also by the simplicity of the paper. Paper is such a humble material, but it holds so much possibility. It can become something beautiful and full of story, while remaining delicate and gentle. For me it reflects perfectly what I am trying to convey – that the quiet voices often have the most to say if we take the time to slow and listen.
INSPIRATION
Ohh, so many! I love the work of paper artist Anne Wood (@woodlucker), textile artist Fleur Woods (@fleurwoodsart) and photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo (@minh_ngoc), and conversing with these women and others across the globe via social media has been wonderful.
There are so many more, we could be here for years…