Robyn Litchfield
www.robynlitchfield.com
@robynlitchfield_studio
Statement:
Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. Landscape becomes a ubiquitous template for exploring personal history, notions of cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging.
Most of her sources are photographs; archival images of early New Zealand and contemporary photographs of primeval landscape taken by herself. She applies transparent paint in expressive brushstrokes and works back into it using various implements and processes such as scraping, layering and erasure to reveal the luminous ground below. The paint mimics the emulsion on the glass plates of early photographs whose images were revealed by light shining through them. She thinks of the ground like a screen where images are projected and perceived.
The primitive and mysterious red forms placed within the paintings derive from remnants of the stencils developed for works based on early postcard images of Forest. For Litchfield they are symbols of loss and longing; for past life, of primeval forest, the biodiversity that it supported and represent a lament for this loss. Their intrusion into the picture plane is a metaphor for a kind of otherness similar to that felt by immigrants today.
www.robynlitchfield.com
@robynlitchfield_studio
Statement:
Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. Landscape becomes a ubiquitous template for exploring personal history, notions of cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging.
Most of her sources are photographs; archival images of early New Zealand and contemporary photographs of primeval landscape taken by herself. She applies transparent paint in expressive brushstrokes and works back into it using various implements and processes such as scraping, layering and erasure to reveal the luminous ground below. The paint mimics the emulsion on the glass plates of early photographs whose images were revealed by light shining through them. She thinks of the ground like a screen where images are projected and perceived.
The primitive and mysterious red forms placed within the paintings derive from remnants of the stencils developed for works based on early postcard images of Forest. For Litchfield they are symbols of loss and longing; for past life, of primeval forest, the biodiversity that it supported and represent a lament for this loss. Their intrusion into the picture plane is a metaphor for a kind of otherness similar to that felt by immigrants today.
Seral Dream