Essay by Marguerite Brown
Into the Woods 2013 (etching 12 x 34 cm)
Over the past 15 years of creative practice,
Bronwyn Rees has focused on making richly textured
prints that express her particular vision of Australia’s
landscape and wilderness areas. Evoking the inherent
beauty of these natural spaces, Rees communicates a
poignant environmental message that is aptly
conveyed in the title of her current exhibition,
Protection. This show features a selection of key
works created by Rees over the past five years as
Artist in Residence at the Firestation Print Studio, a
not-for-profit open access print studio, gallery and
artist studio complex in Melbourne’s south-east.
Throughout Rees’ printmaking oeuvre, nature is
represented as powerful, potent and unsettling. She
writes, “For me, I feel most Australian when walking
and camping in the bush, my humanity slipping away
and becoming smaller and more fragile. Feeling the
power, space and ferocity of our wilderness.”
(Bronwyn Rees, 2015)
Through her meandering lines and expressive
mark-making skills, the artist taps into the wild,
unseen energies bound up in the locations she chooses
to represent. All landscape art is essentially a
mediated view of nature, yet Rees tends to move
beyond pure visual representation in order to convey
something deeper, more experiential. This includes a
sense of being physically and spiritually connected to
the natural world.
Such notions can be detected in her etching Blue
Wishing Tree. In this print the viewer is positioned at
the foot of a vast tree, looking up as its branches
reach skywards towards the starry magnificence
above. This unusual perspective creates a feeling of
being engaged in the scene, as the viewer is no longer
distanced from it in the manner of picturesque
landscape traditions. Rather, together we marvel at
the sprawling living entity above, and may experience
the sense of wonder that pervades Rees’ perception of
nature.
As an Australian with European cultural heritage,
Rees also ponders ideas surrounding identity within
her work, as she states, “I am always trying to tell a
story about Australian identity – as a third generation
colonial import of undistinguished lineage, this is a
slippery thing to try and grab…”
(Bronwyn Rees, 2015)
Certain works contain an almost claustrophobic
atmosphere, and one is reminded of how white
settlers in Australia must have first encountered the
alien Australian bush, so vastly different from the
tamed, tilled and cultivated shores of England and