This video offers insights into the place, process and thinking behind my ‘Endurance’ series and my 2022 solo exhibition ‘Turbulence’.
centre photo by Woodleigh School
I am a visual artist, grateful to live and work on Ngunnawal/Ngunawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, Australia. I combine monotype printmaking, drawing and watercolour painting to create evocative and expansive works on paper. Through my practice, I aim to convey the humbling and restorative experience of being in nature.
Often scaling my work in relation to my outstretched body, and frequently using my fingertip as a mark-making tool, I seek to embed a sense of care and value in the environments I depict, through time and touch. Revisiting the same sites from multiple perspectives, I employ seriality and layering to suggest the accumulation of memory, perception and personal significance intrinsic to the places that shape and move us.
I graduated from the A.N.U. School of Art & Design (Printmedia and Drawing, First Class Honours, 2010) after undertaking a liberal arts education on scholarship at Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA (2005 – 2009). My practice has developed through field-based residencies and cultural exchanges, including the Embassy of Spain’s Torres Travelling Scholarship (2011), Bathurst Regional Gallery’s Hill End Residency (2015), the Broken Hill City Art Gallery’s Open Cut Commission (2022) and the The A.N.U.’s Sharing Stories Arts Exchange on Yuin Country (2019) and Walgalu Country (2025).
In 2026 I was the inaugural recipient of Woodleigh School’s Threads of Belonging Bursary and Residency and in 2023 I was granted the Canberra Arts Patrons Organisation’s Mandy Martin Art and Environment Award. In 2024 I was Winner of the River of Art Prize, in 2021 I was Winner of the Burnie Print Prize, and in 2020 I was Winner of both the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the National Works on Paper prize.
photos by Sammy Hawker
In summer 2025/26 I travelled to the Antarctic Peninsula, following a long-held dream to experience and respond to this remote environment first-hand. Every day I drew and painted in and with the elements – my washes of watercolour holding marks and imprints of falling snow, graupel and wind-blown rain, and my brushstrokes adapting as the ship pitched up and down. I was captivated by the striking blue glow of ice compressed over time, and the enormity and intricacy of a powerful and vulnerable environment full of life and motion.
My recent studio works delve into this impactful experience, focusing on the continual weathering and transformation of glacial icebergs through interaction with ocean and atmosphere. At the threshold of solid and fluid, the endlessly varied forms and textures of icebergs are emblematic of an environment in flux. Through this latest body of work, I hope to draw a globally significant environment into closer proximity, honouring its beauty and its vital role in regulating the ocean currents and climate systems that connect us all.
While the Antarctic Peninsula expanded my language of colour, incorporating myriad blues to imply time, temperature and depth, my use of limited colour has previously been emotive, symbolic or material-led. For example, my ‘Endurance’ series centred on Guarella/Guerilla Bay, Yuin Country, South Coast NSW - a place that holds memories of meaningful time spent with my immediate family in the last summer of my mother’s life. In this body of work, blue came to signify memory and distance. Meanwhile, in ‘(Tangle) Wana Karnu’ 2025, burnt orange hues were transferred directly from rusting steel, inviting a natural process to inform and disrupt my drawing, while referencing the interaction of iron, oxygen and water in the environment of Mutawintji National Park, on Pantjikali, Wanyuparlku, Wilyakali and Malyangapa Country, Far West NSW.
'Tangle (Wana Karnu)', 2025, rust and acrylic ink on paper, 360cm x 240cm, installed in 'Material Nature' curated by Dr Anne-Marie Jean at The Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra.
Australian Women Artists Podcast episode 9: Annika Romeyn (49min)
In this 2025 interview I chatted to Richard Graham about the ideas, experiences and processes that underpin my practice, as well as reflecting on an Australian woman artist who has influenced or inspired me.