Artist in Focus – Aleshanee Faery

Aleshanee is currently exhibiting at the Dax Centre until Friday, 25 August.

This profile was compiled from a transcript of Aleshanee’s artist talk at the opening of ‘Blue on Blue on Blue’ and our Artist in Focus series questions.

What kind of art do you make?

This exhibition features stamped monoprints. I use other print-making techniques, make sculptures, paint, draw, take photos. I’ll try whatever opportunities come up to access ways of making.

Where and when did art making, and in particular print making, start for you?

I was the kindy kid who mixed paint on the page to see what colour it changed to until it was all brown. I went to art school when I was 19. I still have the screen-printed fabric I made there. This style of printmaking is one of the techniques I learned studying at NCAT in 2015. The Create course covered many visual arts media and was a huge boost to my confidence.

Can you tell us about these different processes [working across different print-making techniques] and how they inform your project work and art practice in general?

I often turn to print-making in response to my frustration with drawing. The specific printing process depends on what tools I have access to. Embossed prints require a press, lino prints and stamps usually require a space where I can make a mess and have help cleaning up.

Can you tell us about the print-making technique you used for this exhibition?

I carve a pattern into rubber triangles that are repeatedly stamped adjacent to initial guidelines, then each previous imprint.

How do these intricate patterns form and what decisions are you making when you add to the pattern piece by piece?

I only begin with two or three central lines to delineate the proportions of the page. After I’ve stamped along them as far as I can or want to, the next stamps line up adjacent to stamps that are next to the guideline.

I choose where to stamp depending on how dark or pale it will be, and if I’m mixing stamps then which pattern to stamp next. Sometimes the resulting larger pattern is an unexpected design.

Why the colour blue for this body of work?

Anyone who knows me knows I will always choose blue. In 2018 Fina bought some printmaking tools and the professional oil-based printing ink for Nimbus Studio. This specific shade may have been selected because I’d been talking about the exhibition of Hokusai prints that featured Prussian Blue.

Over the past few years, along with your print making work, you have been making sculptures and installations out of Lomandra reeds. Can you tell us about this work and how the botanic world informs your sculpture and print making work?

My mentor Kate introduced me to Lomandra longifolia and how it can be weaved. The first things we made together were very different objects. I like that I don’t have to plan what I’m creating with it, and that I can go for a walk to harvest a few leaves to use immediately.

I’d love to talk about your recent artworks Battle Armour and the transparency prints Anthropocene for the Climarte exhibition, two very different artworks (both to each other and your practice in general) one an armour of prescription medication blister packs and the other a densely layered print of climate change statistics. Can you talk to the concepts of these works and how the materials fold into the ideas in the work?

These are two of many ideas I’ve had floating around for years, many of which I simply need assistance to make tangible reality. Anthropocene came from feeling overwhelmed by all the climate-change and environment themed ideas I have for works. Battle Armour is an idea from a time when I was prescribed many different medications and hated all the waste being generated. The packets that I collected then were de-cluttered but the idea reoccurred every time I read the side-effects of a new prescription.

What are you currently working towards?

I have a body of work ready for framing. My grass sculptures are embossed into thick paper using a printing press without ink. A few of these will be in the Nimbus group exhibition at the Bundoora Homestead in a couple of months. I also have some large ink on paper experiments, and some small colourful abstract patterns. I recently did a beginner pottery-wheel course that I’d like to try again.

I’d be very happy to sell some works, to pay the studio rent and store less work. In future I’d love to travel for a residency or learning more skills.

Do you have any comments or thoughts about your AAV program?

Every documentary about artists I’ve seen has shown the artists’ spouse or gallery agent being the facilitating force behind their success and legacy. I don’t have supports outside of what the NDIS pays for, and without AAV’s informed advice early in the NDIS process art wouldn’t be so well serviced, just as other priorities in my plan are not.

Without AAV I wouldn’t be exhibiting, I wouldn’t have found a mentor or a studio space. The structure of a weekly program with a small group including supportive facilitators makes a huge difference.

Learn more about how AAV can support artists through grants and auspicing here. Or, find out how you can include AAV’s support and services in your NDIS plan here.

‘Blue on Blue on Blue’ is available via our online gallery. Follow Aleshanee on Instagram, @aleshaneeartist.